“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, who has fulfilled with His hands what He spoke with His mouth” (2 Chron 6:4).
One thing you can say about Solomon—he didn’t do anything by halves! If the temple “must be exceedingly magnificent” (1 Chron 22:5), as David said, his son was the right man for the job. So when the temple was finished, no doubt meeting David’s expectations, how many offerings would be appropriate for the occasion? A thousand? Ten thousand? We know that after his prayer of dedication, “King Solomon offered a sacrifice of twenty-two thousand bulls and one hundred and twenty thousand sheep. So the king and all the people dedicated the house of God” (2 Chron 7:5). That’s right, 142,000 animals! But here we read that, as the ark was finally brought home, “King Solomon, and all the congregation of Israel who were assembled with him before the ark, were sacrificing sheep and oxen that could not be counted or numbered for multitude” (5:6). Yet Micah’s question lingers over the pages of Scripture: “Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?” (Mic 6:7, KJV). No, there was only One that could satisfy Him, His own dear Lamb. Yet all of these events were necessary in bringing history to that climax. God delivered His chosen people “out of the land of Egypt” (2 Chron 6:5). Then He had “chosen Jerusalem,” as He said, “that My name may be there,” and had also “chosen David to be over My people Israel” (v 6). Now, said Solomon, what had been “in the heart of…David” (v 7) had been erected in Jerusalem, the heart of the Land. Now in the heart of the temple was “the ark” and in the heart of the ark “the covenant of the Lord” (v 11). A people. A land. A king. A city. A temple. An ark. A covenant. And they all would meet again on Moriah a thousand years in the future.