Dave's Diary

This coming Sunday will be Transfiguration Sunday, so the daily readings aim to help us to appreciate more deeply what happened on the Mount of Transfiguration.

Daily Reading: 1 Kings 18:1-21

“¹⁰ When the priests withdrew from the Holy Place, the cloud filled the temple of the Lord. ¹¹ And the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled his temple.”

Since the days of their wilderness wanderings, God had drawn near to the Israelites shrouded in a pillar of fiery cloud. Yesterday’s encounter between God and Moses played out under a great cloud of God’s presence that had descended on Mount Sinai, and when God drew near to Moses personally we read that the Lord came down in the cloud and stood there with him …” (Exodus 34:5)

In today’s reading, as Solomon and the priests finally completed the Temple in Jerusalem and placed the various worship-furnishings and the Ark of the Covenant into the Holy of Holies, God once again drew near in all His glory, shrouded in the cloud. Whereas Moses had “bowed to the ground at once and worshipped” when the cloud of God’s glorious presence drew near to him (Exodus 34:8), here we are told that “the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled his temple” (1 Kings 8:11). It seems they were rendered powerless by the extreme glory of the presence of the Lord.

It appears that God gave them this overwhelming sign of His presence and glory resting within the Temple to communicate that this was where they were now to draw near to Him in worship. I believe that it also communicates to all worshippers of God everywhere that when we gather to worship the LORD in spirit and truth we should always expect and anticipate that God will draw near to us in glory as we seek to draw near to Him in worship. We should understand that God’s glory might very occasionally be revealed outwardly through the sign of a cloud of His presence filling the worship-space (there are anecdotal examples of this is modern Church history); but it is far more likely that as each worshipper is overwhelmed by an internal sense of God’s presence, the entire gathering becomes itself the glory cloud – the dwelling place (shekinah) of God’s presence.

Imagine how different our experience of worship will be on Sunday if we come to the Service expecting that!

LORD, by Your Spirit’s ministry, please awaken in my heart the desire to encounter Your glorious presence when I go up to worship You on Sunday, and please awaken in all of our hearts the expectation that it will be so. Amen.