Solomon prays this prayer at the dedication of the temple, perhaps the most triumphant moment of Israel's national life. The ark is in place, the glory cloud has filled the sanctuary, and the king stands before the whole assembly. And in the middle of his prayer he stops and asks the question that should haunt every builder of holy buildings: will God really live here? The compiler of Kings, writing centuries later to exiles whose temple is rubble, preserves the question on purpose. The house is not the point. The God who exceeds the house is.

From the writers we read together

John Polkinghorne

Cambridge mathematical physicist and Anglican priest (1930-2021)

Polkinghorne argued that the God of Christian faith is not one large object among other objects in the universe — not a being who happens to be very big — but the source from which the whole framework of space and time hangs. That is exactly Solomon's instinct three thousand years earlier. If even the heaven of heavens cannot contain God, then God is not the kind of thing that fits inside a place. He is the reason there are places at all.

This matters for how we pray today. Solomon does not stop praying because God is too large to locate; he keeps praying because God has chosen to be located — here, in this house, with this people. Polkinghorne's God who grounds being is the same God who condescends to be addressed by name. The wonder is not that he is everywhere, but that he is also somewhere: with you, in the room you are sitting in, willing to be spoken to.