Today’s Scripture Reading (September
29, 2013): 1 Chronicles 28
I would
think that one of the most frustrating things about being a politician is
knowing that you are only in office for a short period of time. You might have
a long term vision for the nation, but you know that if the vision cannot be
fully realized in the time that you have in your political position, there is
no guarantee that your vision will ever become a reality. A few years ago I was
with an organization and we went through a painstaking eight month vision
discerning process. We invited all of the shareholders to take part in the
process and about 25% of them took us up on the invitation. When we got to the
end of the vision discernment journey, we arrived at a new, concise vision
statement that summed up all of the concerns and conversations that we had had.
It covered such basic issues such as how the organization would relate to the
outside world and what kind of cultural lenses we were willing to put on as we
looked at that world. It was a grand, long-term plan. But soon the naysayers
started to make their presence known. Some of the shareholders confessed that
they had stayed out of the process for the express purpose of tearing the
resulting document down when it was all over. It was not long after that that I
left the organization; and it was not long after I left that the organization
discarded all of our work. Vision tends to be temporary – and it leaks badly.
No matter
how we interpret the circumstances surrounding the building of Solomon’s
Temple, one thing is extremely clear – David had a clear vision of the temple
that needed to be built. It was something that he had thought long and hard
about. David’s vision of the temple was so clear that he could describe it in
painstaking detail. But God had also clearly said no to David’s building of the
temple. So all that David could do was dream – and instill the vision that was
inside of his mind in the imagination of his son, the one that would be king
after David was gone.
David’s
instruction to Solomon was that God would see him through the building of the
temple. Solomon would need to be strong and he would need to be courageous,
because there would be opposition and there would be material shortages – those
things are just the realities of any building project. But in the end, God
would take care of everything that would go wrong and a temple would stand on
Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
But by the
time these words were written, the temple that had once stood proudly on Temple
Mount had been totally destroyed. The hope of the author of these words was
probably that someone else would take up the task and rebuild the temple. That
a new vision would be placed in the heart and mind of a contemporary leader,
and that Jerusalem would once again become the heart of the worship of the God
of Israel. Vision, if it is to survive, always has to be taken up by the ones
who follow us; and they will modify it in their way (the second temple was not
the same as the first), but if they can catch the vision they will make it a
reality.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: 1
Chronicles 29
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