1 Samuel 18

Chapter 18. Solomon’s Fall and Its LessonsThe Lord became angry with Solomon because his heart had turned away from the Lord, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice. Although he had forbidden Solomon to follow other gods, Solomon did not keep the Lord’s command (1 Kings 11:9-10)Like some splendid ruin reminding us of the stately temple that once stood there, like some glorious sunrise ending in lurid tempests, like some noble ship sailing away amid waving pennants and cheering multitudes and then disappearing in mid-ocean and leaving no trace behind, so Solomon’s career became darkened with the deepest shadows as it neared its close, and ended at last in awful mystery. No man, perhaps, would dare to say that Solomon was lost; but no man may affirm that Solomon was saved. Like a ship that founders in mid-ocean, he sank out of sight in the impenetrable darkness of apostasy and divine judgment. All through the ages God has been looking for someone to meet His expectation and satisfy His ideal of a true man, but the race has always failed him. Adam stepped upon the scene encompassed with every proof of God’s goodness, love and care, but e’er the sun had fairly risen the light went out in the dark eclipse of sin and ruin for the race. Abraham was chosen to be the peculiar type of faith, but Abraham failed in the place where he should have been strongest and left the old human blot upon his imperfect record. Moses led forth a new election of redeemed and chosen people from bondage to freedom, and was honored to stand in the innermost presence of Jehovah face to face; but Moses failed in the very quality for which he was most remarkable and broke his own law, and so failed to win his inheritance in the Land of Promise. David, the man after God’s own heart, the very type of Jesus Christ, the anointed King, stooped to the depths of a double crime and covered the closing years of his reign with clouds of domestic and national calamity. And now Solomon, the glorious, the man who seemed above all other men to have reached the climax of human character and success—good and wise, successful and prosperous, enjoying the smile of heaven and the honor and admiration of the whole world—Solomon at last became the most stupendous failure of the human race. He closed his career in a mystery of sin, sorrow and utter failure, and left the heritage of strife, misfortune and judgment to the nation he had governed. In the lapse of centuries nine-tenths of that nation were exterminated, and the remaining tribes were driven from their land and left in sad humiliating captivity, the temple that he had reared became a heap of smoldering ashes and the city that he had glorified a derision and was condemned in the hands of his heathen foes. He was allowed to be the true type of the Son of man, earth’s true King. Then the picture was shivered into fragments and thrown away that we might know that it was only a transient picture, and that the best of men were only men, and the only ideal that can ever satisfy God or meet the needs of man is the divine Man, the blessed One, of whom all these were but broken images and imperfect types. What are some of the lessons that this sad story is fitted to teach? Failure of Wisdom It teaches the insufficiency of human wisdom and culture to save the race. Solomon was the wisest man, and one of the best of men; but Solomon failed, and the wisest and best will fail. The world is purchasing culture today but the golden age of art and literature has usually been an age of moral corruption and shameless sin. The worst elements in the heathen nations today are those who have had a touch of our civilization without the power of divine grace. The more you educate men, the more power you give them for mischief. It is not culture the world needs, but Christ. It is not even character the world needs, not even moral training, good examples, rigid discipline, self-improvement and higher standards of our virtue. All these will fail. There never was a higher standard than that of God’s ancient law. There never was a stricter discipline than that of the Old Testament and God’s rigid dealings with his chosen people. But they all failed. The only hope for the race is a new and heaven-born life; nay, more, the indwelling of the divine Person in the human nature, the union of Christ with our fallen life and the reliving His life in us by the power of the Holy Spirit. Looking out upon the wreck of his race with a broken heart, Ezekiel saw the picture of the past, and his one hope for the future was this: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26). But even that was not enough, for he adds: “And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws” (Ezekiel 36:27). If ever wisdom and personal worth could save mankind, the experiment was truly tried in Solomon, and the lesson ended in their desperate failure. The Curse of Pride One of the deepest sources of Solomon’s failure was the spirit of pride and the love of display which were strongly marked in his life and formed the predominant tendency of his nature. His life was one constant pageant. His ambition was to surround his throne with unparalleled magnificence. His every movement was a triumphal procession. Robed in garments of white, superbly decorated and magnificently equipped with a stud of thousands of horses, splendid chariots and horsemen, and in all the display of oriental magnificence, he went from place to place in a blaze of glory. He lived in an atmosphere of luxury. Every vessel in his household was of purest gold. He was surrounded with the dazzling beauty of a thousand queens, and innumerable courtiers waited upon him and them and brought the homage of all nations to his feet. Alas, we see the same spirit today in