Built on Moriah

“Then Solomon began to build the house of the LORD on Mount Moriah, where the LORD had appeared to David his father, at the place that David had appointed, on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite.” (2 Chronicles 3:1)

Solomon built the temple at Ornan’s fleshing floor on Mount Moriah, the place where Abraham raised a knife (Genesis 22) and David raised an altar (1 Chronicles 21:18-30).

He could have built on a site of victory: where Abraham conquered armies, where Jacob saw the ladder to heaven, where David took down Goliath.

But instead, Solomon laid the first stone of the temple where Abraham laid Isaac on the rock.

He prepared a foundation of devotion where David faced the angel of discipline.

Where his fathers experienced their most painful moments of faith, Solomon made a place of worship.

This is what God does.

God turns our testing points into temple sites. 

He forges our deepest devotion out of the moments when we are most deeply tested and disciplined.

We want a wellspring the easy way and forget that the digging comes first. We want the crown without the excruciating trial (James 1:12). We want a temple site raised on a bed of flowers, but God always builds it on a tested faith.

The call up Moriah always feels baffling because we were expecting a multitude, as many as the stars in the sky. If he wants to give more life, why would he take what I have?

Moriah is where your vision, your hope, and your dreams go to die. But when you go by faith, you find that the multitudes come from Moriah—that for God to fulfill his purpose in you, you have to abandon any notion of doing it yourself.

Rise and go. Lay your plans on the stone, and God will turn you into a living stone. Go to the threshing floor, and he will show you the chaff and the wheat, the old and the new—what can stay and what must go.

It is there, on the bedrock of humble trust, that God builds a better life beyond comparison—a place for his Spirit to dwell.