Thoughts on 2 Chronicles 1 & 2 Peter 1

Today’s reading: 2 Chronicles 1; 2 Peter 1

I always feel like Solomon should have finished better than he did, and I think 2 Peter 1 gives us a good indication as to why he didn’t.

Solomon starts out so promising. When God asks him what He shall do for him, Solomon asks for wisdom and knowledge to govern God’s people well, and God answers the request by granting him great wisdom and knowledge. You would think that the king of God's people, having been granted near endless wisdom and great knowledge, would be in the best position to live his life faithfully for God, but then Solomon ends up going completely off the rails spiritually. What we see from Peter today though is that the knowledge and wisdom are only one part of a life lived faithfully for the Lord.

This is what Peter says:

For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins.

Peter sees knowledge as an indispensable quality of a healthy spiritual life, but it is important to recognize that it is one quality among a handful, and it is the sum total that Peter says will ensure rich entrance into the eternal kingdom of Christ, not any one quality in particular. For Solomon's part, if nothing else, he certainly ended up lacking the self-control to accompany his knowledge. He knew full-well that God had warned the king not to multiply wives, as well as not to marry foreign women who would lead him astray after their gods, but then Solomon did both of these things.

This has been a convicting confluence of Scriptures for me to be thinking about today. I know I've talked about this before, but I very much enjoy learning the Bible and/or learning about the Bible. I have spent years studying it and reading about it, and I couldn't even begin to guess at the number of hours worth of teachings, podcasts, youtube videos, etc. that I have listen to about the Bible over the years. On the one hand, I think I could probably say that my knowledge of the Bible is well above average, especially for a lay Christian, because I really just love it, and I think that's probably a really good thing to enjoy. But on the other hand, it is easy for me to look to how much I know and am learning as something of a substitute for the daily practice of my faith. Yes, I have faith and an abundance of knowledge, but what of virtue, self-control, steadfastness, godliness, brotherly affection, and love? Am I as diligent to pursue these things as I am to pursue knowledge? No, I'm really not...

I want to finish well. I don't just want to be the kind of person who knows a lot about the Bible, I want to be the kind of person whose life is a testament to the grace and goodness of the God who went to His death on a cross in order to redeem me from my sins and bring me into eternal life. I don't want to go the way of Solomon and, despite a wealth of accumulated knowledge, ultimately wander from a life of faithfulness to Him.

Solomon, in all his great wisdom and knowledge, is a very dire warning to me.