In the World–May 11, 2025

Download “In the World” for May 11, 2025, here.

WHEN THE GARAGE ISN’T BIG ENOUGH

What do you do when you want to keep twenty-one of your favorite vintage Porche 911s near you, but you don’t have enough garage space to house them? If you’re millionaire architect Steven Harris, you purchase the one-acre lot across from your Rancho Mirage, CA, home and build a new house with a massive underground garage. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal last month, the house he had been living in has historical value and couldn’t be renovated, but the lot across the way didn’t have those restrictions. “We really didn’t need this house,” Harris says, but now that he has both, he can accommodate more friends and relatives and be close to his collection of sports cars.

WHEN THE ALTAR ISN’T BIG ENOUGH

When King Solomon was ready to dedicate the temple in Jerusalem to God, he commanded that an enormous number of animals be sacrificed: 22,000 head of cattle and 120,000 sheep and goats. Thousands of Levite priests performed the sacrifices during the celebration. While the bronze altar for the temple was huge—roughly thirty by thirty by fifteen feet—it wasn’t nearly big enough for so many animals. For this event only, he commanded that the entire courtyard in front of the temple be used for the offerings.

1. If you could collect twenty-one of any object, what would it be?
2. What’s a creative solution you came up with when you needed room for something?
3. Why did Solomon order that so many animals be sacrificed? What was he “saying”?

Additional Resources

Any videos or web materials are for your personal use. If you play any media files in class, be sure to have the necessary rights to do so.

• Contemporary Worship Weekly
• Echoes Worship Weekly
• Traditional Worship Weekly
• David Guzik’s Notes on 2 Chronicles 7
• Thomas L. Constable’s Expository Notes on 2 Chronicles 7
• Amber Dillon’s “The Sense of an Ending: What Is the Real Last Book of the Old Testament?”