David’s old body-temple was being taken down, but another temple was to be raised up in the Holy City.
We see that 1 Kings opens with a rather embarrassing story. “Now King David was old, advanced in years; and they put covers on him, but he could not get warm” (1 Ki 1:1). All the blankets they heaped on him couldn’t infuse new life into him. Perhaps motivated by David’s history with women, “his servants said to him, ‘Let a young woman, a virgin, be sought for our lord the king, and let her stand before the king, and let her care for him; and let her lie in your bosom, that our lord the king may be warm’” (v 2). The king acquiesced, “so they sought for a lovely young woman throughout all the territory of Israel, and found Abishag the Shunammite, and brought her to the king” (v 3). Trying to hold on to David by any means! How often we fail to see that what the Lord has given as a means to an end becomes to us an end in itself. David, great man though he was, would soon pass away. Only the Lord is permanent. This is a consistent theme in Scripture and through history. As Charles Wesley put it, “God buries His workmen but carries on His work.” It wasn’t the Lord’s intention to raise up a long line of “Davids.” Instead, through David’s lavish provisions (later detailed in 1 Chronicles 29), and his son Solomon’s construction—with the aid of his Gentile neighbor to the north, King Hiram of Tyre—God would provide a new gathering center for His people, where He would “dwell among the children of Israel” (6:13). Built, if you will, from Jewish stones and Gentile timbers, this exceedingly magnificent “house of prayer for all nations” (Isa 56:7) graphically illustrates a structure now being built by God from living stones, quarried from “all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues” (Rev 7:9), of which by grace we can all be a part!