Good morning. Today we are going to continue with our series called The Story. We are looking at the story of God that is told through the people, places, and events of the Bible. Last week we looked at the story of a king by the name of David. Today, we are going to look at the story of his son named Solomon. This particular time in the story takes place at about 1 Kings. David is getting older and people are beginning to speculate who is going to take his place. At that time, you have to realize there wasn’t a clear path of succession. As far as the crown was concerned, it was pretty much up in the air. Because it was up in the air, many people would jockey for position to try to get the crown. David had one son by a lady named Haggith. He had a son by the name of Adonijah. Adonijah decided he was going to take control of the crown by force. He was going to stand up and say I am the next king. It reminded me of a Christmas Eve service a few years ago. Everything was going well and I think Graham was doing the meditation. Lights were down and Graham mentioned something about Jesus the King. About that time, some guy walked down the middle of the aisle and stood up and said “I am the king” and then he left. That is a typical Christmas Eve at Bellevue Christian Church. Adonijah decided to take the crown and claim himself as king.
But Bathsheba, who happened to be Solomon’s mom, found out about that and went and told King David about it. She reminded David that he had promised that Solomon would get the crown. Not one to get out of his word, he said yes Solomon you are king and he anointed him. At that point, Solomon established his throne. We don’t know, but we think Solomon was probably young at that time. We get the sense that Solomon was probably feeling a little insecure about his new role as king. He really didn’t know how to handle it. He took the position and as the story goes, he went and offered sacrifices up on a mountain. He went to sleep that night and God appeared to him in a dream. God just said to Solomon ask anything you want and I will give it to you. This took Solomon aback. He thought about it and he said you have been very kind to my father David and to me, but frankly, I just don’t feel qualified. I am not sure I can handle the duties of a king. There are so many people involved in a country such as this. All I want is that I would be able to be a good king. That I would be able to discern right from wrong. That I would be able to give justice to the people. God’s response is this. “I will give you a wise and discerning heart, so that there will never have been anyone like you, nor will there ever be. Moreover, I will give you what you have not asked for – both riches and honor – so that in your lifetime you will have no equal among kings.” He asked for wisdom and he got riches and honor to boot. He got the wisdom from God. It was God’s wisdom that was given to him. So God gave him the opportunity to test out whether he really understood what he had.
The testing occurred in an interesting story. A story about two prostitutes and a young baby. It is an interesting story. As the story goes, these two prostitutes show up at the king’s court one day. They are arguing back and forth and bickering. They go to the king and one lady says this woman and I shared a house together. She went on to say at one point I became pregnant and I had a baby. Then the lady goes on to say three days later the other lady had a baby. After that, things got bad because that lady went to sleep one night and she actually smothered the baby by mistake. She laid on top of him and smothered the baby. Then she took the dead baby and she gave him to me and put him next to me and took my son that was alive and put him next to her. The next morning I woke up and I knew something was not right. The baby next to me was dead, but I knew it wasn’t my baby. It had to be the other lady’s baby. About that time, the second lady says you have it wrong. It is your baby that is the dead baby. It is my son that is alive. They were arguing back and forth and Solomon is put in this tough position. At that time, there were no witnesses. It was just one woman’s word against the next. Solomon did something that was very wise and a little scary. He told one of his assistants to go and get him a sword. He brought the sword back and he said cut that baby right in two and give half to one lady and the other half to the other lady. About that time, the lady whose son was alive panicked. It says “The woman whose son was alive was filled with compassion for her son and said to the king ‘Please, my lord, give her the living baby! Don’t kill him!’ But the other said ‘Neither I nor you shall have him. Cut him in two!’” Right then Solomon, using his wisdom, he knew the answer. He says “Give the living baby to the first woman. Do not kill him; she is his mother.” How did he know that? Any mothers out there know how he knew that. He knew that the bond between a mother and a son is so strong that even if the mother had to give the baby away to a complete stranger, she would do that instead of allowing any sort of harm to come to the son. This demonstrated that Solomon really was a pretty smart guy full of wisdom. The passage goes on to say “God gave Solomon wisdom and very great insight and a breadth of understanding as measureless as the sand on the seashore.” That is a lot of smarts. He didn’t just have wisdom. He had insight and understanding. If we had time to read the passage, we would see that he pursued all sorts of learning. He was into plant life. He was into trees. He was into studying herbs. He was into studying animal life like reptiles and fish and the birds of the air. He was all about studying the natural sciences. He became an expert on many different topics. So much so that many people came from other nations just to sit at his feet and learn from Solomon. He was so wise and people were just attracted to him.
