Divine Judgment: Israel Split! 1 Kings
11:9-13
Up to this point in 1
Kings we have seen th4e establishment of Solomon on the throne, the rise and
development of Solomon, his wisdom, his skill, his building programs, and the
remarkable way in which God blessed Solomon with the wisdom that He gave him
and He blessed him above and beyond in terms of his prosperity, his kingdom and
his conquest of the neighbouring nations as he is expanding the control of the
territory, the land that God had promised Abraham. That is foundational to
understanding what is unfolding in 1 & 2 Kings which depict what happens to
Israel as a result of their disobedience to God in light of the Mosaic
covenant. In 1 Kings 1-10 God promises Solomon that if Solomon continues to be
faithful to Him, continues to walk in the ways of his father David, then God
will bless him and that Solomon’s descent will not depart from the throne of
David. As we have seen in 1 Kings 11 Solomon failed, and as that was stated as
a conditional promise to Solomon then when Solomon failed and led the nation
into idolatry God was then going to discipline him. So now from 11:9 we see the
beginning of the episode related to that discipline.
The first eight verses
describe Solomon’s sin, that he had many wives. This is a sin related to two
things: a) as a broad category to Solomon’s failure to trust God for security
in the land. What he was doing in marrying all of these foreign wives is
establishing various alliances with foreign powers in order to establish Israel and to protect them from these enemies. He failed to
trust God; and b) he failed to obey Him. He failed the prosperity test and the
people test because he lets the prosperity that he has realised, that God has
given to him, cause him to get his attention off of God and on to the material
wealth, the possessions, the building projects. All of
these things distract him from that single-minded devotion to God. So He
violates the Mosaic Law in terms of his wives and then they influence him into
the direction of idolatry and so he brings in these foreign Gods. There is a
death penalty in the Mosaic Law for anyone who worships Moloch,
and so Solomon, just like his father David, is guilty of a capital crime and
should be executed according to the Mosaic Law. But God in His grace does not
call for that. God allowed David to live and allowed Solomon to live because of
His grace.
We have as our backdrop
the Abrahamic covenant where God promised to Israel land, seed and blessing. The land promise is
foundational to understand the whole movement in the book of Kings. As we get
to the end of Kings we will see that both the northern kingdom and the southern
kingdom have been removed from the land in divine discipline, according to the
fives stages of divine discipline which God outlined in Leviticus 26. What we
see going on from the beginning of Solomon’s failure here in 1 Kings chapter
eleven is the outworking of those five stages of discipline in the history of
Israel, culminating in their removal from the land. So that land promise to
Abraham is foundational for understanding this because when God gave the
conditional Mosaic Law to Israel He makes the issue their obedience. If they
are obedient they will stay in the land God promised Abraham and they will be
blessed by God and experience all of God’s blessings while they are in the
land. But if they continue to be disobedient and apostate and if they reject
God in terms of idols then God is going to discipline them and ultimately take
them out of the land. It is important to understand that the Mosaic Law is a
contract between God and Israel. This is a unique covenant because it is grounded in
this specific piece of real estate. So all of the punishment that God
instigates in each of the cycles or stages of discipline relate to some sort of
problem in the land—economic, health, disease, military defeat, and eventually
military conquest and removal from the land. So the land figures as the thread
that runs through all of these stages of discipline.
No other nation in history
can go into the 5th cycle of discipline because no other nation in
history is promised the piece of real estate that Israel is on. That is the unique feature. It is only Israel that has a God-given right to a certain piece of real
estate. That is why there is this connection in terms of the blessing and the
cursing in Leviticus chapter twenty-six. They ultimately tie to whether Israel is obedient, and only as an obedient people can they
stay in the land and enjoy its blessings. If they are disobedient and
idolatrous then God is going to remove them in discipline. But God will
eventually bring them back as a redeemed people.
So Solomon fails the
people test, he allows these foreign wives to influence him, and the New Testament
counterpart for this which we have to remember is stated in 1 Corinthians 15:33
NASB “Do not be deceived: ‘Bad company corrupts good morals.’”
It doesn’t matter who we are or how comfortable we are in what we believe, if we allow ourselves to become closely associated
and affiliated with people whose ideas and thoughts and opinions influence us
then we need to distance ourselves from those people. That doesn’t mean we can’t
have a relationship at some distance with them. We always have to guard
ourselves from the people around us who influence us.
