Going to bed and waking up to a nightmare

 This week's verses are 1 Kings 11:1-11:

King Solomon fell in love with many foreign women (besides Pharaoh’s daughter), including Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, and Hittites. They came from nations about which the Lord had warned the Israelites, “You must not establish friendly relations with them! If you do, they will surely shift your allegiance to their gods.” But Solomon was irresistibly attracted to them.

He had 700 royal wives and 300 concubines; his wives had a powerful influence over him. When Solomon became old, his wives shifted his allegiance to other gods; he was not wholeheartedly devoted to the Lord his God, as his father David had been. Solomon worshiped the Sidonian goddess Astarte and the detestable Ammonite god Milcom. Solomon did evil in the Lord’s sight; he did not remain loyal to the Lord, as his father David had. Furthermore, on the hill east of Jerusalem Solomon built a high place for the detestable Moabite god Chemosh and for the detestable Ammonite god Milcom. He built high places for all his foreign wives so they could burn incense and make sacrifices to their gods.

The Lord was angry with Solomon because he had shifted his allegiance away from the Lord, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him on two occasions and had warned him about this very thing, so that he would not follow other gods. But he did not obey the Lord’s command. So the Lord said to Solomon, “Because you insist on doing these things and have not kept the covenantal rules I gave you, I will surely tear the kingdom away from you and give it to your servant.

 

King Solomon was one of the smartest men in history. He was extremely gifted. He was also one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in history. He was extremely successful. Not only that, but he was also an extremely spiritual man who had had two very intense encounters with God. If you looked at a man like that, you would think that nothing could dislodge him from his connection with God. He was devout, wanted for nothing his heart could desire, and his creative work and life's story so far had glorified God.

Like many successful men of his time, Solomon had many wives. This obviously wasn't God's original model for man, but marriages made for strong alliances, and in a world full of poverty and violence many women preferred to have a tiny slice of an immensely rich and powerful man than to have a loser all to themselves. As for the concubines, they had no choice in the matter. A wealthy man in those days would own slaves the way a modern man might have a warehouse full of sports cars.

So this was the world Solomon was living in. He started off very devout and devoted to God, but then over time his interests became more diversified. God had blessed him immensely, but Adam and Even in the garden of Eden, he eventually ignored the warning to stay away from certain things.

In his case, God was warning him to stay away from cultures who worshiped false gods. The problem was those cultures were ones he needed strong alliances with and they had some nice looking women. What was a king to do? Gotta be a progressive leader, right? Wrong. In violating God's command to him and opening a door to their influence, he was pulled away from the blessing God had for him and his descendants. Even the nation suffered as a result.

Marriage relationships are intimate relationships. I can't say how much contact Solomon had with each wife, but chances are he favored some more than others. So there were likely some he spent a lot of time with. The problem is that being intimately exposed to their belief systems and different cultural values normalized them to the point where he didn't question them like he should.

If Chemosh and Milcom become household names, and you become familiar with their myths and practices, and you know and love people whose world view is centered on them, is it as easy to draw the line against falling into idolatry? Eventually you start to think "You know, that's not all that different from my religion. Maybe there are just many paths to the same cheese. How much harm could it be to build some temples for them too? I know my wives would really appreciate the gesture, and if the God thing turns out to be less real than I thought, I'm kinda hedging my bets."

If the smartest man in the world, one who had encountered God on a very real level, could fall into that trap, who among us would have done any better? And yet we're exposed to countless religions these days, from movies to books to YouTube propaganda videos for ISIS, and countless alternate world views from Naziism to BLM to Flat Earthism. Spiritually it is a very dangerous time to be alive. We're all as potentially exposed as Solomon. Who knows how much we've absorbed already, without noticing?

It's easy to sort of look down our noses at people who join cults, or who get wrapped up in violent political movements, or who adopt narrow-minded hate-filled philosophies, as if they're dumb or particularly gullible. But here was Solomon, one of the smartest, most educated men of his time, who fell hard into it. It could happen to any of us! Instead of looking at those people with contempt, we should look at them with fear and compassion.

We only see one or two steps into the future when we are about to make a bad decision. Sometimes the bad effects take years to arrive. If God tells us not to do something, we need to take it very seriously because he sees all of the years and all of the steps into the future. We often forget that about him because it's so freaky and unusual for him to have that power. "What does God know, anyway?" Umm, everything?

Solomon's missteps caused the kingdom to split into pieces after his death. Israel was weak and consumed with infighting. The influence of the false religions never really left again for any length of time. And all of this compromise and internal decay left them weak and ripe for invasion by their neighbors. All of those atrocities lamented by Jeremiah? The invasions by Persia and Assyria and eventually Rome? You could argue that all of that suffering and misery could be pinned on Solomon's disastrous matchmaking criteria.

If God gives us a boundary like he gave Solomon, we need to take it seriously. Otherwise, we get talked into crossing the line, like Solomon did, like Eve did, and like Adam did. "Did God really say not to marry one of those gorgeous unbelievers? Am I, the king of God's people, really presented with fewer options than those lesser kings of heathen peoples? How much harm could it possibly be? Besides, there's a massive trade deal hinging on it, and I'm not going to be the one to tell the elders that we're unable to import enough cedar for their houses!"

Don't allow things which stand in opposition to God to become a part of your normal day to day life. Don't let them be part of your daily home life. Don't embrace small compromises in those areas for the sake of workplace harmony or political correctness or drama-free friendships. If you do, then maybe not today or tomorrow, but maybe years from now, you could end up like Solomon.