Bible Commentaries

Solomon and Toleration

1 Kings 11:6-8

I. There is a proverb that tells us that "no one became thoroughly bad all at once," "Nemo repente fit turpissimus". And so it was with Solomon; as the stream of his career sweeps by us in Holy Scripture, windows, as it were, are opened for us through which we gaze out on that sunny flood, so full of promise, carrying on its bosom such rich opportunities and varied treasures, and we note that as it gets wider it loses its pure beauty, as it gets deeper it parts with its simplicity. When we see Solomon again he is the liberal patron of error. He is not an idolater; it would not be fair to call him that. But he would tell us that "he is no bigot," that the Sidonians and the Moabites were sincere in what they believed and practised, that his first duty was to the empire, and to consolidate the acquisitions which he had made; that after all there is an element of truth underlying all religion; "all worships are true". It always sounds well to be tolerant; but believe me it is a deadly thing to be indifferent. Depend upon it, when Solomon says "I do not care in the least what form of religion I follow," when he attends the temple services in the morning, and some other imported religion in the afternoon, and lets his Egyptian wife take him to a third in the evening, he is not tolerant; be is indifferent.

II. But Solomon does not stop at undenominationalism. No one does. It is an impossible position. He settles down a step further into aestheticism, the worship of the beautiful, the luxurious, the fascinating. We detect and we detest the hollow ring of insincerity which hangs round the utterance which does not come from the heart. And so it is with worship that means nothing, which does not spring from any conviction, any sense of God, but which only tickles a man's sense of novelty, or languidly appeals to his aesthetic tastes. Solomon was not spreading religion when he erected the numerous shrines for the manifold superstitions of the East, and their attractive rites. He was degrading it, he was vitiating the religious instinct and depriving the religious sense. Let us remember that all the beauty, all the magnificence of the services of the Church are for the honour and glory of God, and that if we fail to honour Him, fail to find Him, fail to worship Him, they only add to our own condemnation.

III. But the worship of aestheticism has no finality about it. Do not suppose it, for one moment, if any of you have given up vital belief, if you have ceased to believe in God and his Sacraments, that you will be able to go on finding religious satisfaction in beautiful sounds and artistic sights: you will either get better, or you will get worse, and it is terribly easy to get worse. The end of Solomon's career is not encouraging; the least you can say of it 1 Kings 11:9

This is a very sad chapter. It recalls at once the greatness of the opportunity that Solomon had—what Solomon might have been. Solomon is a type for us of degeneration—that falling away from that which we might have become, wasting the opportunities that have been given to us, and so slipping downward instead of progressing upward. When we look on the character of 1 Kings 11:31-32

I. Look at some portions of the plan of God, regarded from the side of His wise omnipotence. Is this world a failure? Does it whirl unchecked and uncontrolled along an aimless path, where luck and fortune and chance are the apparent and only guide to its caprice? Have vice and violence and cunning on the whole the upper hand in the control of the world? No! Remember that God is dealing with a fallen world, where the measures which He takes must be largely remedial, and tending towards a future rather than self-sufficient in the present. This power of God is displayed in the progress which is made, in spite of all the broken surface of storm-water scattered by the wind and driven by the tempest. Look out over the world and you will see progress—you cannot deny it—tending towards a renewal of that time when in the beginning God saw everything that He had made, and behold it was very good; while by the side of progress we see the unerring punishment which overtakes sin and evil—retribution we call it—a sign that God has given us a law which cannot be broken.

II. Equally shallow is the criticism which would believe the purpose of God to have failed in his Church. The Church is God's kingdom set up for the better management of the world. Wherever you go, even to the remotest parts of this realm, you find the beneficent action of the law securing you freedom and enriching you with privileges. If you pause to think at all, you will feel that life is fuller and richer for you by means of the civilization which shelters and develops it. In like manner the Church was meant to embrace us with a scheme of beneficence, to protect us from spiritual evil, to secure us our rights, and privileges, to help us in the midst of a fallen world. It is God's method of government that we may get the greatest good and the least harm out of the world where He has placed us. And most emphatically the Church has not been a failure. When Judaism despises the Gospel, the Gospel is carried to the Gentiles; when the wave is driven back on the shore of the West it laps up in a wider flood on the East; when it surges back from the East and West it is driven up with vigour further into the North or down into the South.

III. But there is another region yet, a region of which all of us know something, where we are apt to charge God with failure, and upbraid Him with the fickleness of His gifts. I mean the region of our own souls. Men turn round on the Old Bible and say it has failed; on the simple life of prayer and devotion, and say it has proved powerless to effect its purpose. Would that we realized more fully the love, the wonderful economy of the purpose of God. What can be more sad than the complete breakdown of the moral sense in the heart once alive unto God. Wise Solomon sunk in sensuality; David, whose heart was responsive to every ripple of the Divine breast, dull and insensate; the altar of God spurned, Sunday desecrated; evil eagerly followed; the shame of vice causing no blush, the meanness of it no compunction! And yet God's purpose survives in another way. Magdalen stands before the world to cheer it with the sight of a penitent love, more deep, more ultra, because like a precious flower, it has been snatched out of the abyss of sin. If ever you have been religious, when you are now cold and dead, cherish that seed of life. God means yet again to revive it, if you will let Him.

—W. C. E. Newbolt Words of Exhortation, p63.

References.—XII:8.—R. Hiley, A Year's Sermons, vol. ii. p78. XII:21-24.—F. D. Maurice, Prophets and Kings, p87. XII:23-25.—W. G. Horder, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xi. p62.