Solomon violated the
promise God had made to him in reference to the covenant with his father David—1
Kings 3:14; 9:4-10. Both times God promised Solomon that if he
was obedient to God and followed in the footsteps of his father David then God
would bless him. But Solomon failed to do this and that is what is expressed in
1 Kings 11:4 NASB “For when Solomon was old, his wives turned his
heart away after other gods; and his heart was not wholly devoted to the LORD his God, as
the heart of David his father {had been.}”
Jeremiah confronts Israel in chapter 17 and focuses on the same issue that
Solomon failed in. Beginning in verse one, Jeremiah outlines
the sin of Judah. Judah
is Solomon’s tribe and they are committing the same sin that Solomon was
committing. Jeremiah 17:1 NASB “The
sin of Judah is written down with an iron stylus [it is deeply engraved]; With
a diamond point it is engraved [fixed negative volition] upon the tablet of
their heart And on the horns of their altars [in their thinking and in their
practice], [2] As they remember their children, So they {remember} their altars
and their Asherim By green trees on the high hills
[idolatry]. [3] O mountain of Mine
in the countryside, I will give over your wealth and all your treasures for
booty, Your high places for sin throughout your
borders.” Israel is referred to as a mountain. The mountain is Mount Zion. Jeremiah is prophesying conquest and defeat. [4] “And
you will, even of yourself, let go of your inheritance That I gave you; And I
will make you serve your enemies In the land which you do not know; For you
have kindled a fire in My anger Which will burn forever.” Obviously this is
metaphorical. God is not permanently disciplining Israel, there is the promise that He will bring them back;
it is a metaphor for the intensity of His righteous judgment. Then he states
the indictment. [5] “Thus says the LORD, ‘Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind And makes flesh his strength, And whose heart turns away
from the LORD.’” When we think that we get security from human
beings, from human effort, from human methodology, then we are in effect being
idolatrous. Surety in life, stability in life, can only come from a
relationship with God and the application of the Word of God in our life. There
is no security anywhere else. This doesn’t mean that we don’t plan; it means
that we don’t trust in them as the ultimate source of our security.
Decisions our leaders are
making can impact us and our descendants for dozens of generations. And that is
exactly what happens with Solomon. Solomon is making decisions as the national leader
and yet they are going to affect every Jew in the street in all of the tribes
and is going to impact the history of Israel up to the very present time. He set them on a course
of idolatry and as a result of that he was setting them on a course of divine
discipline. The decisions of the leadership of a nation can be as significant
in the future of the nation as the decisions of the people. Solomon’s sin is
that he is trusting in alliances in violation of the direct command of God,
relying upon human factors to give military security to Israel and to continue their prosperity. So he is rejecting
the God who is the real source of the blessing and is turning to these other
gods. This is a direct violation of the first commandment in the Mosaic Law. This
is why it is defined as evil: 1 Kings 11:6 NASB “Solomon did what
was evil in the sight of the LORD …” Again and again we are going to see that
phrase in 1 & 2 Kings and it always identifies idolatry because this is the
foundational failure in relation to the ten commandments. Idolatry is an act of treason and disloyalty to the
God who a) delivered them from slavery, and b) who is the head of state. God
demands exclusive obedience and exclusive worship. God isn’t going to share
Himself with any other god.
What Solomon is doing is
violating that principle of divine dependence. He is doing exactly what
Jeremiah states in 17:5 NASB “Cursed is the man who trusts in
mankind And makes flesh his strength, And whose heart
turns away from the LORD.” This is what Solomon had done. The result of that
is described in Jeremiah 17:6 NASB “For he will be like a bush in
the desert And will not see when prosperity comes, But
will live in stony wastes in the wilderness, A land of salt without inhabitant.”
In other words, you dry up on the inside. There is no happiness, no stability, no peace. There is domination by mental attitude sins and
life becomes a miserable experience, ultimately because there is no source of
stability. This is the leanness of soul the psalmist speaks of that comes to
people who reject God.
