We're missing it...

"Then Solomon formed a marriage alliance with Pharaoh king of Egypt, and took Pharaoh’s daughter and brought her to the city of David until he had finished building his own house and the house of the Lord and the wall around Jerusalem."

So I am really trying to carefully read and understand this passage here, and i'm looking at the notes by others in the community... and nobody seems to be hitting on the "inconsistencies" here. I don't mean that I don't believe it or doubt it's accuracy, there's just some phrases of "disequilibrium" here that may help us better understand this text if we can work them out (which I'm not sure I have at this point).

Solomon just became king after his father David died. And one of the first things he does is break one of God's commands for the people of Israel - not to go back to Egypt, to not make any treaties with other nations, and certainly not to intermarry with their women. (Deut. 7) And he blows that one off probably right after David was out of the picture! If there's anyone in the nation that should model following God's commands... shouldn't it be the king - the one leading in front of everybody???

The other thing is in verse 3 - yeah it says he loved God and followed in David's right path... EXCEPT for that whole pagan worship thing. Kinda sounds like a big deal to me, and again as the leader of the nation, why is he FOLLOWING the people in their pagan practices instead of LEADING them to worshiping the one true God in unpolluted ways???

In the next few verses he asks God for wisdom - and the text goes out of its way to show that that was a noble act. And we commend him for that. Anytime we come to God and declare our dependence and reliance on him it pleases him greatly.

So God gives him this wisdom... but what does he do with it? In my reading of this man's life, it really doesn't seem to be applied to anywhere in his PERSONAL life! He may have used that great wisdom PROFESSIONALLY to build the temple and all, but if he truly was a man of wisdom you would think after... i don't know... a couple hundred wives that he'd recognize that might not be the wisest thing to do. Instead, he shacks up with about 1000 women!!! How is that wise?!?!?!

All of us are mixtures of good decisions that bring us closer to God, and poor decisions that bring us further apart. I get that. But I feel sometimes we're missing it when we sell this guy to be some great model leader because one day he did ONE selfless act, while screwing everything else up in his personal life.

Thoughts?

Created about 1 year ago