Solomon

Hello and welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything else along the way. I’m your host, Bryan Broome, and I’m joined by Greg Uttinger and Emily Maxson.

Today we’ll be discussing the reign and mistakes – mostly the mistakes – of King Solomon, and maybe how we can avoid some of the same problems, not in a moralistic kind of way, just an analytical kind of way, if you will. Greg, why don’t you go ahead and start us off.

I suppose that of all the Old Testament characters there are to know about, even small children know about Solomon, something about Solomon in all his glory being arrayed in better clothes than flowers. They know that and they know about not cutting the baby in half, and they may even know that he built this temple thing. It’s amazing what small children do and do not know about the Bible, but they’ve probably heard of Solomon, of course, who is David’s son.

He was a son by Bathsheba, the woman with whom David had committed adultery, and yet God did not require David to divorce her and this son. He sent Nathan the prophet and called his name Jedidiah, which is ‘beloved of the Lord,’ so we have this up front that God loves Solomon. In evidence, he ends up writing three books of scripture – Proverbs, Song of Solomon, and Ecclesiastes – and he’s the wisest man ever. What could possibly go wrong here?

Pride.

He can be wise and also a sinner.

He specifically asked for wisdom to judge Israel, but even that kind of deserted him.

For those who do not know his story, we talked a little bit about not dividing the baby apart last time. Beyond that, the next big thing I suppose is construction of the temple. David had wanted to do it, to build a palace for God, and God had said, “No, your hands are full of blood and you’re not the man to do it. Your son will be a man of peace,” and Solomon – Shalom means peace – gets to do it.

He’s a type and figure of Jesus. He is the wisest of men. Kings and wise men from across the world come to hear his wisdom, including the Queen of Sheba. Probably everyone knows that story. I don’t know why, but they do. He builds the temple of the Lord. He’s the king of Israel, and in his days everyone sits under their vine and fig tree and none makes them afraid.

We even get descriptions of his temple because he feeds his servants well, is extremely hospitable, and has just plenty of food, delicacies and such, to give to those who come to visit him and who want to hear about him.

In the process of building the temple he also builds his own palace, which is adjoined to it, because as an adopted son of God he, unlike Saul, gets to live next door to dad, as it were. His palace is an adjunct to Yahweh’s palace.

Many good things go into the palace and the temple he builds. It’s huge. It’s glorious. It’s one of the wonders of the ancient world. It actually puts most of the seven wonders of the ancient world to shame in terms of beauty and glory. The pyramids were bigger, but that’s about all they had going for them.

You mean that gigantic triangles aren’t? Pythagoras disagrees.

Don’t they collect energy from the stars, or are landing bases for motherships or whatever?

Yeah, they’re spaceships…on TV.

So is everybody else. Aliens, yes. Or you go down the other trail that Solomon is one of the key members of founding freemasonry, but let’s just skip that. Everybody wants a piece of Solomon. Everyone wants to borrow Solomon for something.

His temple was similar to the tabernacle, but much larger – more light, more menorahs, more tables of showbread. The laver was no longer a laver, but it was a huge brazen sea supported by 12 brazen oxen. On top of that there were water chariots that at least in theory could carry water out, so images of God’s word and Spirit going out to the Gentile worlds, but rather the Gentile world came to see it because it was really cool and beautiful.

In addition, we get orchestras and choirs singing the Word of God, because by now most of the psalms were completed. What God’s people had not had before, the spoken sung and musically played Word of God was available. Anytime you went into the temple you could probably hear someone singing the Word of God, and we all know that if you can sing something it’s a whole lot easier to memorize. So there was a lot going on here.

That’s the only reason I memorized the Apostle’s Creed in junior high was because of Rich Mullins.

So we’ve got all this going, but at the same time Solomon engages in foreign trade, which is in itself not a bad thing. We look at our federal government and supposedly the federal government is a non-profit organization, in more ways than one. It doesn’t supposedly do business, but in that day kings were in this awkward equipoise between being private citizens with lots of money, and being public figures who had to take care of the nation. So kings would get lots of money, but then they were expected to do stuff with that money to benefit the nation.

We don’t pay our president billions of dollars and say, “And go use this to defend us and enhance our cities and build these canals,” which wouldn’t happen, but he was doing all this. Some of it was okay-ish.

That’s a really interesting framework distinction. For us, the president is an employee of the federal government, whereas the king is really the person of the State, which as Americans we don’t believe in personal embodiments, which I feel like gives us trouble with Christianity in general.

I think that even the English monarchy did not quite feel comfortable with one person being the embodiment of the State. Even if they saw the monarch as the head of the State, there was still also the Parliament.

Yeah, there were always limitations going back to the Anglo-Saxons and before. There was always a balance to the king, and yet that idea that the king is somehow married to the people and married to the land does exist.

I was just reading a mystery story, and I forget the name of the author, someone I haven’t read in ages, and the policeman was struggling with this idea. He’s investigating a murder that takes place at an earl’s castle. It’s set in the present, and he realizes, “What is an earl anyway? Oh, he has this function in terms of the king or queen, and the things that earls are supposed to do with these kinds of things – oh wait, isn’t that what I do now as a policeman? Huh!” and he struggles with it. It’s not a major theme, but it is something that he thinks about along the way.

It brings up that the things the cop does, he does in the name of the queen and under her authority and for her welfare and the welfare of her people. It’s just an interesting thing that we don’t think about. We don’t have a king or queen.

