2 Chronicles 1:12 - Exposition

Such as none of the kings … before thee, neither … after thee. These words were sadly ominous of the short-lived glory of the kingdom Only two kings had reigned before Solomon in Israel, and the glory of the kingdom too surely culminated in his reign, and even before the end of it ( 2 Chronicles 9:22 , 2 Chronicles 9:23 ; 1 Chronicles 29:25 ; Ecclesiastes 2:9 ). On the other hand, the gratuitous and spontaneous fulness of promise in the Divine reply to a human prayer that "pleased" the Being invoked is most noticeable, and preached beforehand indeed, the lesson of the life of Jesus, "Seek ye first the kingdom … and all these things shall be added unto you" ( Matthew 6:33 ). The contents of this verse are followed in the parallel by the words," And Solomon awoke; and behold it was a dream." There can be no doubt that what is here rehearsed did not lose any force or anything of reality from its transpiring in a dream, of which the abundantly open statement of the method of it, as in "sleep," and in "a dream," may be accepted as the first cogent evidence. But beside this, the frequent recital in the Old Testament of occasions when significant and weighty matters of business import were so conducted by the Divine will forms ample ground and defence for the other class of occasions, of which more spiritual matter was the subject ( Genesis 28:12 ; Genesis 41:7 ; Genesis 20:3 ; Genesis 31:10 , Genesis 31:24 ; Genesis 37:5 ; Genesis 40:5 ; Genesis 41:32 ; 7:15 ; Job 33:15 ; Daniel 2:3 ; Daniel 7:1 ; Matthew 1:20 ; Matthew 2:13 , Matthew 2:22 ; Matthew 27:19 ). On the other hand, side by side with such passages are those that refer to dreams for their emptiness and transiency of impression, when similes of this kind of thing are required ( Job 20:8 ; Psalms 73:20 ; Psalms 126:1 ). This is not the place to enter into any argument of a metaphysical or physiological character respecting dreams, and what they may or may not avail. But as some persons know even too well how dreams have brought them most vivid, most torturing, and most exquisite experiences in turn, there will seem, to them at least, the less difficulty in admitting utterly their availableness for communications of highest import, not only from God to man, but under certain conditions from man to God. Without doubt, certain disabilities (and those, perhaps, more especially of the moral kind) attach to our mind in dreams. But do not dreams also find the scene of the keener activities of mind pure? Granted that the mind is then under ordinary circumstances without a certain control and self-commanding power, yet is it also in some large respects much more at liberty from that besetting tyranny of sense with which waking hours are so familiar! Hence its consummate daring and swiftness and versatility in dream beyond all that it knows in the body's waking state.