And last week we looked together at the rise of Israel’s most glorious king, Solomon the wise. I think you remember the opening years of Solomon’s reign were characterized by one fact that the author drew our attention to – his love for the Lord. In as much as he gave us a little picture of a true messiah, Solomon was a king with a devoted heart.
But tonight, if you’ll turn with me to 1 Kings 11, we have a far more tragic story to confront. You’ll find that on page 291 in the pew Bibles. And as you’ll see in verse 1, Solomon was also a king with a divided heart, a divide which ultimately led to his awful downfall. We are going to read verses 1 to 13 tonight, but really this whole chapter belongs together. You get the tale of Solomon’s fall followed by the terrible consequences of that fall for his people. And so the verses we won’t read, verses 14 to the end, are when you see God immediately begin to fulfill His Word, raising up three adversaries to begin tearing apart Solomon’s glory, and all of it pressing us to see that the ruin of a king is ruinous for this kingdom.
Let me pray and then we’ll read it together.
Glorious Lord, Yourself impart, light of light from God preceding, enter every mind and heart, help us, by Your Spirit’s leading. Father, we need a true king. Would each of us see that need tonight and would we see the King that You have provided and cling to Him in faith. Amen.
1 Kings chapter 11 and verse 1:
“Now King Solomon loved many foreign women, along with the daughter of Pharaoh: Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women, from the nations concerning which the Lord had said to the people of Israel, ‘You shall not enter into marriage with them, neither shall they with you, for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods.’ Solomon clung to these in love. He had 700 wives, who were princesses, and 300 concubines. And his wives turned away his heart. For when Solomon was old his wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God, as was the heart of David his father. For Solomon went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, and after Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites. So Solomon did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and did not wholly follow the Lord, as David his father had done. Then Solomon built a high place for Chemosh the abomination of Moab, and for Molech the abomination of the Ammonites, on the mountain east of Jerusalem. And so he did for all his foreign wives, who made offerings and sacrificed to their gods.
And the Lord was angry with Solomon, because his heart had turned away from the Lord, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice and had commanded him concerning this thing, that he should not go after other gods. But he did not keep what the Lord commanded. Therefore the Lord said to Solomon, ‘Since this has been your practice and you have not kept my covenant and my statutes that I have commanded you, I will surely tear the kingdom from you and will give it to your servant. Yet for the sake of David your father I will not do it in your days, but I will tear it out of the hand of your son. However, I will not tear away all the kingdom, but I will give one tribe to your son, for the sake of David my servant and for the sake of Jerusalem that I have chosen.’”
Well amen. This is the Word of the Lord.
And sometimes, a little bit of heartbreak can be good for us. I wonder if our great danger in coming to this chapter is whether we are tempted to treat it like those slightly redundant warnings that seem to saturate modern life. “Warning: Do not eat the silica pack!” I know it looks tempting! “Warning: Do not use microwave to dry pets!” “Warning: Do not iron clothes while wearing them!” There is something about Solomon’s fall here that is so catastrophic. It’s almost cartoonish, isn’t it? Almost unbelievable. Seven hundred wives; 300 concubines. One commentator did the math so that you don’t have to. That worked out at one royal wedding every three weeks of Solomon’s reign. Can you imagine how difficult the best man speech got after the first few! And to most of us men who cannot quite believe that one woman agreed to marry us, that might make the warning of this chapter just seem like it’s meant for someone else. And so perhaps what it takes to cut through is a little bit of heartbreak.
Well 1 Kings 11 tells what must be one of the saddest stories in the Bible, not because a bad king became worse, but because a good king, a wise king, a glorious king, a man showered with grace, slowly drifted into ruin and it all happened just as his kingdom seemed to finally be growing into something truly beautiful – a place of peace and plenty and justice and joy. Yes, his fall took place in a way that was catastrophically cartoonish and big, but the tragedy all began with something so small and ordinary – a divided heart and an ignored warning – which makes this precisely the kind of warning that should frighten us. This is not as unbelievable as it seems.
Two responses then that the writer of 1 Kings wants his readers to feel as he breaks our hearts tonight over Solomon. He wants us to tremble and he wants us to trust.
