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 Israel, that God has blessed them with because of Solomon's obedience, his maturity. At that time the people were blessed in phenomenal ways materially. But there were seeds to disaster that were already being sown and once God lowered the boom in terms of divine discipline those people lost their prosperity, their wealth, and there were so many things that reverberated, unintended consequences from one person's sins. So the warning there is that we need to pay attention to the fact that sin has consequences far beyond anything we ever imagined at the time we were committing those sins, and the discipline may not only affect us but it may affect our spouse, our children, our grandchildren.
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 Israel. But God is showing that He is true to His promise, that His integrity and power is such that there is nothing that a man do to force God to abrogate His promise once He has made it. So Israel is totally secure, the descent though David is totally secure, but there are temporal consequences to sin. One application from this is that our future salvation is secured by the integrity of God, by the omnipotence of God, which establishes and guarantees the promise. However, through disobedience and sin we can forfeit the blessing and the inheritance. We don't lose the position in the covenant, our salvation, but we can forfeit inheritance, rewards, blessing both in time and eternity.
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 Israel's ties with her neighbours as a means of protection. The primary thing that is driving this is power and security, not sex. It is a loyalty to God issue. It is a failure to trust God to provide for the security, stability and prosperity of the nation. Solomon is going to try to solve the problems himself, human viewpoint style. When he brings these women, these wives, into his home they are bringing with them their opinions, human viewpoint, religion, the demons behind these religions, the demonic influence that is there, and he succumbs to that through eventual pressure—peer pressure, the desire to be accepted, the realisation that everybody has all these different ideas. As people become more internationally oriented, more global in their travels, there is the tendency to ask: Who are we to say that we are the only ones who have market on truth? The historical anchor of truth in the Scripture begins to slip culturally.
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 God, Israel's God, as the soul protector of Israel he is going to get his loyalty through these women and their national gods. Solomon's basic problem is that he has become an internationalist. It is back to the tower of Babel again. He is not going to keep Israel as a distinct, holy people; he is being influenced by all of this internationalism, this globalism, and he is one of the first multiculturalists. He is giving value and credence, and he is approving their system.
1 Kings 11:2 NASB "from the nations concerning which the LORD had said to the sons of Israel, 'You shall not associate with them, nor shall they associate with you, {for} they will surely turn your heart away after their gods." Solomon held fast to these in love.'" He is marrying these women from specific nations and God had prohibited this. He is failing the Law code test which is his primary responsibility as the king. [3] "He had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines, and his wives turned his heart away." Here "heart" has the idea of his mentality, thinking, focus. He shifts from divine viewpoint to human viewpoint.
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 23:31 NASB "I will fix your boundary from the Red Sea to the sea of the Philistines, and from the wilderness to the River {Euphrates;} for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand, and you will drive them out before you.
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 15:33 NASB "Do not be deceived: 'Bad company corrupts good morals.'"
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,
Illustrations