There’s a great line in Leverage where someone asks a Marine, “So are you married?”

“Yes, I’m married to the Constitution of the United States.”

Okay. Not quite the same thing, but patriotism and all that.

It’s interesting too because my wife Emily and I have been watching through a show called Merlin, that I think I recommended on the last episode. It’s very funny to me because the idea of the sovereign being married to the land has shown up several times, especially when the druids show up and start messing with things.

At one point a unicorn was killed by Prince Arthur, and as a result all of Camelot suffered from drought and famine magically induced. It was very interesting because of course the main characters being our modern contemporary viewpoint characters were like, “But that’s not fair. I’m the one that did the thing wrong. You can’t just punish everyone else,” but at that time that would have been the expected thing. “Oh yeah, the sovereign messed up, so the land is suffering because of it, and he needs to atone.”

The grail legends are full of that. The fisher king has been wounded between the legs, and because of that he’s non-procreative and therefore the land is suffering. The land is wasted, and until someone can find him and basically take his place and answer the questions about the grail, the land cannot be healed.

T.S. Eliot brings that forward in his poem “The Wasteland” with the same kind of imagery. The land is waste because the king – I suppose modern man now taking the place of the king – is himself empty, and so the land also is suffering. Everything is suffering.

You can even draw that to today with our culture’s current confusion over gender. I just read a really great article. I think it was published today by Carl Trueman in First Things talking about that very thing, about our confusion. The topical thing from the past week was, “I don’t know what a woman is. I’m not a biologist.”

An actual thing said by a Supreme Court nominee in front of the Senate, by the way.

Oh, that’s what she said. All I saw was, “So-and-so is in trouble because of a passing remark.” I thought, “What did she say?”

Oh no, it was no passing remark.

No, it was a direct answer. But you have that issue and it really stems from not knowing what a person is. More broadly speaking it does have a national effect, what the majority of the nation actually believes and is espousing.

Last night at Bible study, Bryan, we were talking about covenant. I haven’t talked about covenant for a long time, and I asked a rhetorical but leading question. I said, “Is our cat Pepper within the covenant?” and I think everyone was suspecting it was a trick question or something. I said, “I’ll give you a hint – our cat. She’s ours and I’m God’s, so does God’s covenant reach to her or not?”

It was actually an anti-Baptist argument sort of, because if the cat’s in covenant then what’s it say about children?

Well, cats don’t have freewill, so…

There you go. Freewill screws everything up. Oh but wait, we’re talking about Sovereign Grace Baptists. There’s the rub. It makes more sense for Arminian Baptists, which is kind of where I ended up arguing, “If God is sovereign, then he claims everything I am. That includes my sexuality, my future, my children, and how I nurture my children and what I can require of them while they’re in my house, like going to church.” It's not various independent circles of autonomy. This is sovereign covenant authority and love.

That said, that brings us to Solomon.

But king Solomon loved many strange women, together with the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, and Hittites, of the nations concerning which the LORD said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall not go in to 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 seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred 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 Sidonians, and after Milcom 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 an high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, in the hill that is before Jerusalem, and for Molech, the abomination of the children of Ammon. And likewise did he for all his strange wives, which burnt incense and sacrificed unto their gods.

And the LORD was angry with Solomon, because his heart was turned from the LORD God of Israel, which had appeared unto him twice, and had commanded him concerning this thing, that he should not go after other gods. But he kept not that which the LORD commanded.

What happens next belongs more I think to the next discussion, but Solomon’s fall we see beginning here. There are hints of coming attractions in the previous chapter. He’s collecting an awful lot of gold – not even silver, but gold – and he’s buying horses from Egypt. He’s engaging in arms trade, because horses were aggressive weapons.

The thing is that the law in Deuteronomy 17 had said, “You’re going to have a king one day,” and there were a number of things required of the king, like copying out the law of God and knowing it inside and out so you can apply it, being one of the common people and such. But three particular prohibitions were don’t multiply gold and silver to yourself, don’t multiply horses, and don’t multiply wives.

When we think of inflation we normally think of fiat money being printed by the government. It’s one of the rare cases in world history where gold created inflation because there was so much of it in Israel. Silver was worth nothing, we’re told. It drove silver off the market, there was so much gold available.

And so much silver available, obviously. If silver had been more rare than gold, then silver could have been the chief currency.

That’s true.

Now the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was six hundred threescore and six talents of gold.

I don’t know if you caught that number spoken out that way, but that’s 666. When I was in college, one of my friends asked, “Do you think that means anything?” I said, “Yeah, it means he got 666 talents of gold.” I didn’t understand biblical theology very well at that point.

Although it’s correct as far as it goes.

Historically it is indeed what happened, but God is laying the foundation for other numbers that are going to come along, other uses of that number, so that’s a little spooky when that number shows up at that point.

How many years before the writing of Revelation is this? 1,000?

Yes, almost exactly, as a matter of fact.

Then we find out that Solomon was horse trading with Egypt. We have records that he kept a lot of the horses and had horse stalls and such by the lots, but he also sold a lot of the horses to other kings like the kings of Syria, who later would use them to attack Israel, so there was a good move. “Let’s arm our future enemies. That always helps.”

The proud long tradition of that in the past several decades.

“Who can we arm this month?”

I think we’ve kind of agreed that we want to talk about the third thing, and that’s the strange women he married. First of all, strange means foreign. It’s outside the covenant.

