Scripture Daily

Context No. 828 of 4322 · 1 Kings

Context · Reflection

1 Kings 8:44-53: in context

44“If your people go out to battle against their enemy, by whatever way you shall send them, and they pray to the LORD toward the city which you have chosen, and toward the house which I have built for your name, 45then hear in heaven their prayer and their supplication, and maintain their cause. 46If they sin against you (for there is no man who doesn’t sin), and you are angry with them and deliver them to the enemy, so that they carry them away captive to the land of the enemy, far off or near; 47yet if they repent in the land where they are carried captive, and turn again, and make supplication to you in the land of those who carried them captive, saying, ‘We have sinned and have done perversely; we have dealt wickedly,’ 48if they return to you with all their heart and with all their soul in the land of their enemies who carried them captive, and pray to you toward their land which you gave to their fathers, the city which you have chosen and the house which I have built for your name, 49then hear their prayer and their supplication in heaven, your dwelling place, and maintain their cause; 50and forgive your people who have sinned against you, and all their transgressions in which they have transgressed against you; and give them compassion before those who carried them captive, that they may have compassion on them 51(for they are your people and your inheritance, which you brought out of Egypt, from the middle of the iron furnace); 52that your eyes may be open to the supplication of your servant and to the supplication of your people Israel, to listen to them whenever they cry to you. 53For you separated them from among all the peoples of the earth to be your inheritance, as you spoke by Moses your servant, when you brought our fathers out of Egypt, Lord GOD.”

Solomon is dedicating the temple, the crowning achievement of his reign, the house he built for God's name, and in the middle of his long prayer he does something you would not expect at such a triumphant moment. He starts praying about exile. He foresees a day when the people will sin, and he is blunt about how sure that day is, adding, for there is no one who does not sin. He imagines God handing them over to an enemy who carries them off captive to a land far away, the temple a distant memory. It is the darkest possible future, and he prays it into the very ceremony that celebrates the building's glory.

But he prays it in order to build a door back. If they come to their senses in the land of their captivity, he asks, and repent, and turn to you with all their heart and all their soul, and pray toward this land and this house even from that far country, then hear in heaven and forgive. Solomon is making sure that no distance and no failure will ever put his people beyond the reach of a genuine return. Long afterward, exiles in Babylon would open their windows toward Jerusalem and pray exactly as he described, and it would be their lifeline. The point he is quietly planting on the temple's best day is that there is no exile so far, and no sin so great, that a whole-hearted turning back cannot travel the whole way home.

Solomon prayed that repentance would reach God even from the farthest exile. Have I decided I am too far gone or too far away for a turning back to matter, when he built the door open from exactly there?

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