Welcome to Lecture 21 on our course on introduction to Salvation History. This lecture is entitled The Divided Kingdom on the North of the Northern Kingdom, but before we dive in, let's consecrate our time together to our Lord as we always do, and the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, amen.
The name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. Alrighty, well where we left off with our last lecture was really the golden years, right? The golden age, the high points of Salvation History for Israel. It was the time under David in Solomon where there was peace, the Pax Solomonica, the peace of Solomon, rest all about them.
They built this glorious temple to worship God and dedicated it with great celebration, and the people were happy and foreign kings and queens like Sheba came and heard the wisdom of Solomon and worship God. It was tremendous. Now that was the high point, and it pretty much goes downhill from there. So we're going to see what happens because of Israel's sin, what happens to them as we build up towards the exile, and then the return from the exile.
But right now in this lecture, next lecture, we're going to look at the divided kingdom. We'll focus on the north. Now, in the next lecture, we'll do the south. In the following lecture, lecture 23, we'll look at the exile of both kingdoms.
Alright, so that's kind of our trajectory there. Now, what actually causes the United Kingdom to split? Alright, things are going so, so well. A lot of people don't even understand that the kingdom split, or if it did, how it split, what were the reasons for it.
And so that's what we're going to start off with right now in the notes, the reasons for the splitting of the kingdom beginning with Solomon's grave sins. Now, as you can imagine, when Solomon was building this glorious temple, in his palace, which was twice as large as the temple, so twice as long to build as the temple. And the temple was so amazing, you can only imagine what his palace looked like, and all the other building projects that he had in Jerusalem and throughout the kingdom. That stuff ain't cheap.
You're getting a lot of money and a lot of forced labor in order to accomplish these things. And this span of just a couple of decades, right? So what he ended up doing was becoming a king like all the other nations. So he was kind of being depicted as in a certain sense like a new Pharaoh, kind of enslaving his people, right?
Certainly forcing his own people to contribute to labor and enslaving other nations around about him in order to accomplish all this stuff. But he did everything that Samuel said, told Israel, what would do back in the first Samuel chapter eight. Saying, look, I'm warning you right now. If you want to king like all the other nations, he's going to tax you.
He's going to make you do all those building projects. He's going to take the most talented of your sons and your daughters and all this stuff, right? And that's exactly what Solomon began to do. So this was already a lot of red flags for Solomon as you read his story.
But really the thing that caused the split, the thing that made him fall from grace, was a three fold sin. And it's really to understand this, you have to go back to Deuteronomy chapter 17. If you remember, when we were talking about Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy was the second law, Deuteroth nomos, right? We talked about how Deuteronomy was a second law, a secondary law, and how Moses gave the Israelites all kinds of concessions due to their hard hearts.
One of the concessions that he made was allowing them to have a king. Moses knew that they would reject God as their king. And so he said, when you, this is actually chapter 17 verse 14, Moses says, when you come to the land which the Lord your God gives you, and you possess it and dwell in it and say, I will set a king over me like all the nations round about me. See that was fulfilled in first Samuel chapter eight as we discussed a few lectures back.
You may indeed set his king over you, him who the Lord your God will choose. One from among your own brethren, you shall set his king not a foreigner. Okay, so Moses makes this concession. He knows that people are going to fall into sin.
That whole story happens in first Samuel chapter eight, but Moses knowing what's going to happen. He said, there are three things that this king must not do. Verse 16, he must not multiply horses for himself or cause the people to return to Egypt in order to multiply horses. Number one, next verse 17, he shall not multiply wise for himself, lest his heart turn away.
And then also he shall not, he shall not greatly multiply for himself, silver and gold. So wealth. So basically three things he cannot multiply, wives, weapons and wealth. You know, it's very easy, www, you know, the king sends out a word or whatever you want to say.
But it's really easy to remember wives, weapons and wealth, www. So these are the three restrictions that Moses said back in Deuteronomy 17. Well, now if you look at Solomon's story, it makes a lot more sense than of what he did and why it was so bad and ultimately why he was punished for it. So let's look at one of the first example here in the notes.
He must not multiply for himself, silver and gold. So if you go to first Kings chapter 10, verse 14, this is what you read. Now, the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year, just one year, mind you, was 666 talents of gold. Now that's the number that gives everybody the G.B.
