4 As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart was not fully devoted to the LORD his God, as the heart of David his father had been. 5 He followed Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, and Molek the detestable god of the Ammonites. 6 So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the LORD; he did not follow the LORD completely, as David his father had done.
7 On a hill east of Jerusalem, Solomon built a high place for Chemosh the detestable god of Moab, and for Molek the detestable god of the Ammonites. 8 He did the same for all his foreign wives, who burned incense and offered sacrifices to their gods. (NIV)
It didn’t happen overnight; Solomon didn’t go to bed one night faithful to the Lord and wake up the next morning an apostate pagan. His sin crept over him through little compromises, little by little. Perhaps a wife who worshiped the Lord wanted her own private shrine, a high place. It wasn’t something the Lord liked, but until the Temple was finished, she needed to worship someplace. Okay. But then another wife wanted a shrine for her god, Molek. “Why does she get one and I don’t?” As soon as that question was even asked, there was no turning back. All right, you can all get your shrines. Solomon could have insisted that each of them become Jewesses, but perhaps some of them were permitted to retain their childhood beliefs because it was in their treaty/marriage contracts. So up went the Asherah poles. Up went the altars to Molek of the Ammonites and to Chemosh of the Moabites and the Baals, the Egyptian gods and all of the others.
And it went even further. Why do you go to church with your Hebrew wife but you don’t go sacrifice to Molek with me? All the infighting and backbiting and bitterness of the harem would come into play, and can you imagine letters from Solomon’s thousand fathers-in-law? “If you honor our treaty, O King, then why do you dishonor my daughter your wife by failing to give worship to Milcom her god? At least you should go through the motions, so that honor is satisfied, wise king.”
And if that wasn’t enough, Solomon went to the pagan shrines with his pagan wives, and watched the sincerity of their pagan prayers, and perhaps saw some of the devil’s own miracles. What nonsense he might have heard that finally addled even the good godly wisdom in his mind: Her sacrifice to Baal made it rain last month! And after our worship under the Asherah pole, that one became pregnant! Maybe there is a wider view I should be taking of religion. Maybe there is nothing special about the worship of the God of Abraham. Maybe I could be more inclusive for my fifty-score significant others.
In time, his wives turned his heart “after other gods.”
“After other gods” is such a sad phrase, like a door leading out of a familiar house into an unfamiliar, barren wasteland, “after other gods.” Don’t go out there, Solomon! But he’s already gone.
Students of the Bible notice something profound in Ecclesiastes—does Solomon confess his sin and turn back to the Lord? It would seem so. But even so, he is not and never shall be the ideal model of a husband.
But there is something else that must be said about Solomon. The first ten chapters of 1 Kings paint Solomon as a successful, wise, wealthy and ingenious king and administrator. But these things did not bring him into sin. Success and wealth are not sinful in themselves. True, the love of money (not money itself) is the root of all kinds of evil (1 Timothy 6:10). But Solomon’s sin began with polygamy, and it soured and deteriorated into syncretism and idolatry. These are first commandment sins.
And we’re guilty of them, too. We sin according to our station, according to our means. Few of us could ever afford to have more than one spouse, let alone ever convince a present spouse to let somebody else into the marriage. So it would be hard for most of us to fall into the sin of bigamy or polygamy. But we have other sins. We all have temptations that are common to our age, to our culture, to our circumstances. Those sins aren’t “natural” except that they’re part of our sinful human nature, which was never God’s plan.
We need to take all of our sins—the sins of our private idolatries, those “guy in the mirror” sins where my opinion counts more than God’s word—and give them up. Jesus brought us into the family of God with his blood, to rescue us, and we run to Jesus, we cling to Jesus, we adore Jesus. We fall at the foot of the cross and let it be Jesus, Jesus and only Jesus.
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. His wife, Kathryn, attended Chapel from 1987-1990 while studying Secondary Education (Theater and Math) at UW-Madison. Kathryn’s father, John Meyer, was also the first man to serve as a Vicar at Chapel.
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