First then, I wonder if this sad, sad story has moved you to tremble, because what we are watching here is the slow disintegration of human hearts. First, one human heart, verses 1 to 8, show us the slow, tragic, disintegration of a king, and that ought to be enough to make us fear. Solomon’s own, awful ruin is a cautionary tale to any of us believers. But then in verse 9 to the end of the chapter, the writer zooms out to show us a bigger story because with the disintegration of a king comes terrible consequences for God’s people – the disintegration of his kingdom.
How then, did Solomon come to ruin? Well, that is what verses 1 to 8 show us. Tremble at this tragic disintegration of a king. Solomon came to ruin because human hearts are sticky things and this man, with such a big capacity to love, he let his heart stick to too many things, verse 1. He has a big love for the Lord, it’s how his story began in chapter 3, but right back at the start of Solomon’s reign we also saw that there was a pragmatic streak to Solomon’s wisdom. He made a marriage alliance with Egypt, the superpower of the day. A wise move politically – shore up the kingdom’s defenses – but a suicidal move spiritually because Egypt was where Israel had been rescued from; Egypt was the place their hearts were always tempted to crawl back to when they were disgruntled or afraid. And sure enough, there have been little hints over the intervening chapters that Egypt had started growing in Solomon’s heart. Solomon was getting more and more tangled up with Egyptian arms dealers, stockpiling Egyptian chariots and horses, starting to look more and more like a little pharaoh and less and less like a little messiah – something God’s kings were explicitly told not to do.
But because our writer was working to get our hope invested in King Solomon, he’s kept back the worst of it until now. It’s only at the end of the story that he reveals the bombshell. You see, pharaoh’s daughter was just the first, and all this time, Solomon has been making pragmatic compromise after pragmatic compromise, treaties with more and more foreign nations. And with every treaty came a new wife of royal birth and a new shrine for that pagan wife to worship in, like a little embassy for her people and their false god on Israelite soil. And you can imagine Solomon’s political advisors cheering him on. This was brilliant to them. It’s all the more evidence, isn’t it, that Israel is finally entering its golden age. Here is a glorious, practical, openminded king. He loves Yahweh, to be sure; he’s never skimped or cut corners on building the temple. His giving is off the charts, all of those costly sacrifices that we saw last time. But he’s not rigid and inflexible and wed to one narrow interpretation of the Bible. Isn’t he a great modern ruler?
But here’s the problem with Solomon’s pragmatism, verse 2. His heart did exactly what God made human hearts to do. It clung to each of these women in love. That is a Genesis 2 word, isn’t it? It’s how marriage was meant to work. Our hearts were meant to hold fast, to cleave to the one we give ourselves to. And so for all of his wisdom, there was something fundamental about the way human hearts work that Solomon seemed to miss. You see, human relationships can never be just about politics any more than they can ever be just about sex. Notice, by the way, Solomon is playing both games. Along with those royal wives, the political marriages, the 300 concubines, playthings, almost as if that first moral compromise began to snowball. But human hearts are sticky things, and if you hook up with another human being, sure as night follows day, your heart will begin to stick to theirs. It’s how it’s meant to be, marriage is made to be – a profoundly, intimate, melding of hearts because marriage is designed to teach us something of what it means to belong, heart and soul forever, to Christ. But when you let your heart wrap itself around all sorts of different things heading in different directions, there is bound to come a moment when something begins to tear.
And I wonder if the thing that makes this passage so achingly sad is when that tear finally came. Verse 4, “When Solomon was old his wives turned away his heart after other gods.” We think, don’t we, the ones in danger are the young adults. This is a story of something far more sad and perhaps far more common. Think of the bright, young Christian who everyone loves. When he was around the “Lost and Found” Sunday School age, he was elected deacon, he was on fire for the Gospel, so full of gifts. The whole church could see his promise. And only when he was at the “Lamplighters” stage did people begin to notice it wasn’t really Jesus who got him excited anymore. But isn’t it so often true that our last few laps can be the most dangerous? This wasn’t a sudden apostasy. Solomon didn’t deconstruct his faith. He just let his heart cool one degree at a time, year after year of slow, creeping compromises, as if his soul was being slowly choked by the kudzu. It’s only when it’s completely taken over that you realize what you’ve allowed to happen.
