Ep. 062 - Is Wealth a Blessing or a Test? Lessons from Solomon’s Life

Episode Transcript

Spencer
In our culture, we view wealth as this opportunity to enhance the God-given gifts that we have. You know, we think about the CEO that can pay a housecleaner to clean his home so that he can go and spend more time running the company and investing in the vision and those kinds of things. Or, we have parents that they will send a daughter to a basketball camp to enhance her skills.
You know, on the court and get better and better. So we kind of look at wealth as an opportunity. Yet biblically, we see a different trend, and that wealth can actually destroy those gifts and talents.

Austin
So Spencer, in the last episode, we looked at the life of Gideon, and we looked at the entire life of Gideon, not just his places where he puts his trust in the Lord, but then where he puts his trust in himself and his wealth, and how that actually destroys his family. And so today, we're going to dive into the life of Solomon and see how wealth impacted his life in two ways.
First, we're going to look at how wealth impacted the gift that Solomon had given his wisdom. And then secondly, we're going to look at the long term impact on that wealth that Solomon had and what God gave to build the temple. So when we look at this from a culture perspective, how do we see culture moving today
as it pertains to wealth and our views and perceptions on wealth?

Spencer
Well again, generally we look at wealth. Is this opportunity to kind of supercharge those gifts that God has given us. And this can happen. I mean, we can have bright people that go to university, and they have an opportunity to expand on their knowledge and their skill set in those kinds of things. So there is some merit to that,
but we also really fail to see that wealth can have a big impact and it can be negative. When we start to look at the wealth in a way that can kind of, give us greater gifts, give us, you know, greater influence and power if it's not subject to the Lord, if it's not, if we're not being meticulous and kind of putting it before the Lord and saying, Lord, you're my provider, you are the one that needs to direct me, how can I be obedient to you day by day with this gift, be it the talent and the wealth, that has been provided?
So it's, I think we don't really dive into these biblical stories enough to really see what happens to the lives of the people that kept a level of wealth that didn't maybe put a finish line and say, “I don't need anything beyond this. I have enough. How can I then be generous to everyone else that the Lord’s put in my life?
And we see this in the life of Solomon, for sure.

Austin
Yeah. And I think there's so many warnings that we see, especially in the New Testament of what am I saying with my words and what am I doing with my actions? And when it comes to those finish lines, it's “Okay, yeah. Do I believe that God is my provider? Yes. Do I believe that God owns it all? Yes
But then how much do I keep?” And I think we need to hold those in tension when we think about finish lines, both in terms of retirement, but also even annual income. Are we setting finish lines so that we're not amassing a wealth that will destroy our souls, that will destroy our kids, that will destroy our gifts and the talents that God has given us because we're putting the trust, not in God,
tangibly. We may speak it, but we don't act it. And I think that's a big tension that we want to really dive into, press into, because we need to be stewards both with our lips and with our hands.

Spencer
Well, and I think this is one of those things where there is a lot of gray area and we have to come back. We have to listen to the Holy Spirit to guide us and direct us, because not all circumstances end in this way. But it's kind of like when you're driving on the road and you're on the highwa.y and you know, it's rainy and you decide that you're going to go 90 miles an hour, you might get there to your destination
okay. You're going to increase dramatically the likelihood that you hydroplane off the road, if you go 90 on a wet road there. And so I think that's the thing that we come back to, is when we amass that level of wealth, when we don't put it under the Lord's care, when we're not meticulously obedient in the same way, we're setting ourselves up for a lot of pain
potentially, we're increasing the odds exponentially there.

Austin
Yeah. Okay, so let's start off diving into the life of Solomon. We're going to start with 1 Kings 3:5-14. And so it says in verse five, “At Gibeon, the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by night. And God said, ‘ask what I shall give you.’” What a wild way to be woken up in a dream that God comes to Solomon and says, “What,
“what do you want? Like, if God were to come to me and say what do I want? I don't know how I would respond.

