Was Solomon a Good King or a Bad King?

Recently my wife and I have been reading through the Book of Kings in our reading and looking at the different kings of Israel there. We don't need to read into their life very long to decide whether or not they were a good or a bad king.

So we had David, we had Saul, pretty obvious he was a bad king in Israel's history. Then we had David, pretty obvious we don't have to read his life very long until we see he's a good king, a man after God's own heart. We come to Solomon, Israel's third king, and we ask the question, is Solomon a good king or is he a bad king?

And that's the title of the message this morning. And if I would ask you that question, how would you answer that? Is Solomon a good king or is he a bad king?

His obituary doesn't really tell us. It says he slept, he was buried in Jerusalem, slept with his fathers. But was he good or was he bad?

I think Solomon wrote 3,000 or over 3,000 very wise proverbs, and many of them are recorded in the Book of Proverbs, and we quote him almost daily. So why wouldn't he be a good king? He wrote how many songs, Brother John?

I don't have the number, but I think it was thousands. So why shouldn't he be a good king? After all, Solomon, out of all the history of the kings of Israel, probably had more of God poured into his personal life than any other king.

God gave him what he asked for and then more. Why shouldn't he be a good king? I hear people today using Solomon as a model of wealth. Well, God gave Solomon all this wealth, so wealth and riches must be good.

Why shouldn't Solomon be a good king? Open your Bibles with me to 2 Kings 11. When my wife and I were reading through the dedication of the temple, before the dedication of the great temple, that's another all that we would say Solomon's good. He built the temple, a place of permanent worship for God's people for the first time in history. When Solomon was praying that prayer after the temple was built, and he just beseeched the Lord in humility and brokenness. As I was reading that prayer, I told my wife, "This is beautiful." And I've got my pen out, and I started underlying phrases in that prayer. It's the most elegant prayer that one could utter, probably.

Why shouldn't Solomon be a good king?

1 Kings 11:1 says, "But King Solomon loved many strange women together with the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sedanites, and Hittites, of the nations concerning which the Lord said unto the children of Israel, 'You shall not go into them, neither shall they come in unto you, for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods.' Solomon clave unto these in love.

And he had 700 wives and princess and 300 concubines, and his wives turned away his heart. For it came to pass when Solomon was old that his wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not perfect with the Lord his God as was the heart of David his father. For Solomon went after Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Sedanites, and after Malchum, the abomination of the Ammonites, and Solomon did evil in the sight of the Lord and went not fully after the Lord as did David his father. Then did Solomon build a high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, in the hill that is before Jerusalem, and for Molach, the abomination of the children of Ammon.

And likewise did he for all his strange wives which burned incense and sacrifice unto their gods."

Solomon, where's your wisdom? Solomon, what went wrong? These foreigners that are mentioned here are the offspring, the descendants of Lot. And they were bad people. Some of them sacrificed children. They had temple prostitutes. Solomon fell so low after he built that magnificent, beautiful temple of worship for God. It says here that he went out, I think this is about six miles from Jerusalem, and he built a temple, temple but place of worship on a high place for these gods.

How did Solomon fall so low? And he intermingled with the worship of these foreigners, and he served their gods on the high place. When God came to the temple and met him there in a cloud, and the holiness of God came right in his presence, when God poured into Solomon all the wisdom that man ever knew and more, and Solomon fell so low.

Was Solomon a good king?

Well, that question is a big question. I would say it this way, Solomon probably was a good king, but Solomon made some really bad choices. Solomon had a lot going for himself, tremendous. I was going to do one message on this subject, and I began reading, and I'll be landing somewhere today between 1 Kings 3 and 11, just briefly. But the subject is so huge. I can't do this in one short sermon.

I read some of what Josephus had to say about this man. I read some in Chronicles what it had to say about this man, but it's huge. The choices he made this morning, I'd like to focus a little bit on Solomon's choices, and then in a message later sometime, I would like to look at Solomon's heart and going into Ecclesiastes and try to make sense of what he's writing there. When I read the Book of Ecclesiastes, I understand that was his personal journey, his diary, so to speak, of his own personal life. Now, some of you may do a diary. I think it's more a ladies' thing. I know my sisters used to keep a daily diary of their life.

