2 Chronicles is boooorrrriiing.
I was just rereading some of my older posts from Genesis when everything was all about God walking around telling people off and angels doing stuff. 2 Chronicles is about Solomon building the temple to God in Jerusalem. Specifically, it's about Solomon negotiating a trade contract with a foreign king for some lumber and craftsmen, then overseeing, in minute detail, the dimension and decoration of the temple. To summerize: it was really big and pretty much everything was covered in gold.
For me, the real take-away message is about how our deeds are so different in their scope to God's deeds. My problem reading 2 Chronicles today was really that I was trying to compare Solomon's administration of the temple building project to God literally creating the universe from nothing. I'm not saying that the Israelites lost sight of that difference when they were building the temple, but I know how easy it can be to be wowed by a big building project. It would probably seem quaint to us today if we saw the first temple, since we would try to compare it to the great wall of China for size, the taj mahal for majesty and the white house or Versailles for opulence, and it would probably come up with three strikes. So it seems silly to us to see something like Solomon's temple and compare it to the majesty of God himself, but we still do the same kind of thing constantly today, just with bigger and better buildings.
We do this with the things we learn about how the universe works. And don't get me wrong, I am absolutely all for scientific exploration and advancement, but anyone who gets up in arms about some struggle between science and religion must have some serious misconceptions about one or the other. Our learning and understanding has increased a thousand fold over the last few hundred years, but it's still not that significant when you start looking at it as a percentage of the whole, of all the learning and understanding there is to be had.
Of course, in the story of the Tower of Babel God looked at the big tower that was going up and said that He couldn't allow men to work together in such a way because then nothing would be impossible for them, and he confused all their language and made them split up into different nations. So maybe the things we accomplish are really profoundly important on a Godly scale. Who knows? The book of Genesis was weird.
The ark of the covenant is placed inside the temple once it's complete. The text says that the only things inside are the stone tablets with the law given to Moses, but wasn't there other stuff in there too before? Yes, I've found some other mentions of Aaron's staff from that time it grew and budded and a pot of manna from when Moses led everyone through the desert. I wonder what happened to them.
I was just rereading some of my older posts from Genesis when everything was all about God walking around telling people off and angels doing stuff. 2 Chronicles is about Solomon building the temple to God in Jerusalem. Specifically, it's about Solomon negotiating a trade contract with a foreign king for some lumber and craftsmen, then overseeing, in minute detail, the dimension and decoration of the temple. To summerize: it was really big and pretty much everything was covered in gold.
For me, the real take-away message is about how our deeds are so different in their scope to God's deeds. My problem reading 2 Chronicles today was really that I was trying to compare Solomon's administration of the temple building project to God literally creating the universe from nothing. I'm not saying that the Israelites lost sight of that difference when they were building the temple, but I know how easy it can be to be wowed by a big building project. It would probably seem quaint to us today if we saw the first temple, since we would try to compare it to the great wall of China for size, the taj mahal for majesty and the white house or Versailles for opulence, and it would probably come up with three strikes. So it seems silly to us to see something like Solomon's temple and compare it to the majesty of God himself, but we still do the same kind of thing constantly today, just with bigger and better buildings.
We do this with the things we learn about how the universe works. And don't get me wrong, I am absolutely all for scientific exploration and advancement, but anyone who gets up in arms about some struggle between science and religion must have some serious misconceptions about one or the other. Our learning and understanding has increased a thousand fold over the last few hundred years, but it's still not that significant when you start looking at it as a percentage of the whole, of all the learning and understanding there is to be had.
Of course, in the story of the Tower of Babel God looked at the big tower that was going up and said that He couldn't allow men to work together in such a way because then nothing would be impossible for them, and he confused all their language and made them split up into different nations. So maybe the things we accomplish are really profoundly important on a Godly scale. Who knows? The book of Genesis was weird.
The ark of the covenant is placed inside the temple once it's complete. The text says that the only things inside are the stone tablets with the law given to Moses, but wasn't there other stuff in there too before? Yes, I've found some other mentions of Aaron's staff from that time it grew and budded and a pot of manna from when Moses led everyone through the desert. I wonder what happened to them.
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