“31 When a man wrongs his neighbor and is required to take an oath and he comes and swears the oath before Your altar in this temple, 32 then hear from heaven and act. Judge between Your servants, condemning the guilty and bringing down on his own head what he has done. Declare
the innocent not guilty, and so establish his innocence.
33 When Your people Israel have been defeated by an enemy because they have sinned against You, and when they turn back to You and confess Your name, praying and making supplication to You in this temple, 34 then hear from heaven and forgive the sin of Your people Israel and bring them back to the land You gave to their fathers.
35 When the heavens are shut up and there is no rain because Your people have sinned against
You, and when they pray toward this place and confess Your name and turn from their sin because You have afflicted them, 36 then hear from heaven and forgive the sin of Your servants, Your people Israel. Teach them the right way to live, and send rain on the land You gave Your people for an inheritance.
37 When famine or plague comes to the land, or blight or mildew, locusts or grasshoppers, or when an enemy besieges them in any of their cities, whatever disaster or disease may come, 38 and when a prayer or plea is made by any of Your people Israel—each one aware of the afflictions of his own heart, and spreading out his hands toward this temple— 39 then hear from heaven, Your dwelling place. Forgive and act; deal with each man according to all he does, since You know his heart (for You alone know the hearts of all men), 40 so that they will fear You all the time they live in the land You gave our fathers.”
What makes happy happen? What makes blessings abound? We ask and answer those questions in ways big and small. A young lady just out of college decides that what makes being in the thick of things makes happy happen. Wherever the action is, is where she wants to be. A retiree decides that being present in his relationships is what will bring blessing. His plan now that he’s retired is to try to add value to the people around him.
What makes happy happen? What makes blessings abound? We ask and answer those questions in ways scenarios big and small like the two I just listed.
Scenarios on the way to happy and blessing is what we will consider over the next two weeks. Solomon lists seven scenarios in this prayer asking for blessings to abound and for happy keeping happening. Today we see that one of the necessary components for blessings and happiness is forgiveness. We need forgiveness to keep the good of life going. That’s the claim of this sermon.
We consider this in four points. First, a prayer for justice. Second, a prayer in defeat. Third, a prayer in drought. Fourth: a prayer in disaster. First, in verses 31-32, a prayer for justice. Second, in verses 33-34, a prayer in defeat. Third, in verses 35-36, a prayer in drought. Fourth, in verses 37-40, a prayer in disaster.
We see an injustice that needs forgiveness in our first point: a prayer for justice. Last week, we considered Solomon praising the Lord. He praised God for His faithfulness, for being beyond and being near. Now Solomon transitions to petitions—praise then petition; that structure might sound familiar. That’s the Lord’s prayer, “our Father in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. The kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Then, and only then, come the petitions. “Give us this day our daily bread.”
Praise and then petition is the structure of Jesus’ prayer and Solomon’s prayer. It’s not the only structure of prayer, though. We need to beware of prescribing based on only two examples. David’s prayer starts by asking for mercy, “Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger or discipline me in your wrath.” Hezekiah starts his prayer for healing by reminding the Lord that he’s tried to live a godly life, “Please, Lord, remember how I have walked before You wholeheartedly and in truth…” We need to be wary of prescribing a structure for prayer.
We need to be wary because prayer is relational. We don’t prescribe structure for other relational acts. ‘Honey, I think we should have a disagreement tonight. I’ll start by saying something insensitive. Please respond with any frustrations that have been bottling up in you. I’ll explode and then sulk for a few hours and later apologize for losing my cool. You’ll say, “fine,” but it won’t be fine so then before bedtime we can awkwardly work through it so we can both sleep.’ We don’t do that. We don’t flowchart the stuff of relationships. We don’t want prescribe that for prayer either.
There is something to learn in this structure of moving from praise to petition, though; it’s not what the flesh learns. The flesh watches this move from praising God to petitioning God and learns to butter God up. The flesh learns, “Before you ask the heavenly Dad for something, say a few nice things about Him. It helps.” The flesh is afraid that it won’t get what it wants if it doesn’t do prayer right. A study of David’s prayers, Paul’s prayers, Peter’s prayers, and the prayers of church history show otherwise. Those prayers reveal authentic communication. Those people say what makes sense to them. It made sense to Solomon at this temple dedication to praise God for keeping His promises. It made sense to Solomon to praise God for taking an interest in this temple. It makes sense to Solomon now to ask for God to continue taking an interest in this temple in the form of forgiveness.
