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
But that isn’t all that God says. 2 Chronicles
We see this same thing
happen in the Old Testament: that God is watching over them when they are in
the land. Deuteronomy
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,
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,
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,
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
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
1 Kings 9:7 NASB
“then I will cut off
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.
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,
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
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
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
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