In those diaries, those journals, they would write the deepest yearnings, the deepest desires, the greatest, deepest pains they experienced. And when I read Ecclesiastes, I see it as that. And I don't think Solomon ever intended for that to be published, some of it at least. I think God snuck into Solomon's study, and he said, "I'm going to take your journal, and I'm going to put it in the Bible for the whole world to read and learn from your mistakes." I mean, Solomon says things in the Book of Ecclesiastes that aren't even biblical. I mean, they're in the Bible, but they're not really biblical. And I want to look at that in a message later and see what we can learn from the deepest parts of his being and learn from that.

We briefly looked, and we look in the beginning of his reign in chapter three, 1 Kings chapter one, two, three, sort of the early time of his reign. We look briefly at the end, and we see the beginning and the end of his life.

We are all given that space and time of the beginning and the end of our life and between there, especially for Solomon, and it is for all of us to a sense. It's packed full with opportunities, responsibilities, and choices.

Solomon had a huge package of that, didn't he? Opportunities, responsibilities, and choices. And we want to look at that briefly this morning. They tell me that the safest way to travel long distance today is by airplane. Really? When I climb into that aluminum cave, so to speak, and I buckle myself in, and this thing starts shaking, and it goes out the runway, and it takes off, and we fly, what is it, 30, 40 thousand feet high at 600, 500, 400 mile an hour, and we go through the turbulence, I remind myself, they tell me it's the safest way to travel.

And you begin shaking around, and I'm like, "Really? Is this the safest way to travel?" And I thought of that. We don't start clapping until we hit the runway, I mean, the landing strip, do we? Safe takeoff, safe flight. When we come down and we touch ground, we go, "Thank you, God. Thank you, God."

Why is that the safest mode of transportation today? Why? I'm going to say, as I understand it, every commercial airliner has it in it, the little thing they call the black box. So when there is a plane crash, the engineers, those that build these things, they take the black box and they study that. They look for two things. One, why did this crash happen or what happened?

Number two is, how can we correct? How can we keep what happened from happening again? And this is how we learn in God's Word. The Bible tells us that these things are written for our learning. And we can look at the history of the Bible, and we can say, we can look at the life of Solomon, for instance, and we can see, okay, he had a safe takeoff. He had a safe flight, so to speak, but he had a very poor landing. He had a crash. And we're going to dive into his little black box this morning, and we want to learn this morning, what went wrong?

How did Solomon start so beautifully and end so poorly?

Well, the first thing we learn about it, this didn't happen overnight. When we study his life, when we study Ecclesiastes, when we study Kings and Chronicles, it didn't happen all of a sudden. Solomon one day came out and fell in love with 100 or 700 wives.

They didn't have a wedding to do a marriage of 700 wives all in one day. No. This happened very gradually. They tell me that you can take a frog, and you can throw him in a boiling pot of water, and you can't keep him in. He'll just jump right back out. But you can take the same frog, you can put him in lukewarm water in the same pot, and he'll stay there.

I guess he thinks this is sort of cool sitting in this lukewarm water. You turn the burner up slowly but surely. You can boil that frog to toast. And that is what happened, I believe, in Solomon's life. And that is where we can go from point A to point B, good beginning and a poor landing.

First of all, we want to look at wisdom. Wisdom was one of the things that made Solomon so famous. It is the first thing of God himself, could we say, that was poured in. Now, wisdom, the Bible tells us, is a gift, and we see that in Solomon's life. James says, "If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God." And James also says, "Do not err, my beloved brethren. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above and cometh down from the Father of lights."

Someone said, "Knowledge is horizontal, and wisdom is vertical." When we have wisdom, we know it's straight from God. And Solomon had more of that than any other man, the Bible says. So that means heaven poured more into his life than into any other man along that line.

