Hope From the Word

Guest (Male): God gave Solomon a great amount of wisdom, but even with that wisdom, Solomon made his fair share of foolish mistakes. Pastor Bill Luebkemann elaborates.

Bill Luebkemann: Well, how foolish it is. Solomon goes from a guy who's serving God to a guy who's trying to thwart God's plan. Here's a guy that's going to be the next king? I'll kill him. I'll see if I can stop God's plan. Does Solomon really think he can stop God's plan by killing the guy who's going to be king?

How foolish that is. Is that the wisest guy in the world who thinks he can now outwit God by having 700 wives and 300 concubines and thinks they won't lead him astray? And now he thinks he can actually kill a guy who's been anointed by God to be the next king. How foolish that is.

Guest (Male): One baseball player set the disappointing Major League record for strikeouts with 1,316. The same player set a record for five consecutive strikeouts in a World Series game. The holder of both records is the great slugger, Babe Ruth.

Hello and welcome to Hope From the Word with Pastor Bill Luebkemann of Calvary Chapel Marlton. Today, Pastor Bill will be highlighting 1 Kings Chapter 11. Here, we'll explore more of King Solomon's life. Just like the Babe, Solomon was a man who knew both great successes as well as great failures. We can learn a great deal from looking at his life. Here's Pastor Bill to illustrate them for us.

Bill Luebkemann: So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the Lord. He did not follow the Lord completely, as David his father had done. Notice the evil here was in following the other gods. He did not follow the Lord completely, like his father David had done. Solomon was led astray by his wives. He was led to do evil by these wives. He did not follow the Lord completely because of these wives, and he was therefore in a bad place with the Lord because the Lord wants complete and total obedience to Him. He doesn't want to have us share our allegiance.

Now, he may have been worshipping both because it says in verse 7, "on a hill east of Jerusalem, Solomon built a high place for Chemosh, the detestable god of Moab, and for Molech, the detestable god of the Ammonites." He did the same for all his foreign wives who burned incense and offered sacrifices to their gods. So here he is, building high places, altars, places where his wives could worship their gods.

He was helping them out. He was helping them worship their gods, helping them burn incense and offering sacrifices. Some people say, "Well, he wasn't really doing that. He was just playing along." Some people say he was just there, going along with them. He was letting them do it. He's like, "Well, you go ahead. I'll wait for you here." But he was aiding and abetting, if you will.

If you aid and abet a murderer, you'll get the same sentence the murderer does, for the most part, unless you turn state's evidence and cut a deal with the DA. You probably learned that on Law and Order, right? Here's the same thing. No deals with the Lord except if you accept His Son as your Savior. That's the only kind of deal you need because that covers everything all in one shot.

So this guy here was following these other gods. Now, maybe he was still worshipping the Lord. He may have gone back to Jerusalem and worshipped the Lord in the Lord's temple, and then he may have gone and worshipped the god Moab and Molech and whatever. But people were offering babies to Molech and burning incense, and so he was sharing his time. The Lord God is not a timeshare kind of arrangement.

That made the Lord very unhappy, as you can well imagine. "The Lord became angry," it says, with Solomon because his heart had turned away from the Lord, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice. It’s like, man, two times. Most of us never had the Lord appear to us once. Here's a guy the Lord appeared to him twice, and he turned away from Him.

Although He had forbidden Solomon to follow other gods, Solomon did not keep the Lord's command. So the Lord said to Solomon, "Since this is your attitude and you have not kept my covenant and my decrees, which I commanded you, I will most certainly tear the kingdom away from you and give it to one of your subordinates."

"Nevertheless, for the sake of David your father, I will not do it during your lifetime. I will tear it out of the hand of your son. Yet I will not tear the whole kingdom from him but will give him one tribe for the sake of David my servant and for the sake of Jerusalem, which I have chosen."

The Lord's telling him here, "If this is what you're going to do, then you're going to lose the kingdom. I told you what to do and what not to do, and you didn't follow it. And so I'm going to take the kingdom away from you and give it to someone else, one of your subordinates, somebody in your kingdom. Just some Joe off the street, by the way. I'm just going to give the kingdom to someone else in your kingdom, some other Israelite."

"But by the way, I'm not going to do it during your lifetime, but not for your sake. For the sake of your father David, because I promised David your son would reign in peace, your son would have the kingdom." Because of what He promised his father, he's going to go to the grave in peace. After that, this is going to happen. "I'm going to tear it out of the hand of your son."