Spencer
Yeah. Well and the beautiful thing is Solomon responds really well. Yeah. This is the beginning of his reign as king. And he says, “I am but a little child. ”How many kings do we have that say, “I am but a little child?” What a great posture, humility. “I do not know how to go out or come in, and your servant is in the midst of your people.”
And he goes on and says, basically, give me wisdom. I need wisdom to govern well. And God says, “Wow, that's fantastic. I'm going to give you wisdom, but I'm also going to give you all of these other gifts that's going to come basically, as a result of this request and the wisdom that I'm going to impart to you.”
Aand we see over and over again whether it's how Solomon will decide a case between two mothers, whether it's how he's dealing with his different trade partners in the region, tremendous level of wisdom as he moves through the next many years of his life. We see it as well in terms of how he approaches building the temple and how he negotiates with different, kings and brings all of the resources to bear lots of wisdom there,
So the Lord makes good on this. But there's, this is not the end of the story like we talked about last time. Sadly, not the end of the story.

Austin
Right. Well, and I think what's really beautiful about this, even, I think Solomon may have even known that God would allow him to build the temple. Because we see in 1 Chronicles 29, we've talked about this passage before. It's where David is coming to the Lord in that end of his life. He knows his life is about to end.
He has longed to build a temple throughout his life. And David prays and God says, “No, you have been a man of bloodshed, and I will not allow you to build the temple, but I will allow your heir Solomon, to build it.” And so what David does in response is he raises up the people to bring an offering to the Lord to build the temple, and they bring massive amounts of wealth to the building of the temple.
And then David praises God in 1 Chronicles 29 and he says, “This is all yours. You own it all. You've provided for this.” And so we see that wealth to build the temple, then pass to Solomon to build the temple. So it's something that God has honored. God has brought in the wealth for this temple. God has finally said, “Okay, my glory will dwell with you in this temple.”
But then what happens here? So you say you've seen this wealth we brought in? What's the outcome of that?

Spencer
Well, what we see is not just in the temple, but we see Solomon using the wealth, to expand his household and to influence other kings and leaders in the region. And so he kind of uses the wealth and he's got a foothold. But then Israel really becomes the key link between Africa and Europe and Asia, and so everything kind of flows through them.
They become a central hub. And this creates tremendous additional wealth. Now, what we can kind of divine from this, and it's not, you know, explicit in Scripture through all these different things; But Solomon, it says, had 700 wives. If we fast forward to 1 Kings 11:3, “He had 700 wives who were princesses and 300 concubines.”
So rather than following God's plan, which is one husband, one wife rather than keeping his household simple, straightforward; he expands it and uses that wealth, and starts to have all of these different trade partners, you know? And in the ancient world, one of the ways that you built these relationships is you had one king marry the, princess of, you know, the daughter of another king, there so that they would have some kind of familial, you know, relationship there, too.
I think the rationale was, “Well, you won't come attack me if, you know, your daughter’s, married, you know, if my daughter's married to you, you know, is one of the elements there. But what happened? Again, he uses that wealth in ways that were antithetical to God's, purposes and such, just to enhance, again, his level of influence, to enhance maybe the economic prospects of the country.
But at the end of the time, what he ends up with again is 700 wives. And we see this in verse three: “...and Solomon's wives turned away his heart. For when Solomon was old, his wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God, as was the heart of David his father.
For Solomon went after Ashtaroth, the goddess of the Sidonians and after Milcom abomination of the Ammonites.” And it goes on from there. We'll dive into that passage a little bit more in a moment. But what we see is, this wealth, that had been passed on from David, as a good manager in some ways, Solomon parlayed this and built tremendous more wealth, but it wasn't subjugated to God's purposes.
And so we see that, being used, again to, build all of these alliances have more wives, and ultimately it pulls his heart from the Lord. So, we see these gifts, this wisdom that he's given that's above and beyond all other people in history to that point. And yet he's not wise enough to stay close to God, so he knows how to deal with all the other kings and all the other, ambassadors and such,
but he doesn't know how to stay close to God. So his wisdom, this great gift that God has given him, is entirely corrupted.

Austin
Right. Well, I think back to our interview that we had with Peter Greer, and what he was talking about is the leaders that have fallen have all lost an intimacy of their prayer life with the Lord. And we see that with Solomon. Like, if you have all these trade partners and all these things that you're trying to do, yeah, maybe God has given you wisdom to be able to manage it.
But if you're trusting in your own wisdom and not separating that and saying, I'm going to devote most of my time to connecting with the Father, to really getting to know what is your desire, then your wisdom is going to lead to where your heart desires. And if your heart is not longing for the Lord, then you may still have a gift of wisdom.
Solomon probably still had the gift, but it lead him astray away from God, not as it should have brought him back to God, and wisely coming back to the Lord over and over and over and setting his before the Lord.

