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A Mini-Series is a small subset of lessons from a major series which covers a particular subject or book. The class numbers will be in reference to the major series rather than the mini-series.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008

22 - God's Generous Grace [B]

1 Kings 9:10-10:10 by Robert Dean
Series:Kings (2007)
Duration:57 mins 24 secs

God's Generous Grace; 1 Kings 9:10-10:10

 

God appeared to Solomon the first time in 1 Kings chapter three where we get a particularly insightful description of Solomon's spiritual life. 1 Kings 3:3 NASB "Now Solomon loved the LORD, walking in the statutes of his father David, except he sacrificed and burned incense on the high places." The reason for the exception is not that he was into idolatry but that according to the Mosaic Law there was a law related to a central sanctuary that all Israel was supposed to worship God in one place. God regulates worship. Worship is never in any dispensation a matter of subjective opinion or whatever makes one feel right. Christianity is based on objective revelation from God and is not based on our own projections of the way we wish God was or the way we think God is or what makes God more real to us. All those ideas really come out of 19th century liberalism.

 

What we see here is a glimpse into Solomon's spiritual maturity. Solomon loved the Lord and was "walking in the statutes of his father David." In other words, he was obedient to God, walking in the ways of God, walking in the Law, walking in the statutes of the Law. All of these different phrases are synonyms indicating that he was obedient to the Law. It doesn't mean that he was perfect or sinless or better than everybody else, but it means that in the sum total of his life we could say that Solomon was a man who was obedient to the Lord in his life. That is our barometer for defining our love for the Lord. All the way through Scripture, whether we look in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy or whether we go forward to the Gospel of John and into the first epistle of John, again and again and again Scripture says that God measures our love for Him on the basis of obedience. That is not legalism, it is simply that God is saying "If you love Me you will do what pleases Me, and if you don't obey Me you will be disciplined." So we see this picture here of Solomon as a mature believer at the beginning of his reign. We see the expression of that maturity because when God appears to him the first time God makes him this incredible offer and says, "Whatever you ask of me I will give it to you." Solomon asked for wisdom.

1 Kings 3:11 NASB "God said to him, "Because you have asked this thing and have not asked for yourself long life, nor have asked riches for yourself, nor have you asked for the life of your enemies, but have asked for yourself discernment to understand justice, [12] behold, I have done according to your words. Behold, I have given you a wise and discerning heart, so that there has been no one like you before you, nor shall one like you arise after you." So from this passage we learn a couple of principles that are going to work themselves out in 1 Kings 9, beginning in verse 10. There are three principles that are embodied in this section from verse 10 to the end of the chapter.

First we must set the framework for understanding this. As we move through any kind of narrative literature of history, any of the historical books that are describing the events of Israel, the events in the life of people, these are highly editorialised stories. God the Holy Spirit is the one who is picking these events. In biblical narrative the hero is always God, because God is the one who is being pictured behind all the stories, all the narratives that we have in Scripture, as the one who is providing the solution to man's problems. Man's problems are the basis for conflict that we see within every single one of these stories—his conflict with his own sin nature, conflict with living in the world system, conflict with paganism, conflict with other human beings who are attacking him, or angels or demonic forces, whatever, within the angelic conflict. So we have to understand that what is going on in any of these stories ultimately goes back to revealing something about God.

If we look at the elements of 1 Kings 9 and 10 what we see is almost as if the writer is mopping up a lot of loose ends. It talks about Solomon's architectural projects, his building projects, and how he organised the labour forces. It talks about his maritime forces and where they went and how his fame spread throughout the world to the point that the Queen of Sheba heard about him and came to visit him in Israel to see if all that she had heard about Solomon was true. No one she had ever heard about in the whole world had the power, the wisdom, the riches, the wealth and the skill that Solomon did. That ought to tell us something about how magnificent Solomon was. So we stop and ask why God the Holy Spirit has revealed all these things. We have to understand it in the context of what God has revealed in 1 Kings, and that is this promise—1 Kings 3:11-13. The uniqueness of Solomon would stand out as a beacon of God's grace and blessing to the entire world. In the New Testament God sends the church out into the world but in the Old Testament under the Mosaic Law the idea was that if Israel walked in obedience God would bless them so magnificently they would be such a power house of wealth and knowledge and sophistication and advancement that the entire world would want to come to Israel to learn what the secret of their success was. The secret of their success would be their walk with God, their obedient walk with God, and that is exactly what was going on with Solomon.