But also because of his father, He's not going to take all of it away from his son. He's going to let his son have a little piece of it, just one tribe, the part around Jerusalem, which was the part that was more loyal to the Lord in future years than the other part. Notice what these verses don't say here. I want you to see this here very clearly. Notice what it doesn't say in the verses I just read. It never says Solomon repented, apologized, said he was sorry, or changed his mind.

It never says that Solomon says, "Oh my gosh, forgive me, Lord." All these great prayers that Solomon said a few chapters before here, and he prayed and the Lord appeared to him and ever. Here, it doesn't say he even answered, like, "Hello, are you listening, buddy?" You just have to wonder if he had answered the Lord with some repentance, if he had repented and changed his heart and made things right. It just makes you wonder, maybe things would have been different.

Then the Lord raised up against Solomon an adversary, Hadad the Edomite, from the royal line of Edom. Earlier, when David was fighting with Edom, Joab the commander of the army who had gone up to bury the dead had struck down all the men in Edom. Joab and all the Israelites stayed there for six months until they had destroyed all the men in Edom.

Now, this is an example of why when God said to them, "Strike everyone dead." Here's another thing. People today read the Bible, and think, "Oh, it's a book full of murder and they killed people and everything. How can you believe in a God that did that?" This is an example of why God ordered this kind of thing to happen. Because they didn't quite kill everybody, and it's going to come back to haunt them.

Joab and all the Israelites stayed there for six months until they had destroyed all the men in Edom, but Hadad, still only a boy, fled to Egypt with some Edomite officials who had served his father. In other words, they missed some of them. They set out from Midian and went to Paran. Then taking men from Paran with them, they went to Egypt to Pharaoh, king of Egypt, who gave Hadad a house and land and provided him with food.

So this boy, who was back during the time of David, all the men in his country were exterminated by the Jews, but he escaped with some of the counselors who had served his father, went off to Egypt, and Pharaoh put them up. He gave them a place to stay, gave him some land and some food. Pharaoh was so pleased with Hadad that he gave him a sister of his own wife, Queen Tahpenes, in marriage.

The sister of Tahpenes bore him a son named Genubath, whom Tahpenes brought up in the royal palace. There Genubath lived with Pharaoh's own children. By the way, I make no claim that I pronounce these names correctly. Listen at your own risk. While he was in Egypt, Hadad heard that David rested with his fathers and that Joab, the commander of the army, was also dead.

Then Hadad said to Pharaoh, "Let me go that I may return to my own country." So this guy, he's off living in Egypt. He grows up. He was just a boy. Pharaoh is so impressed with him, he gives the grown-up lad a wife of his, gives him his sister-in-law to be his wife. And he has a kid, and his kid is running around the palace with the other palace brats.

But meanwhile, he hears back in his own land that the Jews who killed off all, he just remembers when I was a boy, all my ancestors got killed off there. And he hears that the Jews that did that are all gone. And he says to Pharaoh, "Let me go. I want to go back to my own country. My roots are calling me."

"What have you lacked here that you want to go back to your own country?" Pharaoh asked. "Nothing," Hadad replied, "but do let me go." Something was just calling him back to his own country. What was calling him was God's will because God was raising him up to be a thorn in the side of Israel.

And God raised up against Solomon another adversary, Rezon son of Eliada, who had fled from his master, Hadadezer king of Zobah. He gathered men around him and became the leader of a band of rebels. When David destroyed the forces of Zobah, the rebels went to Damascus where they settled and took control. Rezon was Israel's adversary as long as Solomon lived, adding to the trouble caused by Hadad. So Rezon ruled in Aram and was hostile toward Israel.

So what we see here is that towards the end of his life, as Solomon begins to depart from the Lord, not only is God telling him, "I'm going to take the kingdom away from your son," but then the Lord also allows these adversaries to be raised up to come and be thorns in his side. It doesn't really say what they did, by the way. There's not any additional words in here to describe what they did.

But no doubt they were pricking the Jews around their borders and causing skirmishes and harassing them, and perhaps cutting off trade routes and fighting against convoys and interrupting stealing goods that they were trying to trade with other countries, and who knows what. They were adversaries to Solomon. Most of Solomon's reign was in peace. Remember he had this great kingdom, peace, tranquility everywhere, but it was starting to come apart and come unglued at the seams, and it was God's judgment coming upon him.

