Divine Judgment: Israel Split! 1 Kings 11:9-13
Up to this point in 1 Kings we have seen th4e establishment of Solomon on the throne, the rise and development of Solomon, his wisdom, his skill, his building programs, and the remarkable way in which God blessed Solomon with the wisdom that He gave him and He blessed him above and beyond in terms of his prosperity, his kingdom and his conquest of the neighbouring nations as he is expanding the control of the territory, the land that God had promised Abraham. That is foundational to understanding what is unfolding in 1 & 2 Kings which depict what happens to Israel as a result of their disobedience to God in light of the Mosaic covenant. In 1 Kings 1-10 God promises Solomon that if Solomon continues to be faithful to Him, continues to walk in the ways of his father David, then God will bless him and that Solomon's descent will not depart from the throne of David. As we have seen in 1 Kings 11 Solomon failed, and as that was stated as a conditional promise to Solomon then when Solomon failed and led the nation into idolatry God was then going to discipline him. So now from 11:9 we see the beginning of the episode related to that discipline.
The first eight verses describe Solomon's sin, that he had many wives. This is a sin related to two things: a) as a broad category to Solomon's failure to trust God for security in the land. What he was doing in marrying all of these foreign wives is establishing various alliances with foreign powers in order to establish Israel and to protect them from these enemies. He failed to trust God; and b) he failed to obey Him. He failed the prosperity test and the people test because he lets the prosperity that he has realised, that God has given to him, cause him to get his attention off of God and on to the material wealth, the possessions, the building projects. All of these things distract him from that single-minded devotion to God. So He violates the Mosaic Law in terms of his wives and then they influence him into the direction of idolatry and so he brings in these foreign Gods. There is a death penalty in the Mosaic Law for anyone who worships Moloch, and so Solomon, just like his father David, is guilty of a capital crime and should be executed according to the Mosaic Law. But God in His grace does not call for that. God allowed David to live and allowed Solomon to live because of His grace.
We have as our backdrop the Abrahamic covenant where God promised to Israel land, seed and blessing. The land promise is foundational to understand the whole movement in the book of Kings. As we get to the end of Kings we will see that both the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom have been removed from the land in divine discipline, according to the fives stages of divine discipline which God outlined in Leviticus 26. What we see going on from the beginning of Solomon's failure here in 1 Kings chapter eleven is the outworking of those five stages of discipline in the history of Israel, culminating in their removal from the land. So that land promise to Abraham is foundational for understanding this because when God gave the conditional Mosaic Law to Israel He makes the issue their obedience. If they are obedient they will stay in the land God promised Abraham and they will be blessed by God and experience all of God's blessings while they are in the land. But if they continue to be disobedient and apostate and if they reject God in terms of idols then God is going to discipline them and ultimately take them out of the land. It is important to understand that the Mosaic Law is a contract between God and Israel. This is a unique covenant because it is grounded in this specific piece of real estate. So all of the punishment that God instigates in each of the cycles or stages of discipline relate to some sort of problem in the land—economic, health, disease, military defeat, and eventually military conquest and removal from the land. So the land figures as the thread that runs through all of these stages of discipline.
No other nation in history can go into the 5th cycle of discipline because no other nation in history is promised the piece of real estate that Israel is on. That is the unique feature. It is only Israel that has a God-given right to a certain piece of real estate. That is why there is this connection in terms of the blessing and the cursing in Leviticus chapter twenty-six. They ultimately tie to whether Israel is obedient, and only as an obedient people can they stay in the land and enjoy its blessings. If they are disobedient and idolatrous then God is going to remove them in discipline. But God will eventually bring them back as a redeemed people.
So Solomon fails the people test, he allows these foreign wives to influence him, and the New Testament counterpart for this which we have to remember is stated in 1 Corinthians 15:33 NASB "Do not be deceived: 'Bad company corrupts good morals.'" It doesn't matter who we are or how comfortable we are in what we believe, if we allow ourselves to become closely associated and affiliated with people whose ideas and thoughts and opinions influence us then we need to distance ourselves from those people. That doesn't mean we can't have a relationship at some distance with them. We always have to guard ourselves from the people around us who influence us.
Solomon violated the promise God had made to him in reference to the covenant with his father David—1 Kings 3:14; 9:4-10. Both times God promised Solomon that if he was obedient to God and followed in the footsteps of his father David then God would bless him. But Solomon failed to do this and that is what is expressed in 1 Kings 11:4 NASB "For when Solomon was old, his wives turned his heart away after other gods; and his heart was not wholly devoted to the LORD his God, as the heart of David his father {had been.}"
Jeremiah confronts Israel in chapter 17 and focuses on the same issue that Solomon failed in. Beginning in verse one, Jeremiah outlines the sin of Judah. Judah is Solomon's tribe and they are committing the same sin that Solomon was committing. Jeremiah 17:1 NASB "The sin of Judah is written down with an iron stylus [it is deeply engraved]; With a diamond point it is engraved [fixed negative volition] upon the tablet of their heart And on the horns of their altars [in their thinking and in their practice], [2] As they remember their children, So they {remember} their altars and their Asherim By green trees on the high hills [idolatry]. [3] O mountain of Mine in the countryside, I will give over your wealth and all your treasures for booty, Your high places for sin throughout your borders." Israel is referred to as a mountain. The mountain is Mount Zion. Jeremiah is prophesying conquest and defeat. [4] "And you will, even of yourself, let go of your inheritance That I gave you; And I will make you serve your enemies In the land which you do not know; For you have kindled a fire in My anger Which will burn forever." Obviously this is metaphorical. God is not permanently disciplining Israel, there is the promise that He will bring them back; it is a metaphor for the intensity of His righteous judgment. Then he states the indictment. [5] "Thus says the LORD, 'Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind And makes flesh his strength, And whose heart turns away from the LORD.'" When we think that we get security from human beings, from human effort, from human methodology, then we are in effect being idolatrous. Surety in life, stability in life, can only come from a relationship with God and the application of the Word of God in our life. There is no security anywhere else. This doesn't mean that we don't plan; it means that we don't trust in them as the ultimate source of our security.
