God’s Word for You

2 Chronicles 2:11-18 Money and sin

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Monday, September 16, 2024

11 Hiram king of Tyre replied in a letter to Solomon: “Because the LORD loves his people, he has made you their king.”

It sounds to us as if Hiram knew something about the LORD God. But did he have faith in God? I’m not sure we can answer that with a definite yes or no. In the cultures that surrounded Israel where there were many religions and many gods, it was simply good manners to know about the gods of other nations, and even to accept what people said were the powers or domains of those gods. And while we are commanded to take things in the kindest possible way, Hiram does not claim that he is a worshiper of God in heaven, nor does he make sacrifices to the Lord. He simply agrees to do business with Solomon for the sake of an old friendship and treaty with David.

    12 And Hiram added: “Praise be to the LORD, the God of Israel, who made heaven and earth! He has given King David a wise son, endowed with intelligence and discernment, who will build a temple for the LORD and a palace for himself. 13 I am sending you Huram-Abi, a man of great skill. 14 His mother was from Dan and his father was from Tyre. He is trained to work in gold and silver, bronze and iron, stone and wood, and with purple and blue and crimson yarn and fine linen. He is experienced in all kinds of engraving and can bring about any design given to him. He will work with your craftsmen and with those of my lord, your father David.
    15 “Therefore let my lord send his servants the wheat and barley and the olive oil and wine he promised, 16 and we will cut all the logs you need from Lebanon, and we will float them in rafts by sea down to Joppa. Then you can take them up to Jerusalem.”

We might recognize a few things from this long passage. First, Hiram found an excellent craftsman who even had Israelite blood (“his mother was from Dan”). He was everything Solomon was looking for, and more. In glowing words (verse 14 is one of the longest verses of the Bible) he describes Huram-Abi’s skill, background, training, experience, and a special ability for bringing about “any design given to him.”

Second, the transportation of logs was done the same way it was done in the logging era here in America. Hiram explains that they would put the logs into the sea (probably lashing them together into a modest raft-shape), and float them down the coast to Joppa. In our century, the prevailing currents travel south to north across the Palestinian coast. This does not mean that Hiram could not have floated logs southward; it only means that they would have had to have harnessed either wind or other forces (such as oared vessels) to send the lumber south along the coast. But sea travel was far more economical than land travel for such volumes of cedar and other goods. It can also be said that the Mediterranean has been studied by many oceanographic studies, and there is evidence of considerable change in the last 3,000 years. So we cannot say for certain that the prevailing current in Solomon’s time was the same as it is today.

Third, there is the question of money and of economics in general. Is money an evil to be avoided? Paul said, “The love of money is a root of all sorts of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). Doctrinally, this falls under the subject of dangers to faith, which is to say, ways that a Christian might possibly lose their faith and fall from grace. Professor Lyle Lange lists seven different dangers to faith in his textbook God So Loved the World, and “The love of money and what it buys” is the fifth of these. But money itself is not evil or wicked. Jesus was content to pay his temple tax (Matthew 17:27) and saw the benefit of having a treasurer among the disciples, even when the treasurer was a traitor (John 12:6). Solomon used money and the strength of his economy to build the great temple. The temple was not evil because money was involved; money does not make a man evil. The love of money, however, is the source of terrible sin and even slopes downward into unbelief.

Sometimes sin is described as turning away from God, and sometimes sin is described as turning toward a created thing. Often they are both to be found in the same verse: “Their hearts have turned away from me, and their eyes have lusted after their idols” (Ezekiel 6:9). Jeremiah says just about the same thing (Jeremiah 2:13). The love of money is something that perhaps does both. But God has given us his law to condemn all men, with the intent that they give up their desire of earning their own righteousness before God. In this way the law serves the gospel, since salvation and eternal life in heaven come only through the gospel. When the law does its work in our hearts, crushing our dependence on anything other than Christ, then the gospel calls us back to Christ and to every blessing that comes through him. For the good things in the world and the good things that come in heaven both come to us only through Christ. Without him we have no good thing at all (Psalm 16:2). The conclusion is this: Money is a tool that can be used for much good, but we must be careful not to love it or set it above our love for God. It is a tool, to be used like grammar, or art, or like our many skills. But it must not be desired above God, whom we should fear, love and trust above all things.

17 Solomon took a count of all the aliens who were in Israel, after the census his father David had taken; and they were found to be 153,600. 18 He assigned seventy thousand men to lift and carry, eighty thousand to quarry stone in the hill country, and thirty-six hundred to oversee them and to keep the people working.

Here is the count Solomon made to arrive at the numbers of workers already mentioned in 2:2. He distances himself from David’s census, the one that was sinful and that brought down God’s wrath on the nation (1 Chronicles 21:1-12). Solomon’s count (hardly a complete census) was a saphar, a simple count of the non-Israelites he could use for forced labor to do many of the difficult and menial tasks, especially carrying heavy loads and quarrying stone. David’s census was a manah, a thorough numbering of the men available for his army (1 Chronicles 21:1). But it was the heart of the king that was the point: Solomon did not do this out of pride, or because Satan incited him. He did it to make plans in a practical way for the construction of the temple of God.

God bless your plans for maintaining your household, for balancing your budget and making ends meet, for paying your taxes, paying tuitions and other fees, for honoring your marriage, and for maintaining regular giving through your church to honor God, to allow his servants to carry out their work, and to further the work of God’s kingdom in your lifetime.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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