I Kings 11:1-10

The problem is one of dedication. What was Solomon dedicated to? He wasn't very dedicated to God for very long after the beginning. He was dedicated to his projects, wasn't he? Dedicated to building Jerusalem, building the temple, building his home, building botanical gardens, building things that had to do with expanding his great, overweening vanity.

He ignored what God said in Deuteronomy 17. (That's what it draws our attention to here in I Kings 11.) He ignored what God said in Deuteronomy 17, and that was sin. Unfortunately, unlike David, Solomon did NOT have the spiritual resources to recover from what he did. David recovered when he sinned—because he had a relationship with God. Even though he sinned, he would bounce back from it.

It says in verse 4, that Solomon "clung to" his wives. Normally, that would be good. A man should cling to his wife—cleave to his wife. The problem was that Solomon cleaved to the wrong women! That was the problem, and his attachment to them led him astray. As he tolerated their worship of other gods right in his home, his resistance wore down and he became increasingly vulnerable. Before long, he was participating in the worship of their gods. And once he was accustomed to it, it wore away at his loyalty—as each compromise made the next step easier. His vanity deceived him into feeling that his strength and resolve were so great that he would not fall. But he did. And he paid a bitter price.

Now, one of the deceptive aspects to what Solomon did is something that any of us could fall prey to. It doesn't have to be foreign women. It doesn't have to be something like a hobby, or whatever. I'm thinking now of religion, because this is what especially entrapped him—through his wives. One of the deceptive aspects of this is that there is a similarity of terminology in virtually every religion.

Can you name a Christian religion that doesn't use the terminology "born again," "salvation," "saved," "redemption"? We could go on and on. "Justification," "mercy," "kindness," "forgiveness," "grace." All Western religions (and maybe now even some of these New Age religions) share some of the same terminology, but the theology behind the terms is radically different.

You can be sure that - in Solomon's day - the religion of Ashtoreth, Molech, Baal, Chemosh, and all of these others used terminology very similar to the terminology that was being used in Israel, but the theology was vastly different. Radically different! And here's the problem. This is what trapped Solomon. Once a comfortable syncretism is accepted, God is gradually neglected and idolatry adopted.