It’s not that they were bizarre or just funny.

“That one’s really strange!”

“She has three arms!” No, Solomon in Proverbs had warned his son about strange women, but yet that’s exactly what he falls for. In fact, when he came to the throne he was already married, interestingly enough, to an Ammonite. Rehoboam’s mother, Solomon’s heir, was an Ammonite. That’s a little weird, and we never find any other explanation. It seems too hard to read an Ammonite into Song of Solomon as the bride he’s celebrating, so that leaves some interesting questions of what’s happening there. She does bear him a son, Rehoboam. We don’t find that any of these other women bore him sons. They may have, but they’re not highlighted anyplace.

It is also interesting, though, just something that I pieced together. If the bride of Song of Solomon is a Gentile, then that is yet another prefiguring of the Gentiles being brought in.

Yeah, and I think you can make an argument that the bride is. It’s hard to read exactly what’s going on. She talks about her skin being dark, but she says it’s because she’s been kept out in the sun working in the vineyards and not been able to take care of herself. Does that mean she was naturally darker skinned and thus perhaps from another ethnic group? Or does it just mean that the bride was someone who came out of the fields and out of poverty and had just worked all her life? We don’t know the answer to that exactly.

The Bible says that King Solomon loved these women. He clave unto them in love. The Bible uses the word love, as we do, in lots of different ways and sometimes there’s almost a sardonic or sarcastic overtone in the word.

Let’s put this in perspective. This seems to fall after the completion of the temple. The temple took 20 years and he reigned for 40, so he’s got 20 years to accumulate 1,000 wives.

That’s busy.

That’s busy. That’s roughly a wife a week.

That’s the new reality show on TLC.

There’s no way you can define this as love, unless by loving you simply mean a moment of passion. “We’re on the clock here. I have to be over my passion for you in about 3 days and 6 hours, because I’ve got to go find someone else.”

The way he treated these women is abominable, because once they entered his harem it is unlikely in most cases they ever saw him again in any romantic or sexual way. He basically took from them their virginity and left them nuns for the rest of their lives without male companionship, unless they cheated on the side.

Now, he made sure that they had everything else they wanted – beautiful clothes, attendants, jewels, all of that – but they don’t have exactly the thing he promised them, a husband, because he’s already on to wife 5, 6, 7, 8, 20, 50 or so, or wife 999 by the time we’re done. The purpose of the wives generally in that age was as bonds for contracts or what we could call foreign treaties, non-aggression treaties.

“We want to make sure that we don’t have problems with your nation, so I’ll marry your daughter and you can marry someone from my court, and that way we’re all one big happy family and we wouldn’t conceive of attacking each other because we’re all family. On the other hand, if either of us tries, we have ready-made hostages.” That’s not really a flattering way of doing things.

Not to mention it’s also a political treaty with people who are opposed to you and opposed to your God.

Yes, because if they were servants of your God this would not be necessary. As long as you’re both serving the same God you can have some friendly words on paper, but basically you’re going to hold each other accountable and you’re going to get along most of the time. It’s when I’m worshiping Jehovah and you’re worshiping Baal and you’re worshiping Molech and you’re worshiping Zeus and you’re worshiping Ra that there seems to be a certain lack of unity.

Now, all the others could say, “Well, you know, it’s all the same god at bottom,” and given their metaphysics, their philosophy of religion, they’d be telling the truth. For them, God had many faces. A god in one country has a counterpoint in the god of another country, or “We have just more of god than you do, and our more of god just beat up your less of god.” They could handle it because none of their gods were exclusive. They were gods for the moment, gods for this particular place, and if our gods win, cool. But Jehovah claimed absolute sovereignty over all the nations of the world and said there was none like him, and he was not to be put on the same level as any other god, and Solomon knew this.

God appeared to him twice and warned him about this very thing. The temptation is going to be to worship other gods, because that means buying into the religious philosophies of these nations, swearing by their gods to create mutual defense treaties or non-aggression treaties – a big political thing.

I believe it was President Jimmy Carter who went to Japan and, in the spirit of cooperation and recognizing the unity of all gods, laid a wreath at a Shinto shrine – Jimmy Carter who had coined the political phrase “born again.” It turned out he didn’t mean what the Bible meant, but it took a while for us to figure that one out.

“We want Japan on our side, so we need to placate them in terms of their religion.” I don’t know if anyone has really noticed that their religion is still emperor worship, but that’s something we’re going to have to deal with sometime.

I think some people have noticed that, yes.

They’re rewriting the history books to show how their nation was sold out and how they are still the greatest nation ever.

Well, if their nation is the greatest nation ever, how did it ever get so oblivious to be sold out? That’s what I want to know.

“We were betrayed. That’s it. We were betrayed.”

“So you’re not strong enough to withstand betrayal? Awesome.”

“We’re so kind and gentle-hearted, we would never suspect anyone of treachery, but we won’t make that mistake again.”

However it plays out, this is the kind of thing Solomon was up against, and the solution was simply to trust Jehovah. Trust his promises, his words, his protection. Trust him and obey. It means you have to walk in God’s commandments.

It’s also interesting too, I just thought of a connection back to the patriarchs and how not trusting the promises of God led to extra marriages. Interesting how that lines up so often.

Yeah. What God had told Israel was, “You shall not go into them, neither shall they come into you, for they surely will turn away your heart after their gods.” God laid it out. “You marry them, you will worship their gods.” It was not, “Hey, why don’t you go marry them so they can worship your God.” That never works. Missionary dating has strong limitations.