If you told the Solomon of chapter 3 that one day he would be following after Molech, he would have laughed at you in the face. But early concessions gradually wore down his heart. Did you notice how many times his heart was identified as the problem? Long before there were any outward signs of Molech worship, his inner control center had started to rationalize away the choices. His affections had begun to turn.
I went to a high school that was a bit like Hogwarts, and one of the things I loved about the place was this big, solid, stone staircase that went up to the boys dormitories because every single stair had a huge dip right across the middle where for hundreds of years, hundreds of boys running up and down those stairs, day after day, had slowly polished away the stone until for a few of them there was barely a step left.
And I wonder how many of us are doing exactly that same thing to our hearts, slowly grinding it away without even noticing. What are the things that you are giving your affections to without even realizing that it’s beginning to stick and to pull? Little early patterns of behavior that wear away at your resistance, wrapping your hearts around countless little nothings that drain away the love that belongs to God, scroll by scroll, click by click, compromise by compromise. A job that pays really well but pulls us away from church. A husband who doesn’t really love Jesus. “But we’re getting older now and it just seems so unfair that we still haven’t found someone,” and we say, “I can make it work. I’ll come to church sometimes. It won’t change me.”
But look at verse 2. Isn’t that precisely how Solomon reasoned with himself? The awful thing about his ruin is that this was all so predictable. God told him not to do it and He told him what would happen if he did. “The Lord said,” verse 2. He said it in Exodus 34. He said it in Deuteronomy 7. “Do not marry these nations all around you because they will surely turn your heart after their gods.” And Solomon knew it. Every newly crowned king, remember, had to write out their own copy of the law and read it all the days of his life. God’s king-training program makes our elder-training program look like kindergarten. Solomon knew it. It wasn’t that he wasn’t warned. It wasn’t that he didn’t hear. He just didn’t really believe the danger applied to him. God says it, but God can’t mean it will happen to me. And so Solomon does it, and surprise, surprise, verse 4, it happened to him. His wives turn away his heart after other gods, which means, verse 9, his heart was turned away from the true God. God is jealous for all of it, but hearts are sticky things and there is nothing they will stick to quite so well as a human being you get into bed with.
So much of the sorrow you see in pastoral ministry comes from good, loving Christian people making this same old mistake – giving your heart to a partner who will pull you away from Jesus. Two things just go together like peas and carrots – alliances and affection; wives and worship; husbands and hearts. Maybe there are one or two here tonight who might one day be tempted by that kind of a marriage. So if it’s not too late for you friend, let me plead with you, please do not do it. Don’t think that God isn’t serious. And if you are living with that mistake now, I know a lot of us are, and you can’t undo it, and you are dealing with the mess, well you need to know that Jesus is full of grace. We are going to see some of that soon. But you also need to be deadly sincere with yourself about the danger that you’re in. A divided heart and ignored warnings led to the total, catastrophic ruin of the Old Testament’s most glorious king, and it should make all of us tremble, tremble at this tragic disintegration of a king.
But there is something else in all of this aching human sadness that ought to fill us readers of this book with dread, and that is what Solomon’s ruin meant for Israel because what we see in verses 9 to the end is that the disintegration of a king means the disintegration of a kingdom. If your hopes are wrapped up in this man’s rule, then verse 9 is terrible, terrible news. “The Lord was angry with Solomon because his heart had turned away.” And we’ve had hints already as to why that is such a disaster. First, it’s the sheer horror in verses 6 to 8 when we see just how bad things got. Solomon is not just tolerating some differences; their king made compromises with – what was the word that came three times? An “abomination.” Detestable godlets who ask for detestable things. There was a straight line between Solomon’s indulgence of his wives and the unspeakable idolatry that his heirs and successors would eventually get up to. How did a Davidic king like Manasseah end up sacrificing his own children to Molech? Well, because Solomon brought a jar full of pet viruses into the kingdom and his grandchildren’s grandchildren would open it up and let them rip.
