Talk 6 - Divided Heart, Divided Kingdom

0:00 Well, welcome back to the account of Israel's kings. And we're coming into the story now in chapter 11 to a pivotal moment when this small but wealthy and increasingly powerful nation dramatically split into two. And that raises the question that history so often raises. How did it go so wrong? How did the golden age of King David and Solomon's early years unravel so quickly and so spectacularly? And this paragraph at the start of chapter 11 provides the answer. So let's read it. This is 1 Kings 11 verses 1 to 8.

1:00 King Solomon, however, loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh's daughter, Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, and Hittites. They were from nations about which the Lord had told the Israelites, you must not intermarry with them, because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods. Nevertheless, Solomon held fast to them in love. He had 700 wives of royal birth, and 300 concubines and his wives led him astray. As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods and his heart was not fully devoted to the Lord his God as the heart of David his father had been. He followed Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Sidonians, and Molech, the detestable God of the Ammonites. So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the Lord. He did not follow the Lord completely as David his father had done.

2:17 On a hill east of Jerusalem, Solomon built a high place for Chemosh, the detestable God of Moab, and for Molech, the detestable God of the Ammonites. He did the same for all his foreign wives who burned incense and offered sacrifices to their gods. So the source of the division that we're now going to be reading about over these next weeks lay in Solomon's divided heart. And what follows isn't particularly pleasant reading. So this is a bit of a health warning if you're not familiar with this part of the Old Testament. There will be brighter moments of hope and encouragement and inspiration, but much of this will be dark and will be difficult because we are plunging deep into the reality of the human condition, the underlying sickness of the human heart in rebellion against the creator. And where we ended the first series, chapters 10 and 11, they set the context for the division. They described in detail, if you remember, the flourishing of Solomon and the nation on the international stage.

3:50 Many people came from all over the world to consult his famous wisdom, to listen to his marvelous presentations about nature and so on. And when they came, they brought lavish gifts with them. So Solomon amassed huge wealth in gold, in chariots, and in horses. And there's nothing wrong with gold chariots or horses, but he had 1,400 chariots and 12,000 horses. Take a little while to get around all of them, wouldn't it, and enjoy each of them individually. How do you find the time to do all of that and to rule as God intended you to do? And of course, if Solomon had taken the time to listen to what God's word, for example, in Deuteronomy had to say, he would have known that kings were warned not to devote themselves to amassing wealth and horses. Why?

4:54 Because these things have a way of distracting the heart, building up treasure in earth, the Lord Jesus would have called it. Was there not a wiser way to invest his wealth and spend his time than building special cities as garages for his chariots? And that sets the scene for what we now read in chapter 11. Solomon loved many women besides Pharaoh's daughter. We're told early on in career that he married Pharaoh's daughter and that's all we hear. But now the story begins to unfold of Solomon's romantic activity. And the historian sets this against the background of God's clear instruction to Israel's men not to intermarry with women from other nations. for this reason.

5:59 They will surely turn your hearts after their gods. In other words, the instruction had nothing to do with cultural superiority or nationalism or anything like that. It was actually an acknowledgement of the basic weakness of the people's hearts. God knew what they were like. He knew what would happen, and happen it did. We read, as he grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods. Solomon loved these women. That is stressed a number of times.

6:39 And a man who loves his wife, of course, wants to please his wife. And you can just imagine the kind of scenario. Solomon, darling, I so love being with you. but you know I miss home and I just feel a bit of an alien in this culture and you know what would make me feel really happy with you Solomon and want to stay here if you would just build a little itsy bitsy shrine and just allow me to you know worship my own gods and then I would feel really at home here, Solomon, with you, darling, wouldn't you? And of course, what man wouldn't fall for that? And Solomon fell for it 700 times. They turned his heart. He listened to his heart rather than listening to God.

7:42 And by ignoring and defying God's word, Solomon introduced idolatry into his own home and into the nation, something that his father David did not do. Now this is a big deal. It may not seem like that to us, living at such a great distance. But the tendency to forsake the one true God and compromise with the idolatry of the nations around them dominates basically the rest of the Old Testament. This is such a big deal. But it's not just an ancient problem. When Paul wrote to the believers, the new believers in Thessalonica, he writes this, you turn to God from idols. This is the first century.

8:46 You turn to God from idols to serve the living and true God and wait for his son from heaven. And here's a little picture I took a couple of years ago now of one of the gods in Ephesus this was, not Thessalonica. This was the world of the first Christians. And at the end of his letter, John writes, little children, keep yourselves from idols. Now, I don't know how well you know your own history and the history of this island, but the island into which the gospel first came was equally pagan, equally idolatrous. Some of you have probably been up to Gortmore and you've seen this wonderful statue of the old sea god going way, way back before Christianity came to this island. And many of the Irish gods find parallels with the pantheon of gods in other European nations, gods of sea and earth and sky, often symbolized by stones and fairy forts, as they're called. some 45,000 of these, and by fairy trees, hawthorn, blackthorn, ash, oak, and high places, together with all kinds of celebrations and rituals, including blood sacrifice.

