1 Kings 10:28-11:43 - Close But No Dynasty

Well, welcome back to the Bible Babels Podcast.

I'm your host, Bryon Self.

This is Carlos.

It's great to be back with you. Hope you have had a good week. I cannot remember the past week.

I'm sure lots of... Oh, that's why. Couples Conference.

Our church had a great Couples Conference with Pastor Thomas and Kerry Shepherd from Indiana, and had a great time with them over the weekend. And then he preached Sunday morning and Sunday night. Some great messages, very helpful.

And yeah, I had a good time. What about you, Carlos?

No comment.

Carlos is our Children's Pastor at our church and does a phenomenal job, but he definitely had his hands full this past week. There were 50 kids at the Couples Conference. Thankfully, not all in the age group of Children's Pastors.

Some of them were nursery and preschool and stuff like that. But still, there were a lot of kids. So you get special crowns and rewards in heaven for what you went through this past weekend.

I'm excited to, well, I am excited to go into this next passage of scripture, but it's also really sad. And so in that respect, I'm not excited to go into this passage of scripture.

So last week, we looked at Solomon and kind of some of the intelligent decisions he made, also some of the kind of underhanded decisions he made, and just his extravagant riches. And we talked about the Shields of Gold.

He had, I forget if we mentioned or not, that he also had like peacocks and apes, monkeys, you know, all that kind of stuff. He had a full on zoo going, which was great for kings back in that day.

The more stuff you had, the more people kind of respected you. And so Solomon was richer than anyone else at the time. And so we looked at all that last week, but we're jumping in this week.

I believe it's chapter 10, verse number 28 through the end of chapter 11, if you want to follow along in your Bible. But Carlos, once you started this off, kind of what happens at the end of chapter 10 that we see with Solomon.

So if you know anything about Solomon, he started out great as a young king and just really gave me his life to God and honoring those things, what God had set before him and even for his father, David.

In the first part of this verse, it says, and Solomon had horses brought out of Egypt and linen yarn. The king's merchants received the linen yarn at price.

And a chariot came up and went out of Egypt for 600 shekels of silver and a horse for 150 so far. And so for all the kings of the Hittites and for the kings of Syria, did they bring them out of the means?

Solomon had wanted horses and he got them from Egypt. And at the end of this great description of Solomon's wealth and splendor, we kind of have a sound off on this dark note of Solomon's decision.

And this was a direct of obedience to Deuteronomy 17 verse 16, which says, But he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt to the end that he should multiply horses.

For as much as the Lord has said unto you, ye shall have henceforth returned no more that way. So this is directly talking about multiplying horses from Egypt. And Solomon, in his wisdom, knew that.

And he still did it. And I think Solomon, when he started making these bad decisions, it kind of just tumbled down. It kind of just took off and something he couldn't stop.

So and he probably thought he was the exception, you know, because he was so smart. But we know that no one is the exception to sin. So Solomon had done this direct obedience to the Lord.

And in the last part of that verse is, they exported him to all the kings and the Hittites and the kings of Syria. This may explain why Solomon broke such an obvious commandment.

Perhaps the importation of horses from Egypt began as trading as an agent on behalf of other kings. From this, perhaps Solomon could say, I'm importing horses from Egypt, but I'm not doing it myself.

So he probably thought he was getting like, you know, he had a loophole in this and he wasn't, he felt like he wasn't directly disobeying God's commandments.

Yeah. Yeah. Great thoughts.

And I forget at the, at the beginning part of that verse in Deuteronomy, does it mention anything about amassing wives as well?

No, this one is just talking about multiplying horses.

Yeah.

And making people go back to Egypt.

Yeah. It's another verse in, in Deuteronomy, specifically talking about in the future, when Israel would have a king, what he wasn't supposed to do. And it's also mentioned he's not supposed to amass wives.

And like you just read, he's not supposed to go back to Egypt for horses. I think it's kind of interesting that you have Solomon, when we first kind of read about the first of his wives, it's Pharaoh's daughter from Egypt.

So he was already kind of going down that, that path a little bit and he was already going to Egypt, made treaties by marrying Pharaoh's daughter and all of this. But then we can see this kind of continue then in a really bad way in chapter 11.

In verses one through eight, we can see that Solomon begins amassing wives from all of these nations that were around the Israelites.

And that a lot of them were from these other nations, because a lot of times political whatever that he was trying to do political treaties. But we can see in the passage that then these people, these wives are not giving up their gods or anything.

They're just bringing them along with them. And we can see Solomon beginning to worship the gods of the Ammonites, the gods of, I believe it's the Zidonians, the gods of the Moabites, Ammonites, all of that.

And this is something that God specifically said to Israel, hey, don't intermarry with these other nations because they are going to turn your heart from following God into following other gods.

And we can see that this wasn't always like a super hard and fast line because you can see even in the story of Ruth, how people could reject their gods from their country and go and serve the one true God.

But as evidenced in the passage, that's not what's happening with Solomon here. Here what's happening is you have Solomon that is giving himself holy to the worship of all other gods.

