Then Solomon began to build the temple of the LORD in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where the LORD had appeared to his father David. It was on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite, the place provided by David. – 2 Chronicles 3:1

Today’s Scripture Reading (October 3, 2013): 2 Chronicles 3

A few years ago my family and I were driving home from a vacation and we passed through Eastern Montana. It suddenly dawned on me that we were driving through the very place where the most significant battle of The Great Sioux War of 1876 had been fought – The Battle of Little Big Horn, more commonly known as Custer’s Last Stand. Just that knowledge brought back into my memory some of the stories that I had heard of the battle in my youth. We stopped and I stood on the ground close to the battlefield and I could almost see the battle happening in front of me. I was confronted by the barren wasteland of the territory, and realized how hard escape from the battle would have been. It was not the controversy and the questions of strategy that came to mind, it was just the soldiers and Native Americans that had lost their lives in the battle. Each one was important to somebody. The events had happened 130 years earlier, and yet the whole thing seemed to be just a tragic waste of our most precious resource – people – that deserved to be recalled and remembered.

Maybe one of the most misunderstood phrases is the idea that “we will always remember.” It isn’t really the truth. We don’t always remember. As much as we think we will always remember, almost every event disappears with time. It is the natural way of things. No matter how significant the event, over time it fades from our memories. It is one of the reasons why we build memorials and why memorials are so important to us. They help us to remember - and I think many of us love the process of remembering. It is also why our memorials have the ability to draw crowds. We want to remember and memorials help us to fill in the details that we seem to so easily forget.

The author of Chronicles seems to want to make a connection for us with the past. The temple of Solomon which, by the time these words are written, had long been destroyed was more than just a place to worship God – it was a memorial of a very significant event in the history of the nation. It is supposed that this place where Solomon built his temple was also the very spot where Abraham was asked to sacrifice his son, Isaac. The place where the people had sacrificed their offerings as a substitute for their sins was also the place where Abraham found a ram caught in a bush – a sacrifice to take the place of his son. Mount Moriah was a place where God had moved significantly and with grace twice in history of the nation.

For the Christian, we want to add a third event. In the gathering of the wood by Isaac we see the cross, and in the sacrifice of animals in the temple, we see a sacrifice made by Jesus, the perfect one, for all of us. For this to be true, Mount Moriah ceases to be a specific mountain, but instead comes to include the small hills that surround the mountain, of which Golgotha is one – and Moriah also becomes a memorial of the significant ways that God has moved on earth and the way that he has walked among us.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: 2 Chronicles 4