10:16 And when the gospel came to Ireland, it gradually liberated people from their slavery to these false gods. But paganism did not fully go away. Pagan beliefs were disguised and were merged with institutional Christianity, and they aren't far beneath the surface. And they keep emerging, not only in all kinds of superstitious beliefs and practices, such as making daisy chains. Do you remember making daisy chains when you were little? Do you know what lay behind that? That was to protect you from the malicious fairies at fairy forts. but also in festivals and solstice celebrations like at New Grange in the winter every year where you have to go into a lottery to try to be one of the ones who's there and thousands come and it's shown live on television.

11:14 The growth of practices such as divination and some cases in the revived worship of the ancient gods. This is a photograph I took of a shrine to the goddess Isis in Ireland. a couple of years ago. A number of major road building projects had to be changed because of local protests that the building would involve the destruction of a fairy tree. And at the heart of all of this is the belief, as one recent author put it, nature is not a dead collection of objects but is instead filled with spirits, many of which are able to interact with humankind. This is Ireland in the 21st century. This is the world increasing we live in. And I suspect that we will see paganism increasingly at the core of certain forms of environmental activism, fueled, of course, by vested commercial interests.

12:22 with the loss of moral and spiritual authority of the Christian church across Ireland and with churches that increasingly cut themselves loose from the authority of scripture don't be surprised at the increasing emergence of Celtic neo-paganism neo-Druidism alongside Wicca and other earth-centered religions because naturalism and materialism are the sorts spited by Dawkins and his followers do not satisfy the human spirit. Rather, they provide a fertile soil for the growth of interest in alternative spirituality, such as Druidism and Wicca. If you don't believe me, just type the words in on the internet and you will perhaps be shocked by what you find. Now, what is fundamentally at stake here is not cultural preference. Ancient versus modern. National pride. What is at stake is the truth about the universe and the truth about God.

13:29 Paul tells us in Romans 1 that people originally knew God. That is, they knew deep down there was a God, the creator of the universe. The evidence for his existence was clearly perceived, both in the brilliance of creation around them and in the moral awareness built into them. But they did not want to retain this knowledge. It didn't suit people to be thus dependent, to acknowledge it. They refused to acknowledge God as God. They ceased to be thankful to him. They repressed the knowledge of God.

14:04 But instead of getting rid of the concept of God altogether, they gradually reduced him in stature. They replaced the transcendent invisible creator, whom they couldn't see by gods they could see, and started to worship the creation rather than the creator. They made gods out of the sun, the moon, the sea, the storm, the great physical powers they believed to be the ultimate realities, and manufactured physical symbols of these things. They also deified the great psychological powers they discovered within themselves, such as love, sex, anger, revenge, desire, And they chose physical symbols such as the bull to represent this power and bowed down and worshipped it. They deified natural processes such as childbirth. They invented gods and goddesses to represent these realities and then developed all kinds of ceremonial around these. Built temples, installed priests, priestesses, created special days and festivals. And all of this is bubbling away under the surface of the Western world.

15:19 You see, it gives tangible, visible dimension and excitement to people. Something they can see and touch and feel and sense. You know where the word enthusiasm comes from? It comes from a Greek word that means the God in you. That's where it comes from. The worship of idols. The idea was that when the music got going and a bit of alcohol and perhaps a magic mushroom or two and the gyrating bodies and all the excitement, it was a feeling that the God was inside me. Wow, who wouldn't want that?

16:00 And of course, if the gods get inside you, then of course you can't be excused for whatever you do because it wasn't you did it. It was the gods inside you did it. It bubbles away into the surface and sometimes comes right to the front of the surface. The key issue in this is contrary to what you were probably taught in school. Belief in one supreme, uncreated, transcendent God, monotheism, did not evolve from belief in many lesser created gods, despite what the textbook says. It's the other way around. Polytheism is a descent from monotheism. Some of you will know that one of Dawkins' famous comments, We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in.

16:59 Some of us just go one god further. Famous statement from the God Delusion. And it's repeated many times. Very clever. But it hides the assumption that the god of the Bible is just another in the marketplace of manufactured gods. In the same category as the Ashtoreth and Moloch and Chemosh that we're reading about. But that's not true. Those gods were created gods.

17:28 The God of Christianity is not a created God. He is the God of the whole show. Eternal, uncreated. To confuse the two, as Dawkins and others do, is to make what the philosophers call a category mistake. It's at the level of the school playground. Who made God then? Do you remember? He made God.