Hashtag #datetosave.

I know of exactly one person where that worked out, and dozens and dozens and dozens where it didn’t.

I can think of one that kind of worked out, I guess. She was a young Christian and she was not discipled well and she didn’t know much, and she had a tendency of dating whoever and getting involved with whoever. But finally she got to the point of realizing, “No, that’s wrong. God does not want me to do that. I will not do that again.”

Then a very nice young man and comes and tries to court her and she says, “No, you’re not a Christian.”

“Oh. Well, I can become one.”

“No you can’t. It doesn’t work like that.”

“Well, show me how to become a Christian. Talk to me about this Christianity thing. I’ll become a Christian.”

“No, it doesn’t…” but he persisted, and she tried to avoid him, and he ended up going to our pastor and talking through the faith, and to some other people, and eventually the young lady said to our pastor, “Look, he claims he’s a Christian now. What do you think?”

“I don’t know. I’ll talk to him and see.”

“Yeah, it sounds like he’s a Christian now.”

What? No! They ended up getting married, and as far as I know they’re happy together.

I was also thinking of another young lady who was going out with an unbeliever, just a single date. It was apparently not a big deal in and of itself, but someone kidded her about missionary dating. She said, “Missionary dating? Religion was the furthest thing from my mind.”

Great.

That’s the problem with missionary dating.

I think she thought that over after a while and figured out that was not the way to say that.

We’ve been talking about this close connection between God and his people to whom he has said to be married. Jesus is our husband, we are his bride. A king marries a bride and therefore ought to be faithful to her.

In Judges we saw what happened when the Levites – the pastors, the Bible teachers – weren’t faithful to their wives, did not protect their wives, did not secure them, and then the priests in 1 Samuel who start raping the nuns at the tabernacle door. The Bible keeps pounding this in.

When we get to the New Testament and the letter to Timothy, one of the first things we’re told is that elders and deacons are to be a one-woman man because we’re imaging Christ, and you can’t image Christ and have your emotions and commitments and sexual activities spread over 1,000 women. It’s not loving to them. It is not kind. The fact that you’re paying them well means they’re really pricey whores, but even then they’re being used.

They’ve been put into this position by their fathers, who are kings. They don’t have much to say about it. They are a tool of State. They’re a tool of politics, and what they get out of it is yes, comfy and cush, but not true marital fulfillment by any means. This is what Solomon went along with, so we can look at it from that point of view. How he treats women is just really, really bad.

We can also, as Emily suggested before we started, look at what this means for Israel. He’s supposed to be a husband to Israel, prefiguring Christ and his relationship with the church, but Israel is the one who suffers. He’s selling armaments to nations that are one day going to turn on Israel. He’s calling the other gods’ judgement on the monarchy. Eventually his sins are going to lead to a divided kingdom before this is all done.

There are political and sociological and even climatic issues involved here. Weather gets involved. The law said, “I’ll close up heaven.” The heaven is brass and the earth is iron. It won’t produce. Your crops won’t produce when God is offended because, as you were talking about earlier, we’re in this together. This is a covenant unity and covenant representatives can make decisions and actions that call down God’s wrath upon the whole body. Solomon preeminently was such a wonderful picture, or could have been such a wonderful picture of Jesus, but he goes off after that.

I was thinking of this a while ago in a conversation about immigration, actually. I think somebody was quoting David French or somebody was like, “Immigration is the loving Christian thing – open borders” or something along those lines. A friend and I were both kind of like, “I don’t think the Bible prescribes that. In fact, the job of the government is to take care of the nation.” We don’t want to confuse the free offer of the gospel with the free offer of America. Those are not the same thing. The obligation of the government is to the country that is their home.

I support lots of immigration, but let’s keep things in perspective here. You have a covenant relationship with the nation for which you are working. You don’t have a covenant obligation to everyone who wants to live there.

In Israel there were open borders for people who came peaceably, but peaceably meant you had to abide by the laws of the land, and one of those laws was you don’t get to worship your god out in public. Now, that doesn’t mean that they had a right to worship their god privately. It just meant that the State didn’t have the power to go snooping and looking through your window to see what you were doing behind closed doors.

As with so many things that the Bible condemns, it condemns them and God will be judge, but it doesn’t necessarily give human government the power to go and look for them. It drives sin underground, which is where it belongs, and ultimately only God will judge some things.

In terms of the United States, there was a time in the 1800s when America’s borders were relatively well open and people came from southern and eastern Europe. They came flooding in and a lot of people were concerned that this would overwhelm everything. They would settle in their little ghettos. They’d be stirred up by demigods and eventually we would see something equivalent to the French Revolution in the eastern cities.

This is in part where the plea for public schools came in. “We need to Christianize these people.” But what really happened was certainly not the public schools but it was the churches that went into the ghettos and opened Sunday Schools – schools where they taught people to read using the Bible. A lot of these people were cycled into established churches, where their faith was either matured or redirected or given birth, and America did not face that.

Today when people come across the border, they’re often outlaws with criminal records. We have no way of tracing them or following them, or when we do we ignore the fact. And we don’t see churches on the border with evangelism stations. “Okay, all you illegal immigrants come over here. We’re going to tell you about Jesus before we send you back.” The churches by and large have not taken a lead here.

