1 Chronicles 17 - Our ideas, God's ideas

David had always wanted to build a temple for the Lord. This was motivated by good reasons. David himself had a palace yet God was "living in a tent". David told Nathan the prophet of his desire, and Nathan encouraged him to go with it. However, God later told Nathan that David was not the one to build a temple.

As an aside note that Nathan was in no way infallible. He was certainly a man of God and was not afraid to confront David when necessary. Yet here he was mistaken. At the time of writing this (29 Nov 2013) there has recently been a degree of controversy over the Strange Fire conference and much debate about the role of spiritual gifts today. It has been very interesting to listen to debates between sensible charismatics and reasonable cessationists. Eg beteen Michael Brown and Sam Waldron  and between Adrian Warnock and Doug Wilson. While I agree with many of the concerns of the Cessationists (eg health and wealth merchants) I cannot find any Biblical support for their arguments. One of their planks seems to be that prophets always spoke the infallible word of God. The incident here is just one demonstration that faithful prophets could get it wrong.

God's word to David is that He could manage quite well without a temple, and He never commanded the leaders to build a temple. Building a temple may have seemed important to David, it was not of immediate concern to God. 

In fact God seems more concerned with making David's name great! Moreover, God would build a house for David. Now just think about this and realise how amazing it is. it is very easy for us to start deciding such and such a way is the way that God is going to be honoured, even if God has no interest in being honoured that way! A temple would indeed be built, but it would be built by Solomon.

This revelation results in David humbling himself before God and praising Him all the more. We need to be so careful that we do not try and foist our own ideas on God, and that we joyfully accept His ideas for ourselves. That is the path that leads to true worship and joyful service.