You got tingles down your spine, the 666, right? The 666 talents of gold. That's a lot of gold in one year. Depending on which commentary you read, it could be give or take 20 tons of gold.
That is massive amounts. So a couple of things we have to clarify here. Well, first, he broke one of the three restrictions. Obviously he multiplied for himself in great quantities, silver and gold, and the rest of the verses describe all the rest of his wealth.
But what about this number? 666? Because yeah, I guess it gives people the G.B. G.B.s.
What's this all about? All right. Well, six is the number of evil. Six is the number of rebellion.
Why is that the case? It's because if you go back to creation in Genesis chapters one and two, what you discover is man is created on the sixth day, with the animals, with the beasts, but he's called to the seventh day, the day of Sabbath rest, the day to have covenantal communion with God. But if man rejects with his free will, if he rejects that vocation to be God's adopted son, all right, to have that covenantal communion with God, he remains on the sixth day with the beast. And he's no better off than a mindless beast.
So this is why six in scripture is the number of evil because it is the rejection of the seventh day, the day of intimacy with God. OK, and then 666 is just basically the superlative. You know, we haven't scripture another example is holy, holy, holy, holy, God of hosts. He is the most holy.
So this is basically saying Solomon here broke the commandment of don't multiply for yourself wealth to a superlative degree, right? His he completely committed evil in this regard. OK, so that is strike one. Now, let's look at the next example.
Moses said he must not multiply horses for himself or cause the people to return to Egypt in order to multiply horses. All right, we keep reading in chapter 10 of first Kings and we discover in verse 26, Solomon gathered together, chariots and horsemen. He had 1400 chariots and 12,000 horsemen who he stationed in the chariot cities in Jerusalem and all the rest of his kingdom. We got on to verse 28.
Guess where they came from? You got it Solomon's imported horses was from Egypt. All right, it goes on to describe his horses, how they came from Egypt. And this is essentially strike two.
He gathered all of these chariots, all of these horsemen, basically putting his trust in his armies, right? And his weapons instead of God. OK, because this is going to be cause problems for Kings. If you've got a large standing army, you're going to get prideful.
You're going to fall into hubris and think that you could squish anybody or that you are immune from squishing from being squished. So it's placing your complete trust in yourself and your armies that you build rather than God. So that's right, too. All right.
What's the third thing that Moses has commanded? He must not multiply wives for himself, lest his heart be turned away. Now, this is, I mean, if anyone knows anything about Solomon sins, he knows about his wives. We're in chapter 11, verse one.
Now, King Solomon loved many foreign women, the daughter of Pharaoh. Now, that's a bad sign. In fact, if you go back to chapter three, verse one, this is the first wife that he had was Pharaoh's daughter. So that's a major red flag here to be allowing making alliances with Egypt.
Well, it goes on to the daughter of Pharaoh, the Moabai, Ammonai, Edomite, Sidonian, hit tight women from all the nations concerning which the Lord had said to the sons of Israel, you shall not enter into marriages with them. Neither they with you, for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods. And Solomon clung to these in love. You probably read in lust as well.
Love lust is probably all the same for him. So he has 700 wives and princesses and 300 porcupines, I mean concubines and his wife turns wives turned away his heart from when Solomon was old, his wives turned away his heart after other gods. And his heart was not wholly true to the Lord as God as was the heart of David, his father. He went after the Ashareth, Milcom, he was even the side of the Lord and it lists some other gods as well, King Moshe Molyk.
He worshipped all of them. So this is the straw that breaks the camel's back. This is strike three, you're out. And it was an even bigger problem because when you multiply for yourself wealth or you multiply for yourself weapons, you know, that's one thing.
But now he's fallen into idolatry. Okay. He didn't know, David married, you know, some more than one women for sure, but he never turned his heart away from God. He always loved the Lord with his whole heart.
Okay. And when he said he repented with his whole heart, he says here that David had a, or he's installing, he had a thousand women, which could be easily symbolic, you know, just like 666. There's a symbolic number. He absolutely could have had literally 666 talents of gold.
