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 contain him, a building is beside the point, and so is the hour you spend sitting in one, and so is the money that went into the roof. That objection is fair and it is worth putting plainly.
The man who first raised it had a better claim to the objection than you do. Solomon, standing before the altar with his hands spread toward heaven, in front of the whole congregation, with seven years of cedar and gold behind him. 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 it. What he does instead is ask 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. The name, the eyes, the ear. Nowhere does he ask God to fit inside the room.
Read the rest of the chapter and he keeps correcting the address as he goes. Hear thou in heaven thy dwelling place. He says it again and again, praying toward a house while insisting the one he prays to lives somewhere else.
The question stayed open in Israel's own scriptures for centuries. Isaiah has God asking it himself: The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me? Stephen quotes that line in his last speech before they stone him.
Nobody in that chain answered it. It was asked at the dedication, asked again from heaven through a prophet, and quoted by a man being stoned, and it was left standing every time. Whatever room you are reading this in is a smaller building than the one Solomon was standing in. The question is the same size in both.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 101 is Soul Restoration (Psalm 23:3).