God is peace. Even in the Old Testament, the Lord of the Church appears as the Prince of Peace, Is. ix. 5. According to Luke ix. 56, the Son of Man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them. In order to impress upon the mind this view of the nature and aim of the Church, the Temple--the symbol of the Church--must not be built by David the man of war, but by Solomon, the peaceful, the man of rest, 1 Chron. xxii. 9. Ver. 6. "_For I have not dwelt in any house from the day that I brought up the children of Israel out of Egypt even to this day, and have walked in a tent and in a tabernacle._ Ver. 7. _In all that I have walked among the children of Israel, have I spoken one word with any of the tribes of Israel whom I commanded to feed My people Israel, saying. Why build ye Me not a house of cedar?_" According to several interpreters, these words are intended as a consolation to David for the delay in building the temple, and convey this sense: that God did not require the temple, that the building of it was of no consequence,--as sufficiently appears from the circumstance of His not having hitherto urged it. But such a view would ill agree with the great importance which David continues, even afterwards, to ascribe to the building of the temple,--with the grand efforts of Solomon towards it,--and with the exulting words which are uttered by the latter, in 1 Kings viii. 13, after the work has been accomplished: "I have built Thee an house to dwell in, a settled place for Thee to abide in for ever." A comparison of 1 Kings viii. 16-20 furnishes us with a clue to the right interpretation. In that passage, the period before David is contrasted with that during which David lived. (Compare the עתה, _now_, in ver. 8.) Hitherto, everything in the government had borne a provisional character, and, hence, the sanctuary also. But now that, after the unsettled state of things under [Pg 136] the Judges and Saul, _the definitive government_ has been called into existence with David, to whom the Lord will make an house, the _definitive sanctuary_ also shall be built,--only, that it shall not be founded by David, but by his seed.[2] The words, _I have walked_--literally, I have been walking, I have continued walking--_in a tent and in a tabernacle_, indicate not only that the Lord dwelt in a portable sanctuary, but also, that the place of this sanctuary was oftentimes changed, from one station to another in the wilderness, then to Gilgal, Shiloh, Nob and Gibeon. This changing of the place of the tabernacle is still more distinctly pointed out, in the parallel passage in 1 Chron. xvii. 5: "And I have been from tent to tent, from tabernacle to tabernacle;" _i.e._, I went from one tent into the other, _e.g._, from the dwelling-place of Shiloh into that of Nob,--a mode of expression which pays no attention to the circumstance whether or not the tent was materially the same. Instead of, "With any of the tribes of Israel," we find in 1 Chron. xvii.