cover up

I was recently reading about David, Israel’s second king and the father of Solomon, Israel’s third king. David wanted to build a temple for God, a magnificent structure befitting God’s glory. The prophet Nathan endorsed the idea heartily. After all, hadn’t God called David “a man after my own heart” (Acts 13:22)? But God told Nathan that wasn’t the plan. Nathan had to tell David that Solomon would build the temple. Meanwhile, God promises to establish the family of David as the royal line of Israel.

The curious thing is that when David tells Solomon to build the temple, he tells him that God hasn’t allowed David to build the temple because he has shed too much blood establishing the kingdom of Israel (1 Chronicles 22:8). He repeats this to the leaders of Israel (1 Chronicles 28:3) as he encourages them to support Solomon’s building of the temple.

Yet when I read both accounts of God telling David not to build the temple (2 Samuel 7, 1 Chronicles 17) I don’t find God telling David that he’s shed too much blood. In 1 Kings 5:3 Solomon’s spin is that David was too busy fighting wars to put time into building a temple. But that wasn’t exactly true either. 1 Chronicles 22 and 28 recount the huge amount of time and effort David spent gathering together the materials for the temple. Almost all that’s left is to assemble the materials into the building itself. Actually, it took 150,000 men to do the assembling, but you get my drift: David collects the materials but into perpetuity the building is remembered as “Solomon’s Temple”. That must have really set David’s teeth on edge. I get this sense because when the Ark is brought to Jerusalem David writes a beautiful psalm (1 Chronicles 16) and dances shamelessly (2 Samuel 6:14), but after being denied the privilege of building the temple David lapses into a more pedestrian prayer of thanksgiving (2 Samuel 7:18ff, 2 Chronicles 17:16ff) even though God has just told David that his family line will be established forever.

Why didn’t God just let David build the temple? All the materials were right there. It would have been a great crowning achievement to David’s career. Because that grand finale is denied, David seems to fall back on his warrior identity, pushing that to the forefront with Solomon and the nation’s leaders. As if they needed reminding!

As I’m looking forward to Grace Community’s second decade (we celebrate our first decade on September 14, 2008) I’m under no delusions that I’m as great a leader as David. But still, there are things that I would like to look back on as accomplishments, good things in their own right. And I’m not saying that God has told me directly that he doesn’t want me to accomplish these things. My lack of accomplishment is more likely due to my own ineptness than to God’s denial. The greater question is how will this affect my sense of identity. Will I try to create some face-saving excuse or can I humbly say, “May it be to me as you have said”? I may want to create something grand for God, but God wants to re-create me into the image of Christ and he doesn’t want my edifice complex to get in the way.