We take it for granted that this temple has to do with the forgiveness we’ll study, but that’s only because the Lord worked through it for that purpose. Some pagans used their temples for human sacrifice. The quick connection we Christians make between the temple and forgiveness tells you something about the Lord—it tells you that He’s forgiving.
Each of these seven scenarios, seven petitions, Solomon offers have to do with forgiveness. They deal with different aspects of forgiveness. You intuitively know that forgiveness has different aspects. Forgiving a child who broke your favorite mug is different from forgiving your employee for embezzling. Repentance looks different. Consequences look different. Forgiving someone else and accepting forgiveness from that same person look different. Forgiveness is not simple and so we have these seven scenarios.
The first has to do with the fact that wrong must be confessed for forgiveness. That’s part of verse 31, “When a man wrongs his neighbor and is required to take an oath and he comes and swears the oath before Your altar in this temple, then hear from heaven and act. Judge between Your servants, condemning the guilty and bringing down on his own head what he has done. Declare the innocent not guilty, and so establish his innocence.”
Here you have not just sin but a disagreement about that sin. That’s often how it goes. The one who lied doesn’t always acknowledge that she lied. It’s hard to know who started the quarrel and who keeps pouring gas on the fire. That’s trouble. Sin is trouble. Not owning up to your sin doubles the trouble. This is a prayer for when the trouble is doubled. It’s a prayer for when justice is uncertain.
Uncertain justice is a situation only the Lord can resolve, which is why Solomon prays about it. This king who settled the case between the two prostitutes is wise enough to know that often only the Lord knows. People are complicated. People’s problems are complicated. People’s sin is terribly complicated. Often only the Lord knows what’s needed. The message in this petition is that the Lord does know what’s needed and He will make it all clear.
The temple was a reminder of this; “When a man wrongs his neighbor and is required to take an oath and he comes and swears the oath before Your altar in this temple…” The temple altar functioned in this a bit like putting your hand on the Bible in a court of law and promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It’s an acknowledgement that the Lord will hold you accountable. The Lord’s Supper serves this same role. That’s why the council practices mutual censure before that sacrament. We humans need regular reminders that the Lord knows and will act even if others can’t or won’t.
We need to trust that if we are to remain hopeful in this fallen world. We humans have an understandable need for justice in an unjust world. The Lord will satisfy that need provided we don’t demand justice on our own terms. If you demand justice your way, you’ll get none in the end. If you wait for God’s justice, you’ll be satisfied. That’s Jesus; “will God not bring about justice for His elect who cry out to Him day and night, and will He delay long for them?” Jesus is that judge. He knows the process better than any of us. We would do well to trust him.
That’s Solomon’s first petition regarding forgiveness. God knows the heart. God knows who is guilty. Don’t lie to yourself. Don’t lie to Him. For those of you curious about structure, we spent a disproportionate amount of time on this petition because in this first point we also considered the structure of this prayer, the nature of forgiveness, and oriented ourselves to petitions. The first points of sermons are often the longest because they do double or triple duty; now we come to Solomon’s second petition: a prayer in defeat.
Solomon’s reign was the golden age of Israel. When life is golden, we want to believe it will continue on—it will just get better and better. Solomon is wiser than that as you see in his second scenario; verse 33, “When Your people Israel have been defeated by an enemy because they have sinned against You, and when they turn back to You and confess Your name, praying and making supplication to You in this temple, hen hear from heaven and forgive the sin of Your people Israel and bring them back to the land You gave to their fathers.”
Solomon knew that trouble would come. Defeat would come. Sons would die in battle for no ground gained. Sons would die in battle for ground lost. Experiencing that loss is lifechanging sorrow and the temple was there for such sorrow—“praying and making supplication to You in this temple.” Where do you go when life fall apart? Where do you go when the emotions are too intense to feel? You’ve got your places. I’ve got mine. The Lord said that the temple was the place to go. God is the place to go when life is too much.
That’s the message of Scripture. You hear it from David, “Pour out your hearts before Him; God is a refuge for us.” You hear it from Paul, “we were burdened excessively, beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, we had the sentence of death within ourselves so that we would not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead.” ‘When I find myself in times of trouble, the Holy Spirit works in me speaking words of wisdom, “Come to me,”’ to change a lyric.
We come to Jesus in times of calamity. He’s our temple. You don’t want to come to Jesus only when there’s trouble, but when there is trouble please make a bee-line for him. That’s not weakness. That’s wisdom.