Spencer
Right. So we see again the gift that God has given because of the wealth and the accumulation of wealth and the use of wealth, corrupt that gift. But the sad thing is, to your point, with the temple, we also see the spiritual worshiping place corrupted, in Jerusalem as a whole. So can you walk us through that?

Austin
Yeah. So, Spencer, as you were saying, we look at what Solomon did, he built the temple like God called him to you. And it says in 1 Kings 6:21, “And Solomon overlaid the inside of the house with pure gold, and he drew chains of gold across in front of the inner sanctuary, and overlaid it with gold. And he overlaid the whole house with gold until all the house was finished.
Also the whole altar that belonged to the inner sanctuary he overlaid with gold.” He took this wealth, and he poured it into the temple. He made the temple beautiful. And I think that there is a desire oftentimes to honor the Lord with the spaces that we have and create beauty in them. And so I think in a lot of ways, he wanted to show our God is a God of lavishness and of beauty.
But again, if our aim is the temple, not the God that inhabits the temple, then we become misplaced. And so we look a little further and we see how then Solomon's heart again, like you were saying, it turns away. And so five chapters later, we don't know the time frame, but it says in 1 Kings 11:7 and following:
“Then Solomon built a high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, and for Molech, the abomination of the Ammonites, on the mountain east of Jerusalem. And so he did for all his foreign wives who made offerings and sacrifice to their gods. And the Lord was angry with Solomon, because his heart had turned away from the Lord, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice.
And it commanded him concerning this thing, that he should not go after other gods. But he did not keep what the Lord commanded.” And so we see Solomon's heart initially was good, but then it turns, and he builds these idols in the heart of the city that is supposed to be dedicated to the Lord, in the presence of this place of the temple that is supposed to represent God dwelling with man, he's saying, “No I'm going to make idols that love child sacrifice,” these
false gods that bring child sacrifice like an abomination to the Lord, is where Solomon's heart turns because he's wanting to appease his foreign wives.

Spencer
Right? He puts them ahead of God. And it's so sad because after the temple is built, you have this amazing prayer. You know that he prays and you've got a heart that does seem like it's lined up really with where God would want it. He's recognizing God's majesty, his glory, you know, the beauty of the temple and trying to be, you know, pure-hearted there, I think.
But it's that steady accumulation of riches in all likelihood, the steady accumulation of alliances and foreign wives and listening to them that he didn't need. There's, it's absolutely antithetical to what God's call on his kings had been over time. So, such a sad trajectory. We see not only Solomon's gifts, his wisdom corrupted, but we also see Jerusalem corrupted.
Now, the temple itself, you know, they're not erecting an idol or an altar to, Chemosh or something like that in that temple. But if it's “Okay, well, we've got the we've got all these different gods, and, you know, you just go wherever you want you to worship your thing, and it's all sanctioned by the government, and you know, Solomon's a wise guy,
and so he's going to, you know, set up all these different places that you could worship,” How confusing also to, his nation, you know, that he's basically saying it, you know, “Do whatever you want to do, you know, religiously, I'm not going to follow the Lord in the same way that he has called me to do.”

Austin
But, you know, and Spencer your point is I think about the Old Testament law, as we look at Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, these places God very clearly says, don't intermarry with these foreign wives because they will draw your heart to their foreign gods. Like he sets this up in the law and Solomon ignores it. And I think that's the other piece here, is that, yes, God gave Solomon wisdom.
Solomon did follow the Lord for a while, and then he started ignoring the law. He started saying, “Maybe I know better than God.” And I think we often get into this trap of: When wealth comes, am I going to trust the wealth because I have control of it, or am I going to trust the Lord for my daily bread?”
I think that's the tension that we often find ourselves in, is when we get to these places of self-sufficiency where, “Okay, my investment accounts are doing well, my bank account is doing well. Okay, I can, I don't I don't necessarily need God. I can start making my own laws for my own life” versus putting my face back to what is the Scripture say, putting my hope and my life in the hands of the Lord every day, every moment of the day,
Or am I just going to say, “Well, I've got what I need, and so I'm going to do what I want”?

