The Friday after the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity Sunday
Posted on November 7, 2025 by under
Scripture: 1 Kings 9:1-9 (NKJV)
9:1 And it came to pass, when Solomon had finished building the house of the Lord and the king’s house, and all Solomon’s desire which he wanted to do, 2 that the Lord appeared to Solomon the second time, as He had appeared to him at Gibeon. 3 And the Lord said to him: “I have heard your prayer and your supplication that you have made before Me; I have consecrated this house which you have built to put My name there forever, and My eyes and My heart will be there perpetually. 4 Now if you walk before Me as your father David walked, in integrity of heart and in uprightness, to do according to all that I have commanded you, and if you keep My statutes and My judgments, 5 then I will establish the throne of your kingdom over Israel forever, as I promised David your father, saying, ‘You shall not fail to have a man on the throne of Israel.’ 6 But if you or your sons at all turn from following Me, and do not keep My commandments and My statutes which I have set before you, but go and serve other gods and worship them, 7 then I will cut off Israel from the land which I have given them; and this house which I have consecrated for My name I will cast out of My sight. Israel will be a proverb and a byword among all peoples. 8 And as for this house, which is exalted, everyone who passes by it will be astonished and will hiss, and say, ‘Why has the Lord done thus to this land and to this house?’ 9 Then they will answer, ‘Because they forsook the Lord their God, who brought their fathers out of the land of Egypt, and have embraced other gods, and worshiped them and served them; therefore the Lord has brought all this calamity on them.’”
Devotion
The Lord lays things out for Solomon very straightforwardly, just as He had done for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden: ‘I’m giving you this, and if it is ever not this way, everyone must acknowledge, it is because of you and not because of Me.’
This is, of course, not simply a matter of God maintaining His reputation by assigning blame. It is the Lord establishing for those who come afterwards that He already had a plan for every possible failure of humans whom He had blessed, so that they might be restored to the state of blessedness and bounty that He had given them. It is this reality to which the unbelieving world is blind. It’s why they ask, “Why me?” It’s why they assert, “If God exists and is truly good, He wouldn’t allow these bad things to happen,” and “You must be misunderstanding the Bible, because if God makes people in His image and calls them good, and I was born with this desire, He must approve of what I want to do, not call it ‘sin’ like you do.”
God’s Word makes it clear that Adam’s sin resulted in children born in his own sinful, dying likeness (Gen. 4:1). From him we have a continuing responsibility to God for acknowledging His original design (Gen. 9:6) and His desire to restore every descendant of Adam to it through Christ’s atonement for sin (Col. 3:10, Eph. 4:24, Ezek. 18:32, 1 Tim. 2:4–5).
Collect: Grant, we beseech Thee, Merciful Lord, to Thy faithful people pardon and peace, that they may be cleansed from all their sins, and serve Thee with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ, Thy Son, our Lord, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost, ever One God, world without end. Amen.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