Decisions our leaders are making can impact us and our descendants for dozens of generations. And that is exactly what happens with Solomon. Solomon is making decisions as the national leader and yet they are going to affect every Jew in the street in all of the tribes and is going to impact the history of Israel up to the very present time. He set them on a course of idolatry and as a result of that he was setting them on a course of divine discipline. The decisions of the leadership of a nation can be as significant in the future of the nation as the decisions of the people. Solomon's sin is that he is trusting in alliances in violation of the direct command of God, relying upon human factors to give military security to Israel and to continue their prosperity. So he is rejecting the God who is the real source of the blessing and is turning to these other gods. This is a direct violation of the first commandment in the Mosaic Law. This is why it is defined as evil: 1 Kings 11:6 NASB "Solomon did what was evil in the sight of the LORD …" Again and again we are going to see that phrase in 1 & 2 Kings and it always identifies idolatry because this is the foundational failure in relation to the ten commandments. Idolatry is an act of treason and disloyalty to the God who a) delivered them from slavery, and b) who is the head of state. God demands exclusive obedience and exclusive worship. God isn't going to share Himself with any other god.
What Solomon is doing is violating that principle of divine dependence. He is doing exactly what Jeremiah states in 17:5 NASB "Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind And makes flesh his strength, And whose heart turns away from the LORD." This is what Solomon had done. The result of that is described in Jeremiah 17:6 NASB "For he will be like a bush in the desert And will not see when prosperity comes, But will live in stony wastes in the wilderness, A land of salt without inhabitant." In other words, you dry up on the inside. There is no happiness, no stability, no peace. There is domination by mental attitude sins and life becomes a miserable experience, ultimately because there is no source of stability. This is the leanness of soul the psalmist speaks of that comes to people who reject God.
The contrast is given in Jeremiah 17:7 NASB "Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD And whose trust is the LORD.
Solomon is choosing a path where he is looking to security from other people and from other nations. Today it goes by the word "internationalism." In Genesis chapter eleven it went by the name of the tower of Babel. It is man's attempt to bring peace and stability into his experience by defying God and uniting against Him. The tower of Babel was at its root a religious activity. They were raising the tower in opposition to God, they were staying there united on the plain of Shinar at Babylon for the purpose of defying God's command to Noah to scatter out throughout the earth. They stayed in one place, they built this tower as a way to reach God, the idea being that God got mad at them and tried to destroy them with the flood, so now they are going to build their own mountain so that when another flood comes they will be able to survive. This is the foolishness of the human heart that rejects God and denies who he actually is. So here was this first endeavour of the human race uniting against God to provide security and stability for himself and to deny the control of God. As a result God established the fifth divine institution at that point, which was national distinctions, by confusing the languages. There is never a time when God authorises a return to a one-world internationalism. Every attempt to unify the nations to solve all of our problems apart from God there is going to be something that God does in human history in order to stop it.
What is interesting about this particular passage is that Solomon builds these "worship centres" for all of these idols from all of these surrounding nations and God is going to raise up people in these surrounding nations that are going to create havoc for him in the last years of his reign.
1 Kings 11:9 NASB "Now the LORD was angry with Solomon because his heart was turned away from the LORD, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice,
1 Kings 11:11 NASB "So the LORD said to Solomon, 'Because you have done this, and you have not kept My covenant and My statutes, which I have commanded you, I will surely tear the kingdom from you, and will give it to your servant.
Solomon is in a unique position because he is David's son and David's heir. He has personal promises from God with regard to his future if he will be faithful to God. He is as the king of Israel the leader of God's covenant people, and thus he is responsible for the covenant faithfulness of the people. Because he goes astray he leads the people astray, and so this is why God is going to so harshly judge him. We see that Solomon's failure is both a personal failure and a national failure. As a representative of the nation his sin has national implications. The principle here is that our sins do not just affect us. Our sins have consequences and many times they are unforseen and unintended but they affect those who are around us. So God's judgment on Solomon is that He is going to rip the kingdom apart.
The result of this is that God begins to act in a profound way in human history. What is important to recognise here, starting in verse 14, is the raising up of these external enemies, Hadad the Edomite and Resin the king of Zobah. God allows them to come to power because of Solomon's sin. The ultimate causation in human history is always spirituality. In the church age it has to do with church age believers; in the age of Israel it had to do with the Israelites and how whether they were obedient or disobedient to the Mosaic covenant.