1 Kings 10–11 — Solomon had everything God gives a man under the old covenant, and it was not enough to keep his heart.
The Texts
“Solomon loved the LORD, walking in the statutes of David his father, only he sacrificed and made offerings at the high places.”
— 1 Kings 3:3
“The whole earth sought the presence of Solomon to hear his wisdom, which God had put into his mind.”
— 1 Kings 10:24
“His wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not wholly true to the LORD his God, as was the heart of David his father.”
— 1 Kings 11:4
“I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.”
— Job 42:5
“Unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
— John 3:3
“This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”
— John 17:3
The Observation
The reading moves through the rise and fall of Solomon. 1 Kings 3 opens with three things set side by side. Solomon makes a marriage alliance with Pharaoh and takes his daughter. The people are sacrificing at the high places because no house has yet been built for the name of the LORD. Solomon loves the LORD, walking in the statutes of David his father, only he sacrifices and makes offerings at the high places. The narrator is careful. He affirms the love. He flags the compromise. He does not resolve the tension. He lets both stand because both are true.
At Gibeon the LORD appears to Solomon in a dream and offers him anything he asks. Solomon asks for an understanding mind to govern the people, to discern between good and evil. God is pleased. He grants wisdom, and adds riches and honor that Solomon did not ask for. The gift is real. The giver is generous. The king goes back to Jerusalem and offers burnt offerings and peace offerings before the ark of the covenant.
By 1 Kings 10 the nations are streaming to Solomon. The Queen of Sheba comes from the ends of the earth. She sees the house he built, the food on his table, the seating of his officials, and there is no more breath in her. She blesses the LORD, but she is looking at Solomon. The glory of God and the glory of Solomon have become difficult to distinguish. That is the problem.
What Came Out of Studying It
The shape is right. The agent is wrong. By 1 Kings 11, Solomon has seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. The text names the nations: Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, Hittite, Egyptian. Women from every direction. One man drawing the nations to himself through marriage covenant. Marriage in Scripture is the deepest form of covenant available between human beings. It is the image God uses for his own relationship with his people. Solomon is enacting something that looks structurally like what God intends to do — bring the nations into covenant relationship with himself through One.
The shape is right. The agent is wrong. And the method is sin. The covenant of marriage is rightly between one man and one woman. We are flesh. We cannot divide ourselves across seven hundred covenant bonds without it costing everything. Only God can bind himself to his people in covenant faithfulness without being diminished or turned aside. Solomon attempted what only God can do, and the direction reversed.
When Christ gathers the nations, the nations are transformed. They come out of idolatry and into worship of the true God. When Solomon gathers the nations, Solomon is transformed. “His wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not wholly true to the LORD his God, as was the heart of David his father” (1 Kings 11:4). Instead of the nations being brought to the LORD through covenant with the king, the king is brought to the gods of the nations through covenant with the wives.
God had told Abraham that in his seed all the nations would be blessed. God had given Solomon wisdom so the nations would come, and the nations came. Solomon had the right office, the right temple, the right wisdom, and the right opportunity. Every step he took could have been rationalized as the next extension of the mission God had given him. But the promise to bless the nations was God’s to fulfill, not Solomon’s to engineer. And the difference between right and almost right is the difference between worship and idolatry.
The builder of temples. Solomon built the temple. He knew how to build a house for God. The same man then built high places for Chemosh, Molech, and Ashtoreth on the hills around Jerusalem, in sight of the temple. A man who builds gods has placed himself above the gods he builds. He is the source. They are his products. The wisdom God gave him as a gift for the service of God’s people had become the instrument of his own autonomous authority. He decides which gods get shrines. He allocates the resources. He determines the locations. The builder of the temple has become the builder of temples, and the deciding mind behind all of them is his.
The way that seems right. This is the pattern of Genesis 3. The serpent did not say “reject God.” He said “you will be like God.” The temptation in the wilderness did not ask Jesus to do evil things. It asked him to do plausible things by the wrong means and on the wrong terms. Sin is blinding in its very nature. We justify what we are doing while we are doing it. In 1 Kings 3, Solomon loves the LORD. By 1 Kings 11, “when Solomon was old his wives turned away his heart after other gods” (11:4). A reign that began at Gibeon with God’s own voice ended with shrines to Chemosh and Molech on the hills around Jerusalem.
The Hebrew verb forms in 1 Kings 11 describe sustained, continuing, unrepented idolatry. He built shrines. He maintained them. He did this for all his foreign wives. The language is the same kind of pattern John describes in 1 John 3 — the ongoing direction of a life, the grain of the wood, the characteristic action that defines a person. John’s present participle, ho poiōn tēn hamartian — “the one doing sin” — describes a settled direction, not an isolated act.
The text holds David up as the standard and Solomon is measured against him. David sinned spectacularly. But the text records David’s repentance — “I have sinned against the LORD” (2 Samuel 12:13) — and records no such thing for Solomon. Proverbs, which bears Solomon’s name, says it twice: “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death” (Proverbs 14:12; 16:25).
God raises up adversaries. God responds to Solomon’s idolatry by raising up adversaries. The Hebrew verb is qum in the hiphil — “caused to rise up.” Hadad the Edomite. Rezon the son of Eliada. Jeroboam the son of Nebat. These men are not righteous. Hadad has a blood grudge. Rezon is a bandit king. Jeroboam will become an idolater whose name becomes a formula for evil. God does not raise up righteous men to judge Solomon. He raises up enemies. This is the pattern of Scripture. God raised up Assyria and called it “the rod of my anger” (Isaiah 10:5) and then judged Assyria. He raised up Babylon and called Nebuchadnezzar “my servant” (Jeremiah 25:9) and then judged Babylon. He used Pharaoh to display his power and drowned his army. The human agents act according to their own motives. God superintends their actions toward his ends. Both things are true simultaneously. The cross is the supreme instance: “This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23).