And he's already spent in an incalculable amount of money on the temple, on all of the things that went into God's house, all of these things that now he's not even using the temple.

And even the prayer that we saw a few weeks ago that he prayed and asked God for all of these blessings as the people would follow God. Now he's completely abandoned following God.

And we can see kind of in this next little section from verses 9 through 13, God's response to that is that the Lord tells Solomon that he's going to take the kingdom from him because he is now turning and worshiping other gods, and he's going to

give it to someone else. But for King David's sake, he was going to leave Solomon's descendants, one tribe of Israel, to rule over. There's 12 tribes of Israel, and now God has taken every tribe but one from Solomon's line.

One little fact I accidentally skipped over was, can you tell us how many wives Solomon had?

Well, they says about 1,000, what, maybe more than that.

Yeah, and specifically 700 wives.

700 wives and 300 concubines.

Yeah, which I gotta be honest, I'm married, I enjoy being married. I think it was yesterday we celebrated three years since we got engaged. But no offense to Samantha, I can only handle one woman.

I could not handle 700. And maybe with all the money, you can just pay people to, you know, do the honeydew list. Maybe you could, you know, do whatever.

Maybe you can be like Solomon was for Pharaoh's daughter and build her her own city and her own house and all of that. But it's just too much.

Yeah, he chose this because the first part of that passage is he loved many strange women, many foreign women. It's not like they were convincing him or you're putting them putting them under some kind of spell. But it was just his personal choice.

Yeah, it was his choice.

And as we mentioned earlier, it was a choice that went against what God had already said in Deuteronomy. Hey, don't amass wives, specifically don't amass wives from these other nations. But that's exactly what Solomon did.

The Lord rebukes him for it. He tells him, hey, this is going to end badly for you. So, then what happens after this?

Really, this is the end in 1 Kings of what we hear about Solomon from verses 14 through 40. We see God raising up a few enemies against Solomon as a punishment for Solomon's spiritual adultery against God, his idolatry.

And the first of these is Hey Dad, the Edomite. Why don't you talk about that for just a little bit from verses 14 to 22.

Yeah, so his whole country had suffered a massive defeat by Job and Israel. He had fled to Egypt as a small boy, and Pharaoh took him in and loved him like a son, even giving his sister-in-law to him as a wife. And in verses 23 to 25, was that Rezin?

Rezin, I think so.

Rezin of Zoboah?

Zobah.

Zobah.

Rezin had been a slave to King. These are some really crazy names.

Had a deezer.

Had a deezer of Zobah, but escaped and created a raiding party when David destroyed the Zobites. Is that what that is?

I think it might be Zobites.

Zobites.

Yeah, the people of Zobah. Yeah, in both of these, you have kind of indirectly David's involved in some of this, where it was David's army led by Joab that had crushed the Edomites. The Edomites had constantly attacked Israel.

You can read a lot about that in Judges. And Hadad was one that he had fled when Joab was just really taking out a lot of that army and that land. He had gone to Egypt.

And because Pharaoh gave him his sister-in-law as a wife, now he's actually related to Solomon in kind of a weird way. Don't you think it's a little weird to give someone your sister-in-law as a wife?

Yeah, not direct family.

Yeah, like I have a sister-in-law that's single, but I don't know if I would be like, hey, Carlos, you can be married to my sister-in-law, and that's my gift to you because I love you so much.

And I don't know, maybe it was a bigger deal for Pharaoh that now he's part of the royal family of Egypt.

And we can see from the fact that God mentions that he's raised him up as an enemy that even though they were kind of related because they were both related to Pharaoh, there are problems that arise from Hadad attacking or leading writing parties or

politically against Solomon and this. And then, like you mentioned with, what do we say, Rezin? Rezin of Zobah? You have, he had kind of been under the same thing of David's armies.

This was before David was king, but when he was just going around with his band of Merry Men, just kidding, he's not Robin Hood.

But when he was going around with his men, and they had defeated the Zobahites, that he had fled to Damascus in Syria, became a king in that region, and then he had men that he would raid Israel with as well.

And then, why don't you talk about this very special next guy, Jeroboam, talked about in verses 26 through verses 40.

Jeroboam the Ephraimite, the son of a widow. Jeroboam was appointed by Solomon to be over all of the Ephraimite and Manassehite workforce. There's all these ites, you know.

I just call them something else. I don't know. The prophet Ahadji, Ahaija.

It's like Elijah, which just changes the name to Elijah.

Ahaija, he met Jeroboam on the road outside of Jerusalem and tore his new cloak into 12 pieces and gave 10 pieces to Jeroboam, telling him that he would be the king of 10 of the tribes of Israel because of Solomon's idolatry.

He also promises Jeroboam a dynasty like God promised David if he will follow the Lord. Solomon hears about this and tries to kill Jeroboam, but Jeroboam flees to Egypt protected by King Shishak of Egypt. Could even have been Solomon's father-in-law.

I like one of the prerequisites of being a king is just follow the Lord. And they really have a hard time with that.

They do. They do. Yeah, I think it's incredible.

