But will God really dwell on earth with humans? The heavens, even the highest heavens, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built!
2 Chronicles 6:18
At the beginning of 2 Chronicles, King Solomon, the son of King David, builds a temple for God. Before there was a temple, people went to the Tabernacle that Moses built to worship the Lord (1 Chronicles 17:1). The Tabernacle housed the ark of God and wherever the ark was, there God was also.
But the Israelites understood that God was the creator and sustainer of all things. So after Solomon builds the temple for the Lord, he asks if God will really dwell on earth with humans (2 Chronicles 6:18). God usually would give a sign (Genesis 9:13, Genesis 15:17); give a dream (Job 33:14-15, Genesis 41:32, 1 Kings 3:5); send his angels to represent him (Judges 6:11, Judges 13:3, ); or have a prophet represent him (2 Samuel 12:1), though He did speak directly with some people (Exodus 33:11). The thought of God, the almighty God, dwelling among us, humans, was unfathomable.
In 1990, NASA took an image of earth 6 billion kilometers away from Voyager 1. The entire earth appeared as a single little dot in the image, which is at the top of this article. And guess what? If we took a picture of the entire universe, earth wouldn’t even show up. That’s how small we are in the grand scale of the universe!
When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?
Psalm 8:3-4
We are so small in the universe that God created. Even though you are there in the picture of earth, you don’t even show up. We each, individually, are smaller than a dot in that picture.
God is so much bigger than the universe he created. And yet, God did dwell among us! That was Jesus!
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
John 1:1, 14
The almighty God, took the form of man! Jesus lived among us and experienced the joys and the pain that all of us go through in life. And after Jesus went back to heaven, God comes back as the Holy Spirit. The temples the Holy Spirit dwells in today are not made of brick, stones, or gold. No, they are the hearts of those that believe in Jesus (John 14:15-17, Galatians 4:6, 1 Corinthians 6:19).
God isn’t a God that is distant and does not understand what we go through each day. He’s been there and done that. That’s why we can go to Jesus in confidence for help with our weaknesses and temptations (Hebrews 4:14-16). He walks with us each day because He is in us.
We are never alone and we are significant to him despite how insignificant we seem in scale of the universe. God loves us so much, He did the unfathomable.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
John 3:16