And God does judge nations. And you can see that it's happening here in these verses. Also, Jeroboam son of Nebat rebelled against the king. He was one of Solomon's officials, an Ephraimite from Zeredah, and his mother was a widow named Zeruah. Here is an account of how he rebelled against the king. Solomon had built the supporting terraces and had filled in the gap in the wall of the city of David his father.

Now Jeroboam was a man of standing, and when Solomon saw how well the young man did his work, he put him in charge of the whole labor force of the house of Joseph. So here's a guy that impressed Solomon. So much so that Solomon put him in an important position, this guy Jeroboam. About that time, Jeroboam was going out of Jerusalem, and Ahijah the prophet of Shiloh met him on the way wearing a new cloak.

The two of them were alone out in the country, and Ahijah took hold of the new cloak he was wearing and tore it into 12 pieces. Not Jeroboam's cloak, by the way. He took off his own cloak, which was a new cloak, and he tore his own cloak into 12 pieces. Then he said to Jeroboam, "Take ten pieces for yourself, for this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says."

I love it when these prophets in the Old Testament talked. They were very graphic. They could have just said, "You're going to get ten-twelfths of the kingdom, buddy." Why have to ruin a new cloak to tell him that? But he took his cloak and he tore it up. What's the other guy thinking? "What are you doing to the new cloak?" "Well, just hang on. You'll see in a minute there."

How long did it take him to tear this thing up into 12 pieces? Were they equal-sized pieces? He says, "This is what the Lord God of Israel says: 'See, I am going to tear the kingdom out of Solomon's hand and give you ten tribes. But for the sake of my servant David and the city of Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, he will have one tribe.'"

"'I will do this because they have forsaken me and worshipped Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, Chemosh the god of the Moabites, and Molech the god of the Ammonites, and have not walked in my ways nor done what is right in my eyes, nor kept my statutes and laws as David, Solomon's father, did.'"

So the prophecy is, "I'm going to take ten of the tribes away from Solomon and give them to you. But I'm going to allow his son to keep one of the tribes and the city of Jerusalem. He's going to have one tribe, and I'm going to do this because they've worshipped these other gods. And I'm also going to do it because they have not walked in my ways, they have not done what is right in my eyes, and they've not kept my statutes and laws."

God told David, "If your descendants will keep my statutes and my laws, then I'm just going to bless their socks off forever." And they couldn't even do it for one stinking generation. Not even one generation. And then when Solomon took over, God gave Solomon the same promise. "If you and your descendants keep my statutes and my laws, my decrees, follow my ways, man, you're going to never want for anything. You're going to have everything you could ever want."

And he couldn't even do it for the rest of his life, let alone his sons and children. And here God's telling this other guy, "I'm going to give you all this because Solomon over there is off worshipping other gods." Here he's sent a prophet here to speak to some man off the street. Yeah, he was an official in the kingdom, but he was a subordinate of Solomon.

He wasn't the second in command or the third in command. He was an impressive guy. It says he was a hard worker. Solomon was impressed with him, put him in charge of a few things. So he was management, if you will, in Solomon's kingdom there. But God picked this guy out to be king over some part of the nation, ten tribes' worth.

"But I will not take the whole kingdom out of Solomon's hand. I have made him ruler all the days of his life for the sake of David my servant, whom I chose and who observed my commands and statutes." He, his father, kept my commands and my statutes. That's why Solomon got this job to begin with, because of his father, and because of his father, I'm not going to take the whole kingdom away from him.

"I will take the kingdom from his son's hands and give you ten tribes. I will give one tribe to his son so that David my servant may always have a lamp before me in Jerusalem, the city where I chose to put my name. However, as for you, I will take you, and you will rule over all that your heart desires, and you will be king over Israel."

"If you do whatever I command you and walk in my ways and do what is right in my eyes by keeping my statutes and commands as David my servant did, I will be with you. I will build you a dynasty as enduring as the one I built for David, and will give Israel to you. I will humble David's descendants because of this, but not forever."

This guy got the same promise David did and the same promise Solomon did. But not to worry, he can't keep it either. But he got the same promise that they got. "If you follow me, I'm going to make you into a dynasty. I'm going to leave the one kingdom there for David's son in respect for David. We're going to leave him the one tribe there so he'll have a kingdom there, but it'll be small, but it'll include Jerusalem. But then I'm going to give you all the rest, if you follow me."

He didn't follow Him. It's too bad. He could have. God clearly told him there it's going to happen after Solomon passes away. He said back in verse 34, "I have made him the ruler all the days of his life." Verse 35, "I will take the kingdom from his son's hands." Well, hello, his son doesn't have it yet, okay? Solomon has the kingdom all the days of his life.