There was one lady in particular who was really attracted to him and her name is the Queen of Sheba. In chapter 10, the opening line says “When the queen of Sheba heard about the famous Solomon and his relation to the name of the Lord, she came to test him with hard questions. Arriving at Jerusalem with a very great caravan – with camels carrying spices, large quantities of gold and precious stone – she came to Solomon and talked with him about all that she had on her mind. Solomon answered all her questions. Nothing was too hard for the king to explain to her. When the queen of Sheba saw all the wisdom of Solomon and the palace he had built, the food on his tables, the seating of his officials, the attending servants in their robes, his cupbearers, and the burnt offerings he made at the temple of the Lord, she was overwhelmed.” Legend has it that they had a little bit of a fling going on. Legend has it that actually Solomon wrote the book called The Song of Solomon. It is a pretty racy book. Probably the most erotic book in the Bible.
I thought I would give you a little teaser. In one part, Solomon is sitting there talking to his lady the queen and he goes on to say “Your graceful legs are like jewels. The work of a craftsman’s hands. Your navel is a rounded goblet that never lacks blended wine. Your waist is a mound of wheat encircled by lilies.” Any woman like to hear that from their husband? He was an excellent writer. He is known to have written 3,000 proverbs and 1,005 songs. The guy loved to write. Fortunately, we have a lot of his writings inside the book we call the book of Proverbs. The book of Proverbs is just basically wise instructions. Useful sayings. Wise sayings. They are very good sayings. There are a lot of good short ones in there that are easy to memorize like Proverbs 3:5-6 “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your path straight.” Good wisdom about trusting the Lord. There is another chunk of wisdom about you ladies and about making sure that you show a little bit of discretion. He says “Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman who shows no discretion.” Then he goes on to say “Grey hair is a crown of splendor; it is attained by a righteous life.” One I picked up from Financial Peace yesterday, “The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty.” They mentioned that in Financial Peace yesterday. It was a phenomenal workshop. If you haven’t been to it yet and you are struggling at all with finances and even if you aren’t struggling with finances, I highly recommend that you attend that. It is well worth your time and your money. There are all these proverbs and nuggets of wisdom. The good thing about Proverbs is the book is divided into 31 chapters. If you are looking for a nice short devotional for your quiet time, you can read through a chapter a day and after a month you will get through the entire book of Proverbs.
So again, Solomon was very smart and very wise. We also know that the guy was very, very rich. Extremely rich. He had set up this relationship with the surrounding nations, basically a protection around these people. He required representatives from the nations to come to him and pay him tribute, which was basically protection money. The passage tells us that “The weight of the gold that Solomon received yearly was 666 talents, not including the revenues from merchants and traders and from all the Arabian kings and governors of the land.” 666 talents was roughly equivalent to 25 tons of gold. He is getting it from all these people that are coming to him. He had a lot of stuff. He liked to spend his money. He wasn’t shy about spending his money. In addition to building the temple for God, he built this enormous palace that took him 13 years to build and it was just filled with all sorts of gold items. The goblets, eating utensils, everything was made of gold. He also apparently had a whole fleet of sailing ships that would go into distant lands and every two or three years they would come back and bring spices and more gold and ivory and silver and even exotic animals. They would bring in all sorts of things for him. Also, he was a guy who liked chariots. He had 1400 chariots and 12,000 horses. Apparently, in an archeological dig, they actually found some evidence of the stalls of the horses. He had a ton of horses. He had all this wealth and wisdom, but something went terribly wrong.
