1 Kings 9:1-9
"9 As soon as Solomon had finished building the house of the Lord and the king's house and all that Solomon desired to build, 2 the Lord appeared to Solomon a second time, as he had appeared to him at Gibeon. 3 And the Lord said to him, “I have heard your prayer and your plea, which you have made before me. I have consecrated this house that you have built, by putting my name there forever. My eyes and my heart will be there for all time. 4 And as for you, if you will walk before me, as David your father walked, with integrity of heart and uprightness, doing according to all that I have commanded you, and keeping my statutes and my rules, 5 then I will establish your royal throne over Israel forever, as I promised David your father, saying, ‘You shall not lack a man on the throne of Israel.’ 6 But if you turn aside from following me, you or your children, and do not keep my commandments and my statutes that I have set before you, but go and serve other gods and worship them, 7 then I will cut off Israel from the land that I have given them, and the house that I have consecrated for my name I will cast out of my sight, and Israel will become a proverb and a byword among all peoples. 8 And this house will become a heap of ruins. Everyone passing by it will be astonished and will hiss, and they will say, ‘Why has the Lord done thus to this land and to this house?’ 9 Then they will say, ‘Because they abandoned the Lord their God who brought their fathers out of the land of Egypt and laid hold on other gods and worshiped them and served them. Therefore the Lord has brought all this disaster on them.’”"
Commentators have drawn attention to the contrast between this vision and that recorded in 6:11-13, while the temple was being built. As one says, 'Then, all was promise and en- couragement; now, not only is warning mingled with promise, but, as in Solomon's own prayer, the sadder alternative seems in prophetic anticipation to overpower the brighter.' There is a spiritual lesson in this. It is that men are generally in a far healthier state spiritually when they are busy at work on an unfinished project, straining every nerve to reach their goal, than when, having finished it, they sit back in relaxation. Israel in process of possessing the land under the leadership of Joshua was a far more spiritual and obedient people than Israel fully established in her inheritance, years later. David, in his trials and tribulations before he reached the throne was a far better man than David the king; the Church under persecution is infinitely stronger and more steadfast than the Church at ease in Zion. Well might the prophet pray, 'O Lord, revive Thy work in the midst of the years' - not at the beginning when all is bright with hope, and hope acts as an anchor to the soul, but much later on, when earli- er inspiration has faded. Then is the real danger point. It is this Paul has in mind when in Eph- esians 6 he urges us to be girt with the armour of God, to enable us to 'withstand in the evil day, and having done all to stand'. Having done all. That is the force of the warning note in this later vision given to Solomon. The events which follow in this book show how timely the warning was, and that, alas, it went unheeded.