God's Generous Grace; 1 Kings 9:10-10:10
God appeared to Solomon the
first time in 1 Kings chapter three where we get a
particularly insightful description of Solomon’s spiritual life. 1 Kings
3:3 NASB “Now Solomon loved the LORD, walking in the statutes of
his father David, except he sacrificed and burned incense on the high places.”
The reason for the exception is not that he was into idolatry but that
according to the Mosaic Law there was a law related to a central sanctuary that
all Israel was supposed to worship God in one place. God
regulates worship. Worship is never in any dispensation a matter of subjective
opinion or whatever makes one feel right. Christianity is based on objective
revelation from God and is not based on our own projections of the way we wish
God was or the way we think God is or what makes God more real to us. All those
ideas really come out of 19th century liberalism.
What we see here is a glimpse
into Solomon’s spiritual maturity. Solomon loved the Lord and was “walking in
the statutes of his father David.” In other words, he was obedient to God,
walking in the ways of God, walking in the Law, walking in the statutes of the
Law. All of these different phrases are synonyms indicating that he was obedient
to the Law. It doesn’t mean that he was perfect or sinless or better than
everybody else, but it means that in the sum total of his life we could say
that Solomon was a man who was obedient to the Lord in his life. That is our
barometer for defining our love for the Lord. All the way through Scripture,
whether we look in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy or whether we go
forward to the Gospel of John and into the first epistle of John, again and
again and again Scripture says that God measures our love for Him on the basis
of obedience. That is not legalism, it is simply that God is saying “If you
love Me you will do what pleases Me, and if you don’t
obey Me you will be disciplined.” So we see this picture here of Solomon as a
mature believer at the beginning of his reign. We see the expression of that
maturity because when God appears to him the first time God makes him this
incredible offer and says, “Whatever you ask of me I will give it to you.”
Solomon asked for wisdom.
1 Kings 3:11 NASB
“God said to him, “Because you have asked this thing and have not asked for
yourself long life, nor have asked riches for yourself, nor have you asked for
the life of your enemies, but have asked for yourself discernment to understand
justice, [12] behold, I have done according to your words. Behold,
I have given you a wise and discerning heart, so that there has been no one
like you before you, nor shall one like you arise after you.” So from this
passage we learn a couple of principles that are going to work themselves out
in 1 Kings 9, beginning in verse 10. There are three principles that are
embodied in this section from verse 10 to the end of the chapter.
First we must set the
framework for understanding this. As we move through any kind of narrative
literature of history, any of the historical books that are describing the
events of Israel, the events in the life of people, these are highly
editorialised stories. God the Holy Spirit is the one who is picking these
events. In biblical narrative the hero is always God, because God is the one
who is being pictured behind all the stories, all the narratives that we have
in Scripture, as the one who is providing the solution to man’s problems. Man’s
problems are the basis for conflict that we see within every single one of
these stories—his conflict with his own sin nature, conflict with living in the
world system, conflict with paganism, conflict with other human beings who are
attacking him, or angels or demonic forces, whatever, within the angelic
conflict. So we have to understand that what is going on in any of these
stories ultimately goes back to revealing something about God.
If we look at the elements
of 1 Kings 9 and 10 what we see is almost as if the writer is mopping up a lot
of loose ends. It talks about Solomon’s architectural projects, his building
projects, and how he organised the labour forces. It talks about his maritime
forces and where they went and how his fame spread throughout the world to the
point that the Queen of Sheba heard about him and came to visit him in Israel to see if all that she had heard about Solomon was
true. No one she had ever heard about in the whole world had the power, the
wisdom, the riches, the wealth and the skill that Solomon did. That ought to
tell us something about how magnificent Solomon was. So we stop and ask why God
the Holy Spirit has revealed all these things. We have to understand it in the
context of what God has revealed in 1 Kings, and that is this promise—1 Kings 3:11-13. The uniqueness of Solomon would stand out as a
beacon of God’s grace and blessing to the entire world. In the New Testament
God sends the church out into the world but in the Old Testament under the
Mosaic Law the idea was that if Israel walked in obedience God would bless them
so magnificently they would be such a power house of wealth and knowledge and
sophistication and advancement that the entire world would want to come to
Israel to learn what the secret of their success was. The secret of their
success would be their walk with God, their obedient walk with God, and that is
exactly what was going on with Solomon.
