Sin: Failure and Consequences. 1 Kings
11:1-8
We have been looking at the
doctrine of prosperity testing and a summary of the problem-solving
devices—problems related to any type of situation that calls for a solution,
anything that calls for a decision. Any time we have a decision to make, by and
large we have choices related to the application of the Word of God or not;
doing something God’s way, applying the Word God’s way. That is where so many
people tend to fall apart. They think that they are doing the right thing and
it doesn’t matter what the way is, or they think that they are doing it the
right way and it is not really the right thing at all. The only way we can come
to understand and have discernment in those areas is through a study of the
Word, over and over again.
Solomon as a young man is
someone who is described as one who loved the Lord. That means in biblical
terminology that he knew the Law and he obeyed the Law. Again and again in the
book of Deuteronomy God makes this distinction that the way we express our love
for Him is to keep His statutes, His ordinances, His commandments; that the
measure of our love for God is not by how we feel about God. Yet modern man has
taken love to be a purely emotive concept and when it comes to spiritual things
we think we love God because we have certain feelings about Him. This has
infiltrated the church to such a tremendous degree that it is almost impossible
to find anybody who is saying anything truly substantive or accurate about biblical
love, because their starting point is that it has something to do with emotion
or feeling or some sort of subjective sense about God. Our subjective emotions,
expressions and feelings can be terribly misleading, even to the point that
they become idolatrous, and we end up rather than worshipping an idol of metal
or wood or stone, the major failing of the Jews in the Old Testament, having a
tendency as modern evangelical Christians to generate mental images,
constructs, opinions about God, what pleases God, what our relationship with
God is, and what God must like from us, and then we worship that. It is just a
mental form of idolatry because there is not enough knowledge of the Word to
truly understand who God is or who Jesus is.
In John 14 we have the
passage where Peter and Philip who have spent day in and day out with the Lord
Jesus Christ for three years and are sitting there asking, Who are you, and
Show us the Father, and to Philip Jesus says: “Have I been so long with you,
and {yet} you have not come to know Me, Philip?” It takes time, thought, study
and reflection to come to know anyone, much less the God of creation, the Lord
of the universe. Yet people don’t want to take the time to do that. They think
that an hour on Sunday morning or listening to an audio once or twice a week is
sufficient, but too often five minutes later our thoughts are completely
consumed with the details of life rather than sitting and thinking about what
has been studied and reflecting upon it. That is what the Bible refers to as
meditation: reflecting and thinking about it. The Bible meaning is to fill the
mind with the thought of Scripture and to reflect upon it, to think about it,
to think about how what we have just read or heard impacts our life.
One of the great principles
in the Bible is that in the Word of God, God presents then characters of the
Old Testament warts and all. We see their failings, their flaws, their sin
nature; they even get tagged with names that relate to their sin nature, and
hopefully they will get a new name when they get to heaven because they
wouldn’t want to go through all of eternity being known as Rahab
the harlot. Beyond that former state she has a tremendous spiritual life and
walked with the Lord and it didn’t have anything to do with that which had been
her previous occupation. The thing that makes a story a great story is
conflict, and conflict has to be resolved somewhere, there has to be some sort
of solution to the conflict. And when the conflict involves man in the
Scriptures then the hero who provides the solution is God. Ultimately in all of
the great stories of Scripture we always have God solving something one way or
another and He gives us the tools—the problem-solving devices—and we can take
those tools and impose those on the stories being looked at in the text, asking
the question: Which problem-solving device is being used? How is it being used,
and do I find myself in similar type situations, challenges, adversity,
prosperity, or whatever it may be, and how am I utilising the problem-solving
devices in the same way? And what isn’t applied?
What we see in 1 Kings 11 is
the description of Solomon’s failure. Everything up to this point in 1 Kings
1-10 has been on a positive trajectory. The failure occurs in the last twenty
years of his life, probably in the last ten years of his life. But that
foundation for that failure is actually seen much earlier in his life, and that
is true for all of us. There are sin patterns, areas of weakness, tendencies
that we have in our sin natures that if we don’t deal with them under the principles
of Scripture it is very likely that when we get into our later years what
happens is that these things have grown and grown, and all of a sudden some of
these trends or patterns that were somewhat hidden suddenly become out in the
open for everyone else to see.