the love of luxury and social preeminence which is abroad among our people. The competitions of society for ascendancy and lavish display in entertainment, equipage and palatial residences are even vying with the magnificence and extravagance of Europe and striving to outshine them. It is a sad and shameful picture. It brought to Solomon only vanity and vexation of spirit; and its end in our age will be financial distress, social corruption, national wickedness, spiritual ruin, a shadow as deep and dark as that in which Solomon passed from the resplendent stage of his fatal career. Failure of Wealth The love and pursuit of wealth was another of Solomon’s snares. He was the richest man of his age. His commercial enterprises were stupendous and successful. His income from them brought him millions every year. If money could make a life happy and successful, he had all that it could claim. Alas, he was one of the many whom God has entrusted with great riches to show how little He values them. The other day a multimillionaire of London and Cape Town leaped into the sea in despair to escape the toils and torments of a hundred millions. Today millions of souls are lost through the snares and temptations that come to them through boundless wealth. Money will be a blessing if we hold it as a trust; but it will sink us in the depths of ruin if we ever allow ourselves to own it or prize it. If we give it to Him and only for Him, He may trust us with it in boundless measure; but once it gets its heartless grip upon our souls, it will drag us down to the grave as dark as Solomon’s. How solemn is the warning of the faithful apostle, “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs” (1 Timothy 6:10). That is the certain result of coveting after money, hankering for it, and setting the heart upon it even moderately. But there is another and more terrible sentence in that paragraph describing another class of men, “People who want to get rich” (1 Timothy 6:9). These are not the people that hanker after gold, but they are the people that determine at any cost to be rich. For them there is a shorter career and a quicker descent. They “fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction” (1 Timothy 6:9). Beloved, if God has saved you from this snare, be careful how you ever tamper with it again. Selfishness Selfishness was one of the banes of Solomon’s life. He allowed himself to become the end of not only his own existence, but of his people’s. Everything was made tributary to his power, greatness and success. Seventy thousand citizens were drafted into labor gangs which toiled in the quarries and lumber camps to supply the material for his extensive buildings and extravagant undertakings. Thousands of servants waited upon him, and whole trains of sheep and cattle and all sorts of animals were brought into his palace to administer every luxury to his table. For a while the people bore the cost of this splendid entertainment, but, after a while, they groaned under the yoke of enormous taxation, and eventually they rose against the oppression and spurned the hand that inaugurated it. Rehoboam rightly described the persecution under Solomon’s reign when he said, “My father laid on you a heavy yoke; I will make it even heavier. My father scourged you with whips; I will scourge you with scorpions” (1 Kings 12:11). A selfish life will always be an unhappy and unsuccessful life. While you are the center of your life plan and the end to which all things are made to converge, you will find yourself openly defied and disappointed. It is the law of heaven that he that saves his life shall lose it, and he that loses his life, for the sake of Christ and others, will find it (Matthew 10:39). Selfishness is the essence of Satan; love is the center of God’s life and God’s government, and love is the opposite of self. It, therefore, must be true that the man who lives for self is the enemy of God, and all the forces of God’s government are against him. If you love your friends because they minister to your pleasure, if you pursue your love in order that you may reap the joy, if you hold your money for your own will and gratification, if you even do your Christian work for your own honor and reputation, you shall find your life will turn against you, will get out of adjustment and end in disaster. You are putting the pyramid on the wrong end and it cannot stand. We are all naturally wound around ourselves like a watch spring around its center. We need to be unwound and then fastened around God. We are naturally introverted and we need to be turned upside down and inside out, and de-centered and re-centered. Alas for Solomon! He lived for himself and he lived to find that all was lost. Fleshly Lust Alas, there was a deeper depth of sin and folly. Solomon is an example of the curse of sensuality and earthly indulgence. It was partly through his pride and love of display that he surrounded himself with the rank and beauty of the world and maintained a harem of a thousand fair women from all the courts of the surrounding nations. But it was also an exhibition of the grossest self-indulgence, and the coarse unbridled passion which has so often degraded the thrones and palaces of earth into beastly menageries, and brought upon mankind the curse of Sodom and Gomorrah. Alas, it is, perhaps, the strongest and most perilous social current in our own time; and, like a fetid torrent from the sewers of the pit, it is sweeping through the social life of our own land and our own time, with a breath of license and a depth of wickedness which but too surely remind us that that fearful sign of the end. “It was the same in the days of Lot” (Luke 17:28), is at last upon us. You may gild this sin with all the beauty of Solomon’s court, you may keep it