So what we see here as a
backdrop to the last half of 1 Kings chapter nine and
chapter ten is: a) God is always faithful to His promise no matter how much we
fail. God is faithful even when we are failures. We know that principle and
that is what exaggerates the grace of God, and this is what this whole episode
does. We can’t outdo God’s grace and no matter what the situation is, no matter
what failures we may have in our past, we understand that especially in the
church age when we know that Jesus Christ has paid the price for all of our
sins; and because we are accepted into God’s presence on the basis of Christ’s
righteousness (not ours), and that puts us in the position of strength so that
we can live life with a tremendous sense of confidence and energy because we
are secure in that relationship with God; b) God goes beyond His promise. God’s
grace goes beyond our thoughts and imagination. It is more than we could ever
ask for. In Philippians 4:19
we have a promise related to this for the church age believer: NASB
“And my God will supply all your needs according [according to a standard] to
His riches in glory in Christ Jesus.” The riches in Christ Jesus are beyond
anything that we could ever imagine. We could never outdo that resource, that
reservoir of wealth that God has because it is infinite; [c] It is here that we
see Solomon demonstrating in his life the principle which he states so clearly
in Proverbs 1:7 NASB “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of
knowledge [wisdom].” We see that played out in his life as a young man and
through the first twenty years or so of his reign when he was walking with God.
It was the fear of the Lord that was the starting point for his success.
Everything in his life was there because he has his relationship with God
squared away and secure from the very beginning.
1 Kings 9:10 NASB “It
came about at the end of twenty years in which Solomon had built the two
houses, the house of the LORD and the king’s house.” So the first thing that we
focus on is Solomon’s building program and his alliance with Hiram the king of Tyre. [11] “(Hiram king of Tyre had supplied Solomon with cedar and cypress timber
and gold according to all his desire), then King Solomon gave Hiram twenty
cities in the land of Galilee.” What we learn from this is the tremendous trade agreement that took
place between Hiram and Solomon. As Hiram provides the material for the
building of the temple and palace Solomon is going to pay him. Solomon gave
Hiram twenty cities and for some reason Hiram was no pleased with this.
1 Kings 9:12 NASB
“So Hiram came out from Tyre to
see the cities which Solomon had given him, and they did not please him.
[13] He said, ‘What are these cities which you have given me, my brother?’ So
they were called the land of Cabul to this day.” The word “cabul”
indicates some kind of worthless land, something that is good for nothing. It
seems that Hiram just didn’t appreciate this gift in light of all that he did
and he ended up giving this land back to Solomon, according to 2 Chronicles
8:2. [14] “And Hiram sent to the king 120 talents of gold.” That is 9000 lbs of
gold. Most of this gold is melted down and put into the temple. That is why the
temple of Solomon was considered an incredibly glorious thing. As one would walk into Jerusalem in the early morning and the sun was coming up over
the Mount of Olives it would hit that gold building, and the brilliance
of it was almost blinding. There was no place like that in all the earth. That
is the theme of this whole section. It is because of God’s blessing of Solomon
because of his walk with the Lord, because of His blessing of Israel, that there is no place like this in all the earth. The
amount that they had of gold and silver is just beyond our comprehension, and
that is because of God’s blessing on Israel and making it stand out among all the nations of the
earth.
So the first thing that we
note is how Solomon dealt with his trade partner, Hiram, and that is covered in
1 Kings 9:10-14. We see the tremendous wealth of that project. Then the second thing
that we see is an additional note in relation to his construction project. It
starts off talking about the labour force that Solomon conscripted. He really
had two forces. One was a slave-labour force, vv. 20-22 NASB “{As
for} all the people who were left of the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, who were not of the sons of Israel,
their descendants who were left after them in the land whom the sons of Israel
were unable to destroy utterly, from them Solomon levied forced laborers, even to this day. But Solomon did
not make slaves of the sons of Israel; for they were men of war, his servants, his princes,
his captains, his chariot commanders, and his horsemen.”
The Jews were not forced
into slavery but they were also organised into different teams related to
labour and to the military because as the wealth of Israel expands under the blessing of God they have to
protect their wealth. They have to have a standing army in order to protect the
nation against marauding bands who would seek to plunder them and attack them.
