The Man Who Had Everything
King Solomon was the richest, wisest, most successful person of his time. The first half of the book 1 Kings described him as a man who got life handed to him on a silver platter. The son of King David and Queen Bathsheba, young Solomon grew up in the royal palace. Early on, he astounded others with his talent for songwriting and natural history. He composed 1,005 songs and spun off 3,000 proverbs.
Solomon became king of Israel and received from God the special gift of wisdom. He was called the wisest man in the world, and kings and queens traveled hundreds of miles to meet him. They went away dazzled by the genius of Israel’s king and by the prosperity of his nation.
Of all Solomon’s accomplishments, one stands out above the others. He built the temple of God, the finest building in the world of that day. Almost 200,000 men labored for seven years to complete it.
Despite the successes of Solomon’s reign, however, later in his life the king had a dramatic downturn. His fall eventually brought the kingdom crashing down around him, and the second half of 1 Kings described the grim process of dismemberment.
How did it happen? How could the liveliest, wealthiest, most contented nation of its day slide so disastrously in one generation?
As 1 Kings tells it, Solomon seemed unable to control his excesses. Reared in a palace, he loved luxury. When Israel launched its first maritime expeditions, he used them to gather such exotica as gold, ivory, apes, peacocks, and silver. He plated the floor of the temple with gold, wastefully glided over fine cedar and precious ivory, and fashioned militarily useless shields out of gold. First Kings described the seven-year construction of the temple in elaborate detail. But then it pointedly noted that the construction of Solomon’s palace – twice the temple’s size – took 13 years (1 Kings 7:1).
Solomon showed similar extravagance in his love life. First, he married the daughter of the Egyptian pharaoh (perhaps indicating he was relying on military alliances, not God, for the defense of his country). Then disobeying God’s specific orders, he married the princesses of Moab, Ammon, Edom, Sidon, and other nations. Seven hundred wives in all, and 300 concubines! The entire complexion of the court changed. It became un-Jewish, foreign. To please his wives, Solomon took a final, terrible step: he built altars to all their gods. The one who had built the Israelites’ greatest monument to God had fallen to worshiping idols.
To pay for the building projects, Solomon instituted Israel’s first national taxation system. He drafted workers for employment and kept them as virtual slaves. When bills mounted, he went so far as to cede certain northern towns in the promised land to another king (1Kings 9:10-14). Resentment opened up between Israel’s North and South.
But the gulf separating Israel from God was even more dangerous. Previously, the people of Israel had looked to God as their leader. Now, however, the focus shifted from God in heaven to the king in Jerusalem. Solomon had even made himself the unofficial religious leader of the country, and when he slid badly, the nation soon followed.
Solomon started out with every advantage of wealth, power, and wisdom. But 1 Kings gave this tragic conclusion: “So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the Lord; he did not follow the Lord completely, as David his father had done (1Kings 11:6).
Solomon seemed obsessed with a desire to outdo anyone who had ever lived. Along the way, he failed to make God the center of his life. He achieved lasting fame in history, but as a negative example. Jesus Christ himself rendered the final verdict on Solomon and his striving for glory when he pointed to a lily growing wild in the field. “Not even Solomon in all his splendor,” he said, "was dressed like one of these" (Matthew 6:29).
(The Devotional Study Bible)
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