The next thing we want to notice about wisdom, and this is probably when Solomon was in his wisest moment, is when God gave him that blank check with his name signed and said, "Solomon, whatever you want, you name it, I'll give it."

What a test. Now, if God would do that to you today, what would you put in that blank check?

I would say this is before God poured out the wisdom and understanding. It was probably still the wisest moment in Solomon's life. And we can go to 1 Kings 3 and read that, 1 Kings 3:6 through 15.

"And Solomon said, 'Thou hast showed unto thy servant David, my father, great mercy according as he walked before thee in truth and in righteousness, and in unrighteousness, uprightness of heart with thee. And thou hast kept for him this great kindness that thou hast given him a son to sit on his throne as it is this day. And now, O Lord my God, thou hast made thy servant king instead of David, my father. And I'm but a little child. I know not how to go out or to come in. And thy servant is in the midst of thy people, which thou hast chosen a great people that cannot be numbered nor counted for multitude. Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad.

For who is able to judge this, thy so great a people?" And the speech pleased the Lord, and Solomon, that Solomon had asked this thing. We learn here that because Solomon had such a humble request, he put himself in the category of a little child. He said, "I don't even know how to come in and go out." It was on that basis that God poured out an understanding heart, an understanding mind, the wisdom. And later on, it says that he gave him a large heart, which has the idea of a heart that can wrap around almost any subject there is in the kingdom.

What more could you ask for but that? God was so pleased with that. We want to learn something from that this morning about God. God will give us that kind of wisdom as well, all that we need when we offer him that kind of heart and prayer.

Jesus says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God."

He said, "You've been so kind and merciful to my father David. O my Lord, this is a great people." He had the love that he needed, I believe, for God's people. He honored his father. And all that was in this speech, and it pleased the Lord. And it was about that time in Solomon's life, if I understand the timeline. It was about that time in his life that he wrote the Proverbs that we have recorded today in the Book of Proverbs and the Song of Solomon that is written about a love that is between the Father of heaven and his people. The best love story ever written, probably, was written by Solomon about right here in this time of his life.

The other thing we're going to learn about the wisdom of Solomon, that this wisdom and all the Proverbs that if there was ever a man that knew about life and how to do life, it would have been Solomon. That just comes out in Proverbs over and over. We quote it. I mean, just wise little sayings just to live out the daily life. When I read that and then I read Solomon's life, I'm like, "Solomon, did you really practice these Proverbs in your own life?" I believe he did many of them. But there are many of them that we can see Solomon didn't really practice what he preached.

If we practice wisdom, it stays with us. If we maintain a good humble heart before our Lord, it will stay with us. James says it this way, "Wisdom is knowledge in action. Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you? Let him show out of a good conversation his works with meekness of wisdom." So if we have wisdom, James is encouraging us, if you've been given wisdom from God, put it to good use or you're going to lose it. And Solomon lost his wisdom. He lost it. We see that in Ecclesiastes. I'm like, when I read some parts of Ecclesiastes, I'm thinking, "Solomon, what are you thinking?"

The wisest man that ever lived, and you would write this, Solomon, what are you thinking? When we see how he ended his life in 11, 1 Kings 11, we think, "Solomon, where did all these wise sayings, these Proverbs go in your life?" I mean, you're out there building an altar on the high place and bowing down to foreign gods, pagan gods.

Solomon, what happened to your wisdom? Ecclesiastes 2:15 and 16, Solomon says this, "Then said I in my heart, as it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me. And why was I then more wise?" Stated as a question. "Then I said in my heart, this also is vanity. For there's no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool forever."

I mean, that's not really true, Solomon. That's not really true. He's seeing, "Which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man as the fool?" So he's saying in those verses, there's no difference in wisdom or foolishness. They all die the same way, and in eternity, it really doesn't make a difference.

