Re:Verse passage – 1 Chronicles 28:11-21 (day three)
“Then David gave to his son Solomon…the plan of all that he had in mind.”
David’s most painful and harmful behavioral patterns – emotional distance from his family and reckless military buildup (see the census in 1 Chronicles 21), among other things – marked a continuing cycle of spiritual distress and repeated reconciliation with God. War and blood, bodily and spiritual, permeated David’s life, and he found solace with God in between those episodes. Although the temple would be God’s dwelling, it would, in the eyes of the nation, also reflect the character of the one who would set his hand to build it. David reached a point at which he understood that. The temple required the kind of stable foundation that was foreign to his way of living. His life with God was not Solomon’s. That’s neither good nor bad. It just is.
Someone in our class on Sunday said something interesting: “David, being a warrior, might have built a temple like a fortress. But God intended it to be a place of peace and welcome. Solomon was the man for that.”