What Does the Location of the Temple Teach Us about Worship?

"Then David said, "Here shall be the house of the Lord God and here the altar of burnt offering for Israel" (1 Chron 22:1). The location of the Temple is the same location upon which David offered a sacrifice to assuage God's wrath against God's people in the wake of David's sin of the census (cf. 1 Chron 21; 2 Sam 24:1-25).

In his comments on 1 Chronicles 22, D. A. Carson offers the following reflection on what this site selection teaches us about worship:

The place chosen for the temple is the place where a sacrifice was offered and the wrath of God against sin was averted. Of course, the very design of tabernacle and temple was meant to remind people that sin had to be atoned for, that one could not simply saunter into the presence of the holy God, that the sacrifices God himself had prescribed had to be offered by the high priest once a year, first for his own sins and then for the sins of the people. But the siting of the temple on this location reinforces the point. Worship and religion are not primarily about offering to God something called praise, something God prefers not to be without. Worship and religion are first of all about God-centeredness--and because we are rebels, that means that worship and religion are in the first instance about being reconciled to this God, our Creator and Redeemer, from whom we have willfully become alienated. The hear of the temple is not its choirs, its incense, its ceremonies. The heart of the temple is about averting the wrath of God, by the means he himself has provided." (D. A. Carson, For the Love of God, Vol. 1 [Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1998], 330).