And he's saying, what is the purpose of wisdom anyway? I believe we can learn firsthand from Solomon. When he stopped exercising and practicing the knowledge God gave to him and putting it into wisdom, he lost it, and it was a wasted gift. And it will be a wasted gift to us today when we do not put it to action.

Something we want to learn about love. Now, it's interesting. We just read the passage in 1 Kings 11. It says, "Solomon loved many wives."

Drop down a couple of verses from that. It says, "He claved to these in love."

And in 1 Kings 3, it says that Solomon loved God, and God loved Solomon. I went to my Hebrew concordance. I thought for sure these must be different words. And I found they're the exact same words. The same kind of original word that was used to describe the love that Solomon had for these wives was the same word used to describe the love that he had for God in chapter 3.

Something happened between chapter 3 and chapter 11 with that love that Solomon expressed. Jesus says, "We cannot serve two masters." Solomon loved God, and he loved many strange wives.

It's interesting. Now, I don't know why God does this, and I think Conrad brought this out or somebody brought this out in Sunday school this morning, that sometimes we can do wrong for quite a while before it's noticed by anyone or even maybe judged or brought to correction by God. But if you notice early in the reign of Solomon, clear back in chapter 3, I think it's in verse 1, it says that Solomon made a league with the king of Egypt, and he brought his daughter into Jerusalem.

And apparently, it seemed like, as we read it there, that it seemed like he was pricked in his heart a little bit about that. So then he took this daughter of Pharaoh, and he put her outside of the walls of Jerusalem until the temple was built or the house of Solomon.

There's nothing mentioned about right there in the early part. This is right while he was loving God. He was taking Pharaoh's daughter. Now, I looked up into Josephus' writing, and he said he married her. Clear back in the early reign, he married this woman.

This is step one in disobedience to God. And there's a tension going on between the love of God and the loyalty to the king of Egypt. Wasn't God's very purpose of Israel coming out of Egypt to free them from slavery? And here Solomon is going back to Egypt, and he's saying, "Hey, king, I tell you what. I'm this new king of Israel. And can we somehow link arms together?" And it was a political move, I believe. He was making an alliance with the king of Egypt. Well, after all, this all made sense in the human mind. Why wouldn't you feel safe and protected if you brought the king of Egypt, brought her daughter into Jerusalem, and marry her and somehow have a security that you're in enemy territory or whatever?

There's protection there. Old king from Egypt's going to say, "Oh, we'll back off of Jerusalem or Israel because my daughter's there." See the thing that he's doing here, the first step? And God was there, and he just didn't really say anything about that. I'm like, "God, why didn't you address this problem right up front?"

First step. Just like the frog sitting in the warm water in the pot, just a little bit of compromise here and there is how he got to where he got to. He's yoking together. And this was a clear step against God's command for his people. They were not to marry outsiders. They were not to intermarry with the pagans. They were not to make those links and unequally yoke themselves together. This was the very beginning of Solomon's 700 marriages.

It didn't all happen on one wedding day. Slowly but surely, he's linking and making these wise political moves and aligning himself. And these 700 wives, I understand, were ladies of the house, as we say today. I mean, they were important women. It's not only that he loves them for sensual reasons, but he loves and clings to them for political power, political protection, political fame, you name it. 700 wives and 300 concubines.

These women were of royalty, and they were acquired to make political alliances with heathen nations, security, safety, power, wealth, and prosperity in the future. And when we look at it, it's called the golden age of history in Israel's history. It was a time of peace. It was a time of political power and building. And, oh, Queen what's her name? Sheba came, and she was impressed. She was impressed with this kingdom. She was impressed with Solomon's wealth.

A lot is at stake when we begin to negotiate and one little step at a time the principles of life that God has laid out for us. When we do life God's way, we can expect the blessing of wisdom and all the blessings that God wants to pour into our life. We can expect them to stay with us. But when we, one by one, we step away. 1 John 2:3-5 says, "And hereby we do know that we know him if we keep his commandments. And he that sayeth, 'I know him,' and keepeth not his commandments is a liar. And the truth is not in him, but he that keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God perfected."

