Season 5 - Episode 9
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On Sunday, when discussing Solomon building his Temple, I talked about what he was building and how. I skipped over something kind of fascinating in the text, though. I didn’t talk about when he dedicated the Temple. 1 Kings 8:2 tells us, “All the Israelites came together to King Solomon at the time of the festival in the month of Ethanim, the seventh month.” What was this festival? And was there significance related to the events of the story? The festival was often called the Feast of Booths, also referred to in English as the Feast of Tents or Tabernacles. I’m going to reflect briefly on the significance of this timing and some of what it has me thinking about in this Covenant Weekly for October 28, 2025.
Before Israel was led out of Egypt, Yahweh already existed. But people didn’t know where Yahweh was. Abram first heard from Yahweh in Ur. Jacob later had a dream and named the place “Bethel” because he thought, “This is where God lives!” Joseph had dreams in Canaan and in an Egyptian prison cell. Moses encountered God in the wilderness. In their escape, Israel saw God embodied by a pillar of cloud and/or fire. Yahweh existed. But Yahweh was not bound to any place or location.
But that wasn’t enough for Israel. They needed something they could see to identify with Yahweh for their worship. They were used to magnificent temples, centres for the expression of religious devotion. And God met them at their place of need–kind of. God didn’t give them a Temple. God led them to build a tent. It was a fancy tent, to be sure, but it was a tent (a tabernacle) that could go with them as they moved through the desert.
And the Spirit of God dwelt among them in this tent. Long after they were established in the land of Canaan, long after families had built homes and settled down, God lived in a tent. God was content in a temporary structure. After all, it didn’t really contain Yahweh anyway!
But, in a reflection of Israel’s inability to accept that God couldn’t be contained, David and Solomon couldn’t accept that what they considered God’s house wasn’t permanent. After all, how could their God be real and powerful and present if the divine was in a tent that could be packed away and moved at any time! And so Solomon built a magnificent Temple, which he describes to God as “a place for you to dwell forever.”
And he dedicated this permanent temple during the festival of tents, when Israel was to commemorate their time of transition. He sought to put God in a permanent place during the celebration designed to remember that God couldn’t be bound! It is ironic and funny at first thought.
But the longer I’ve thought about it, the less funny it has become. Because I’m becoming increasingly aware of our desire (my own desire) to make permanent that which God has designed to be temporary. There are so many examples of this, from my own life and from my decades of church experience.
Anyone who has worked in a church has heard the words, “But we've always done it this way!” I’ve even heard it in church plants that are less than ten years old! We easily get tied to ways of doing things or programs that are fairly new. Something created to meet a moment in time becomes something we want to make permanent. We easily forget that what we want to be permanent once replaced a former way of doing things–likely a former way that a previous generation wished had been permanent!
And it isn’t just programs or styles. We can easily get emotionally tied to physical structures and desire their permanence. Or maybe you wish we still used the Bible translation you grew up with, even though the language we use every day has long since changed. Churches have split because one generation insisted that songs that were fairly new to them shouldn’t be replaced (or often just joined by) more new songs from the next generation.
I’m saying this, not with the intent of criticizing. I’m observing a human reality. Change is hard. But just because change is hard doesn’t mean we should fight for permanence where permanence was never intended and probably isn’t healthy.
In fact, growth requires change. It requires impermanence. A parent may love having kids of a certain age, but if they try to keep their offspring at that age or continue to treat them as though they are that age, it won’t be healthy for parent or child. I may wish I were a younger age. But it's probably better for me to embrace aging in healthy ways rather than fighting against it. Even organizations and churches that are trying to do the same things today in the same ways they’ve done them before are struggling and dying.
Paul talks about growth in 1 Corinthians 3 when he says, “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” Even our ideas, beliefs, and convictions have impermanence built into them. And lest you think Paul equated “becoming a man” with finding a permanent way of understanding the world, the next verse says this: For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. Even the guy who wrote most of our New Testament knew that this side of eternity, all of our ways, understandings, and knowledge are marked by impermanence.
I’m not suggesting that we rush to change for the sake of change. That, I believe, can be just as disastrous as fighting for permanence, just in different ways. But we certainly shouldn’t be working to build temples of various kinds in efforts to house a God who cannot be contained.
What I am pondering, and perhaps this is something we need to consider together, is how we can embrace impermanence alongside honesty about the challenges that come with change. And by wrestling with the tension between these things, holding them together in tension, perhaps we can create environments where we can be most attuned to what God is doing among us, as a church, in our families, as we move through ages and stages, and in our world.
As God said through the prophet Isaiah thousands of years ago:
See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?