We pick that up in the first verse of chapter 11 that says “King Solomon, however, loved many foreign women besides pharaoh’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.’” You may recall David had a weakness for woman. Solomon really had a weakness. He had 700 wives and 300 concubines. It is just incredible to think about that. The problem is not so much that he had all these wives. Really the problem was that these wives somehow turned his heart away from God back to idols. That is the real problem. Things got progressively worse. So much so that the writer goes on to write “Solomon did evil in the eyes of the Lord. He did not follow the Lord completely as David his father had done.” You might remember that phrase “did evil in the eyes of the Lord.” That was quite frequent back in the book of Judges but now we are talking about King Solomon. Basically, the Lord told Solomon you are done with. I am going to tear your kingdom in two. As we look next week, we will see that is exactly what happened. Solomon’s kingdom pretty much got split completely in two.
As I began to think about the life of Solomon and what caused him to backslide and have this struggle, I began to think maybe it had to do with the women in his life. Maybe it had to do with his heart being bad. I think those are more just symptoms. Those are more the end result of something that went terribly wrong at some point in his life. At some point in his life, I think he forgot one of the most important proverbs which is “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” This is one that is so easy to skip over but it is so important. Think about “fear of the Lord”. You read this and you may think does that mean we are supposed to be terrified of the Lord? It doesn’t necessarily mean we are to be terrified. That could be one meaning. But the underlying Hebrew word could have three or four different senses behind it. It could be terror. It could be a sense of awe. It could be a sense of reverence or respect. It could be a combination of things going on here. I really think what it is in a nutshell is it is someone who understands that God who created the universe pretty much has the power over that universe. At any given moment, he could squish any one of us like a bug if he wanted to. At the same time, he is a God that is defined by love. He also would be someone who, at any given moment, is willing to pour out love to anybody, even the most undeserving people. That is what I see as the fear of the Lord. How does the fear of the Lord lead to wisdom? I think it makes perfect sense. When you begin to really experience the fear of the Lord, understanding the power of God and the love of God, the natural response, the wise thing to do is to submit yourself to him. That is the beginning of the wise life. Of a life filled with wisdom. As you continue to operate from a posture of fear of the Lord throughout your life, you have a pretty good chance of making good choices in life. When you get away from that fear of the Lord that you begin to make bad choices and in some cases evil choices. It was Solomon who said “Through the fear of the Lord, a man avoids evil.” When I was finishing this sermon, I was really struggling with trying to figure what one thing caused Solomon to decline. What I realized was it really had to do with this idea of fear of the Lord. When we read “Solomon did evil in the eyes of the Lord” and then we read this one that says “Through the fear of the Lord a man avoids evil”, to me the logical conclusion is that Solomon was evil because he didn’t fear the Lord. It makes sense to me and I think that is what happened. He fell away from the thing that he knew as a very young man when he walked with Lord. He fell away from that fear, reverence, awesome fear that there is a God of the universe out there that is all-powerful, all-knowing but at the same time all-loving. I think he lost track of that.
Consequently, by the end of his days, I think he was, at a minimum, depressed. At a maximum, he was bordering on insanity. I definitely think he was melancholy. We see that in the book of Ecclesiastes. He wrote the book of Ecclesiastes many believe during this latter part of life where he began reflecting on his whole life. He had all this stuff and all this wisdom and he was still able to write. He had still these nuggets of wisdom, but he really wasn’t following God any more. In the book of Ecclesiastes, he lays it all out there. It is a very good book full of wisdom nuggets, but it is one of the most depressing books you can read. It is very depressing. Solomon goes through pretty much the whole book saying and starts out saying life is meaningless. I went and I pursued this. I pursued education. I pursued learning, and I found out at the end of the day it really doesn’t matter how much I know. Somebody knows more. I went out and pursued making wealth and it really didn’t matter. Somebody ended up getting my wealth anyway. It is really meaningless. I went out there and partied and chased women. The bottom line is it just doesn’t matter. It is all meaningless. In one of the early lines he says “I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.” He keeps repeating that theme over and over and over again. I really would say that he forgot the fear of the Lord.