John is saying that obedience tells the story.

It trumps. Obedience goes beyond love. It goes beyond sacrifices. And the way we allow God to order our life in the everyday details of life is where it's going to be. He says, "That's how you will know that you are my people."

That's where Solomon struck out the subtle steps of disobedience. Jesus says, "In that day, many will come to me saying, 'Lord, Lord, have we not done many wonderful works in thy name? Have we not worshiped you?'" There's a lot of people today say, "Lord, Lord," that are so far removed from God's ways.

The next step we see also in chapter 3, very early on in his reign, the Bible says that he followed David his father, except he worshiped in high places.

High places in those days were set up by the pagans, the foreign gods. I understand they took them to high places of worship, simply. And these were literal high places. They're little mounds and hills and mountains or what have you.

And just maybe two verses after, the Bible says that Solomon loved God. He went out, and he did sacrifices on a high place. David, I mean, Solomon. Solomon, why do you do this? I'm thinking, why does Solomon do this? I mean, what's the name of this high place? It's right in there somewhere.

Gibeon. Gibeon. Thank you. Gibeon was a large high place, and I think it was six miles away from Jerusalem. And the Ark of God at this point is in Jerusalem. And here Solomon just got done saying that he loves God, but at the same time, he goes to Gibeon and offers up 100 animals, I think, in sacrifice.

I say, why? And that is where God came in a dream to him. And that's where he prayed that beautiful prayer and request, "Gibeon."

And Josephus says that when Solomon woke up, he jumped out of his bed, and he went to Jerusalem to worship. Interesting. I believe he was convicted in his heart in his dream. Jumped out of his bed, went over six miles or whatever to Jerusalem.

Solomon should not have been at this high place. And the lesson for us today, the only thing I can see now, he was worshiping God there. I believe he's burning incense, and the smoke is going up, and God's being blessed and glorified, and he's offering these sacrifices. But he's at the wrong place of worship. David did not go to this place for worship. His father didn't go here.

Solomon went here. One of the first steps of deviating from the ways of his father, that God came back again to Solomon and said, "Now, if you keep doing just what your father did, and you walk in all of my ways, and you keep my laws, then I will bless you, and I'll even give, and I'll add to the blessing, and I'll give you an extension of life.

Long life. And I'll keep my name in this place." Those were promises that God came over and over a number of times to Solomon during his reign.

Why did he do this? Why did he go? I think, what can we learn from this from Solomon? I believe he was being cozy with the greater society. It was the cool place to worship God. After all, all the other nations worship God on the high places.

Why shouldn't we? I'm going to prove to everybody else that I can go out here, and I can violate a small principle in his mind of God's order and get away with it. A number of years ago, we were invited to a wedding.

This wasn't a wedding of our circles. It was supposed to be a Christian wedding. And as we sat during the ceremony, there was a dear lady that was the bishop of the church, I guess. She was leading out in the ceremony, had a nice little wedding sermon, good and fine, couldn't fault anything with the worship. But as I sit there, I'm thinking, there's three violations to God's order going on right in this place.

Number one, there's a woman leading out in the church of God. Violation number two, this woman is praying and prophesying with her head uncovered. Violation number three, the Bible is clear that women are not to adorn themselves outwardly. And this woman was adorned with jewelry hanging from her ears and whatever else.

But a great message, a great little sermon on marriage, nothing to fault about. We expect God's blessing to rest on us when we do things other than God's way. It's not happening. In violation, well, it's just a small thing. It's just this little thing. Oh, you make a big deal out of such a little thing.

God makes really big deals out of small things. We see that in the end of Solomon's life.

When we study his life and building of his house and building the temple and ruling the people of Israel, we see some deals there that seem to be like shady business deals. Don't have time to get into that.

But something very telling in the book of 1 Kings when Solomon's at the end of his life and his son Rehoboam comes along and is supposed to take his place.

