And there I have provided a place for the ark, in which is the covenant of the LORD that he made with our fathers, when he brought them out of the land of Egypt.”
Solomon ends his address to Israel not with the temple's splendour but with its purpose. The whole house was built to hold one chest, and that chest held God's covenant with a rescued people.
A house made for the ark
The temple's scale is not the point of the verse. What it was built to hold is.
H. L. RossierThis magnificent house had been built to hold the ark of the covenant (v. 21). The people's responsibility would now be tested under a new order they had never known — the order of glory. But even there, the tables of the law remained the standard of that responsibility.
A plan Solomon did not invent
Solomon says he "provided a place," yet the whole speech credits God with both the promise and its keeping.
Leslie M. GrantSolomon was glad to recognise that God had both promised the temple and kept that promise by having Solomon build it. Solomon had not thought up this project, but God had. Solomon simply obeyed the Word of the Lord: he built the temple and so provided a place for the ark, which held the covenant the Lord had made with Israel when He brought them out of Egypt (vv. 20-21).
The journey's end
The ark had crossed a desert. Now it had a permanent home. Darby notes what stayed inside it and what did not.
J. N. DarbyThe priests had carried the ark by its poles. Those poles were now the memorial of their journeys with God. In His faithfulness He had led them, kept them, and brought them into the rest He had prepared for them. But what had been the sign of their means of grace in the wilderness was no longer inside: nothing but the law remained there. Aaron's rod and the pot of manna would not have matched the glorious reign and the rest of Canaan. The law was there. It was the basis for governing the kingdom, and the rule of the righteousness the kingdom was to practise.
Rossier reads the same scene as a picture of rest that only those inside could see:
H. L. RossierClearly this was the rest of God. It had all the more value because it came with a permanent reminder of what had gone before. Only, to be sure of this rest and to enjoy it, you had to enter the Holy Place. Those outside could not take it in.
What "the covenant" in the ark meant
The verse calls the ark's contents a covenant. That covenant was written on stone tablets, and it decided whether God would stay in the house.
H. L. RossierThe ark contained the tables of the law, the testimony of the covenant between the Lord and His people. On His part God kept this covenant with careful and unchanging faithfulness, but it was conditional. If Israel met its conditions, God would dwell among His people. If Israel disobeyed, the Lord had to leave her — to leave His throne and His house in Israel.
Ridout looks past the chest to the one heart where that law was never broken:
Samuel RidoutThe tables of the covenant were also in the ark. God's holy law was kept safe in the only place where it could remain unbroken: in the heart of Christ Himself. "Your law is within my heart" shone out perfectly in His outward life.
Egypt, not Abraham
Solomon dates the covenant from the exodus. Darby notes which fathers Solomon does not name:
J. N. DarbyHe has built a house for Jehovah to dwell in as a fixed home — that He may dwell in it forever. Notice here too that everything refers to the deliverance out of Egypt, to Horeb, to the law, and not to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Up to a point it was no doubt the fulfilment of the promises made to them, and fully so as a picture. But Solomon does not appeal to those promises for where he now stands.
Summary
- Promise — Solomon did not plan the temple. God promised it and carried it out; Solomon's part was obedience.
- Purpose — The whole splendid building existed for one reason: to give the ark of the covenant a place.
- Contents — Inside were the tables of the law: a covenant God kept faithfully, but one that depended on Israel's obedience. Commentators point past it to Christ, whose heart alone kept that law unbroken.
- Rest — The carrying poles stayed as a memorial of the wilderness journey, but that journey was over. Only those who entered the Holy Place could see this rest for themselves.
- Reference point — Solomon dates the covenant from the rescue out of Egypt and the law given at Horeb, not from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The temple rests on a rescue God had already carried out.