So what we see here as a backdrop to the last half of 1 Kings chapter nine and chapter ten is: a) God is always faithful to His promise no matter how much we fail. God is faithful even when we are failures. We know that principle and that is what exaggerates the grace of God, and this is what this whole episode does. We can't outdo God's grace and no matter what the situation is, no matter what failures we may have in our past, we understand that especially in the church age when we know that Jesus Christ has paid the price for all of our sins; and because we are accepted into God's presence on the basis of Christ's righteousness (not ours), and that puts us in the position of strength so that we can live life with a tremendous sense of confidence and energy because we are secure in that relationship with God; b) God goes beyond His promise. God's grace goes beyond our thoughts and imagination. It is more than we could ever ask for. In Philippians 4:19 we have a promise related to this for the church age believer: NASB "And my God will supply all your needs according [according to a standard] to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus." The riches in Christ Jesus are beyond anything that we could ever imagine. We could never outdo that resource, that reservoir of wealth that God has because it is infinite; [c] It is here that we see Solomon demonstrating in his life the principle which he states so clearly in Proverbs 1:7 NASB "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge [wisdom]." We see that played out in his life as a young man and through the first twenty years or so of his reign when he was walking with God. It was the fear of the Lord that was the starting point for his success. Everything in his life was there because he has his relationship with God squared away and secure from the very beginning.  

1 Kings 9:10 NASB "It came about at the end of twenty years in which Solomon had built the two houses, the house of the LORD and the king's house." So the first thing that we focus on is Solomon's building program and his alliance with Hiram the king of Tyre. [11] "(Hiram king of Tyre had supplied Solomon with cedar and cypress timber and gold according to all his desire), then King Solomon gave Hiram twenty cities in the land of Galilee." What we learn from this is the tremendous trade agreement that took place between Hiram and Solomon. As Hiram provides the material for the building of the temple and palace Solomon is going to pay him. Solomon gave Hiram twenty cities and for some reason Hiram was no pleased with this.

1 Kings 9:12 NASB "So Hiram came out from Tyre to see the cities which Solomon had given him, and they did not please him. [13] He said, 'What are these cities which you have given me, my brother?' So they were called the land of Cabul to this day." The word "cabul" indicates some kind of worthless land, something that is good for nothing. It seems that Hiram just didn't appreciate this gift in light of all that he did and he ended up giving this land back to Solomon, according to 2 Chronicles 8:2. [14] "And Hiram sent to the king 120 talents of gold." That is 9000 lbs of gold. Most of this gold is melted down and put into the temple. That is why the temple of Solomon was considered an incredibly glorious thing. As one would walk into Jerusalem in the early morning and the sun was coming up over the Mount of Olives it would hit that gold building, and the brilliance of it was almost blinding. There was no place like that in all the earth. That is the theme of this whole section. It is because of God's blessing of Solomon because of his walk with the Lord, because of His blessing of Israel, that there is no place like this in all the earth. The amount that they had of gold and silver is just beyond our comprehension, and that is because of God's blessing on Israel and making it stand out among all the nations of the earth.

So the first thing that we note is how Solomon dealt with his trade partner, Hiram, and that is covered in 1 Kings 9:10-14. We see the tremendous wealth of that project. Then the second thing that we see is an additional note in relation to his construction project. It starts off talking about the labour force that Solomon conscripted. He really had two forces. One was a slave-labour force, vv. 20-22 NASB "{As for} all the people who were left of the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, who were not of the sons of Israel, their descendants who were left after them in the land whom the sons of Israel were unable to destroy utterly, from them Solomon levied forced laborers, even to this day. But Solomon did not make slaves of the sons of Israel; for they were men of war, his servants, his princes, his captains, his chariot commanders, and his horsemen."

The Jews were not forced into slavery but they were also organised into different teams related to labour and to the military because as the wealth of Israel expands under the blessing of God they have to protect their wealth. They have to have a standing army in order to protect the nation against marauding bands who would seek to plunder them and attack them.