This is a prophet talking about what he's going to do in the future, what God's going to do in the future, He's going to take the kingdom from Solomon's son in the future. But if you look back in verse 26, it says Jeroboam son of Nebat rebelled against the king. See, we're reading an account of the story of how this led up to this revolt.

Why did he rebel against the king? This prophet came up to him and told him what God was going to do, and then apparently he decided not to wait for God to do it. He just went out and had his own little revolt to bring it about. In 26, it says he rebelled against the king, and then verse 27 says, "Here's the account of how he rebelled against the king."

What he should have done, you remember it was prophesied to David that he would be the king, meanwhile Saul was chasing him all over the land for 10 or 12 or more years, and David wouldn't lay a finger on Saul until God took care of it. And God made David the king. And that's what Jeroboam should have done.

He should have taken a lesson from David and said, "This was prophesied to me that God's going to do this after Solomon passes away. God's going to give me ten of the 12 tribes. I will wait for that to happen." But instead, he heard this prophecy, he decided he's going to make it happen sooner rather than later, and he started up some kind of a revolt or something.

And what happened? Well, verse 40, "Solomon tried to kill Jeroboam, but Jeroboam fled to Egypt to Shishak the king and stayed there until Solomon's death." Because he tried to bring it about himself, Solomon tried to kill him. He didn't succeed, and the guy Jeroboam ran away to Egypt and stayed there until Solomon died.

If he hadn't tried to rebel against the king, I'm not sure the king would have ever known about this happening. It says here that they went in the desert, the prophet Ahijah from Shiloh and Jeroboam going into the desert, and it says in verse 29, "The two of them were alone." They were out in the country. That means they were a long way from anyone else.

In other words, nobody knew about this incident, and he could have kept this to himself. He could have treasured it in his heart. He could have waited to see what the Lord did. When the angel spoke to Mary, it said she treasured these things in her heart. He could have waited on God to see what God brought about, but instead he seemed to take matters into his own hand, and maybe that's why Jeroboam also was not a successful king.

He went out and tried to make things happen and wound up getting Solomon to try to kill him, and he wound up running away. It would have been better if he just kept it to himself, treasured it in his heart, pondered it, reflected on it, and thought, "Well, we'll see what God does here. God said He's going to do that, when it happens, it happens."

Well, that was the account of the revolt. Solomon got wind of it, Solomon tried to kill him, thought, "I'll get rid of him." How foolish it is. Solomon goes from a guy who's serving God to a guy who's trying to thwart God's plan. Here's a guy that's going to be the next king? I'll kill him. I'll see if I can stop God's plan. Does Solomon really think he can stop God's plan by killing the guy who's going to be king? How foolish that is.

Is that the wisest guy in the world who thinks he can now outwit God by having 700 wives and 300 concubines and thinks they won't lead him astray? And now he thinks he can actually kill a guy who's been anointed by God to be the next king. Well, verse 41, and we'll close here at the end of the chapter. "As for the other events of Solomon's reign, all he did and the wisdom he displayed, are they not written in the book of the annals of Solomon?"

Solomon reigned in Jerusalem over all Israel 40 years. Then he rested with his fathers and was buried in the city of David his father, and Rehoboam his son succeeded him as king.

Guest (Male): Solomon faltered at the end of his life and it resulted in great consequences. What will happen to the nation of Israel? We'll find out together as we continue to study 1 Kings here on Hope From the Word. You can hear this message or more Hope From the Word with Pastor Bill Luebkemann by going to ccmarlton.org.

Pastor Bill's messages can also be found by downloading the Hope FM app on your smartphone or tablet. Or if you prefer to listen via podcast, you can find Hope From the Word wherever you find your podcasts. We'd love to have you join us at Calvary Chapel of Marlton either in person or online. Our Sunday service begins at 10:00 AM, and there's a Wednesday evening service at 7:00.

To catch us online, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel at Calvary Chapel of Marlton or just go to our website for the link: ccmarlton.org. And if you would, take a moment to write to Pastor Bill. It would be such a blessing to us. We're thankful each and every time we hear what God is doing in our listeners' lives, and we want to pray for you too. Either email us through the website at ccmarlton.org or call 856-983-1662. We'll continue our study of 1 Kings next time on Hope From the Word with Pastor Bill Luebkemann, a presentation of Calvary Chapel of Marlton.