Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 101 · April 11
Will God Indeed Dwell
“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?”
If the heaven of heavens cannot hold God, it can seem that a building does not matter. Then neither does the hour you spend sitting in one, or the money that went into its roof. That is a fair objection, and it deserves to be put plainly.
The man who first raised it had more right to it than any of us. Solomon stood before the altar with his hands spread toward heaven, in front of the whole congregation of Israel, with seven years of building in cedar and gold behind him. And he asked, "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?"
He never answers the question. Instead he asks for smaller things: "That thine eyes may be open toward this house night and day, even toward the place of which thou hast said, My name shall be there." He asks for God's name to be there, for God's eyes to watch over it and for God's ear to hear. Nowhere does he ask God to fit inside the room.
As the prayer goes on, he keeps putting God's address right. Again and again he says, "hear thou in heaven thy dwelling place." He prays toward a house, while saying all along that the One he prays to lives in heaven.
The question stayed open in Israel's Scriptures for centuries. In Isaiah, God asks it Himself: "The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me?" Stephen quotes those words in his last speech, just before he is stoned.
Nobody in that line of people answers the question. It was asked at the opening of the temple, asked again by God through a prophet, and quoted by a man about to die, and each time it was left standing. Yet in the very next verse Isaiah tells you where God's eyes rest: "to this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word." Whatever room you are reading this in is smaller than Solomon's temple. The God no building can hold still looks toward anyone there who humbly listens to Him.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 101 is Soul Restoration (Psalm 23:3).