In 1 Kings 3:3, when Solomon loved the Lord, he also loved the Shulamite women to whom he wrote his love ballot called the Song of Solomon. The women, Solomon married were foreign with false gods that Solomon adopted as his. In 1 Kings 3:3, the author notes at the beginning of Solomon’s forty-year reign that “Solomon loved the Lord.” The author bookended Solomon’s biography in 1 Kings 11:1 by saying the opposite: “But king Solomon loved many foreign women.” The problem is not racial but religious. The record of how Solomon failed in this area is in 1 Kings 11:1-4. Next, Solomon challenges us to not waste our life in building our house or family. We must choose to serve God for his glory, not ours, and in dependence on God and not in the energy of the flesh. They wasted their lives and God’s resources selfishly on themselves. They never lived in the extravagant villa one day. When the communist’s dictators were executed in 1989, the completion was still four years away. Fifteen thousand workers labored for years to build their personal house and private hideaway with gold fixtures in the bathroom, gold finger bowls, with gold picture frames. For the twenty-four years, the dictators stole from the starving people to build their eight hundred million-dollar, 150 room gold plated mansion. in The Journey Isn’t Over: The Pilgrim Psalms for Life’s Challenges and Joys wrote about Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, who were the tandem dictators over Romania for twenty-four years. In contrast to Solomon building God’s house, Walter Kaiser, Jr. Solomon spared no expense in building God’s house. It is estimated that it took 200,000 workers seven years to build Solomon’s temple. Fifty percent of Solomon’s biography is dedicated to describing Solomon’s building projects. The biographer of Solomon in 1 Kings 9:10 records that Solomon spent twenty years building God’s house and his house. How Solomon built God’s house and his house are recorded in Solomon’s biography in 1 Kings 3-11?įirst, Solomon challenges us not to waste our life but invest it in building God’s house or God’s work. But then God revealed to the Nathan the prophet that God was going to build David’s house or family which included the coming Messiah (7:11, 16). We see this same play on words in 2 Samuel 7, when David desired to build God a “house” (7:1-3) that He was worthy of. Solomon also could be referring to Your House or family because in verses three to five, he writes of “children” whom we, with God’s help, should make into useful arrows in God’s service. He could be referring to God’s House because the pilgrims were singing these “songs of degrees” or “songs of ascent” as they travelled to worship in God’s House in Jerusalem (122:1). When Solomon refers to “house” in verse one, he could be referring to God’s House or Your House or to both. This is the wasted life that Solomon warns against in Psalm 127. The other way a person can waste his/her life is do important tasks in the energy of the flesh not for God’s glory. Also there is the lazy sluggard who is a fool and the diligent is a wise. There are the adulterous or foolish woman contrasted with the virtuous or wise woman. Solomon contrasts the wise and the fool in different ways in Proverbs. Solomon warns against this slothful lifestyle in Proverbs (10:4 6:6-8 20:4). The first is to be lazy or doing what is not important. The couple falls into the first of two ways Solomon states that a person can waste his/her life. Picture them before Christ at the great day of judgment: “Look, Lord. Tragically, this was the dream: Come to the end of your life-your one and only precious God-given life-and let the last great work of your life, before you give an account to your Creator, be this: playing softball and collecting shells. At first, when I read it, I thought it might be a joke. Now they live in Punta Gorda, Florida, where they cruise on their 30-foot trawler, play softball and collect shells. Consider a story from the February 1998 edition of Reader’s Digest, which tells about a couple who took early retirement from their jobs in the Northeast five years ago when he was 59 and she was 51. The brakes failed, the car went over a cliff, and they were both killed instantly…. Laura was a widow, a medical doctor, pushing eighty years old, and serving at Ruby’s side in Cameroon. Single all her life, she poured it out for one great thing: to make Jesus Christ known among the unreached, the poor, and the sick. In April 2000, Ruby Eliason and Laura Edwards were killed in Cameroon, West Africa. In chapter three, he wrote of two women who some might consider to have wasted their lives. John Piper wrote a book entitled Don’t Waste Your Life. Solomon in the only Pilgrim Psalm (Psalm 127) he wrote, challenged us three times in two verses, not to live a “vain” or empty, worthless, or wasted life.
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