A preacher should always live by his own sermons. That's
easier said than done though. Solomon was the writer of Proverbs 5:1-5, "My son, attend unto my wisdom... for
the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb... but her end is bitter...
her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell." Solomon was
wise enough to warn others to stay away from "strange women" - wild
women, that is. But, evidently he later
figured that it was something that he could control in his own life. I Kings
11:1 says plainly that Solomon loved MANY of those strange women that he had
warned the rest of us about. Actually, he only had a 1000 of them. A thousand!?
God had warned (in Deuteronomy 17:16-17) that Jewish kings
should neither accumulate horses from Egypt, nor wives... from anywhere, but
especially foreign ones; idolatrous ones. Again, Solomon was guilty of all the
above. It is a heartbreaking story. His wives turned his heart away from God
and that cost him everything. His kingdom was divided into 2 unequal sections
between a man named Jeroboam and Solomon's foolish son, Rehoboam. One would
think that we would all learn from Solomon's mistakes, right? And yet, how
successful are you in resisting your "besetting
sin" (Hebrews 12:1). It's a sad reality. Alexander Pope's phrase "to err is
human" applies to all of us so precisely. Knowing WHAT to do and actually
DOING it ... well, we all know by experience that those are 2 very different
things. Thankfully, "to forgive is divine"
is also very accurate.
Now, the effect was not immediate. I Kings 11:4 says that
the king was old when he took up idolatry. It is likely that he had already
written the Song of Songs and the Proverbs before his fall into sin.
Ecclesiastes would likely have been written as a confession at the very end of
his life (Ecclesiastes 12:13).
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