In embracing all of God’s lavish gifts, as he aged Solomon spurned the Giver and so lost it all.
It seemed that Solomon had a voracious appetite for the three Ws. First was Wisdom. He was a student of the humanities, a writer of proverbs and songs, with a knowledge of trees and animals, birds, reptiles, and fish. He could answer the Queen of Sheba’s hardest riddles. He learned farming techniques and oversaw massive building projects. He floated Israel’s first navy and managed a massive empire all the way to the Euphrates. And, as we have discussed, the second W was Wealth, making him the richest man in the world. The third W? “King Solomon loved many foreign women…from the nations of whom the Lord had said to the children of Israel, ‘You shall not intermarry with them, nor they with you. Surely they will turn away your hearts after their gods.’ Solomon clung to these in love. And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines…For it was so, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned his heart after other gods; and his heart was not loyal to the Lord his God” (1 Ki 11:1-4). Notice it was “when Solomon was old” that he strayed from the Lord. Yes, as the poet C.C. Miller has written, “’Twas a sheep, not a lamb, that strayed away In the parable Jesus told, A grown-up sheep that strayed away From the ninety and nine in the fold.” We aren’t beyond danger until we’re Home. To keep these 1,000 women happy, he constructed temples to their pagan gods and goddesses so that, by amalgamating the deities of all the Canaanites, there were more gods in Israel than there had been in Canaan! No wonder God said, “I will surely tear the kingdom away from you” (v 11). In reality, they had already torn it from God and given it to their pagan idols. The kingdom was tottering, ready to collapse.