That is a sobering thought, is it not, for all of us parents? The compromises we make can ruin souls for generations. But it is far worse here, don’t you see, because Solomon isn’t just any parent. He is the anointed king. He represents all of them. They desperately needed a king who was different, a messiah whose heart was wholly true to the Lord his God. But it turns out the king they have is just like them – verse 4, verse 6. His heart might be big, but it is not the heart of a faithful, Davidic king. A divided heart is not the heart of a true messiah. And for all of his gifts and graces, Solomon is nothing more than a mini Israel. His fate in this book explicitly foreshadows their fate.
You see it even in the words the author keeps reminding us of. “His heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God.” Those are words you might have heard somewhere before because they were Solomon’s own advice to his people at the climax of his reign. The day he dedicated the temple in chapter 8 verse 61, he said to them all, “Let your heart therefore be wholly true to the Lord our God, walking in His statutes and keeping His commandments.” But it turns out their king doesn’t even follow his own wisdom. They have a king who is just like they are.
Maybe we are meant to be reminded of the rest of Solomon’s prayer that day. He prayed knowing that only the God they met in that temple in Jerusalem could forgive human sins. He prayed knowing that one day God’s people would turn their hearts away from God and they would be carried off in judgment into a far country. And he prayed, trusting that one day their hearts would turn back and they would repent and the God of that temple in Jerusalem, no other god, would hear their prayer and forgive them and put everything right. And now, Israel’s own king plays out that whole story in his own life, except for the final step. We are never told whether he repents and finds his way back home.
So do you see what a calamity this is for the people of God? As it goes for the king, so it goes for the kingdom. The failure of their messiah, their anointed king, is the worst disaster ever to befall the people of God. Verse 11 – Solomon is a king with a torn heart presiding over a torn covenant, and God’s response, “I will surely tear the kingdom from you and give it to your servant,” which is precisely what we see starting to happen over the rest of the chapter. You were right to hope in this king, and you’re also right now if your heart breaks at his ruin. We got a brief, beautiful glimpse of the world as it could be, a little forty year reign of peace and plenty and justice and joy. We were so close to heaven, and now after that forty year flash in the pan, God begins the four hundred year process of tearing it all to pieces in judgment, beginning with these three adversaries.
And God does it in a very pointed way. The first two are both from peoples vanquished under David, a covenant keeping king. But the moment God’s king turns away from the Gospel in his heart, those old enemies of His people start to crawl back out of the woodwork. And if you read the rest of this chapter later, look out for all the ways that these adversaries are painted as a kind of parody of Israel. They shelter in Egypt. One of them grows up in pharaoh’s house, just like Moses. He even has a kind of a “Let my people go!” moment. And how long at the end of the chapter is Solomon’s glorious reign? Forty years. Were those the glory days or, in retrospect, was it one long sad walk back into the wilderness? You see, all those wonderful works of God for His people, they depended, as we saw last week, on a king whose heart is true, and without that we are right back where we started – stranded in Egypt, slaves to sin and death. His obedience is our joy, but his failure is terrible sorrow.
So will you tremble at the thought of a king whose heart is as messed up and divided as yours and mine? We desperately need a representative whose heart is different – like us in every way, but without sin. And so the author has crafted this history the way he has because he wants us to feel the heartbreak at the end of Solomon’s life. It ought to make us tremble as we see our desperate need. But finally, can you see how that heartbreak is also driving us to trust? Yes, his fall was supersized, but it all started with something so small and ordinary that we share with him entirely – messed up affections, divided hearts – and if in our fundamental problem we are actually just like this Solomon, then what are we meant to trust in to keep us from disaster?
Just notice all of the things that Solomon had going for him, which at the end of the day didn’t have the power to keep him safe. He had enormous, genuine love for the Lord, but love wasn’t enough to keep him. It didn’t stop him from parceling out his heart to all sorts of other things. Your own love, your affections, those are not a thing to rest in. Solomon had unprecedented wisdom from God, but a wise man who knows right from wrong can still choose very foolish paths that he knows to be disobedience. And then in verse 9, notice, we get two more aggravating factors that make Solomon’s sin even more tragic.
