Forming Faith Blog

Teaching the Temple (1 Kings 5 & 8)

Posted on October 14 2025 by Gregory Rawn

Solomon presided over the building of God’s house—the temple—fulfilling his father David’s wish. There are many ways to approach this text. How will you do so?

A 3D rendered image of Solomon's temple created by Jeremy Park, Bible-Scenes.com (not AI)
Jeremy Park, Bible-Scenes.com
Since Last Time

Last week, the Narrative Lectionary showed us God calling and anointing David as king after Saul (through Samuel). It took around 15 years between David’s anointing and actually taking the throne, with plenty of adventures and shenanigans in the meantime (including multiple instances of Saul throwing spears at David). David ruled over Israel for 40 years, until his death, at which time his son Solomon became king. After asking God for wisdom (and receiving it plus extra stuff), Solomon decided to build the temple, the house of God. This is when today’s passages begin.

Different Paths

With any complicated task, there are many ways you can teach, preach, etc., any Bible passage. Sometimes there’s an obvious path (such as talking about God calling us with Samuel’s calling or God looking on our hearts with David’s calling), although we are under no obligation to follow the obvious way. At other times, there are multiple directions we might want to go. For me, this is one of those times. So, I will be providing a bit of a sampler platter with the hope that it will help get your creative juices flowing.

What Is the Temple?

The first direction we can go (or perhaps the first leg of any faith-formational journey we lead) is to simply cover what the temple even is. It’s likely that many of your faith formation participants (whether in a class, small group, or even worship) would be familiar with the idea of the temple, but many won’t be. Even those who do could probably learn something valuable.

What indeed is the temple?

  • Not a church. I think that this is an important point to make. Indeed, both the Jerusalem temple and our churches are places to worship God. But there can only be one temple (at a time), and there should be many churches. While many churches have an altar in their sanctuary (holy place), it was only the temple that held animal sacrifices and other such rituals as commanded in the Torah. You can go further into “what is a church?” but only if you have the time.
  • A holy place. Holiness is a concept many of us struggle to understand, especially with God’s Holy Spirit dwelling in all of us. But holiness—being set apart for a special use—was a central feature of the temple. Many of the regulations in Leviticus about clean and unclean were about holiness. Those who were “clean” could enter the temple to worship; those who were “unclean” could not. Regular people could only enter some parts of the temple, priests and Levites could only enter other parts, and the Holy of Holies could only be entered by the high priest once a year.
Building God’s House

Although (thankfully) we don’t read about all of the building details found in 1 Kings 6–7, a fun and engaging direction to go is to focus on the process of building. Have your younger students mime building actions. Give participants (of all ages) building supplies like blocks, play dough, air-dry clay, or even random recycled materials to build their own version of the temple. You can even ask why they designed their creation as they did to start a conversation about worship.

Fulfilling Our Callings

If you are using, or at least inspired by, our unit themes, then you can connect Solomon’s task with the concept of calling (as this unit is Called by God). That is what we did with our main Point, which is shared by all of our products:

We give the best of ourselves when we work to fulfill our callings.

David desired to honor God by building God a house (temple). God politely declined but promised both that David’s son would build the house (temple) for God and that God would build a house (royal dynasty) for David.

In building the temple, Solomon fulfilled the task he was called to do. And he indeed did his best to make a fabulous house for God.

Clouds, Glory, Darkness

One part of the assigned passage that grabbed my attention was the last part:

And when the priests came out of the holy place, a cloud filled the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord. Then Solomon said, “The Lord has said that he would dwell in thick darkness.”

1 Kings 8:10-12

God’s presence was so much that the priests couldn’t even do their jobs! This is also not the only time when God’s presence was marked by clouds (or smoke). Moses and the people saw this in the pillar of cloud and fire during the exodus (Exodus 13:21; 14:19-20), and on Mount Sinai when God gave the Torah (Exodus 19:16, 18). The prophet Isaiah would see the temple filled with smoke when he saw God sitting on a throne (Isaiah 6:4). God even spoke from a cloud at Jesus’ transfiguration (Matthew 17:5; Mark 9:7; Luke 9:34-35). Many crafts and science demonstrations can illustrate this.

The Darker Side

It is very easy (and appropriate) to get caught up with the wonder and glory of the fancy temple. But if you read further in 1 Kings 5, you will see that the laborers for the temple building project weren’t volunteers. They were forced laborers. While this is different than slavery, it also wouldn’t be something that most of us would feel comfortable with in our time. This sounds a bit like the warning that Samuel gave the Israelites when they first demanded a king (1 Samuel 8:10-18). This isn’t likely something you will want to cover with elementary students, but it could be an interesting discussion point for adults and perhaps even teenagers.

There are many ways to approach this text. I hope that these ideas will inspire you to follow the path best for you and your participants.

In God’s presence,

Gregory Rawn (Publisher)

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