Remember what Israel told Rehoboam? "Now, if you want us to follow you, you got to do some things different than your father. And one is the yoke of your father was really heavy. It was grievous." And I don't know what all that means. A little bit of Ecclesiastes will tell us that. "I made me" how does he say that? About workers of men and of servants of women and of men. "And I made me singers, and I made me" we get the feeling there that somehow in his authority, he had slave labor, he had forced labor, and maybe overtaxing the people. And they made it clear to his son, "If you're going to treat us like your dad Solomon did, we're not going to serve you," right up front.

What all that meant? I don't know. But that was a deviation from God's plan for his leadership. He was supposed to love his people. He was supposed to look out for them. He was supposed to set them free from slavery. He had that call on his life. But somehow, they didn't take it that way.

What can we learn from Solomon's wealth? There again, people are using Solomon today as a role model of wealth. It must be okay because God gave Solomon wealth, and he became a very wealthy man. Do you ever hear those statements? It must be a blessing from God.

Let's look at most people remember Solomon as the man who built the temple of God in Jerusalem. Now, Solomon did a lot of good things in the kingdom, but he did some really bad things. One of the things is, did you know that the temple even though Solomon I mean, David, if we read back into his life, he had prepared a lot of the supplies for the temple ahead of time. Because when we read the Psalms, we see that this was the heartbeat of David, that there was a house of God built where God's people can come in and gather together to worship. That was his vision. And he expressed that to Solomon, his son, while David was still alive.

That was the goal. That was the vision. We come and we read about the building of the temple, and that's great. But Solomon's palace is astounding. It took almost twice the time to build Solomon's palace, and it was another time as big as the temple, Solomon's palace.

Ecclesiastes Solomon says, "I have enlarged my borders. I have built me houses." And all of a sudden, the palace became a project, and it seemed prices became more of an interest to Solomon than true values. And we read it in Ecclesiastes over and over that Solomon's thrust was to build this mansion of a place for his own house, twice as large as the temple, almost twice as long to build it. I'll just give a little bit of description of this. So we read the description in the Bible, the assembly hall, which had 60 pillars of Lebanon. I think Isaiah has something to say about that, these 60 pillars of Lebanon.

And I read a writer. He said, "These were not just regular old pine trees what we're used to. I mean, these were

cedars of wealth.

And there were 60 of this in this one particular assembly room lined with 60 pillars. In that room, there were 500 battle shields that were hanging on the walls as decoration. And these battle shields were made of wood lined with gold. And the gold that was transported in here just for these shields to cover them was over 2,500 pounds of gold." And when you read that study, it seemed like his funds were running low, and he made this commitment. He gave a collateral of 20 cities to one of the kings. I can't say his name now. There was some agreement that was made. And there again, he was crossing the lines of God's command. He wasn't supposed to do that.

He was not supposed to accumulate gold, and he was not supposed to take these border cities out as a collateral either. So even in his building of his palace, he was violating God's law. And we say, "Ooh." Now, I read somewhere that they would never use gold-lined battle shields to go to battle with because something about gold, it was too soft or whatever. It didn't work as a shield.

So this was as a display. This was to impress his guests.

And Queen of Sheba, who traveled 1,500 miles to see what this man is made of and what his palace is made of, she was impressed. How many tons of gold did she bring along? How many tons did he give back? She went home with more than she came with.

Do you see what's going on here? Solomon is impressing. He is impressing the whole world, the known world back then, with his he was committing some major sins right in his own palace. Why did Solomon need 500 shields that required over 2,500 pounds of gold to make?

Why did he need an ivory throne overlaid with gold? Why must he and his guests drink only from golden vessels? To what purpose were the thousands of horses and chariots he assembled in pursuing each of these goals? Solomon disobeyed the very word of the Lord.

The kings of Israel were not to multiply horses and go to Egypt to get them, but Solomon did.

Not only did he accumulate horses, he became a horse dealer. If we read his life, he was trading horses for sums of money. He was a horse dealer.

Nor was the king to multiply gold nor wives, and Solomon violated all these ways of God.

