Thursday MP - September 1 (Psalms 16, 17; 1 Kings 5:1-6:1, 7)

In today’s Old Testament reading, Solomon begins to build the temple — using forced labor (verses 13 and following). And so we have come full circle — the Hebrew people, set free from slavery in Egypt where they made bricks for the pyramids and the Pharoah’s other projects, are now enslaved by their own king to build a temple, supposedly in honor of the very LORD who had set their ancestors free. Delivered from the ways of Egypt, the people have now fallen back into the very death-dealing practices from which they had been set free.

We Christians have this experience too — we are set free in Christ and then we keep finding ourselves drawn back into new forms of the same old bondage from which we have been delivered. Already in the New Testament Paul was horrified when the Galatians started turning their backs on the gospel. Luther rebelled against the new “Babylonian captivity” of the church. In our own country, we threw off a king but then often turned to “strong leaders” to tell us what to do when the habits of democracy waned.

What patience God must need to deal with us, who find living in the freedom of God’s grace so difficult! And yet God never tires of setting us free over and over again.