21 - God Speaks to Solomon in a Dream [B]

God Speaks to Solomon in a Dream; 1 Kings 9:1-9

We are looking at God's response to Solomon's prayer. A lot of times we don't see God's direct response to prayer in the Old Testament or hear His articulation of that response. There are times, of course, that we do but for the most part we don't. The same thing happens to day in the church age. We live today in an era of no revelation, no ongoing special revelation, so praying to God often seems to a lot of people to be just a sort of one way conversation. It is hard for people to recognise that the second part of the conversation takes place as we read the Word of God, because God communicates to us through His Word. He is not a God who has ever communicated through feeling or through impressions or through intuitive insights. There is always a clear juxtaposition in the way that God has dealt with His people. God has revealed Himself, He has preserved Scripture, and the way and means of the various pagan religions, no matter what they are, all have certain things in common. This brings up the whole area which is theologically called bibliology and has to do with the ultimate authority in our life and how well we as believers conform to the Word of God as the ultimate authority in our lives.

In 2 Chronicles chapter seven we see God's response in a fuller way than we have recorded in 1 Kings chapter nine which was a more abridged version. The reason has to do with the purposes of the writer of Chronicles. Often when God speaks, or in the Gospels when Jesus speaks, He taught (in the Gospels) for lengthy periods of time. We can read through the accounts very quickly and yet it is clear that Jesus must have taught for much longer. The Holy Spirit in inspiration had an economic use of language and He was able to communicate what Jesus taught without taking up pages and pages of repetition. Under the Holy Spirit the writers of Scripture will take out of a somewhat lengthy statement that which He needs in order to present the case. The writer of Kings is selecting a portion in order to emphasise one things; the writer of Chronicles is writing after the exile and his emphasis is basically to give a talk to the Jews who are back in the land to encourage them to finish building the temple, to finish re-establishing the priesthood and its operation, and to go back to the glory days of Israel when they were walking with the Lord prior to the discipline of the Babylonian captivity. So when the writer of Chronicles records God's answer to Solomon's prayer he brings out the aspect of God's direct answer to the discipline section of the prayer—recognition that Israel would disobey God—and he focuses on God's promise to them they he would listen to them and to heal the land.

2 Chronicles 7:12 ^NASB "Then the LORD appeared to Solomon at night and said to him, 'I have heard your prayer and have chosen this place for Myself as a house of sacrifice'." The word "dream" does not appear here but that is what is implied. We know from the account in 1 Kings chapter nine that He appeared to him a second time as he had previously at Gilgal. So this is the second time that God appeared to Solomon and the implication is that He has appeared in a dream to Solomon, and there is a conversation that takes place. [13] "If I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or if I command the locust to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among My people, [14] and My people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin and will heal their land." He is summarising the statements that Solomon has made in the first part of each of his seven petitions in his prayer in 1 Kings chapter eight, summarising the various types of discipline that God would bring upon Israel. It is not an exhaustive list, it is simply a summary of the ways God will judge the nation in the land because of their disobedience.

But that isn't all that God says. 2 Chronicles 7:15 ^NASB "Now My eyes will be open and My ears attentive to the prayer {offered} in this place." His "eyes" have to do with His watchfulness, His care, His concern, and that He is in control, watching over the affairs of the nation Israel. When prayer is done the right way under the Mosaic Law, "in this place," i.e. the temple. [16] "For now I have chosen and consecrated this house that My name may be there forever, and My eyes and My heart will be there perpetually." This is the second time in these two verses where He talks about His eyes, so this gives us a good indication of what God is talking about in terms of His care for Israel. All of this terminology comes out of Deuteronomy and Leviticus. [17] "As for you, if you walk before Me as your father David walked, even to do according to all that I have commanded you, and will keep My statutes and My ordinances, [18] then I will establish your royal throne as I covenanted with your father David, saying, 'You shall not lack a man {to be} ruler in Israel.' [19] But if you turn away and forsake My statutes and My commandments which I have set before you, and go and serve other gods and worship them, [20] then I will uproot you from My land which I have given you, and this house which I have consecrated for My name I will cast out of My sight and I will make it a proverb and a byword among all peoples." So there is the warning, the threat of judgment.

We see this same thing happen in the Old Testament: that God is watching over them when they are in the land. Deuteronomy 11:12 ^NASB "a land for which the LORD your God cares; the eyes of the LORD your God are always on it, from the beginning even to the end of the year." The implication is accountability. Israel is accountable for their actions and for their obedience to the Lord. The place that He has named is designated as the central sanctuary, Deuteronomy 12:11 ^NASB "then it shall come about that the place in which the LORD your God will choose for His name to dwell, there you shall bring all that I command you: your burnt offerings and your sacrifices, your tithes and the contribution of your hand, and all your choice votive offerings which you will vow to the LORD." It is this place that is set apart as the central place of worship for Israel.