The contrast is given in Jeremiah
17:7 NASB “Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD And whose
trust is the LORD. For
he will be like a tree planted by the water, That
extends its roots by a stream And will not fear when the heat comes; But its
leaves will be green, And it will not be anxious in a year of drought Nor cease
to yield fruit.” In other words, when pressures come and we go through economic
reverses, recessions, depressions, or tough times in life for whatever the reason,
for the believer whose mind is focused on God he has stability, peace and
happiness because that peace and happiness is dependent on the promise of God
and the stability of God, and not on our circumstances. So we have a sure and
certain hope, and that hope is based on the Lord Jesus Christ, God the Father
and the Holy Spirit and what they have provided for us, and we can never lose
that.
Solomon is choosing a path
where he is looking to security from other people and from other nations. Today
it goes by the word “internationalism.” In Genesis chapter eleven it went by
the name of the tower of Babel.
It is man’s attempt to bring peace and stability into his experience by defying
God and uniting against Him. The tower of Babel was at its root a religious activity. They were
raising the tower in opposition to God, they were
staying there united on the plain of Shinar at Babylon for the purpose of defying God’s command to Noah to
scatter out throughout the earth. They stayed in one place, they built this
tower as a way to reach God, the idea being that God got mad at them and tried
to destroy them with the flood, so now they are going to build their own
mountain so that when another flood comes they will be able to survive. This is
the foolishness of the human heart that rejects God and denies who he actually
is. So here was this first endeavour of the human race uniting against God to
provide security and stability for himself and to deny the control of God. As a
result God established the fifth divine institution at that point, which was national
distinctions, by confusing the languages. There is never a time when God
authorises a return to a one-world internationalism.
Every attempt to unify the nations to solve all of our problems apart from God
there is going to be something that God does in human history in order to stop
it.
What is interesting about
this particular passage is that Solomon builds these “worship centres” for all
of these idols from all of these surrounding nations and God is going to raise up people in these surrounding nations that are going
to create havoc for him in the last years of his reign.
1 Kings 11:9 NASB
“Now the LORD was angry with Solomon because his heart was turned
away from the LORD, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice,
[10] and had commanded him concerning this thing, that he should not go after
other gods; but he did not observe what the LORD had commanded.” God is going to carry
out the cycles of discipline just as He laid out in Leviticus chapter 26. God
has appeared to Solomon twice. He spoke face to face with Solomon, outlined His
plans to Solomon, He did not mediate His directions to Solomon through a
prophet. From the time of the death of David to this chapter we don’t hear of a
prophet coming to address Solomon. It is God who directly addresses Solomon. There
were prophets but they don’t address Solomon.
1 Kings 11:11 NASB
“So the LORD said to Solomon, ‘Because you have done this, and you
have not kept My covenant and My statutes, which I
have commanded you, I will surely tear the kingdom from you, and will give it
to your servant. [12] Nevertheless I will not do it in your days
for the sake of your father David, {but} I will tear it out of the hand of your
son.” This is a tremendous picture of how Solomon is being blessed by
association with his father David. [13] “However, I will not tear away all the
kingdom, {but} I will give one tribe to your son for the sake of My servant David and for the sake of Jerusalem which I have chosen.” So there is grace in this
judgment because of David, because of the Davidic covenant.
Solomon is in a unique
position because he is David’s son and David’s heir. He has personal promises
from God with regard to his future if he will be faithful to God. He is as the
king of Israel the leader of God’s covenant people, and thus he is
responsible for the covenant faithfulness of the people. Because he goes astray
he leads the people astray, and so this is why God is going to so harshly judge
him. We see that Solomon’s failure is both a personal failure and a national
failure. As a representative of the nation his sin has national implications. The
principle here is that our sins do not just affect us. Our sins have
consequences and many times they are unforseen and unintended but they affect
those who are around us. So God’s judgment on Solomon is that He is going to
rip the kingdom apart.
The result of this is that
God begins to act in a profound way in human history. What is important to
recognise here, starting in verse 14, is the raising up of these external enemies,
Hadad the Edomite and Resin
the king of Zobah. God allows them to come to power
because of Solomon’s sin. The ultimate causation in human history is always
spirituality. In the church age it has to do with church age believers; in the
age of Israel it had to do with the Israelites and how whether they
were obedient or disobedient to the Mosaic covenant.