Obviously, we know some of the rest of this story that will go into over the next couple of weeks. But I think it's crazy that God gives Jeroboam the same opportunity that he gave to David.

Like we look back and we're like, man, David was a man after God's own heart. David loved the Lord. David was so great.

David did all of these things for God. But God wasn't just like, oh, because David's so holy and David's so great, David is going to be the top of the kings, the top of the everything, and he's going to be the end all be all.

It's God gives this same opportunity to so many people. We'll see even more as we go through the rest of first and second kings.

God gives this opportunity to so many people that if they follow him, that he's going to make their name great, he's going to bless their children, all of these things, and that he gives this to Jeroboam and this awesome opportunity.

I like in here, if you'll notice, Ahijah, he rips his cloak into 12 pieces because there's 12 tribes.

Yeah.

But how many pieces does he give to Jeroboam?

10.

Now, just a few verses earlier, God had told Solomon, hey, you're only going to get one tribe of Israel, but we can see in here that he's giving him an additional tribe.

And so that's when you'll occasionally hear reference, the 10 lost tribes of Israel that were when the nation was destroyed by Assyria. And then the people were taken into captivity, killed, put in the slavery, all of those types of things.

You have that. But God here, even though he's giving this awesome new opportunity to Jeroboam, and even though Solomon is under condemnation, that he's still continuing to give to Solomon, even though he didn't deserve it.

Any thoughts on any of that?

Solomon was immediately, what's the word I'm looking for?

Big mad.

He was big mad, yes. He was immediately, he felt immediately threatened.

Yeah. I think it's crazy too, because, so he knows God's given him everything that he has. We saw that last week with the Queen of Sheba, like it was obvious God was the reason for all of this.

And God had told him, because you're worshiping other gods, I'm punishing you. So why does Solomon now think when he hears, okay, God has made Jeroboam, he's gonna be the next king of all of these tribes.

Why does he then think that it's going to end well for him if he tries to kill Jeroboam?

Now we can know for sure that the saying, you get wiser in age is false.

Yep, it's true. It's true. Yeah, it's just, it's crazy to me.

Yeah, Solomon has tried at first to serve God, love God, there were blessings from that. But there was definitely bad things that occurred as a result of him walking further and further away from God.

So then in verses 41 through 43, Solomon dies after reigning for 40 years.

And what started off as like this awesome story of a person that gave God so much, that did awesome things for God, now ends with a person that's bitter at, he's bitter at God for punishing him for his sin.

And he wanted to sin and not have any consequences for it. So he's bitter at God for the consequences of his sin. He's bitter at Jeroboam for being, for God wanting to use him and his life.

He's bitter at all of these different things. We can see his enemies and stuff that are a constant thorn in his side. It goes from a person that was so merciful early on.

If you'll remember, he gave mercy to all of the people that had risen up against him. Was it Adonijah?

Adonijah, yeah.

Joab, you know, all of these people. He'd shown them mercy multiple times. He, even when he had started off being king, when God asked him, hey, what do you want?

He said, I want to have an understanding heart. I want to be wise. I want to know what I'm doing as a king.

And he didn't ask for any of the great things. Instead, he just asked for wisdom. And now at the end of his life, it's just, it's a bitter person serving every other God that there was in Israel at the time.

And it's just a complete change from the beginning.

Well, then David had many wives as well, right?

Yeah, he had several.

Not as much as Solomon, but maybe if he wouldn't have done that, maybe he could have helped Solomon out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.

And you can kind of see in the passage when it mentions all of the nations that were around Israel at the time that he's intermarrying with, there's almost this hope of political gain and political security that, okay, if I'm related to the King of

Egypt, Egypt's not going to attack me. If I'm related to the Hittites, the Hittites aren't going to attack me.

If I'm related to, and so there's this thing of he's searching for safety and security in the other nations and in the other nations gods, and he's not searching for safety and security in Israel's God.

It just goes to show a relationship with God is vital, even if you are the wisest man on the planet.

Yeah, it doesn't matter how smart you are. It doesn't matter how much money you have. It doesn't matter any of that.

All that matters is are you walking with and following and loving God. Yeah, we'll see next week some of the consequences that all of this has on Solomon's son, Rehoboam.

Like you mentioned with David, the example that we give to the people that come behind us is hugely important. And we'll dive into some of that next week. Well, any last thoughts on this section of scripture?

Nope.

All right.

Well, that's all I got. We look forward to hearing from you. Well, not here.

Well, we do look forward to hearing from you. But looking forward to our episode next week.

And if you have any questions, have any thoughts, anything that you would like to have us talk about, you can do so by going to our Instagram page, which is at Bible Babels or at Bible Babels Podcast.

And you can also just message us on on Facebook or anything like that. Want to give a special shout out to Lloyd, who watches or listens to the podcast. Thanks for listening and for my family and I guess anyone else that's listening.

But want to give you a shout out. We are looking forward to in the next couple of weeks, might be having some guest hosts onto the podcast and really looking forward to that.

So stay tuned and continue to walk with God, read his word, love him, pray to him. And that's what it's all about. Well, I'm your host, Bryon Self.

This is Carlos.

Have a good one.