The Temple in the Bible

Solomon's Temple: The House Filled With Glory

Solomon's temple was the first permanent house built for the God of Israel, raised in Jerusalem in the tenth century before Christ, seven years in the building, overlaid with gold and cedar. When it was finished and the ark was set in its place, the glory of the LORD filled the house so that the priests could not stand to minister. It was the settled sign that God had come to dwell with His people, and its whole splendour was meant to point beyond itself to the God who cannot be contained by any house.

When the ark was brought into the finished temple, the cloud of God's presence descended:

So that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud: for the glory of the LORD had filled the house of the LORD.1 Kings 8:11 (KJV)

From a tent to a house

For generations Israel had worshiped at the tabernacle, the portable tent God gave Moses in the wilderness. When David became king and brought the ark to Jerusalem, he longed to build God a permanent house of cedar, but the LORD told him that his son, not he, would build it, because David had been a man of war. So the task passed to Solomon.

The book of First Kings dates the building precisely: in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel came out of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign, he began to build the house of the LORD. It stood on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, on the threshing floor David had bought. Solomon drew cedar and cypress from Hiram, king of Tyre, and set a great labour force to the work, and the temple was seven years in the building.

Its glory and its scale

The temple followed the plan of the tabernacle but on a grand and permanent scale. It had a porch, a holy place, and the innermost room, the holy of holies, a perfect cube overlaid within with pure gold, where the ark of the covenant was set beneath the wings of two great carved cherubim. The walls were lined with cedar carved with cherubim, palm trees, and open flowers, and overlaid with gold, so that no stone was seen. Before the porch stood two pillars of bronze, named Jachin and Boaz. In the courts stood the bronze altar and the great molten sea, a huge bronze basin resting on twelve oxen.

Everything about it spoke of holiness, order, and worth. It was not extravagance for its own sake; it was Israel saying, with gold and cedar and bronze, that the God who dwelt here was worthy of the very best they had.

The day the glory came down

The heart of the story is not the building but the moment God moved in. When the priests brought the ark into the holy of holies and came out, the cloud filled the house of the LORD, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud, for the glory of the LORD had filled the house of the LORD. The same glory that had filled the tabernacle in the wilderness now filled the temple in Jerusalem. God had accepted the house and taken up residence among His people.

The second book of Chronicles adds that fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering, and the glory of the LORD filled the house. This was the sign every Israelite understood: the living God was present, not as an idea but as a fire and a cloud, dwelling in the midst of His people.

Solomon's prayer and its honesty

What keeps the story from idolatry is Solomon's own prayer at the dedication. Standing before the altar, he asked the honest question at the centre of the whole Bible's theology of the temple: But will God indeed dwell on the earth? behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded? Solomon knew that no building could hold God. The temple was not a box for God; it was the place He had chosen to put His name, so that His eyes and His heart would be there, and so that prayer turned toward it would be heard.

The LORD answered, I have hallowed this house, which thou hast built, to put my name there for ever; and mine eyes and mine heart shall be there perpetually. The temple was a meeting place, a house of prayer and sacrifice, a fixed sign in a wandering world that God had drawn near.

The centuries it stood

For nearly four hundred years Solomon's temple stood at the centre of Israel's life and worship. Three times a year the people streamed up to Jerusalem for the great feasts, singing the psalms of ascent as they climbed toward the house of God. The priests offered the morning and evening sacrifices, the incense rose, the lamps were tended, and the Day of Atonement came round each year, when the high priest entered the holy of holies with blood. The temple gave shape and rhythm to the faith of a whole nation.

Yet the same dedication that saw the glory descend also carried a warning. The LORD told Solomon that if he and his people turned away to serve other gods, then this house, which was high, would become a ruin, and everyone passing by would be astonished. The temple was never a guarantee; it was a gift held on the condition of faithfulness. Israel's later history, its slow drift into idolatry and injustice, would test that warning to its bitter end. The glory that filled the house could also depart from it, and the prophets would one day have to say that it had. So even at the height of its splendour, Solomon's temple pointed beyond itself, to a dwelling of God that could never be lost and a faithfulness that would have to come from God's own side of the covenant.

How it points to Christ

The New Testament does not leave the temple as a closed chapter of Israel's past. When the glory of God filled Solomon's house, it was a foreshadowing of a greater filling. John writes that the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father. The glory that once descended in a cloud came at last in a person. Jesus said plainly, standing in the courts of the later temple, that in this place is one greater than the temple.

Solomon's temple, then, is the first great picture of God dwelling with His people, and every part of the story leans forward. The house of gold and cedar that could not contain God gave way to the God who came to dwell in flesh, and then in His church, and at last in the city where He will dwell with His people for ever. The glory that filled the house was always meant to lead the eye to Christ, in whom all the fulness of the Godhead dwells bodily, and through Him to the day when the whole creation is filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

To stand in wonder before Solomon's temple is right, but it is not the end of wonder. The gold has long since been carried off, the cedar burned, the very stones scattered; yet the God who filled that house has not grown distant. He came nearer than Solomon could have dreamed, into a manger, into a carpenter's shop, into a garden of agony and an empty tomb, and finally into the hearts of His people by His Spirit. The temple teaches us to expect the glory of God, and Christ shows us where that glory came to rest. What Solomon built in seven years pointed to what God had purposed from before the foundation of the world: to dwell with us, and to make us His own.

A note for all traditions: the history above (the temples, their building, their destruction, and the rebuilding) is told as Scripture and the record present it. Where the New Testament states plainly that the temple is fulfilled in Christ, that is named as fulfilment; where a connection is a reflection rather than a direct statement, it is offered as such. The one Lord of the whole story, from Solomon to the new Jerusalem, is Jesus Christ, and every believer is called to draw near to God through him.

Read on: The meaning of the temple · Jesus and the temple · The Tabernacle: Christ in the tent · The Temple in the Bible