Deuteronomy 17:20 says, "The king was commanded to remain humble before the Lord and not consider himself better than his brothers." That was violated in his palace. He was impressing the kingdoms of this world. He was impressing. He's impressing many people today with his wealth.

Jesus said, "One of the father's lilies was more beautifully arrayed than Solomon in all his glory." Jesus wasn't impressed with Solomon and his wealth. I'm going to ask you the question. Are you impressed with Solomon and his wealth? 1 Peter 3:4 says, "True beauty comes from within, from the hidden person of the heart, which is of God and great price." The men of Solomon's age were putting tremendous value on those golden-lined vessels, and they were impressed by it. But God is impressed about the beauty of character that he was intentional about when he gave Solomon the wisdom. And he said, "As icing on the cake, I'm going to give you riches and honor as well."

That was extra. But God had never intended Solomon to make himself a palace of this sort. He had never intended for him to waste the precious riches, the gifts that God gave to him, on Solomon himself. And Solomon will tell us that in Ecclesiastes very clearly. He says, "All this in the end was vanity of vanities." And Solomon had a very boring life when we read the book of Ecclesiastes.

Think of the long-reaching effects of Solomon's poor choices in his life. We continue to read through the book of Kings. We come to 2 Kings. We see in there, toward the end of the kingdom of Judah. Well, first of all, Solomon's choices did just opposite of what God promised to do if he would stay faithful.

It was the beginning of the end, so to speak. It was the dividing of the kingdom. And then we come to Jesiah's life among many bad kings. Jesiah comes along. I think if I have this history right, it's 300 years or so later.

Jesiah says, remember, Jesiah rose up, and he said, "We're going to have to clean house." And he went into the temple, and he cleaned out the false stuff in the house. And then he went out into the groves and the high places. He went to the south. And when he was done in the south, he went to the north. And if we follow his track, he went clear back to these high places that Solomon had set up to destroy them.

So long-reaching effects of poor choices that Solomon made. I was impressed when Reggie was here the other week in India. He said, "There is a flow of churches, a flow of Christianity in parts of India that stem back to William Carey coming to India with the gospel." That is encouraging. That is telling us our choices, whether they're good or they're bad, they have long-reaching effects. I think William Carey was 230 years back if I did my math correctly. And there's still a flow of Christianity coming from the gospel he took to India. Folks, today, we have just what Solomon did. We have a beginning, and we have an end. All of us are going to have an obituary.

My question, my challenge to us, while we're not kings of a great kingdom as Solomon was, all of us this morning have opportunities. We have responsibilities, and we have choices. What are we doing with them that are going to have effects 200 years from now if time should allow?

Oh, we say, "How can that be possible? Little me making a choice today that would have a ripple effect 230 years from today?" Surely, surely. We all have a street address, and on that street, we have neighbors. We have a community.

And I have faith enough to say that when we do life God's way, our life is going to have a ripple effect in one way or the other in 200 years, in 300 years from today. Let's make right choices.

Solomon opened the Proverbs by saying, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." And he closed the book of Proverbs, I mean, Ecclesiastes, by saying, "The whole of man is to fear God and keep his commandments."

What a way to open, and what a way to close. And that is our choice today. It goes beyond our love for God. That doesn't make sense, does it? But we see Solomon loved God, but he didn't obey God completely, and he landed poorly.

Solomon opened the book of Proverbs by making it very clear to us the importance of bowing to God. Solomon didn't do that for us as an example, but he still said it. And it came from God's wisdom, not Solomon's wisdom.

Bow the heart to God. Give an ear to him. Give him a loyal heart as David did. Now, David wasn't perfect. He sinned, didn't he? But David knew how to repent and get right when he did fail. Solomon didn't seem to know that. We see Solomon's failures. Do we ever read in his life that he was broken? Do we ever read that he came to God and said, "I'm so sorry. I've disobeyed you"? The question remains, did Solomon die a saved man?

May God bless you. Anything.