Although the Bible welcomed people to Israel, it did not guarantee them automatic citizenship. Some peoples never got to be citizens, that is they could never do what we would call vote or hold office. Some could, but it took three generations. They had to assimilate into Israeli culture, meaning ultimately they did have to accept the God of Israel. They didn’t have to believe in Jehovah to live there, but if they wanted any role of leadership, this was God’s nation and you had to submit yourself to the Lord himself, so there was a plan there.

But of course if people came with weapons, that’s called invasion and that was to be repelled. If they were a bunch of cutthroats, then you do what David did. You took a band of men out and you hunted them down and you killed them all.

I think too there’s a difference, like you’re saying, between coming in to have the rights of citizenship and coming in for economic purposes functionally. Being the token Libertarian on the podcast, I really like the idea of there being borders open for free trade instead of all the nonsense and legislation that currently surrounds things like that.

I don’t think you’ll get any arguments from us on that one.

No, I didn’t think so. But obviously national defense is still a thing that you need to take into account, and you don’t automatically give everyone who comes across the right to vote.

Voting is not a human right.

Correct, because that’s the thing. Voting, or really just citizenship rights, is a right of citizenship. You wouldn’t expect to emigrate for a period of six months to the United Kingdom and then vote on Brexit, but for some reason it’s a given that anyone who comes into the United States is given voting rights, a driver’s license, and all these various types of things that functionally should be limited to American citizens.

That is actually how it works in California. If you’re listening somewhere that is not California, that is how it works here.

That’s why I left California partially. In any case, there are things that are human rights and there are things that even our Constitution recognizes as a human right – life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness in our particular secular orientation – but that doesn’t extend to every aspect of what American citizens enjoy.

Citizenship is covenant membership. If you are not under the sanctions of the covenant, that is answerable to the covenant authorities and able to be called up to execute the sanctions of government, to fight in an army or a militia if you’re male, or provide other support if you’re female…

We’re not biologists, though.

Yeah, right. If you can’t do those things, then you don’t get to tell us how we do those things, or do much of anything else actually. You’re welcome to be here and live peaceably under our laws, and if that’s economically advantageous, good for you. That’s wonderful. Maybe one day you’ll see that you really do want to be part of this great experiment in liberty, and maybe we actually need you, because some immigrants have a better clue on what liberty is than people who’ve grown up here for five generations.

Well, there’s that.

I’m reminded of the scene in 12 Angry Men where the Italian immigrant gets in the face of one of the other jurors and says, “It is a privilege to serve on a jury! This is a world where democracy and liberty and freedom and responsibility mean something. I’ve come here for this. How can you just laugh it off as something that’s too much trouble? You just want to get to a ball game and you’re going to throw this away, when you are given this great responsibility to decide a man’s life!”

Even apart from all of the initial reasons he gave, you’re deciding a man’s life. Don’t treat this frivolously.

Exactly. So some more things about Solomon. I think we need to ask ourselves, maybe without a good answer, just why Solomon did this. The obvious reason is purely political. All these 1,000 women – and only 700 were princesses, the rest were just other romantic/sexual encounters – but at least the princesses were used to worshiping their own god and having their own way. And after being here for 5, 10, 15 years, they begin to think, “I miss home and I miss my goddess, I miss my gods, I miss my pantheon. I want to worship the way I’m used to worshiping, because I don’t have any other comfort here. This god of yours is so strange. I mean he’s invisible. I can’t even see him or visualize him.

“So dear husband, in order to keep me happy and express my happiness when I write home to Daddy, my king father, wouldn’t you please arrange for me to have chapel services for my god?” And little by little, Solomon begins to give in. Of course, once you give in, all the wives now want it and he has to keep them all happy.

So politically it’s easy to see why once you go down this direction, you’re kind of screwed, but I think the question we need to consider is how did the wisest man in the history of the world, save our Lord himself, justify this or rationalize this?

What do you say when your advisors come and say, “Um, you’re introducing polytheism and idolatry just outside the temple gate on this mount over here? What’s that all about, Solomon? What are you thinking?” What does he say at that point?

Happy wife, happy life?

Religious liberty?

Yeah, it’s religious liberty, there we go. There’s that. “Surely you don’t want me to prescribe how they should worship. Isn’t freedom of religion a given in our nation? Sure, we’re keeping it quiet and out of sight. What do you want me to do, execute them or something?” or “Well, you know, an idol is nothing in the world. There’s no God but one, so this is just a matter of me exercising my Christian liberty. They can do whatever they want. These idols are just pieces of stone and wood. They don’t mean anything. If it makes them happy and keeps us from wars, isn’t that a small price to pay? It’s nothing.”

“My heart’s not in it, so it doesn’t matter.”

Yeah, “I don’t mean anything by it, so obviously it’s not really a sin.”

“I was very sincere in my worship of [Tash? 40:04]

“Yes, they’re so sincere. They found the most sincere pumpkin patch in the world and are worshiping their gods and goddesses in it. What could possibly be wrong with this great sincerity? Doesn’t God wear many faces? Isn’t he manifest in all of nature? We talk about angels and cherubim and all that. Aren’t these sort of little gods?”

“I mean if you put it in that perspective it’s alright. We can have little gods, as long as we recognize the transcendent God who lies beyond all. Our theology is big enough to accommodate that.”

“We wouldn’t want to put God into a scroll-shaped box.”

“Exactly. God is too great to be contained in any one religion.”

We could go on like this I suspect for a long time, because this is the way of the world.

The easiest game in the world to play.

