The point of the Solomon story, folks, is that this man was an idiot; a person endowed with an unparalleled gift from God which he ultimately allowed to corrupt him. For reasons I’ll never understand, we insist on seeing only the Disney version of the story, which does the bible a great injustice. This is why young people, coming of age, turn away. Modeling a consistent Christian testimony, you plant seeds within your kids' hearts. Which is no guarantee they won't turn out to be little jerks, but it holds out the promise that your child will indeed know the difference between authentic Christianity and the fair-weather stuff most of us practice.
The
Wrong Story
It amazes me that, to this day, Christians (most especially us
Church Folk) completely miss the point of the King Solomon story. We
teach our kids this nonsense about King Solomon having been the
wisest man who ever lived. We quote Solomon’s idle, drunken musings
from Proverbs and live our lives by them. But, as usual, we fail to
approach the subject in full, tending to rely on our G-Rated Sunday
School homilies as opposed to what the Word actually has to say.
King Solomon’s is a cautionary tale. It is not an uplifting, hopeful
story, and King Solomon is not, not, not, by any stretch of the
imagination, to be lifted up or idealized; let alone idolized—as in
Us Folk actually naming churches after him.
Beloved: the point of the King Solomon story is not how wise a man
he was but how, ultimately, arrogant and therefore unwise a
man he was. The point of the story, folks, is that this man was
an idiot; a person endowed with an unparalleled gift from God
which he ultimately allowed to corrupt him.
For reasons I’ll never understand, we insist on seeing only the
Disney version of the story, which does the bible a great injustice.
This is why young people, coming of age, turn away. No longer forced
to come to church by their parents, they have found little or no
truth or meaning in scripture because we keep jacking it up. We keep
rounding the edges off and shading the story here and excluding this
here other section. We tend to present scripture like a child’s
story book; some evangelicals even going to the ridiculous extreme
of re-editing Mel Gibson’s epic The Passion of The Christ to
reduce the screen time of Jesus' suffering.
This is how silly we are, how ignorant we are: the whole point of
The Passion… was to, for the first time in film history, provide
at least a reasonably compromised version of the horror Our Lord
went through at the cross. And these holier-than-me folks are
re-editing the thing because, apparently, they know better than Mel
Gibson and, obviously, God Himself, Whose record they are sanitizing
so as not to offend. We were supposed to be offended, supposed to be
horrified, by the seeming unending torture exhibited in The
Passion… But Church Folk—in this case, white Church Folk—have a
bizarre sense that all things “Christian” should also be safe,
sanitized Disney fare.
Taken literally, the Holy Bible runs rampant with sex, sexism,
violence on an unthinkable scale, and some of the worst imaginable
atrocities—the killing and raping of women and children—as blessed
by God. Christianity as we practice it is a fairly modern invention,
being only a couple of centuries old. The clean cut,
sanitized-for-your-protection evangelical Gospel is at least
three-quarters compromise. Its cultish, mass-hypnosis message
promotes faith as panacea.
Truth is a much harder sell because truth includes tons of
unpleasant realities so far as our belief system is concerned.
However, a Christian engaged with uncompromised truth is far less
likely to wander from his faith than those engaged in the Xanax and
Prozac Compromised Lie; the sanitized campus pumping only “approved”
Sandy Patti music through loudspeakers. This is cult behavior, the
unrealistic environment of most Christian bookstores; scrubbed of
much semblance of reality and making Pod People Christians.
The problem with Christianity, as I see it, is that it is a
compromised religion adhering to a set of values as opposed to
following wherever scripture takes us and allowing our values to be
a product of that journey. Solomon’s story is a prime example of
this nonsense. Write this down someplace: King Solomon Was The
Biggest Idiot Who Ever Lived. That, beloved, is the intended lesson,
not this foolishness about the happy and wise king who loved God so
let’s name our church after him. You have named your church after
the biggest idiot in living history, which demonstrates, straight
off, that the shot-callers at this church know nothing, nothing
whatsoever, about scripture. They are just Church Folk.
