Thoughts on 1 Kings 11

Today’s reading: 1 Kings 11; 1 Thessalonians 5

1 Kings 11 is an important warning about the slow spiritual decay caused by "little" disobediences over time.

We are all faced with the temptation, in various areas of our lives, to take God's word a little less seriously than in other areas. We think, "I know God warns against this, but I've got it under control, it won't be that big of a deal," and so we go our own way rather than going the Lord's way. Often, for a time at least, our own wisdom seems vindicated. We indulge our "minor" sins and otherwise continue to follow the Lord, and it becomes increasingly clear that this little disobedience really wasn't all that big of a deal to begin with, and so we allow it to continue unabated. But what happens, as we indulge our sin, is the slow, often imperceptible, drift away from the faith and faithfulness we had at first, until we, like Solomon, can end up going entirely off the deep end without ever having made the discreet choice to turn from God.

In Deuteronomy 17 God gave Israel instructions for their kings, including that "he shall not acquire many wives for himself, lest his heart turn away..." Despite this warning, we are told in 1 Kings 11 that Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines, which I'll go out on a limb and say probably counts as "many wives." Surely Solomon didn't see this as a real danger. Yes, the Lord said these wives would turn his heart away, but as he started acquiring wife after wife, he was still faithful to God, so clearly this warning was for kings with less mental fortitude than him! Despite all the wisdom he received from God, he didn't have the wisdom to trust that the Lord knew what He was talking about. And for a time, his own wisdom seemed justified as 1 Kings 11 tells us that it wasn't until he was old that his heart was led astray.

This is part of the insidiousness of sin. When we indulge our sin and look around for immediate consequences, very often we don't see any, and so we conclude that there truly are no consequences to the indulgence. This leads us to feel the freedom to continue to indulge it, knowing that we know better than God here, and there really are no consequences to it. But what we don't see is the long-burning, slow decay of our faith that that sin allows into our lives. We don't see, like Solomon, the direction we are heading away from faithfulness to God, sometimes until it is too late, if we ever notice it at all. Our sin builds callouses over our heart that quiet the voice of conviction from the Holy Spirit, making it harder and harder to recognize that something is amiss, even as we start building temples to other gods (figuratively speaking, hopefully).

You would think that Solomon would have noticed how far he had drifted once he started considering building a temple to another god, and yet, the indication seems to be that Solomon commissioned the worship of many other gods in Israel before God had to actively break in and rebuke him for it. This "little" disobedience had led him so far astray that he wasn't even shaken out of his spiritual reverie by the construction of temples and high places even for gods like Molech to whom children were sacrificed in worship...

From this, I just want to call out the importance of two things in the Christian life: taking sin seriously, and being invested in Christian community.

In terms of taking sin seriously, it is far too easy to rank or compartmentalize sins into categories of seriousness and then let ourselves off the hook for the sins we deem less serious. "I'm not murdering anybody, selling drugs, cheating on my spouse, etc. This little indulgence isn't going to hurt anything." And yet I'm sure Solomon was saying the same thing about marrying just one or two more wives here or there. It is not a question of how serious we consider a given sin to be, nor is it a question of whether we understand why God says it is an issue in the first place, it is an issue of obedience. And when we actively choose disobedience, no matter how great or small the disobedience may be, we set ourselves on a spiritually treacherous road.

And in terms of being invested in Christian community, we need people in our lives to encourage, admonish, and exhort us when we do start drifting the way of Solomon. I don't mean we need to show up at church each week such that people would notice if we stopped coming, I mean we need to have close enough friendships in the Body of Christ that they notice even when our habits and attitudes start to change. We need the people in our lives who know us well enough to say, "Hey, this thing has seemed a little off lately, is something going on?" or, "Last time I saw this trajectory with you, you had let that sin creep in. How are things going with that? Do we need to talk about it?" We should strive to take sin seriously, and not let it creep in, but our enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour, our hearts are desperately sick and wicked above all else, and our flesh is at enmity with God. So we need God's provision of His community to help us run the race well through to the end, staying faithful to our God, and not letting sin and temptation slowly cut us loose from our anchor in the cross.