That would be no surprise. And sure, he could have a thousand women as well, although that seems to me to be a little bit more symbolic. That's 10 is the perfect number, completion, totality. So 10 times, 10 times, 10.
So there you have that kind of trifecta again, a thousand women where you can enlarge all these women. That's a lot of women. That sounds pretty exhausting, but not impractical. So it could be very, very symbolic, but nevertheless, it's describing how his heart perfectly turned away and started to worship all these gods.
Because when you marry a foreign woman, what would often happen is you would swear by their gods in the marriage ceremony. And that was the beginning of the end for him. So his heart was turned away from God. He constructed altars for all these false gods.
He's got these false deities. Molek is listed here. And that's a really bad one. We're going to see that later on.
Molek demanded child sacrifice. So this is a huge problem. This is strike one, strike two, strike three. You're out because not only did you break the commands of Moses, but even worse, you started to worship all these false gods.
OK, so that explains a little bit more why Solomon was in such big trouble, but it's even deeper than that. Because these three sins really correspond to what scripture in the tradition of the church teaches is the triple concubisence. Concubisence is the million dollar word for this lecture. This simply means the tendency to sin, the tendency to sin.
Right. We all have this tendency to sin. It's part of our fallen nature. We are conceived in original sin and our intellects, our dark and our wheels are weakened.
So all temptations are rooted in a three fold tendency to sin. And we actually learned a lot of this from 1 John, chapter two, which says John, John 1 John, chapter two, or 16 for all that is in the world, the less of the flesh and the less of the eyes and the pride of life is not of the father, but of the world. OK, so what are these three things? Less of the flesh, less of the eyes and the pride of life.
The less of the flesh is an inordinate desire for bodily pleasures of any kind. And the operative word there is inordinate or uncontrolled. We are human beings. We do have desires of the flesh, but they must be ordered.
All right. So we have desires for food, for drink, for sexual intimacy, for sleep. I mean, you name it, you fill in the blank. We have bodily appetites, but when they become disordered, all right, they become sinful.
They really enslave us to that appetite. All right. So you can have a disordered appetite for sexual intimacy, then you're promiscuous and you're cheating on your spouse or fallen into all kinds of sexual sins. There's, of course, that is an example.
You can have an inordinate desire for alcohol and that can go into full blown alcoholism. And again, you fill in the blank. So less of the flesh is an inordinate desire for bodily pleasures. OK, the less of the eyes is an inordinate desire for accumulating possessions.
So I repeat, inordinate is the operative word. We are human beings. We do need to have possessions, pride of property. We have to have house and cars and clothes and put aside money in the bank for a rainy day and have a savings account for children's education or whatever it is.
It can you fill in the blank? But when it becomes inordinate, we become enslaved to those desires. That's what we call materialism and consumerism, where we just want to desire more and more and more and more stuff. And so our houses are full of stuff and they get so full of stuff.
We got to go rent storage sheds to put more stuff in those storage sheds. That's an inordinate desire and we become enslaved to that. I always joke with my students, a good example of the less of the eyes. This is an inordinate desire to accumulate possessions is those videos on YouTube.
You see on Black Friday when you see people elbowing each other in the face in order to get that last TV. That's a great visual on what the less of the eyes is. All right. Then you've got finally the pride of life.
And that's pretty, pretty self explanatory. It's placing oneself before God and before others. This can become so bad. It's like atheism or agnosticism or just selfishness and egotism in so many different manifestations.
But these three things here, less of the flesh, left of the eyes and the pride of life is at the root of all of our sins. And scripture knows this first John, of course, as much. And so does Moses. When Moses says don't multiply for yourself, wives, weapons and wealth.
What he's saying is the king is going to have an ability to fall into these temptations in a royal way, right? A royally large way. So when Solomon falls into the multiplying for himself, silver and gold, that's wealth. He fell to the last of the eyes.
OK, when he multiplies for himself, all these weapons and the chariots and the horsemen, that's the pride of life. It's placing his trust in his army rather than God, but then the famous example of the wives, well, by process of elimination. And very logically, that would be less of the flesh. OK, so Solomon fell to the threefold concubuses completely and totally his heart was turned away.
So I hope that helps you again to understand them that these are his sins that trigger the split of the kingdom because after these sins are asleep.