1 Kings 6:1-10
"6 In the four hundred and eightieth year after the people of Israel came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, which is the second month, he began to build the house of the Lord. 2 The house that King Solomon built for the Lord was sixty cubitslong, twenty cubits wide, and thirty cubits high. 3 The vestibule in front of the nave of the house was twenty cubits long, equal to the width of the house, and ten cubits deep in front of the house. 4 And he made for the house windows with recessed frames. 5 He also built a structure against the wall of the house, running around the walls of the house, both the nave and the inner sanctuary. And he made side chambers all around. 6 The lowest story was five cubits broad, the middle one was six cubits broad, and the third was seven cubits broad. For around the outside of the house he made offsets on the wall in order that the supporting beams should not be inserted into the walls of the house.
7 When the house was built, it was with stone prepared at the quarry, so that neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron was heard in the house while it was being built.
8 The entrance for the lowest story was on the south side of the house, and one went up by stairs to the middle story, and from the middle story to the third. 9 So he built the house and finished it, and he made the ceiling of the house of beams and planks of cedar. 10 He built the structure against the whole house, five cubits high, and it was joined to the house with timbers of cedar."
If we compare the measurements of the old Tabernacle given in Exodus 26 with those of the Temple given here, we shall see that Solomon's building was in proportion a replica of the Mosaic one, each dimension being doubled, the resultant temple being eight times the size of the Tabernacle in the wilderness. That it was based upon the earlier pattern gives us warrant to see in it a foreshadowing of things to come, as was the tabernacle before it (see Epistle to the Hebrews, chapters 8 and 9). We may justly apply these verses, therefore, as an illustration of spiritual life. In 7, for example, we are told that the stones used in the building were made ready cut, squared and smoothed before ever they were brought to the building site, and no sound of tools was heard in the house while it was a-building. There is a parable of Christian things here. We as believers are to be living stones in the temple not made with hands (see 1 Peter 2:4, 5), and it is here, in our earthly pilgrimage, that our rough-hewn ungainliness is cut and squared and made ready for our position in the life hereafter. The world to come is not the place for living stones to be prepared for the temple of God - the prepared people are prepared on earth, and this realisation should colour our whole attitude to the disciplines we undergo as Christians. It would be unthinkable, would it not, to graduate to the higher spheres unfinished, with the work of polishing only half-done?