Long-forgotten gold
“The floor of the house he overlaid with gold” 1 Kings 6:30
Not just the floor, but the walls too. If you walked into Solomon’s Temple, you would find yourself in another dimension. I’m afraid our modern world and its modern wonders would not diminish our surprised awe. In fact, I think they would increase it. The plasticized and cheaply materialized age that we live in is quite distinct from the old craftsmanship of Hiram and the little golden world that Solomon’s Temple was.
Gold is found throughout the Bible. There was gold was in Eden. It was acquired by the people in Egypt, and it built the utensils and the Ark. Gold was everywhere inside the Temple at Jerusalem, and gold paves the streets of that heavenly city to come.
Gold is unique among the precious metals. They are all of a silver hue, but gold is rich, colorful, and unique. It’s warm. It images God’s glory, even as the golden beams that light our world. Gold is our faith, tested and precious. We are not much to look at; the temples of our bodies are decaying. But inside, our hearts are golden with God’s grace and his glory.
We’ve seen this world’s gold. We’ve even seen and tasted something of God’s glory in it. But very soon we’ll experience it. As one of Narnia’s own prophets has said,
“I have heard of those little scratches in the crust that you Top-dwellers call mines. But that’s where you get dead gold, dead silver, dead gems. Down in Bism we have them alive and growing. There I’ll pick you bunches of rubies that you can eat and squeeze you a cup full of diamond-juice. You won’t care much about fingering the cold, dead treasures of your shallow mines after you have tasted the live ones of Bism.”