1 Kings 11 describes Solomon’s
failure and God’s discipline on Solomon for his failures. Even though it takes
Solomon a long time to recover, a long time before he confesses his sins, we
know from Ecclesiastes that he does eventually. It is interesting that the book
that Solomon probably wrote first is Proverbs where he expresses his wisdom,
and the book that he wrote last is probably Ecclesiastes (we can’t say for
sure), which he wrote towards the end of his life. Even though he recovered,
even though he confessed his sins, and even though he repented in the true
sense of the word—he changed, reversed course, turned back to God and became
obedient again—there were still consequences to his sin, both national and personal.
It didn’t just affect him; it affected thousands and thousands of people for
generations. Part of God’s discipline for his shift to idolatry here is that
the kingdom is going to be taken (all but the tribes of Judah and Benjamin)
away from the authority of the house of David. This is going to set up an
alternate kingdom in the north under the leadership of Jeroboam I. It takes
them right into idolatry. Later under Ahab when he married Jezebel it is going
to take the northern kingdom into the worst forms of idolatry and will result
in the discipline of economic disaster of many in both the northern and
southern kingdoms. These people have seen the golden age of Solomon, the
tremendous wealth that has come to the nation
Just think how many people in
tis country are on negative volition right now and are rejecting the truth of
Scripture, and yet there are hundreds of thousands of believers who are trying
to do the right thing, studying the Word, growing to maturity, but because of
the vast number of people who are in degeneracy, perversion, idolatry and demonism,
believers are going top suffer by association as God brings discipline upon
this nation.
One principle to be noted as
a framework for approaching this is, first of all, this is an illustration of
God’s faithful, loyal love. One of the key words that we find in the Old Testament
is the Hebrew word chesed,
and it basically refers to God’s faithful, loyal love. Chesed is a love that is based on
a contract, a covenant. It has structure to it, commitment underlying it, it
doesn’t depend upon anything; it is the kind of love that governs a marriage
after the wedding which is defined in terms of a contract. That is what gives
it stability and certainty (or it should) because it is grounded in a contract
and gives structure and definition and meaning to the concept of love. And all
of this is related to salvation. When we think of the contractual nature of
what God does when He saves us from the very beginning of biblical history up
to the present when God makes a promise to save people on the basis of faith in
His promise. In the Old Testament it was a promise of future deliverance; in
the New Testament it looks back on what Christ did on the cross as He paid the
penalty for our sins and establishes the basis for the new contract, the new
covenant. So salvation is pictured this way, and our first principle is that
when a person is saved that salvation can’t be lost no matter what the sin was.
That is what is depicted here in a broader sense with Solomon. Because when God came along, first to Abraham and then to David, He
entered into an unconditional contract. He promised Abraham that He
would make a great nation from his seed, and He promised him land. There were
certain conditions attached to the enjoyment of that and blessing but He
guaranteed that there would be a genetic, ethnic descent from Abraham and that
this group would be the source of world-wide blessing, and they would have an
eternal homeland on a specific piece of real estate.
If God could have broken His
promise He would have because of the evil that Solomon introduces into the
nation
The second key lesson here is
that sin has consequences. Sometimes when we confess our sins or when we commit
certain sins, for whatever reason related to the grace of God, God just doesn’t
nail us for those sins. He doesn’t discipline us. God just doesn’t seem to
lower the boom on every sin that we commit. That’s grace. But that is God’s
choice, not ours, so we don’t know when we will get it and when we won’t. God
disciplines us in the ways that are right and appropriate to each of us in
terms of our spiritual growth. Sometimes He doesn’t ever discipline us for
certain things and we grow out of them; other times He just diminishes,
minimises the discipline and it is not nearly as bad as it could have been. Then
at other times He really needs to discipline us with the full force of His
justice to get our attention and to rattle our arrogant cages.
We never know what kind of
future obstacles and unintended consequences develop out from our sin. Furthermore,
personal sin may develop into personal tragedy and suffering brought on by bad
decisions we make from a position of weakness. We may make some very foolish
decision that has to do with satisfying our sin nature and it may cost us
everything that we have. We don’t know that at the time. It may have
devastating consequences in the lives of those around us in all manner of
unexpected ways. We never know what that suffering by association factor may
be.