1 Kings 9:1-3 ^NASB "Now it came about when Solomon had finished building the house of the LORD, and the king's house, and all that Solomon desired to do, that the LORD appeared to Solomon a second time, as He had appeared to him at Gibeon. The LORD said to him, "I have heard your prayer and your supplication, which you have made before Me; I have consecrated this house which you have built by putting My name there forever, and My eyes and My heart will be there perpetually." In between the first half of verse three and the second half of the verse are all the verses we read in 2 Chronicles chapter seven.

Then in verse 4 God is going to give Solomon a conditional covenant that will be similar to the Davidic covenant. 1 Kings 9:4 ^NASB "As for you, if you will walk before Me as your father David walked, in integrity of heart and uprightness, doing according to all that I have commanded you {and} will keep My statutes and My ordinances, [5] then I will establish the throne of your kingdom over Israel forever, just as I promised to your father David, saying, 'You shall not lack a man on the throne of Israel.'" Note first of all that this is a conditional promise, indicated by the if-then construction. What God is promising Solomon here is that if he is obedient like David then it is through his line that the Davidic covenant will be fulfilled.

1 Kings 9:6 ^NASB "But if you or your sons indeed turn away from following Me, and do not keep My commandments and My statutes which I have set before you, and go and serve other gods and worship them, [7] then I will cut off Israel from the land which I have given them, and the house which I have consecrated for My name, I will cast out of My sight. So Israel will become a proverb and a byword among all peoples." We don't have all of that in the Chronicles account because that was written after this had already happened, and they were fully aware of that. The purpose of the Chronicles account was to encourage the people to get back to God because of His faithfulness in restoring them to the land, and so the emphasis in Chronicles is on how God has heard the prayer of Solomon and has brought them back to the land where the emphasis here is on the warning. This foreshadows exactly what is going to happen in both the northern and southern kingdoms, especially in the southern kingdom where what we will see take place is that eventually the descendants of Solomon, just as Solomon did, will turn their backs on God and begin to reject God and go in a desperate search for meaning and happiness through everything that he could conceivably think of, and that is the story of Ecclesiastes, his confession of the fact that he saw happiness in everything in life but could not find it apart from God and that life is meaningless apart from God.

Because of that and because of how history worked out with his descendants, and his descendants turned from God, God does not fulfil the promise of the Davidic kings through the line of Solomon. One of his descendants just before the captivity is Jechoniah, and because of his evil and idolatry and all the things he did God says no one who is a descendant of Jechoniah would ever sit on the throne and rule over Israel. That is called the Coniah curse. This is why there are two different accounts of the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospels.

Luke 3:23 ^NASB "When He began His ministry, Jesus Himself was about thirty years of age, being, as was supposed, the son of Joseph, the son of Eli." If we look at Matthew we see that Matthew starts with Abraham and comes forward. Joseph's name is inserted instead of Mary in Luke 3 because it was typical in genealogies to have the man's name there and not the woman's name. What we have in Luke 3 is the physical descent through His mother coming down to Jesus. Luke 3:31 ^NASB "the son of Melea, the son of Menna, the son of Mattatha, the son of Nathan, the son of David. " Jesus' lineage physically couldn't have gone through Joseph because if we look at the Matthew genealogy it traces back through Coniah, and Jesus could not be a physical descendant of Coniah because of the Coniah curse. So He is cut off physically from having that descent through Solomon, but it is through Solomon that He has a legal inheritance to the throne. But it is Mary through whom He has the direct physical descent through and her line goes back to Nathan.

1 Kings 9:7 ^NASB "then I will cut off Israel from the land which I have given them, and the house which I have consecrated for My name, I will cast out of My sight. So Israel will become a proverb and a byword among all peoples." This happened in 586 BC. [8] "And this house [temple] will become a heap of ruins; everyone who passes by will be astonished and hiss and say, 'Why has the LORD done thus to this land and to this house?' [10]  And they will say, 'Because they forsook the LORD their God, who brought their fathers out of the land of Egypt, and adopted other gods and worshiped them and served them, therefore the LORD has brought all this adversity on them.'"

All of this gives us the content that God reveals to Solomon in this dream. These dreams contained rational content, discourse from God that can be analysed, studied, and broken down so that we can understand precisely and exactly what He said. The word "dream" is from a Hebrew word that means vision. Another word means to see, and it indicates that God is revealing Himself in some way. Another word refers to a revelatory message. None of these words can be distinguished from one another. In some cases they are used interchangeably. Dreams generally take place at night when asleep; visions generally take place during the daytime when awake and somehow God would reveal something that they would see, much as John does on the Isle of Patmos.