And if God has lovingly brought you here tonight, then these two factors apply to you as well. His grace to us makes our divided hearts even more impossible to excuse. Solomon had profoundly intimate religious experience. The lover of his soul had met with him twice. Even the first time, remember, when he was worshiping up a mountain like a lost sheep, he had tasted fellowship with God but it wasn’t enough to stop him trying to manufacture those cheap, counterfeit spiritual dopamine hits. Religious experience wasn’t enough to keep him. And finally, verse 10, God had commanded him about this very thing. He had written it out himself in his own becoming a king training workbook, but even deeply privileged religious education wasn’t enough to keep him. God’s warnings were always for other people.
So what is it then that we are being urged to trust? Well, even in this sad, sad story about the disintegration of every hope, the writer always has one eye on the perfect integrity of God. This integrity everywhere, but one thing in this chapter remains perfectly whole and true, and that is God Himself. I wonder if you can see the good news even in the anger God shows to Solomon in verse 9. What kind of a God would not be angry when the shepherd He provides for His sheep brings ruin upon His kingdom? What kind of a God would not be angry when the king He set His love on shares his heart with a thousand worthless things. God’s anger is His infinite goodness and love refracted through human betrayal. Because He loves you, He is jealous for your whole heart. He will not share you. And so you see God’s integrity here when He is faithful in judgment. God said it would turn Solomon’s heart but Solomon didn’t believe Him and it turned Solomon’s heart. God said He would tear the kingdom from a disobedient king, Solomon didn’t believe Him; God did what God said. And if you think God is bluffing when He warns you in His Word, try Him and see. He is faithful in His judgment. Perfect integrity.
But secondly, He is also wonderfully faithful here in His mercy. Even as He begins to mete out the curses of His covenant, isn’t it extraordinary how much His covenant love holds back His hands. God has two great loves in verses 12 and 13 that nothing can tear out of His heart. “For the sake of your father, David, and for the sake of Jerusalem that I have chosen,” God’s heart is so full of love for His faithful king that He is willing to delay the punishment to His son. “Not now, not in your lifetime,” verse 12, “and not total,” verse 13. “I’ll spare one tribe so that My promises of an eternal throne will still stand because Jerusalem is the place where forgiveness is made, the place where blood is shed for sins, the place I have chosen for My temple. And because of that, this destruction will not be total. For the sake of the king I love, for the sake of that place of sacrifice.”
One day those two things – king and sacrifice – will come together. Just look down at God’s last word in this chapter, verse 39. And God in His mercy adds one more “not.” This judgment will be “not yet” and “not total” and finally “not forever.” Isn’t that the word the writer wants his heartbroken Jewish readers to cling onto in hope? God can be faithful in His judgment and faithful in His mercy because God is faithful in His Christ. Surely that is why this author has worked so hard to get our hopes up in Solomon and to hold back the tragedy to the end. He is teaching us to take God’s warning seriously so that we cling to the King whose heart is whole. A King who is not like us. A King we can truly trust because His heart never ever wandered.
Well friends, wouldn’t you love to know what became of Solomon? I wish he’d told us, and I think there might be some clues in the bigger context; I could bore you with my own theories after the service. But not now, because surely there is a reason God does not answer the one thing we are longing to know – “Did Solomon – wise, kind, glorious Solomon – ever repent?” Surely God doesn’t answer because He wants you and me to walk out of church tonight with a little stone inside our shoe. The question we desperately want to ask is the wrong question, isn’t it? We need to ask, “What state is my heart in tonight? Will I repent? What will keep me from Solomon’s ruin?” It’s not my love for the Lord. It’s not my wisdom. Not my religious experience. Not even my Bible knowledge. What will keep me? Well the only thing I can do is tremble at the mess I see inside me and cling to the King whose heart is whole. Will you do that with me now? Let’s pray.
Gracious God, we praise You that for all the mess in our divided hearts one thing is true – You have not changed. You are still full of faithful, covenant love for our faithful Messiah, our King Jesus. So now Lord, for His sake and for the sake of His perfect offering on the cross, would You forgive us for the coldness of our hearts, for the way we spread our affections so thinly, for the way we’ve ignored the loving warnings of Your Word? Bind our hearts to Him we pray, and in Your great and steadfast love, would You hold us fast to the praise of Your abounding grace? Amen.