17:55 Nobody made God. God is uncreated creator. So the issue facing Solomon was not culture or personal preference. Well, in this culture we worship Moloch. In this one, the Ashtoreth. Here we worship the God of Israel. Well, they're all gods on the same level. And it doesn't really matter.

18:16 Whichever one works for you. That's not the issue. The issue was, what is real? In the sense that what is real according to the truth of the universe? What is the truth? Idols are false gods. The art and music developed around these things may be very creative, beautifully done, But they are not in accordance with what is real, what is true. They're fundamentally false.

18:58 To worship anything other than the creator is both to live a lie and the supreme insult to the creator himself. God called Abraham out of this idolatry in Babylon to start a protest movement. This family that became a nation was meant to be a protest movement in the midst of all this idolatry against the false understanding of reality. And for that to be realized, God had to put a hedge around the people, a way of protecting them from compromise with the idolatry of the nations around them. So this warning against intermarrying with the pagan nations, that's the context of it.

20:01 To preserve this protest against the slavery of idolatry. God knew that if they intermarried with women from the pagan nations, the likely result would not be the conversion of the women but the turning of their husbands after their false gods. And Israel would eventually have disappeared as a distinct nation. God's promises and preparation to bring in Messiah, the son of David, would have been hopelessly compromised and would have disappeared without trace. That's how important this is. This is not some silly little regulation of a nasty God, but rather an attempt to protect people so that they can witness to the truth. But Solomon chose to go against God's explicit instructions. Perhaps he thought as king he could make up his own rules.

21:09 Perhaps he thought that who married wouldn't affect his relationship with God in any way. Whatever he thought, one choice led to another, and just as God had warned, it resulted in a divided heart with divided loyalties. The word heart, if we look at these early verses, it's mentioned five times. Now in Western culture, heart tends to mean feelings and emotions as opposed to your mind and your thinking, but not in Hebrew culture. In Hebrew culture, the heart is the center of the human personality, the thinking, willing, feeling center, the real you. It's about what you really think, really value, really love. It's the seat of your actual loyalties rather than the things you claim to be your loyalties. We're dealing here then with what lies within.

22:09 And Solomon allowed his heart to become divided, not overnight, as he grew old. Notice the phrase, it happened over years, one unwise decision after another, a slow process, a creeping decline into increasing idolatry. Solomon still retained a technical belief in God. He played the public game, leading the nation's worship when it was required. But there was a different story playing out underneath. His heart was divided. And as his heart became more and more compromised, his conscience more and more desensitized. He sacrificed his loyalty to God for loyalty to his wives and their desires.

23:04 And to please them, as we read, he had temples built in Jerusalem to their false gods. Verse 9 tells us that he did all this despite the fact that the Lord literally appeared to Solomon Now that's very rare. God doesn't normally relate to us directly like that. But as he grew older, those genuine encounters with God faded in his thinking, and his heart became more and more distracted. He abdicated spiritual leadership of his own life, of his family and the nation, the temple that had occupied central place in his life and in the nation was no longer unrivaled Solomon built other shrines the spiritual landscape of his home and the nation changed everybody could see it and everybody was affected by it and when I was talking to Heather in the the other day about these things. She asked the obvious question, why did such a wise person behave so foolishly? Well, having a brilliant gift of a mind is one thing.

24:34 Having an undivided heart is another. The first is about gift, about talent, if you like. The second is about moral character and godliness. As far as gift was concerned, Solomon was brilliant and world famous. But although brilliant and wise intellectually, he had a divided heart. His heart was not fully to the Lord his God as his father David had been. Of course David was far from perfect. David had made his mistakes but his heart towards the Lord remained constant despite his moral failings.

25:24 He didn't turn to alternative gods and when confronted about his sin he confessed and repented and restored his relationship with God. Solomon didn't follow the Lord completely David did. A divided heart. It happens. Not normally overnight. But as with Solomon, a slow process, often hidden at first from everyone, including those closest. A process that goes on in the heart where despite its knowledge of the truth and even genuine experience of God, its loyalty to God starts to become divided as the heart begins to listen to other voices and other possibilities turn their imagination. Of course, it's unlikely that we will start worshiping images of the sun or of a bull.

26:30 But our hearts get divided and drawn away from God and we start to fall in love as Demas did with this present age, with its fashions, its values, its possibilities. It could be sexual desire. It could be material wealth because Paul warns us that greed or covetousness is idolatry. And before we know it, we are beginning to build personal shrines to these things in our minds, on the internet, and what we choose to give our time and resources too. And our prayer life, our engagement with scripture, our engagement in witness and mission, these things slowly weaken until we end up in a spiritual desert that we will seek to fill with anything and everything but God. A divided heart will lead to a divided and compromised life, a lack of spiritual reality and power. So guard your heart. Protect the single focus.