Four things in the
building project: the house of the Lord [temple], the palace of the king, the Millo, and the wall of Jerusalem. Then three cities are mentioned and they are in
different parts of the land. They are key cities for Solomon. The first
mentioned is the farthest to the north, Hazor,
located about 10 miles to the north of the Sea of Galilee. 1 Kings 9:15 NASB “Now this is
the account of the forced labor which King Solomon
levied to build the house of the LORD, his own house, the Millo,
the wall of Jerusalem, Hazor, Megiddo, and Gezer.” Walls were constructed and the fortification was
put there in the north in order to protect the land from invaders. This was a
chariot city. Megiddo is not at the northern part of the region of Galilee but is about two thirds of the way up. Gezer sat astride a major trade route that came up from Egypt. 1 Kings 9:16 NASB “{For} Pharaoh king of
Egypt had gone up and captured Gezer and burned it
with fire, and killed the Canaanites who lived in the city, and had given it
{as} a dowry to his daughter, Solomon’s wife.” What that did was open up the
trade route and now there was a free flow of goods from Egypt all the way to Israel, up the coast to Lebanon and modern Turkey. So we see that what undergirds
a lot of this relates to economics, that God was giving them military strength
and power so that they were able to open up trade routes and it developed a
monopoly. Israel controlled all the major trade routes and took
tribute from everybody. Hiram and Solomon basically controlled all trade in the
ancient world and this is part of the way God expanded the power and the
privilege of Israel. And there is nothing wrong with that.
What the Bible shows is
that everything that happens in history, which includes economics, the rise and
the fall of empires, has to do ultimately with the plan of God, the purposes of
God, and the spiritual richness of the people and their relationship with God. When
we are studying the Word of God and are doing the things that God says to do—because
God is the creator of everything in the universe, the political and economic
laws, and things work the way they do because God designed them that way—when we
are walking in conformity to the creator then the unseen consequences of that,
the residual effects of that are material blessing and stability. But it is not
a direct line cause and affect, it is the unseen consequences, the unintended consequences,
of having that rich spiritual life and people living and thinking in a way that
conforms to reality as God defined it, and not according to their own psychotic
wish. The more that people and the nation get away from God’s Word, the more
they get away from worshipping God as the creator and understanding the
principles that He built into the creation, the further they drift from that
they begin to live on that, begin to send money they don’t have, begin to
misidentify problems, begin to make bad decisions from positions of weakness,
and there starts to be a build-up of negative effects and consequences and the
realisation of a lot of unintended consequences.
The other cities mentioned
are down in the south in Judah and are designed to be fortifications in order to
protect the southern border from any military incursion. So what we see here is
a string security for the nation, a strong economy, but what gives the whole
situation its real strength is their obedience to the Lord, which is seen in
Solomon. Solomon is so strong in his spiritual life he becomes a spiritual
leader for the people, setting that example, and it has a motivating trickle
down effect throughout the entire nation.
1 Kings 9:19 NASB
“and all the storage cities which Solomon had, even the cities for his chariots
and the cities for his horsemen, and all that it pleased Solomon to build in
Jerusalem, in Lebanon, and in all the land under his rule.” Verses
20-22 describes his organisation of various labour forces.
1 Kings 9:25 NASB “Now
three times in a year Solomon offered burnt offerings and peace offerings on
the altar which he built to the LORD, burning incense with them {on the altar} which {was}
before the LORD. So he finished the house.” That is a reminder in
this section of the strength of Solomon’s spiritual life and his relationship
with the Lord, and this would have been in relationship to the three annual feasts
that required all Jews to come to Jerusalem. This would have been the time of Passover or the
feats of unleavened bread, later it would be Pentecost, etc.
1 Kings 9:28 NASB
“They went to Ophir and took four hundred and twenty
talents of gold from there, and brought {it} to King Solomon.” Nobody knows
where Ophir is. 420 talents of gold is 32,000 lbs or 16 tons. This indicates the wealth of Israel under Solomon.
The point of all of this
is that God’s grace is beyond anything that we could possibly imagine. When we
walk with the Lord and he is our priority in life then God is the one who is
going to bless us beyond anything that we could imagine. That is not to say
that it is going to be material in terms of our bank account. It can be in
numerous ways that God is going to bless and prosper us but it is the result of
making our relationship with God the number one priority in life.