Four things in the building project: the house of the Lord [temple], the palace of the king, the Millo, and the wall of Jerusalem. Then three cities are mentioned and they are in different parts of the land. They are key cities for Solomon. The first mentioned is the farthest to the north, Hazor, located about 10 miles to the north of the Sea of Galilee. 1 Kings 9:15 NASB "Now this is the account of the forced labor which King Solomon levied to build the house of the LORD, his own house, the Millo, the wall of Jerusalem, Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer." Walls were constructed and the fortification was put there in the north in order to protect the land from invaders. This was a chariot city. Megiddo is not at the northern part of the region of Galilee but is about two thirds of the way up. Gezer sat astride a major trade route that came up from Egypt. 1 Kings 9:16 NASB "{For} Pharaoh king of Egypt had gone up and captured Gezer and burned it with fire, and killed the Canaanites who lived in the city, and had given it {as} a dowry to his daughter, Solomon's wife." What that did was open up the trade route and now there was a free flow of goods from Egypt all the way to Israel, up the coast to Lebanon and modern Turkey. So we see that what undergirds a lot of this relates to economics, that God was giving them military strength and power so that they were able to open up trade routes and it developed a monopoly. Israel controlled all the major trade routes and took tribute from everybody. Hiram and Solomon basically controlled all trade in the ancient world and this is part of the way God expanded the power and the privilege of Israel. And there is nothing wrong with that.

What the Bible shows is that everything that happens in history, which includes economics, the rise and the fall of empires, has to do ultimately with the plan of God, the purposes of God, and the spiritual richness of the people and their relationship with God. When we are studying the Word of God and are doing the things that God says to do—because God is the creator of everything in the universe, the political and economic laws, and things work the way they do because God designed them that way—when we are walking in conformity to the creator then the unseen consequences of that, the residual effects of that are material blessing and stability. But it is not a direct line cause and affect, it is the unseen consequences, the unintended consequences, of having that rich spiritual life and people living and thinking in a way that conforms to reality as God defined it, and not according to their own psychotic wish. The more that people and the nation get away from God's Word, the more they get away from worshipping God as the creator and understanding the principles that He built into the creation, the further they drift from that they begin to live on that, begin to send money they don't have, begin to misidentify problems, begin to make bad decisions from positions of weakness, and there starts to be a build-up of negative effects and consequences and the realisation of a lot of unintended consequences.

The other cities mentioned are down in the south in Judah and are designed to be fortifications in order to protect the southern border from any military incursion. So what we see here is a string security for the nation, a strong economy, but what gives the whole situation its real strength is their obedience to the Lord, which is seen in Solomon. Solomon is so strong in his spiritual life he becomes a spiritual leader for the people, setting that example, and it has a motivating trickle down effect throughout the entire nation.

1 Kings 9:19 NASB "and all the storage cities which Solomon had, even the cities for his chariots and the cities for his horsemen, and all that it pleased Solomon to build in Jerusalem, in Lebanon, and in all the land under his rule." Verses 20-22 describes his organisation of various labour forces.

1 Kings 9:25 NASB "Now three times in a year Solomon offered burnt offerings and peace offerings on the altar which he built to the LORD, burning incense with them {on the altar} which {was} before the LORD. So he finished the house." That is a reminder in this section of the strength of Solomon's spiritual life and his relationship with the Lord, and this would have been in relationship to the three annual feasts that required all Jews to come to Jerusalem. This would have been the time of Passover or the feats of unleavened bread, later it would be Pentecost, etc.

1 Kings 9:28 NASB "They went to Ophir and took four hundred and twenty talents of gold from there, and brought {it} to King Solomon." Nobody knows where Ophir is. 420 talents of gold is 32,000 lbs or 16 tons. This indicates the wealth of Israel under Solomon.   

The point of all of this is that God's grace is beyond anything that we could possibly imagine. When we walk with the Lord and he is our priority in life then God is the one who is going to bless us beyond anything that we could imagine. That is not to say that it is going to be material in terms of our bank account. It can be in numerous ways that God is going to bless and prosper us but it is the result of making our relationship with God the number one priority in life.