27:41 Feed the core loyalty of your heart to God. Now as a quick aside, don't misunderstand and misapply God's instruction about intermarrying with other nations. This was given to Israel, not to us. Northern Ireland isn't Israel. It isn't a sacral state under God like Israel was subject to the terms of the legal covenant God made with them. As Christians, we've been baptized in the Spirit of God into a new spiritual community that didn't exist in Solomon's day. It isn't geographical or political or ethnic. The church, the body of Christ, is made up with people from all nationalities and ethnicities.

28:29 So please don't interpret this as an instruction to prevent you from marrying a French person or a Chinese person or an American. But there is an underlying spiritual principle which is repeated in the New Testament. As a Christian, loyal to Jesus, to decide deliberately to go into partnership with someone who does not share your core loyalty to Christ carries all kinds of risks, especially when it comes to life's deepest relationship, which is marriage. At best, it will limit it. You can't share at the most important level, but rather pull in opposite directions, potentially crippling your potential for serving the Lord. Yes, the other person might become a Christian. Wonderful.

29:32 But if not, you might still be able to serve the Lord But then the opposite might happen. You end up with a divided heart. And in hopeless compromise, unable to serve. And you drift into complete ineffectiveness, spiritually. Or even into unbelief. Having said that, it must also, I think, be said. That just by having a life partner who is a believer doesn't by itself guarantee that everything will remain strong and centered on Christ. Even in marriages where both start out with the same basic loyalty to Christ, the husband or the wife can lose their grip on spiritual reality and allow their hearts to become divided, as Solomon did.

30:35 it's not easy to say I say it with a heavy heart I am so thankful for the times that Heather has steadied me and encouraged me to give myself to serving the Lord, to scripture, to prayer even at the cost of our time together to career prospects and to financial comfort I have been blessed with the love of an incredible woman whom I don't deserve. Solomon didn't have that. He didn't look for it. He made no attempt to create it, quite the opposite. And his choices had serious consequences for him and for the people he had been called to lead. And so as I finish, God announced his judgment directly to Solomon in verses 11 to 13, since this is your attitude. And you have not kept my covenant and my decrees which I commanded you. I will most certainly tear the kingdom away from you and give it to one of your subordinates.

31:40 Nevertheless, for the sake of David, your father, I will not do it during your lifetime. I will tear it out of the hand of your son, yet I will not tear the whole kingdom from him, but give him one tribe for the sake of David, my servant, and for the sake of Jerusalem, which I have chosen. The kingdom was going to be divided because Solomon's heart was divided. It wouldn't happen until Solomon died, but if you read on down the chapter, we haven't time to go into it this morning, you will discover that God now raised up opposition, disciplines in Solomon's life, Two adversaries that came against him, whereas before there hadn't been any. The third adversary was a certain Jeroboam, and he will enter the stage very soon. He was project manager for a massive reconstruction of the city walls, and when Solomon saw how excellent he was, he put him in charge of the whole labor force in Jerusalem. So while Solomon was focused on his wives and building shrines, Jeroboam was focused, hardworking, industrious, gaining the respect and loyalty of the people. And one day he had a dramatic encounter with the prophet Ahijah who informed him that God was planning to give him rule over the ten tribes.

33:11 How did Solomon respond? Well, when he got wind of it, he tried to kill Jeroboam. no repentance no recognition that this was of God what a sad note to end on no recognition of mistakes seeking to kill the person that God had raised up to lead in his place you see if leaders lose their grip lose their focus and have a divided heart they should not be surprised if God ends up giving the leadership role to others. But sadly, what happens is that if that happens, the leader who's being displaced gets angry and cross and will do anything and destroy anyone. And how sad. We see that sometimes in business. Whole business is trashed through the bullying personality of one individual, and you see it also in church, tragically,

34:19 and unable to allow God to move on with others. The final picture I want to leave with you, as I've done, you'll know this. I was down at the strand in Port Stewart, and I caught sight of this, And I thought, you know what? That would be a useful image to take away with. Do not swim near rocks. And maybe some of us are doing that. You're playing a public game, a technical belief in God and singing the songs and so on, but underneath, you're swimming near the rocks. all I can do is use the Old Testament story because this is what it's for so that we learn from it and that we don't fall in the same way as Solomon fell please don't swim near the rocks let's pray

35:40 these are serious words and we thank you that you love us enough to tell us the truth to tell us the truth about ourselves when the culture around us is telling us oh you're wonderful you're marvelous there's nothing wrong and you tell us the truth that yes created in the image of God. Wonderful in that sense, but oh, the heart is fallen. There's a rebel within. And how we need both your forgiveness and your spirit so that we can walk upright and stay away from the rocks. So challenge and encourage us. If we need to open up to you and perhaps others about stuff in our lives, give us the courage to do that.

36:39 May we enjoy to the full of your fullness and your forgiveness and your salvation and the work of your spirit and your guidance and your strengthening. May we not have a divided heart. but a single heart towards you. In Jesus' name, amen. Amen.