To make up reasons why we don’t have to be faithful to the one true God, and why we don’t have to require that of other people. “I mean I believe in Jehovah, but who am I to force my opinions on someone else?” – the king of Israel in this case, the High Supreme Court judge, the image of Messiah.

“You’re married to these people.”

“And do you care about their souls at all? Oh, that’s right. Sincerity is enough. We don’t need anything more.”

So as we look at Solomon we see a wonderful beginning, it seems, and a horrible end. In the end God passes judgement and says that for his sins, for the idolatry that he did – not what his wives did but what he did – God’s going to rend the kingdom from him.

For David’s sake, Solomon and his heirs will retain one tribe, Judah. Actually it’s more like Judah and Benjamin, with a bunch of Levites and a bunch of people from other tribes who just had to go there because it’s a little more godly than the northern kingdom, but the kingdom is divided and the northern kingdom never recovers, and the southern kingdom has a bumpy ride until the Babylonian captivity, and in many ways it is Solomon’s fault.

One little footnote to all of this. In the days of Josiah, during his revival and his reform as he was trying to get all of the idolatry out of Judah, he finally gets around to the Mount of Olives and sees the shrines that Solomon built for his wives. This is 600 years later, give or take, and all of the intervening kings including Hezekiah had not removed them. In spite of all the great revival that Hezekiah had led four generations earlier, they hadn’t gone near them. You have to ask why not?

Well, probably because Solomon built them, and when some great person leaves something great behind, we don’t want to remove the monument, even if it’s an idol to a false god. Josiah was the only one with the guts to go and say, “It doesn’t matter. Tear it all down. It’s going out of here.”

The mountain that we know as the Mount of Olives in his day was called the Mount of Corruption because it was so full of this stuff. To what degree important people used it we have no way of knowing, but somebody was using it.

I’m reading a mystery story that involves dancing in folk religion. Among the superstitious enigma there will always be little strains of idolatry. That’s why the light of the gospel has to keep shining. We have to keep preaching and teaching the gospel over and over and over again in its most basic elements, because people are stupid. People are foolish and they will grab onto superstitious ideas. “It’s what my dad believed, and his dad before him for five generations, so we’re not going to change anything now. Besides, there’s nothing really wrong with it. It’s not really heathen.”

No, it’s wrong. God will be worshiped alone. We are to have one divine husband, one divine bridegroom, as he has one church, one bride, and he’s absolutely faithful and he calls us to be faithful in the same pattern.

As far as looking forward, as all scripture that we’re looking at now points forward to Christ, it’s an interesting parallel to me to see that what is called the Mount of Corruption is the same place that our Lord goes on the night before – or technically the night of, I forget how it would be reckoned in Jewish days – before he is crucified he goes to the Mount of Corruption and pleads for strength from his Father before going to the actual Mount of Corruption that is the worst.

Some have actually speculated that Calvary or Golgotha actually was the Mount of Olives. If nothing else, Jewish tradition said the Mount of Olives was where Isaac had been offered for sacrifice. You could look out the temple gate across the Brook Kidron and see the Mount of Olives, and they can point and say, “Right there. That’s where Abraham offered his son.”

There’s a great deal of irony and foreshadowing in all of this. The Mount of Olives had a very important role even early on and adds to this understanding of what Jesus took upon himself for us – the corruption that we earned. Even his best promises to us we corrupted, and yet he bought us all back out of all of that.

Our Lord is good. And on that note, I think that’s a good place to wrap it up. Let’s move into recommendations.

Emily, tell us about this book of yours.

I just finished reading a book that I thought was really great. It’s called The Great Sex Rescue and it’s taking a look at the most popular and most recommended books and resources on sex and marriage in the evangelical world for the past few decades, looking at the impact that those books have had, which has not been universally good.

Do you remember the names of any of these books?

One big one that features prominently is Love and Respect. I don’t remember the subtitle or the author because I had not heard of it before. There’s also Every Man’s Battle.

Was one of them Sheet Music?

Yeah. There were a lot that I’d heard of, a lot that I hadn’t heard of, a lot that I am now thankful that I had not heard of. What they’re trying to do is contribute some evidence to the conversation. They started with a survey of like 22,000 women to see what teachings they had been exposed to, what teachings they espoused, what teachings had been recommended to them, and what their lives looked like after that and because of that.

They’re not chiefly trying to create a scriptural argument. They’re trying to see what works and they deal with scripture along the way, which leads to my one thing of where there’s a hole in this book. They kind of dismiss a hierarchical view of marriage, to use their word, which they immediately conflate with power dynamics in an unhealthy way.

They do deal with the scripture of “Do not deprive one another,” which I had no idea was twisted in so many ways by so many books.

I don’t know that either, and I’m not sure I want to, but okay.

Your mental health will be better off for not knowing.

I do recommend reading this book because it’s kind of like being safe and not realizing how dangerous things can be, so I found it a really helpful book. I’m really glad to have read it and I’m recommending it left and right for my married friends. I think our generation particularly needed this book, because we’ve seen both the impact of the courtship fad – there were a lot of good things about it, but there were a lot of unintended harmful consequences…

There was a lot of legalism that went with it.

That too.

And some misunderstanding of the father’s authority and the personhood, for lack of a better word, of the young woman. She’s not a robot. She’s not your slave. She has things to say. And sometimes it did go that way.