The Lion: Family man Calvin Broadus's endlessly entertaining pimp personna.
True Love
King David's son, Solomon, was the wisest man recorded in the
bible. Yet, toward the end of his life, he disobeyed God, marrying
women from nations God had warned would turn his heart toward false
gods. I doubt Solomon was "in love" with every one of those thousand
women. Some marriages were surely done out of political expediency.
Some purely for lust. Some just for the heck of it. And it was just
as likely the 700 and the 300 held some numerical significance to
Solomon, which suggests a great many of these arrangements were made
in an effort to get to that number. I'm not sure how it's possible
that Solomon had a personal, meaningful relationship with those
women, hundreds of whom it is likely he rarely if ever saw. I have
similar misgivings about pastors of huge churches, wondering how
this man can call himself "pastor" of people he doesn't even know or
have any meaningful relationship with.
Romantic love is a difficult and complex emotion. It requires
experience and maturity to know the difference between real love
and, say, a crush. A crush is usually about you—about what you want,
what your fantasy is. Real love is always about the other
person—what's best for them. Real love involves sacrifice.
Infatuation is nearly always selfish. The happiness of the other
person is secondary in a dysfunctional or codependent relationship:
he's miserable and she knows it but she doesn't care because she
can't bear the thought of losing him. Love is, he's miserable and
she knows it and she confronts that misery head-on and together they
take steps to heal their relationship or to end it.
I know a lot of married people. I don't know a lot of happily
married people. In my experience, 75% of couples I know—married or
not—are not happy. He's miserable, she doesn't care. Or they stay
together out of religious obligation or social pressure. Most of
these couples likely came together while still in the throes of
infatuation, where you're both a little drunk with passion and are
not making honest assessments about the long-term viability of your
relationship. Years later, you're miserable, barely talking over
dinner. Not mad at each other, but not excited, not eager, tired of
each other's company. Real love, the enduring, real thing, is a lot
more rare than we think it is. And many times when we believe we are
in love, we really aren't. But by the time we realize that, there
are Pampers and a mortgage and it's all very complex. So we settle
into lives well beneath the healthy and productive, hopeful future
we'd once imagined, missing out on major life opportunities because
of our impatience and disobedience to God.
Romantic love has a way of distracting us from God's purpose. Our
intellect becomes less sure where matters of the heart are
concerned. Solomon, the wisest man in the bible, was led astray by
700 wives and 300 concubines [I Kings 11:3], and ended up doing evil
in the eyes of the Lord [v6], not following the Lord completely, as
David his father had done. The fact is, good people, God-fearing
people, born-again people, can still make mistakes and can still
produce lousy kids. Not that Solomon was a lousy kid, far from it,
but Solomon's inconsistent testimony made him one generation removed
from the purer relationship with God his father and ancestors had.
Which, in turn, caused Solomon's own son, Rehoboam, to be even
farther removed from the knowledge of and relationship with God.
Rehoboam was, by all accounts, a lousy kid, a disgrace to a great
father. A tyrant who ultimately caused a split in the nation of
Israel. This is the lesson of an inconsistent testimony.
Many
parents rely on the church, on Sunday school and youth programs, to
teach their children about God. The way to teach your child about
God is to know Him for yourself. To have a thriving and productive
relationship with God such that the love of Jesus Christ fills your
home and His Holy Spirit inhabits your dwelling and your heart. By
modeling a consistent Christian testimony, you plant seeds within
your kids' hearts. Which is no guarantee they won't turn out to be
little jerks—mind you, we all go through the Little Jerk stage—but
it holds out the promise that your child will indeed know the
difference between authentic Christianity and the fair-weather stuff
most of us practice.
At the very least, this cautionary tale of the
wisest man who ever lived should comfort parents in that even a
godly man, a brilliant and wise man, can produce a foolish and
shameful child. "A wise son makes a father glad, But a foolish son
is a grief to his mother." (Proverbs 10:1). Check out I Kings
Chapters 9-14.
Christopher J. Priest
13 February 2011 Original
1 May 2015 Updated
editor@praisenet.org
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