That is really the story of Solomon and all I want to talk about today. I hope that you picked up a nugget or two from one of his proverbs or from his story, something that maybe you can use in your own life. Really what I want you to leave with today is remembering that primary proverb that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” I suspect that there are people here today that maybe when they were younger they really walked with the Lord. They had this incredible fear of the Lord. Fear again in the sense that I know this God out there is all-powerful. I know he create the universe. I know he created me. I know that at any minute he can take it all away from me. I also know that he is a loving God and he will do anything for me. I think there are people that are like that. At some point in life, like Solomon, they got a little bit sidetracked. They got a little bit too close to the world. Maybe they began to look at things a little bit different. Maybe they began to chase after wealth or women or drugs or power. What happened is they fell away from the fear of the Lord and after that you start making some pretty dumb choices. I would say stupid choices. In some cases, lethal choices. When you fall out of that protection of the fear of the Lord, you are going to make dumb choices. There is no way around it. You are going to eventually make very bad decisions. If there are people like that who maybe accepted Christ at a young age and you were following God and for some reason you fell away, I would say consider whether or not you really do fear the Lord. Consider whether or not you really have that understanding of God or if you lost it somewhere. He is the maker of the universe and a God that loves you so much he would do anything for you. If you are at that place, go back to the fear of the Lord. Get back to a posture of worship. The cool thing about it is when you walk away from God and you decide to come back, he is right there waiting for you. He is like a good friend. You haven’t talked in a few years but just pick up where we left off and everything is fine. No embarrassment. No nothing. Just start from where you are at. Just pick it up and begin to worship.
Then I know there are people that probably have not really experienced that total fear of the Lord. Maybe someone is just checking out Christianity but they know there is something not right in the world. If there is no God, it is a hopeless situation out there. It is bad enough knowing there is a God out there, but when there is no God out there, it is the end. There is nothing. There is no hope whatsoever. There are some people that are beginning to say I know there has to be a God. I believe there is an all-powerful God up there. They might even begin to experience what I would call the wisdom of God. The wisdom of God that is defined by the salvation experience. I don’t have time to get into it, but in 1 Corinthians Paul talks about the wisdom of God. He sarcastically says out there in the world where are the scholars, where are the wise people, where are the philosophers? The rhetorical answer is they are nowhere because none of those smart people are smart enough to reason into the understanding of God, into a knowledge of God, into a knowledge of the universe, a knowledge of themselves, a knowledge of what happens at the end of life. Paul says it is the wisdom of God that is really the true wisdom because the wisdom of God stumps the wisdom of the wise. He goes on to say “For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.” That is why God is so much wiser. He uses something totally foolish, a crucified messiah, to save the world. The wise people reason that makes absolutely no sense. You are right. It doesn’t through man’s eyes. But it makes perfect sense from God’s eyes. If you are at a place where you are beginning to experience the power, majesty, and wonder of God, and you are starting to get a hint that maybe this wisdom of God is true and he is actually using a crucified Christ to bring us back, then you are at a good spot. You are at a spot where you better keep going. Don’t look back. Just keep moving forward and put yourself into a posture of submission before God and begin to worship him and then begin to live a life of the fear of the Lord. Then come visit me in six months or so, and your life won’t be perfect, but I pretty much guarantee you will be making some better decisions in life. That is all I really have to say. I tried to think of something wise to conclude this sermon. I don’t have to because Solomon did it. He gave me the very words. In the last part of Ecclesiastes he says “Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” Let us pray.
