God has blessed our family with a lovely home and garden. Through the years I have battled the pernicious omnipresence of weeds; it matters not how hard I try eradicating them, they always seem to return. In my never-ending battle, I use a systemic weed killer called “Round-Up.” Once applied, the weeds appear normal, even though they are in the process of dying; they may reproduce, but they are dead.
I suggest that this is analogous to life. All people are like weeds in God’s beautiful garden of life. The live and they die, but they always reproduce after their kind. Weeds reproduce weeds and sinners reproduce sinners. What the sinner does not realize, however, is that God judges sin with a systemic poison that always kills the sinner.
Solomon, king of Israel, illustrates this truth. By God’s grace, He takes the son of an adulterous relationship and makes him the object of His favor. Realizing his inadequacies, Solomon asks God for wisdom to rule properly His people. God grants his request, and not only makes him the wisest of men, but also rich and powerful. As you know, these are the three measures of worldly success: wisdom, wealth, and power. Applying God’s wisdom, Solomon writes three of the OT books.
Applying God’s wisdom, he also thought he could compromise the clear teachings of God. God said, do not marry foreign wives; Solomon had many pagan wives. God said, do not accrue many wives; Solomon had 1000 wives and concubines. God said, do not accumulate horses; Solomon violated this clear command. These were “wise” decisions on Solomon’s part. After all, does not wisdom dictate that it is better to marry the daughter of your enemy than to go to war with him at the expense of your son’s life? And besides, Solomon was smarter and more powerful than his wives; he had no doubt that he would be head of his home.
I can find no reference to Solomon breaking himself before God in utter dependence upon Him, asking God to keep him from sinning; no reference to God saying that Solomon was a good king, or that he hated sin. He even had the audacity to worship pagan gods with his wives. He took God’s endowments and used them for his own ends, and in the process it killed him. God took ten of the twelve tribes from Solomon’s descendent, and the children produced by his pagan marriages spread idolatry throughout the land.
Solomon became secure in his relationship with God, resulting in his presuming on that relationship, which in turn destroyed him and his nation. The premise of this little meditation is today’s generation of Christians have emulated Solomon. They do not realize that God has created life in such a way that their sin will destroy them. Holding tenaciously to the promise that “the gift of God is eternal life,” they ignore God’s warning that “the wages of sin is death.”
Possibly no author of the Bible lived a more flawed life than Solomon. We are aware that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). God faulted Moses and David, they repented, and God forgave them. Solomon sinned with no indication that he repented or that God forgave him.
Did God use Solomon to write three books of the Bible and then send him to hell? What biblical indication do we have that he is in heaven? These are terrifying thoughts. Rarely do I commune with God in the Scriptures without His bringing terror to my soul. “And if the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?” (1Peter 4:18).
May God grant us both the wisdom of Solomon and the “broken and contrite spirit” that is essential for a relationship with God.
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