Yeah. Then as well as that whole movement, we also have the explosion of pornography in unprecedented ways. On the one hand there’s always been porn, but on the other hand we now have the internet and tabbed browsing on the internet and smart phones. I think our generation is having to reckon with these things in ways that previous generations didn’t.

Absolutely. As an elder I can tell you that this is one of our greatest challenges within our church. Whether it be just beginning in young people, or whether it be a settled habit in older men who have a reputation for maturity and godliness, it has been an extremely destructive thing. We’ve even gotten now and then a woman confessing, “I have a problem with that, too,” which didn’t used to be a thing, but everything is changing.

Yes, the ready accessibility – click your phone and be ready to click it off again if someone walks in the room – it’s something that other generations have not had to deal with. It’s not that phones are sinful, it’s just that it makes sin so much easier. We’ve found out that we don’t have the spiritual capital, the spiritual reserves to know how to deal with it. We push it off by saying, “Well, the thing is not evil.”

“Yes, but you are.” Until you recognize that and confess that and deal with it after a gospel fashion, you’re probably going to shipwreck your marriage and your family. I have seen it happen and it is a frightening thing. If this book helps in that, that’s a good thing.

Now, this is not my recommendation obviously, but one of our dear friends gave me and my wife a book a few days before our wedding, and we looked it over the day after our wedding. It was kind of like these other ones that The Great Sex Rescue looks at.

Emily was just flipping through it and trying to see, “Okay, what’s the advice in here? I really trust the person that gave this to me. She said she didn’t look through it a whole lot with her husband, but she liked what she had seen.”

On one of the pages it was like – I’m trying to figure out how to put this delicately – it basically said, “If you want to get an idea for how the wedding night might go, then try doing things on your own a bit first.”

Oh my.

We were both like, “No. That’s wrong.” I believe that book was targeted towards Christians, but I can’t remember for certain. It’s not obviously right on that point, and potentially many, many more points that we never even bothered to look at because that was enough.

There are so many books out there that get recommended that don’t get checked thoroughly, that are just kind of, “Here, I heard this was good.”

I also think part of it comes from how we don’t talk about it very much in churches. There’s very little 1-on-1 discipleship happening, so it feels like when someone writes a book people are just like, “Oh, thank goodness somebody wrote something about this. I can hand it off to this single person who’s about to get married.”

There’s two problems with that. One, the person giving the book over gets to say, “Oh, thank goodness I don’t have to have the conversation with them directly, because that’s so awkward.” And secondly, I think it’s partially laziness as well. “I don’t want to do the work to have that conversation with them.”

I guess I could make that part of one of my recommendations. If you’re discipling someone, if you’re an older person in the church or if you have people who are your peers that are under your wing or something like that, don’t be afraid of the awkward conversations, whether it’s this kind of topic or whether it’s any other thing that might make you squirm and feel uncomfortable. Just talk to them about it like you’re a normal human being, because we need it.

I guarantee 90% of the conversations that you fear because you think they’re going to be very awkward are way less awkward than you actually think they are.

Usually. My wife just made the excellent point that when it comes to mentoring and mentee-ing, as it were, the mentor carries this kind of apprehension as well that, “I could mess up this person’s life by giving them advice,” so it’s a lot easier to say, “Oh, let me just hand you off to the expert, because I don’t feel like I’m an expert.”

That’s also something I see a lot in just broader evangelical culture, broader Christian culture. “Oh, I don’t know how to have this argument, this conversation in a natural human one-on-one way, so I’m going to link you to an article from my pastor, or to this celebrity pastor, or just listen to this sermon that my pastor preached on Sunday. The man of God, the expert, will be the one that will convince you, because I can’t do it.”

I was going to say just in passing that we in Reformed Presbyterian circles pride ourselves on how well we know doctrine, but when it comes for time to explain it, we often fall flat on our faces. We either are arrogant and deaf to the subtleties of the argument within what the person is often saying, or we suddenly realize we don’t know what in the world to say.

“I know this is right. I’ve been taught this all my life. I’ve heard these great sermons on it.”

“Well, can you explain them to me?”

“Uhhh, uhh, not as such.”

I think it does start with just ordinary things. I mean sexuality is pretty ordinary. It is a little scary, I’ll give you that.

It is private to some extent.

And rightly so, and there are some things that don’t belong necessarily in a public forum. As a high school teacher I have to be very careful about what I say, and yet I think that my students have probably heard more about sexuality from me than they have generally in their churches, and frighteningly sometimes from their parents.

I remember years ago a young man asked me, “So what exactly is lust anyway?” He asked this in class. He was a bright young man from a good family, a godly family, so I figured, “Well, if he doesn’t know, probably there are a lot of other people who don’t know,” so I told him quickly but rather bluntly. And his response was, “Whoa, I’ve got a lot of repenting to do.” But the shame was his father was an elder in a Reformed church and this young man was at least 14 or 15.

I can think of another dad, not in our tradition and not even necessarily a professing Christian, although his wife most certainly was, but I liked him. He was a good guy, a guy who worked with his hands. He somehow came to respect me because his kids had been in my classes.

He said, “My son’s getting to that age and I need to have that conversation with him. Maybe you can give me some ideas about how to explain ‘it’ to him.”

I gave him some euphemistic things he could say, because he was obviously afraid to use the proper names of any body parts. “Okay, I like that. I could do that.” Then he went away and I’m thinking, “Your son is 16. He already knows all of this, but I appreciate that now at a late point you’re trying to do the right thing.”

