Today, I am reading and commenting on  1 Kings 11-12.

The writer tells us that King Solomon had 700 wives and an additional 300 concubines.  He does not record if Solomon acquired these wives and concubines out of lust, or out of political expedience, but the numbers suggest the former rather than the latter.  In addition, these women were from peoples whom God had instructed the Israelites not to intermarry because , if they did, the Israelites who married women from these peoples would begin to worship their gods.  So, we have King Solomon marrying many wives, which God had told the Israelites that their kings must not do, for the very reason we see hear: “He must not take many wives, or his heart will be led astray. ”  In fact, if we read that passage in Deuteronomy, the taking of many wives is just the “straw that broke the camels back” of Solomon failing to follow God’s instruction for kings of Israel.  Previously, we had read about the many horses which Solomon acquired (it is worth noting that David had destroyed many of the horses   when he conquered an enemy with a large number of horses).  Not only did Solomon acquire a large number of horses, he sent to Egypt to acquire them.  So, we see that King Solomon did not depart from God all at once.  He did so little by little.  The same thing can happen to us.  It may start with a harmless lie, told to save someone’s feelings.  Or, perhaps, we do something else we know that we should not, but it is just easier to go along than to resist.  The problem comes in when we no longer struggle with telling the lie, or doing something else, when we tell ourselves that it is not really wrong because we are doing it for good reasons.  When we stop recognizing that our sins are wrong, we will begin to escalate them, until we end up where Solomon was, worshiping other gods and serving them.  I want to note that the passage tells us that Solomon sponsored worship of Ashtoreth, Chemosh, and Molek.  The worship of Ashtoreth involved exploitive sexual practices, while the worship of Chemosh and Molek involved human sacrifice.  In the case of of Molek that human sacrifice involved children.  Solomon did not go from devoted worship of God to human sacrifice all at once.  He slipped away from God little by little.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.