Spencer
Well, and as we think about this, we're pulled in, not maybe not the same ways because none of us are going to have 700 spouses, and, nor all of the children that we come with that, we would be crushed, by, that, obviously. But when we think about wealth, I think in our time, it gives us choices and it gives us hobbies; choices for hobbies and choices for how we use our time and the people that we interact with.
And these are, a parallel trajectory, you know, in a lot of ways, because rather than perhaps, serving our brother and sister, loving them well, recognizing that we have, you know, poor people that, you know, don't have the same level of economic help. We end up getting into arenas where, again, we can have a lot of fun with wealth.
I mean, there are tremendously fun things to do, and it's not to say that we can't go play a round of golf or, you know, go on a vacation or what have you. But when our hearts are drawn in that direction and we just start to build and to build and to build towards those things that we find fulfilling that are related to wealth, we really put ourselves in danger, I think.
But it's not so much, again, that we're marrying foreign, people with, hearts that might be towards other idols, but it's actually introducing other idols potentially into our life, other things that would really draw us that, they never need to be the center. They never really need to have any sway over us.

Austin
Right. Well, I think back to we've talked about Ecclesiastes 2 before, but this is Solomon saying, “I search for riches, I search for sex, I search for gardens and vineyards and all of these things to give me life. And yeah, they may have been temporarily enjoyable, but he says at the very end, in chapter 2:24, ”A person can do nothing better than to eat, drink and find satisfaction in their own toil.
This too, I see, is from the hand of God. For without him who can eat or find enjoyment?” And I think there's this reality that we can enjoy life. But those enjoyments, like you were saying, they don't need to be the ends, the telos of our life. We don't need to pursue all of the things, all of the hobbies for our own pleasure.
Those things are meant to be enjoyed in tandem with God. They're meant to, I'm meant to walk alongside my father, enjoying his presence as he allows me to enjoy his world. But it's not about me enjoying the world. It's about me enjoying the gifts that my Father is providing in this world. And so it's: “How do I allow God to lead and guide and not just store up wealth for my soul, not just store up fun things for me, but how do I enjoy my Father in the midst of this life?”

Spencer
Right. And that's a tough set of decisions, reflection, conversations with brothers and sisters and, really coming to a place of peace. There's not, you know, one path that we come back to and we say, “Okay, it's got to be like this,” but we need to recognize the allure of wealth, the draw towards those things, that they're not necessarily bad enough of themselves, but when you take a good thing and make it an ultimate thing, like Tim Keller talks about, we're on that path towards idolatry.
And, having people around us that can speak truth to that is an important thing too.

Austin
Yeah. So, you know, as we wrap up this episode, we see how Solomon devolved into just debauchery in a lot of ways because of his wealth. And even if you finish that story along, you read the next couple chapters in Kings or Chronicles that talk about the life of Solomon; the very next thing that happens is the split of the kingdom.
It destroys not just his life. It destroys his family's life, and it destroys the nation of Israel. And it sends them off again, back into captivity, either to Babylon or to Syria. And, you know, I think we look at wealth oftentimes as neutral or we look at money as neutral. And I think we need to come back and say it's not because our hearts are never neutral.
Our hearts are going to long for what our hearts long for. And we really need to take all of these things before the Lord and say, “God, is this going to be where you want me to use this well. God will provide for us, but how do we actually tangibly be stewards of that and not just vocal stewards of that?

Spencer
Yeah, such a tough dynamic to be able to discern, put before him and yet so important in that. Well, we hope that you've enjoyed this episode maybe even found it challenging. And until we see you next time, take care.

Austin
If you found this episode valuable. Share with a friend and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so that you don't miss the next episode.

Disclosure
This content was provided by Second Half Stewardship. We are in Knoxville, Tennessee and you can visit our website at www.secondhalfstewardship.com. The information in this recording is intended for general, educational and informational purposes only, and should not be construed as investment advisory, financial planning, legal, tax, or other professional advice based on your specific situation. Please consult your professional advisor before taking any action based on its contents.