WISDOM IS DESIRED, BUT IT IS NOT FOR GRASP
KINGS 3: 3 Solomon loved the Lord, walking in the statutes of David his father; except that he sacrificed and burned incense in the high places. 4 The king went to Gibeon to sacrifice there; for that was the great high place. Solomon offered a thousand burnt offerings on that altar. 5 In Gibeon, Yahweh appeared to Solomon in a dream by night; and God said, “Ask for what I should give you.”
Besides the great prophets and Moses himself in the old Testament scriptures two people were given very high biblical esteem and these were King David and King Solomon. They became Sunday School Heroes as well, meanwhile we have to stay at that their larger than life figures are a little bit exaggerated in the tradition though they were indeed extraordinary personalities in the past.
However they had a lot of flaws and it is very interesting and that's the very reason we love the scriptures that the Bible doesn't hide at all their flaws and we should mention with regrets or without regress that they had a lot of flaws. Both. We can take it our aim at them as a personal and emotionally filled rebuking but what happened to them was not only their personal failures to deal with the situation but it was a system failure of the country and of the society. And the whole thing is in the Bible, and it is thoroughly explained, clearly like the blue sky.
Even when Solomon is described as the most wise person on Earth, we should admit that he did not fulfill the requirements prescribed by Heaven, because he was a tyrant over the people. Same with his father, David, who was, a blood stained warlord rather than an innocent prayer hero or an immaculate knight.
The Bible says itself, when King David wanted to build the the temple as a permanent sanctuary for the presence of God in Jerusalem God told him, that you are not allowed to build the temple because your hands are filled with too much blood of your enemies and other people. Your son, Solomon, will build the Temple. It is not to hard to see, that even in the Bible, some things became marked down from political reasons.
Originally, the temple was not build, as it is written in the Book of the Acts, chapter seven, that God drove nations out before the face of the Israel “to the days of David, who found favor in the sight of God, and asked to find a habitation for the God of Jacob. 47But Solomon built him a house. 48However, the Most High doesn’t dwell in temples made with hands, as the prophet says, 49‘heaven is my throne, and the earth a footstool for my feet. What kind of house will you build me?’ says the Lord. ‘Or what is the place of my rest? 50Didn’t my hand make all these things?’
Originally, the temple was a tent, called the tabernacle. It was mobile, in the sense that it was easy to take it apart, and put it up in an other place. The people served and serviced the mobile tent temple were the Levites. There are some opinions, that the Temple of Jerusalem should not have ever been built for the major reasons.
Reason one: As we can see it from history a Temple, likely built from stone in the capital, can be destroyed, ransacked, looted and erased by a powerful enemy, like indeed the Babylonians and the Romans were. Meanwhile a tent can be destroyed easily, but also can be rebuilt with the same ease, and also at can be moved fast, out of harms way, if it is necessary.
Reason two is not only that God does not dwell in man made houses, but any full centralization of the worship of the one God, cannot be anything else, but the earthly ruler’s will to control religion and the crowds through the religion. Sometimes we have to read even in the Bible between the lines. The Book of the Kings praises Solomon, that “Solomon loved the Lord, walking in the statutes of David his father; except that he sacrificed and burned incense in the high places.”
From history we know, the full demand of the centralization happened in Judah only 200 years later, around 720 BCE, when King Hezekiah with the help of Prophet Isaiah, made Jerusalem and the Jerusalem Temple the only sacrificial religious center for Israel. Meanwhile in the time of Solomon, in fact there were many habitual altars of Yahweh all arund in the country, used by the local people in different regions. That is why Solomon made occasional royal trips to these traditional places to offer sacrifices as other ancient rulers used to do, regularly.
The Books of the Kings was written by prophet Jeremiah, in whose time his ruler, King Josiah attempted to reinstate the centralization, which was originally established originally a century earlier. Jeremiah supported his King Josiah in the centralization, but theologically we can see between the line he kind of disagreed, not only by stating that there were other altars of the Lord all around in the country during the reign of David and Solomon, but essentially these traditional places were marked by the extraordinary presence of the King of Heaven, as it is written in the Book of Kings, by Jeremiah the prophet:
“King Solomon went to Gibeon to sacrifice there; for that was the great high place. Solomon offered a thousand burnt offerings on that altar. In Gibeon, the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by night. ”
It means that not only that Gibeon was a high place of worship, but even the Lord, himself, appeared there, offering Solomon the opportunity to ask anything he desires.
Thus, this famous encounter did not happened in the centralized Jerusalem, not even in the magnificent stone building, called the Jerusalem Temple, but outside in the country, in a supposedly despicable ancient high place, which is of course cannot be that despicable and pagan worship place, as the Lord appeared there.
So Solomon was asking for understanding to do justice, when as a King he had to judge the people. His asking was granted, and in the popular view, he became one of the wisest person ever lived. However, it was not the case. He received legal minded clarity to judge among the litigated people, but other than that he failed to serve the Lord, which was not surprisingly also mentioned by Jeremiah, offering criticism, that Solomon was not flawless, at all. He did as tyrants do: taxed the people till teeth and beyond, taking the young men into his army, ordering the tribes to provide free of charge slave labor for construction projects, and every tribe must have provided full provisions to feed the royal court for a month in a rotation, beside that famously he had one thousand wives. Indeed, Solomon was a hated ruler, who ruled with an iron fist. When he died, all the tribes of Israel other than Judah and Benjamin, left his kingdom, and established a separated Northern Kingdom.
Divine Wisdom comes with the Holy Spirit, which rejects Earthly Kingdoms, palaces and horses, gold and silver, as the wisdom of Heaven is more desirable than anything on Earth, as the Apostle Paul wrote once, that “I count all things to be a loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whom I suffered the loss of all things, and count them nothing but refuse, that I may gain Christ” AMEN