I believe my friend was honorable and he really thought that this was something his son would not know about. How he could not remember from his own youth I don’t know, but it was sort of, “Oh no, my boy wouldn’t even think about these things. He wouldn’t know about being sexually stimulated.” I’m still using euphemisms.

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure he does.”

Again it’s one more example of parents being afraid to talk, and nervous because they don’t know what to say, and sometimes it’s legitimate. “I screwed up in my relationships early on. I screwed up my sexuality. I have nothing to say.”

Well, God does, and sometimes we just need to read what God says and say, “Do you understand that? Let’s talk about what adultery means. Fornication – let me explain to you what that means. Lust – I can tell you what that one means. Why does God not want these things? Let’s look at Ephesians 5 and see why he doesn’t want these things.” There are things you can say.

I think I just discovered my recommendation, and that’s oddly enough Deuteronomy 6, talking about the Bible with your kids. You don’t have to be a genius and you don’t have to know everything. You can say, “I don’t know, but I’ll go find out and we can continue this conversation another time.” Or “That’s a good question and it’s kind of awkward for me, but I’ll try to give you an answer.”

This is what we should do. We don’t always, and we all screw it up sooner or later, but I think it needs to be our mindset. It’s what the Bible commands us to do. Sometimes we’re ready to teach the doctrine of the Trinity and the ontological economic Trinity, and the [inaudible 59:52] of the Spirit, and we’re not able to say, “And this is why you shouldn’t be looking at pictures of naked people.”

And it’s okay to say to your kids, “I screwed up. Here’s how. Don’t do this.” They will respect you for that.

It’s absolutely okay.

I think too along with that is that a lot of parents try to give off the aura of unfailing, unquestionable moral superiority, and if that façade is broken then so are a lot of the things that you tried to teach them when you were assuming that air. It’s so much better for you and for your children’s sake to just be honest about your own shortcomings.

If you get mad at them and you become sinfully angry, then you apologize to them and say, “That was not right of me, and the reason I can tell you that is because of this thing called humility that God has graciously given to me, and that he calls us all to have. I know that Christ has died for that sin, I’ve repented for it, and it’s covered by his blood.”

Then you can take any mistake and point them right back to Jesus, because now it’s something that you also have to appeal to for right standing with God. It’s not that the child is the one who makes mistakes against the sheer cliffs of insanity, just this unyielding wall of perfection that their parents supposedly are. That’s not how it works.

If there is one thing that parents must be, it’s vulnerable and honest and transparent. I don’t think that means you have to tell them every single sin you’ve ever committed. For one thing, it would take too long. And we must be humble.

This is kind of a reach, but when you were saying that, I went back to an old book called Robinson Crusoe, where Crusoe was explaining to Friday how forgiveness works. For those of you who do not know, Robinson Crusoe is a Christian book about Robinson Crusoe’s personal conversion. Unfortunately, that section which is the major theme of the book has been edited out of a lot of modern versions as irrelevant, but he’s trying to explain to this man who he is leading out of heathendom and idolatry – and he uses words like “the nature of the new covenant in Jesus’ blood” and “the glorious kingdom of God” and “the realities of the new birth” and how we can all be forgiven.

Friday’s response is something like, “Oh, good. You repent, I repent, same repent. We all be forgiven.”

We know that’s not going to happen, but the principle is right. He’s a little confused, but he got the spirit of it.

So that’s my recommendation. Talk to your kids about the Bible. It starts sometimes by just opening the Bible, or sometimes it’s by saying, “Hey, what happened today that’s worth talking about?”

I’m going to give my proper recommendation, so to speak. My recommendation is a web app called Notion.so. It’s so hard to describe because it kind of does everything. It’s Google Drive. It’s a task manager. It’s a calendar system if you want it to be. All these things are modular and it’s built with blocks, so you can have a page that has an inline database.

What confused me at first was that it was not like an Excel spreadsheet. It’s a true database. If you have a column, that column is the column all the way down. You can’t edit the formula partway down for one cell, so that was one thing that was confusing and a little bit difficult to work around sometimes, especially because we’re also using it at work and my goal was to “take Excel spreadsheet, put into Notion, oh no…”

It's very, very cool. One of the things that makes it most powerful is the databases and the ability to do inter-relations between databases, and even between properties within the same database. One practical function of that is you can make tasks with their own relevant sub-tasks. You can have a database that contains let’s say your teams, then you create a relation between that database and another database for tasks. You basically say, “This task is associated with this entry in the team’s database,” and all this kind of stuff, so it's very powerful in what you can eventually do with it.

I am nowhere near an expert yet, but I’d say I’m on the upper end of moderately proficient. So far it’s been great. I’ve actually put a whole bunch of things into it, and my wife has completely overhauled her productivity thing in Notion. She has our meal plans for this week, next week, and the week after that, all planned out in Notion, the to-do list for each day for each of us, her long-term plans, her short-term plans, her middle-term plans, etc.

You can really use it for a multitude of things, and the best way to kind of figure out what you can use it for is to just fiddle around with it as much as you can and come to understand what the actual functions are.

So that’s my recommendation. It’s a really great productivity tool that I love. I even put my notes for a roleplaying campaign that I am developing into Notion, and my database for the campaign has things like factions and villains and NPCs and player characters and locations, items, magical items etc, and it’s very, very cool.

Thank you both so much for joining me for this conversation. I really enjoyed this episode. We had good talks.

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