From Wise to Wicked
What we can learn from King Solomon
OK Men,
1 Kings 4:29-30 says this about King Solomon, David’s son: “God gave Solomon wisdom and very great insight, and a breadth of understanding as measureless as the sand on the seashore. Solomon’s wisdom was greater than the wisdom of all the people of the East, and greater than all the wisdom of Egypt.”
He was blessed with wisdom from God himself. What a gift! 1 Kings 10:23-24 also says, “King Solomon was greater in riches and wisdom than all the other kings of the earth. The whole world sought audience with Solomon to hear the wisdom God had put in his heart.” And yet, despite his wisdom, I’m just gonna say it… he was kind of stupid.
The man who spent 7 years building the temple to honor God, would eventually grow far from Him. While kings of the world chased Solomon’s advice, Solomon chased the sinful desires of his heart, women.
1 Kings 11:1-6 tells us, “King Solomon, however, loved many foreign women besides Pharoah’s daughter - Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, and Hittites. They were from nations about which the Lord had told the Israelites, ‘You must not intermarry with them, because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods.’ Nevertheless, Solomon held fast to them in love. He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray. As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart was not fully devoted to the Lord his God, as the heart of David his father had been. He followed Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, and Molek the detestable god of the Ammonites. So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the Lord; he did not follow the Lord completely, as David his father had done.”
Do you know who Ashtoreth and Molek were the gods of? Ashtoreth was the goddess of love, war, fertility, and sex. Molek was the god of…wait for it…child sacrifice. Suddenly it’s not too difficult to see how Solomon grew to have 700 wives and 300 concubines. He would need that many women to serve both of those detestable gods. This coming from the guy who was known to be the wisest on earth; the one who received wisdom straight from God, and not from doing things the hard way like the rest of us!
How in the world does a man go from honoring God, and being incredibly blessed by Him, to serving other gods, succumbing to extreme lust, and then performing horrific actions?
Two reasons: 1) He directly disobeyed God, and 2) he never checked is heart.
God explicitly told the Israelites not to marry those from other nations because their hearts to be turned to other gods. That’s exactly what happened. The wise Solomon disobeyed a direct command from God and the weakness in his heart took over. He never stopped and asked himself, “Are my actions pleasing to God?” The same heart that God once filled with wisdom, led Solomon down a path that would impact all of Israel, as they would later split into two nations, Israel and Judah, Judah being the nation that still served the God of David, the God of Solomon’s wisdom.
But don’t we do these exact same things? Our actions may not be leading us to sleep with 1000 women, but we have all directly disobeyed God. We have all sinned. We have all separated ourselves from God with our own actions. We have all failed to ask ourselves, “Are my actions pleasing to God?” But we can begin today.
I invite you today, men, to ask yourselves, “How are my actions pleasing to God? How am I glorifying the one who both created and then saved me?” It’s an important question to ask ourselves from time to time, perhaps even daily, because unchecked sin becomes poison in the heart. The only antidote to that sinful poison in our hearts and veins is Jesus Christ.
Spend some time talking with Jesus today, ask him to show you how your actions could better honor Him. Check your heart today before wisdom becomes wickedness. Proverbs 4:23 says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”
In one of the more ironic twists for today, do you know who wrote Proverbs 4:23? King Solomon. Let this fantastic verse, that is full of wisdom, show us how far Solomon fell. Let it remind us how far we too can fall from an unrepentant heart.
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