The remnant narrows to One. The kingdom is not entirely torn away, because of the promise to David. “I will not tear away all the kingdom, but I will give one tribe to your son, for the sake of David my servant and for the sake of Jerusalem that I have chosen” (1 Kings 11:13). The Davidic covenant from 2 Samuel 7 holds: “Your throne shall be established forever.” But the throne narrows through the exile, through five centuries of no reigning king, until the line is a carpenter in Nazareth and the kingdom is a man with no place to lay his head. The remnant that was always narrowing — from Abraham to Israel to the remnant to the faithful few — narrows to One. Jesus is the true Israel. The servant in Isaiah who is Israel and who has a mission to Israel. The vine in John 15 — “I am the true vine” — replacing the vine of Psalm 80 that produced wild grapes. The seed of Abraham that Paul identifies in Galatians 3:16 as one person: Christ. The remnant is reduced to One, and from that One everything opens again to include all who are united to him by faith (Galatians 3:29).
Solomon in his own way tried to be that One. He gathered the nations. He entered covenants. He built temples. He exercised godlike authority over worship. The shape of what he did anticipated what Christ would do. The difference is total. When God goes to the nations, he goes in grace. He tears the curtain of the temple from top to bottom, inside out, and makes a way through the body of his Son to dwell near his people and have his people near him. When Solomon went to the nations through his wives, the nations changed him. God empties himself and the nations are filled. Solomon filled himself and was emptied of his faithfulness.
Job and Solomon. The parallel with Job runs in the opposite direction. Job begins with everything and loses it by the end of chapter 1. The entire middle of the book is an argument about why. God answers out of the whirlwind, and the content of the answer is: I am God and you are not. Job’s response is: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you” (Job 42:5). Job moved from hearing to seeing. From knowledge about God to knowledge of God. The stripping of everything was the means by which Job came to see God directly.
Solomon moved in the opposite direction. He began with an encounter. God appeared to him twice. He had the seeing. But the text says his heart was turned, that it was not wholly true to the LORD his God. God who appeared to him twice disciplined him by tearing the kingdom — but did not abandon him. The Davidic covenant held. What the two stories show from opposite directions is that the knowledge of God is not a function of what a man has or lacks. Job’s losses did not produce it. Solomon’s gains did not secure it.
You must be born again. This is where Jesus’ words to Nicodemus land with full weight. “Unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). Nicodemus is himself a kind of small Solomon — a Pharisee, a ruler, a teacher of Israel. He has learning, position, and credentials. Jesus cuts through all of it. You must be born from above, by the Spirit, who blows where he wishes.
Solomon is the supreme proof that the new birth is necessary. He had more than any person before or after him. Wisdom given directly by God. Wealth added by God. The nations came. The temple was built. The glory filled the house. And none of it was sufficient to keep his heart. The gifts could not regenerate him. The wisdom could not save him. The temple he built with his own hands could not transform him from the inside. He had everything God gives a man under the old covenant — law, wisdom, temple, presence, promise, warning — and it was not enough. It could never have been enough. Because the problem is not outside the man. The problem is the man. Solomon’s heart was the one thing his wisdom could not fix, because the tool and the problem were the same organ.
Ecclesiastes reads as though it were written from Solomon’s chair. The book identifies its speaker as “the son of David, king in Jerusalem” (Ecclesiastes 1:1), and the tradition has long attributed it to Solomon, though not all scholars agree. Whether or not Solomon wrote it, the voice fits: “I made great works. I built houses and planted vineyards… I also gathered for myself silver and gold… Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind” (Ecclesiastes 2:4, 8, 11). Everything “under the sun” — within the horizon of human effort — is hebel. Vapor. Breath. The conclusion of the book: “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man” (Ecclesiastes 12:13). The man who built shrines for every god on the hills around Jerusalem arrives at the one thing he abandoned. Fear God. The beginning of wisdom. The thing he lost.
What This Means for Me
You must be born again means Solomon was not enough. Christ is the true temple, and those united to him are God’s dwelling place. The Spirit writes the law on hearts of flesh and opens the eyes through the hearing of the word. The resurrection is bodily. The new creation is real. “This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3). The knowing that is life comes from above. It always did. Solomon’s story is the proof that it must.
Key Scriptures
1 Kings 3:3 · 1 Kings 3:9–13 · 1 Kings 10:24 · 1 Kings 11:4 · 1 Kings 11:13 · 2 Samuel 7:16 · Proverbs 14:12 · Proverbs 16:25 · Ecclesiastes 2:4–11 · Ecclesiastes 12:13 · Isaiah 10:5 · Jeremiah 25:9 · Acts 2:23 · Job 42:5 · John 3:3 · John 15:1 · John 17:3 · Galatians 3:16, 29 · 1 John 3:9
Prayer
Father, teach me to know the difference between your purposes and my own — the difference between right and almost right. Grant me the fear of God that is the beginning of wisdom and the end of it.
Thank you that Christ is the true temple, that those united to him are your dwelling place, and that the Spirit writes your law on hearts of flesh. Thank you that the resurrection is bodily and the new creation is real. The wars and the suffering are one more reason to long for Jesus and his return.
I pray for those in authority over us. For the families in Iran, Lebanon, Israel, and across the Middle East. For Ukraine. For the conflicts around the world that have fallen out of the headlines but not out of your sight. For our own country. Come, Lord Jesus.
Amen.
