I Kings 9:1-9
As soon as Solomon had finished building the house of the Lord and the king's house and all that Solomon desired to build, 2 the Lord appeared to Solomon a second time, as he had appeared to him at Gibeon. 3 And the Lord said to him, “I have heard your prayer and your plea, which you have made before me. I have consecrated this house that you have built, by putting my name there forever. My eyes and my heart will be there for all time. 4 And as for you, if you will walk before me, as David your father walked, with integrity of heart and uprightness, doing according to all that I have commanded you, and keeping my statutes and my rules, 5 then I will establish your royal throne over Israel forever, as I promised David your father, saying, ‘You shall not lack a man on the throne of Israel.’ 6 But if you turn aside from following me, you or your children, and do not keep my commandments and my statutes that I have set before you, but go and serve other gods and worship them, 7 then I will cut off Israel from the land that I have given them, and the house that I have consecrated for my name I will cast out of my sight, and Israel will become a proverb and a byword among all peoples. 8 And this house will become a heap of ruins. Everyone passing by it will be astonished and will hiss, and they will say, ‘Why has the Lord done thus to this land and to this house?’ 9 Then they will say, ‘Because they abandoned the Lord their God who brought their fathers out of the land of Egypt and laid hold on other gods and worshiped them and served them. Therefore the Lord has brought all this disaster on them.’”
Have you ever wondered if God was conditional? We always hear about God's unconditional love and God's unending grace. But then we read "if-then" statements like the one in 1 Kings. The problem is that if we focus on just this one story and forget everything else, then we think we understand God. If we just look at this story, we miss the big picture.
Just looking at this story, it's not that far removed from our imagination that God would punish people for their sins. In fact, God does punish for sins. But not in the way that we think. Pastors, theologians, and Christians who have public voices often mistake the wrath of God for something else. There were plenty of people who thought that 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and other natural disasters were the wrath of God. That misses the origin of the story and it misses what God has done and will do for his people. When we think that God is punishing people for their transgressions, we forget that God chose Israel from the beginning. From the very beginning, in the book of Genesis, God creates man and woman and chooses them.
We make the mistake thinking that God punishes with annihilation or death. But in a weird sense, God does punish. But not how we reason. Think about a dog on a leash on a busy road. If the dog gets off the leash, then something bad could happen. The dog probably feels that the leash is restrictive, yet he probably doesn't know that it keeps them safe. God has set up boundaries for us. We think that God's rules are restrictive, yet we find freedom and safety in God's statutes and rules. It is not so much a reward for good behavior, but as the Psalmist says, learning to love the ordinances of God. Our hope is not found in our judgment--the judgment we receive or pass on others--but in the embrace of God. We are not dogs on a leash, but we are loved and cared for by God. May we see God's love and fulfilled promises in the world today.
Prayer: God, teach me to love your laws and find freedom in your care for us all. Amen.
G. Thomas Martin