There are two categories of divine revelation that we must understand. The first is general revelation which refers to non-verbal, non-specific, non-directive revelation. Psalm 19:1 ^NASB "The heavens are telling of the glory of God; And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands." There is no real content there but there is evidence of something, it just says something by its very presence. So you can't develop theology based on general revelation. Special revelation, which is the second category, must always interpret general revelation. For example, we can't go to things from nature and derive patterns and principles just on the basis of creation. It is only through revelation that God enables us to actively used examples. There are examples we can use from nature and ones we can't. E.g. an ant is a pattern for good work and consistent labour in the book of Proverbs. But the ant is not used as a pattern for family life because there is a queen and lots of males, and that's it. The Bible never uses that, so special revelation always has to tell us how to use general revelation, how to interpret general revelation. In and of itself general revelation is not sufficient. It is sufficient for one thing and that is to show that God exists, Romans 1, and it is enough information to hold men accountable for the knowledge of His existence.

We have to understand these two categories because when we are talking about God revealing Himself through impressions, through intuition, through dreams, visions, anything like that, then we recognise that that is special revelation. It is not general revelation because we recognise that there is some sort of specificity that is being communicated. Scripture is very clear that special revelation is ended, there is no ongoing special revelation; God Has closed the canon. The challenge is to live on the basis of what God has revealed without needing the tantalising and titillating emotions of having the ongoing experiences with God. The issue is to rest on and study His Word.

Several Gentiles have revelatory dreams in the Old Testament. God doesn't just reveal Himself to Jews and He doesn't just reveal Himself to believers. He revealed Himself to Abimelech in Genesis 20, to the butler and the baker in Genesis 40, to the Pharaoh in Genesis 41, to a Midianite soldier and Gideon eavesdrops on the conversation in Judges 7:13, to Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 2 & 4. But in every case a Jew had to be there to properly interpret that revelation because from Genesis 12 on the Jew became the custodian of divine revelation.  

God affirms that he speaks through dreams and visions as the normal approach to revelation in the Old Testament, but with Moses He addressed him in a more direct personal manner. Numbers 12:6-8 ^NASB "He said, 'Hear now My words: If there is a prophet among you, I, the LORD, shall make Myself known to him in a vision. I shall speak with him in a dream. Not so, with My servant Moses, He is faithful in all My household, With him I speak mouth to mouth, Even openly, and not in dark sayings, And he beholds the form of the LORD. Why then were you not afraid To speak against My servant, against Moses?'"

In the Law God provides quality control for dreams and visions. Deuteronomy 13:1-3 ^NASB "If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder comes true, concerning which he spoke to you, saying, 'Let us go after other gods (whom you have not known) and let us serve them,' you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams; for the LORD your God is testing you to find out if you love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul." A second area of testing is in Deuteronomy 18 concerning a prophet who claims things will come true and they don't come to pass, and God says prophets are going to have a one hundred per cent reliability there.

Visions are given to a variety of prophets in the Old Testament: Nathan in relationship to David, other visions given to prophets such as Iddo at the time of Jereboam, Zechariah, Isaiah, etc. Every one of their prophecies, when God speaks to them through dreams and visions, relate to Israel's history; they never relate to the trivial day-to-day details of people's lives.

There are only four dreams that communicate after Law is revealed, dreams are primarily before. The four are the passage in 1 Kings 9 and 2 Chronicles 7, Judges 7:13, 1 Kings 3 when God appears to Solomon the first time, and the fourth to Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 2. However, there is the implication in the text that there were other dreams that were not recorded in history.

The dreams always relate to God's plan for history and the outworking of the Abrahamic covenant.

In the New Testament dreams are primarily associated with the birth of Christ and the announcement of His birth, related to Mary, related to the Magi, related to Joseph being warned. Later on Pilate's wife has a dream but that is probably not supernatural revelation but closer to what we think of as intuition today.

The term "vision" is used twelve times in the New Testament. It refers to the transfiguration of Jesus, Saul of Tarsus is given a vision, Peter has a vision in Acts 10, Paul's Macedonian vision, then the Lord came him a vision encouraging him to stay in Corinth in Acts 18.

Four conclusions: a) Dreams and visions were to communicate when there was no canon of Scripture; b) Dreams and visions were never designed to communicate personal information, personal guidance or trivial data. They are given to give a representative of the covenant community guidance in terms of his ministry, not in terms of his personal life; c) dreams are common to everyone but we don't use that as a system for guidance. When we evaluate the dreams of the Bible they don't relate to personal issues, they relater to God's plan and purposes for Israel; d) dreams and visions should not be confused with intuition.