With Solomon, his sin, which
went on for a number of years, finally resulted in God’s intervention. Solomon’s
sin related to his internationalism. That is ultimately what it was. It is
interesting to get into this whole scenario where Solomon had 700 wives and 300
concubines. The nations where these wives were from is
important. It is suspected that ninety-nine out of a hundred messages that deal
with this focus on Solomon’s sexual proclivity. That is not what is going on
here. It may be a factor but that is not really what is going on. First of all,
Solomon here is in his older years. He is entering into relationships with all
of the surrounding countries and there are marriages designed to shore up
alliances and to strengthen
There is this idea that we
have to respect everybody’s ideas and there is this concept of tolerance which
begins to be more and more recognised in the culture. But the term changed.
Tolerance and being tolerant used to mean: “I think that your ideas are
horrible and if you follow your ideas you are going to destroy yourself and
this nation. I abhor and despise your ideas and they are dead wrong, but I am
going to put up with them and allow you the freedom to live in this country,
even though you have ideas that are self-destructive.” Now tolerance means that
you have to approve and go along with what other people believe and say, no
matter how asinine, destructive, stupid, foolish or biblically wrong it is. And
you can’t say that it is wrong, immoral, that homosexuality is immoral,
destructive and perverse, and that if it is allowed to continue without
interference from government it will destroy the country, because that is the
way God created reality. So now, in order to be tolerant, we have to approve
this and even have to promote it. If we don’t then we are deemed completely
intolerant and guilty of “hate speech.”
So Solomon becomes exposed to
all of these different cultures and religions, and it comes though an area
which is probably an area of weakness in him which is all of these women. Solomon,
we are told, loved many foreign women. Instead of being loyal to
1 Kings 11:2 NASB “from
the nations concerning which the LORD had said to the sons of
The statement in 1 Kings 11:2
comes out of two key passages in the Old Testament. It summarizes what is in
Exodus 23:31ff which is where God gives the Mosaic Law for marriage. So first
of all Solomon breaks the divine establishment basis for marriage by having
more than one wife. Anything other than marriage between one man and one woman
is a violation of divine establishment and once you start changing the
definition of marriage—and it doesn’t matter whether it is called civil union
or any other sophistry—it is just as much an abomination and is
self-destructive for a nation to tolerate it and to incorporate it into law.
Exodus
Exodus
34:12 NASB “Watch yourself that you make no covenant with the
inhabitants of the land into which you are going, or it will become a snare in
your midst. [13] But {rather,} you
are to tear down their altars and smash their {sacred} pillars and cut down
their Asherim.” This is the one flaw we saw early on
in 1 Kings chapter three. Solomon loved the Lord with
all his heart, but he didn’t tear down the high places. It is those little
things that we don’t think are that bad, the secret sins, that we eventually
give in to and it begins to grow and take on a life of its own. Verse 13 infers
that we are to tear down all evidence of human viewpoint thinking. That is what
we do in sanctification and it is a great illustration of the process of
spiritual growth. We have to capture every stronghold, every thought. [14] “—for
you shall not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a
jealous God—” God is not going to tolerate the worship of other gods because it
is destructive and it doesn’t fit reality. [15] “otherwise you might make a
covenant with the inhabitants of the land and they would play the harlot with
their gods and sacrifice to their gods, and someone might invite you to eat of
his sacrifice,
So we don’t want to get into
the trap of compromise with unbelievers and even believers who are operating on
human viewpoint. This same principle is clarified later on in Deuteronomy 7:3,
4 NASB “Furthermore, you shall not intermarry with them; you shall
not give your daughters to their sons, nor shall you take their daughters for
your sons.
1 Corinthians
The point is that there
needs to be this separation, distinction. But Solomon violates that and in
doing so he is violating the conditions that God placed in the promise that He
gave when he appeared to Solomon in 1 Kings chapter
nine. 1 Kings 3:14 NASB “If [conditional]
you walk in My ways, keeping My statutes and commandments, as your father David
walked, then I will prolong your days.” God is going to be true to David that
one of David’s descendants is going to sit on an eternal throne. Is that going
to go through Solomon or someone else? But then in the second appearance, after
the temple is dedicated, 1 Kings 9:4, 5 “As for you, if you will walk before Me
as your father David walked, in integrity of heart and uprightness, doing
according to all that I have commanded you {and} will keep My statutes and My
ordinances,