In this petition about defeat, Solomon connects the defeat with sin—“When Your people Israel have been defeated by an enemy because they have sinned against You.” The Lord promised that Israel would experience defeat as a consequence for sin; Leviticus 26:17, “I will set My face against you so that you will be defeated before your enemies; and those who hate you will rule over you, and you will flee when no one is pursuing you.” Sin has consequences. The psychologist Jordan Peterson isn’t a Christian—as far as I know—but he is clear that in his clinical experience no one gets away with anything. Sin has consequences.
The connection between sin and military defeat was an equation for Israel because they were a theocracy. The Lord was their king and the king came with His people into battle when His people were behind Him. We can’t take this into the church scattered among the nations, but we would do well to remember the equation of sin having consequential consequences.
It doesn’t always seem that way in the short term. The wicked seem to prosper. The righteous often have hard lives. That’s because the Lord is working more than just one equation. We need to remember that when we don’t understand.
What we do understand is that sin has consequences and we don’t want these consequences. Each one of us is a sinner and so each one of us has reason—plenty of reasons—to be afraid of the consequences; verse 33 tells that we need not be afraid if we, “turn back to You and confess Your name.” There is assurance of forgiveness. Knowing that you are forgiven is one of the chief gifts in life. We receive it weekly Sunday mornings in the confession of sin and assurance of pardon. That habit isn’t meant to be a bore. It’s meant to bore into our stubborn souls and inject “strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow,” as the hymn puts it. That’s this prayer in defeat. Now we turn to our third point: prayer in drought.
We moderns tend to think we are much more advanced than the ancients. We scoff at their believing the gods controlled the weather. After all, we understand meteorology. Solomon would ask who we think governs the laws of meteorology. The weather is the next scenario; verse 35, “When the heavens are shut up and there is no rain because Your people have sinned against You, and when they pray toward this place and confess Your name and turn from their sin because You have afflicted them, then hear from heaven and forgive the sin of Your servants, Your people Israel. Teach them the right way to live, and send rain on the land You gave Your people for an inheritance.”
This has been misapplied in multiple ways. Some have claimed it to be true for any believer in any nation. Every so often a prayer movement latches unto these verses along those lines. That’s not the primary purpose of this passage. Others claim to have moved beyond such material desires because what matters isn’t happiness or crops but holiness and character. That’s just as mistaken.
The way forward with this prayer about drought is to grow aware of our fleshly impulse to seek to control God by obedience. This is the Israelite heart that kept the commandments for the crops. The fear of drought was all that kept him from denying the Lord. He’s fallen into a “I scratch your back, you scratch mine,” relationship with the Lord. The Pharisees couldn’t see that they were doing the same. The fear of being thought sinners is all that kept them from denying the Lord. You see that when the Lord lived among them. They were more concerned with their purity than with his. Don’t use God. God is always the goal. If you miss that, you’ll miss Him. We finish with our fourth scenario: a prayer in disaster.
If you tend to overthink, one word in this prayer will help you more than any other; verse 37, “When famine or plague comes to the land, or blight or mildew, locusts or grasshoppers, or when an enemy besieges them in any of their cities, whatever disaster or disease may come…” That word “whatever” helps overthinkers.
What about fire? Whatever disaster. What about a power grid failure? Whatever disaster. Flood? Whatever disaster. Losing your job? Whatever disaster. Losing the next job? Whatever disaster. The all-inclusiveness of that word “whatever” helps overthinkers. It’s the same as “day and night” representing all time in Psalm 121, “The sun will not beat down on you by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord will keep you from all evil; He will keep your life.” It’s the same as “nor anything else” in Romans 8, “neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” It’s a way of saying in whatever goes wrong, pray. Tell God what’s going on, “each one aware of the afflictions of his own heart,” as verse 38 puts it.
I don’t know all your afflictions. You don’t know all the afflictions of the person sitting nearest you. We don’t know all the afflictions of the people who are nearest to us in this life. We are much more of a mystery to each other than we could begin to accept—mysteries even to ourselves; that’s verse 39, “Forgive and act; deal with each man according to all he does, since You know his heart (for You alone know the hearts of all men).”
I have some ideas why certain disasters have struck me, but even after overthinking them I likely know only less than three percent of the reasons. God alone knows. He knows what I needed to repent of, what I needed to be redirected from. He alone knows what’s going on in you and so the word to you in disaster is to pray to Him. He knows.
Jesus went to Him. When disaster struck and Jesus was in Gethsemane what did he do? He prayed. I’d be foolish to think I don’t need to pray in disaster if Jesus did. Jesus trusted that his Father knew what makes blessings abound. Follow him in that. Pray to your Father in heaven. Amen.