out of the low level of the street and the slums, you may hide it under the subterfuges of your deceitful social system, but it will ever prove, as it ever has, the most subtle, the most swift, the most certain highway to the lowest hell. Oh, let the young, the reckless, the tempted, ponder the awful words which this man has left us out of the bitterness of his own experience: “For her house leads down to death and her paths to the spirits of the dead. None who go to her return or attain the paths of life” (Proverbs 2:18-19). “But little do they know that the dead are there, that her guests are in the depths of the grave” (Proverbs 9:18). The World Disobedience to God’s law respecting marriage with the heathen and separation from the world had much to do with Solomon’s fall. God had strictly forbidden ancient Israel to mingle with the surrounding nations in social life, and especially marriage; and He has forbidden us to be “yoked together with unbelievers” (2 Corinthians 6:14). Any man or woman who dares to disobey this divine command must take the consequences—an unhappy life and perhaps a lost eternity. A spirit of easy compromise and unholy yielding to the influence of others, especially of his heathen wives, was another cause of Solomon’s sin. It was bad enough to marry them and bring them into the heart of a holy nation. It was much worse to allow them to practice the heathen rites of their idolatrous religions with his consent. It was intolerable when he went so far as to erect costly temples for them for their abominable rites on the very brow of Olivet and overlooking the temple itself, for we are expressly told that he built a high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, in the hill that is before Jerusalem, and the other of Moloch, the abomination of the children of Ammon. Right there in full view of the holy city were these monuments of cruel superstition which God had denounced in the most terrible terms; and in the fiery arms of the burning idol, the little children were offered in living sacrifice while their cries were drowned by the rude song of heathen music before the holy nation who had been taught for centuries to beware of these hideous rites. No wonder they called that hill the Mount of Offence. But this was not the worst. It was but one step more for him to join in these infamous idolatries and to yield to the pleadings of the wives he loved and throw himself without reserve into their abominable excesses. Alas, it has been well said: Vice is a monster of such horrid mien That to be hated needs but to be seen; But seen too often familiar grows its face, And first we fear, then pity, then embrace. SinAll this was heightened and aggravated by the fact that Solomon sank into these depths of sin after he had known the Lord, and, as the sacred record expresses it, after the Lord had appeared unto him twice. How solemnly it reminds us of the peril of backsliding after we have received the deeper life of Christ, and the second blessing of the Holy Spirit. It was very sad when Israel went back after they were saved from Egypt, but it was more sad and terrible when they apostatized after they had won the land of Canaan. “See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God” (Hebrews 3:12). Let us fear lest we too should become, like Solomon, beacons, useful only in the awful warning which our lives will hold forth to others. Let us shun the dangers which led him into sin and folly. Let us especially make sure to claim that which he missed, the utter surrender of our life from the world and self and sin and the indwelling life of God who is, through the Holy Spirit, within us. And, finally, let us “Watch out! Be on guard against all kinds of greed” (Luke 12:15). Never shall I forget a picture which comes back to me from early ministry: that of a beautiful young couple with whom my life was thrown for some months in somewhat intimate acquaintance at the time when God first blessed me with the Holy Spirit. The beautiful wife was much laid upon my heart in prayer and personal effort for her salvation, but she met all my approaches with the hard and heartless impulse of a worldling. Often she used to say to me, “I love the world. I revel in it. I delight in the dance, in the horse race, in the theater. I have no sympathy with your narrow notions and puritanical ideas. I just idolize the world.” One day I said to her: “My dear sister, some day you will hate the world as much as you love it now.” She laughed me to scorn, but I prayed on. In a few weeks I noticed her spirit had changed. She seemed to grow depressed, bitter and cynical. One day when we were talking, she said to me, “Oh, I just hate the world,” and her lips were set with the bitterness of a cynic. I reminded her of how she loved it once, and she broke out with bitter invectives and told me how everything had failed her, deceived her and how she wished she could fly from it. I tried to tell her of a better world and of a joy that would fill her heart, but her heart had been poisoned by the bane of Solomon, and she left me with the bitterness of the wormwood and gall. Next morning I was startled by an early call, and as I went to my door a messenger with pale face asked me to come down quickly. I hastened to obey and to my horror when I reached the parlor, under the white sheet lay the lifeless body of that wretched society woman. She had just been dragged from the river into which she had plunged in the darkness of night—a soul sickened of earth but unfit for heaven. As I stood beside that coffin and tried to perform the service of that funeral, it seemed to me that I was looking at a lost eternity, and I heard, like a whisper, the solemn message: “Dear children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21).