On 18th September the people of Scotland will be asked one question: Should Scotland be an independent country?
If the majority vote yes, the wheels would be set in motion to disband the United Kingdom.
It’s been a carefully planned process, with dates, deadlines, votes and procedures.
Whether or not you want to live in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, God is building his own, united, kingdom. It’s the best place to live. You wouldn’t vote yourself out of that one.
Enter 1 Kings chapters 11 and 12 –the disbanding of Solomon’s united kingdom. Chapter 10 tells of wealthy, wise Solomon, ruling over a huge kingdom. By the end of chapter 12, the kingdom is split in two – there’s a north-south divide.
Chapters 11 and 12 tell how you get from one to the other. How does the united kingdom become the divided kingdom? There’s no tidy referendum. No planned process. It’s a chaotic mess. Yet the narrator tells us repeatedly that this was no accident. God was at work.
The clear message of these chapters is that Solomon’s divided heart leads to Solomon’s divided kingdom. Solomon’s divided heart leads to Solomon’s divided kingdom.
Let’s look at the two halves of that in turn
Solomon’s Divided Heart
First, Solomon’s divided heart.
In the Bible, the heart is not the organ that pumps blood around the human body. It’s not feeling and emotions either. It includes that, but it’s much more. It’s the real me, where I make my decisions, my thoughts, my feelings, my loyalties, my priorities.
Chapter 11, verse 1: King Solomon, however, loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh’s daughter – Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites. They were from the 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, wait for it, seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines.
Solomon loved his God. But he also loved his women.
The narrator is not xenophobic. The problem was not their quantity or their country. It was their creed. They did not follow the same God. God had told Israel often: Love foreign women, you’ll start to love their gods. Solomon, like many after him, thought he was the exception. They wouldn’t lead him astray.
So what happened? Verse 3: 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 Molek the detestable god of the Ammonites. That’s Molek, whose worship required child sacrifice.
The problem started in his heart. He had divided loyalties. His behaviour caught up later. Verse 7: On a hill east of Jerusalem, Solomon built a high place for Chemosh the detestable god of Moab, and for Molek the detestable god of the Ammonites. He did the same for all his foreign wives, who burned incense and offered sacrifices to their gods.
You can hear the talk around the dinner table, can’t you? Solomon, dear, it’s such a long way back to Ammon. Our Molek gets a lot of bad press, but you mustn’t believe everything you read in the papers. He’s a kind god really – the extremists who kill children in his name aren’t the mainstream. Couldn’t we have a place where we could go and pray to him here in Jerusalem?
And all the wives said the same. And then the planning application went in. A few people objected, but most were too busy to notice. The Daily Mail pointed out the slippery slope, but nobody believed them because that’s what you’d expect the Mail to say. And a few years later there you were. Two plots of land that used to be grassed over now held the Chemosh Chapel and the Molek Mosque. No one was quite sure how they got there, but it all began with Solomon’s divided heart.
The God of Israel was the only god of that era that demanded exclusive loyalty. All the other deities were happy to be mixed and matched.
And the arrival of Jesus changed nothing. He won’t let us have him as part of our a-la-carte personal religion either.
In the desert, tempted by Satan, Jesus said It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’ Jesus echoed the Old Testament teaching that we must love our families. But when it comes to our prime loyalty in life, he had no room for compromise. Anyone who does not hate his father, mother, wife and children, his brothers and sisters, even his own life, cannot be his disciple. We cannot serve two masters. We cannot live for God and money. Our hearts must be undivided. Living for Jesus. Loyal to Jesus. Loving Jesus. And only him.
Just as in Solomon’s day, the done thing today is to mix and match religion. The God of Israel, the Lord Jesus, demand our exclusive loyalty.
We’re not likely to face the pressure to start following other actual gods. We might if we lived in Birmingham or Bradford. The main gods in these parts are tolerance and diversity on the one hand, and money and prosperity on the other.
Tolerance and diversity. The god of equality. Whatever you do, don’t offend someone, or imply their beliefs are unacceptable to you. It seems the Equalities Act is a trump card over anything else. We tolerate everything – except a Jesus who says we must worship him alone.
Money and prosperity. Some people have everything and live for what they’ve acquired. Others wish they did, and live to try and move up a rung. We afford and buy a nice house. We trim our hedges. We polish our cars. We give the lawn a manicure. I didn’t say there’s anything wrong with a well-kept garden. But when it’s all so many people live for, it would be easy to find our hearts becoming divided.
Years down the line, we start building shrines to these gods of equality and wealth. And apart from a few remarks in a few papers, nobody even notices that it’s Christians who have bought into this agenda. It all happens so gradually and imperceptibly. But it started in the heart.
Solomon’s divided heart.
Solomon’s Divided Kingdom
Then, Solomon’s divided kingdom.
Here’s what happened next. The rest of Solomon’s reign wasn’t as harmonious as the early years. He faced a number of adversaries, both from neighbouring kingdoms and from his own civil service.
The biggest threat was from a man called Jeroboam, who a section manager in the ministry of construction. God sent a prophet called Ahijah to sidle up to Jeroboam and to tell him that he’d get to be king of 10 of the 12 tribes after Solomon’s death.
Imagine the Archbishop of Canterbury taking a junior government minister for a walk up Ben Nevis, and telling him that in 10 years’ time, he’ll be king of Caledonia, and all he sees will be his.
A bit like that. But not much.
Solomon dies, and his son Rehoboam is made king over his own tribe of Judah. But to be king over all Israel, so he travels north to a town with massive historical significance, Shechem. There, the people say: “Not so fast. Solomon worked us, almost like we were slaves. Before we sign on the dotted line how would you treat us?”
He’s advised to be a servant king. But he rejects that advice, and tells the people he’s going to make Solomon look gentle. Things are going to get much tougher. So the people say, “Well in that case, I think we’re done here. You keep Judah. We’ll have Jeroboam as our king.”
And so the split is done.
The question is: Who split the kingdom? Solomon, with his divided heart? Jeroboam, who became so hungry for power? Rehoboam, for being so hard-nosed and foolish? There’d be truth in all of that.
The inspired writer tells us who split the kingdom. Chapter 12, verse 15: So the king did not listen to the people, for this turn of event was from the Lord, to fulfil the word the Lord had spoken to Jeroboam son of Nebat through Ahijah the Shilonite. And then verse 24: This is what the Lord says: Do not go up to fight against your brothers, the Israelites. Go home, every one of you, for this is my doing.
Who split the kingdom? God did. He was in the driving seat. Everyone else’s scheming and plotting, arrogance and stubbornness, accomplished what God wanted done.
Solomon’s divided heart leads to Solomon’s divided kingdom. It’s what God said would happen. So it’s what happened.
And it’s what the risen Jesus still does today.
When we see division, we’re sad. Especially when it’s in the Christian church. Local churches fall apart because of power struggles and divisions. Whole denominations do too. The Church of England has some deep seated divisions; it seems the whole thing could fall apart at any point.
We’re right to be sad. We ask where God is in all this. But rarely do we consider that he may be behind it.
He might not be. We don’t have the prophet Ahijah to tell us what God is doing in any given break-up. But when churches or denominations have power struggles and splits, we have to at least consider the possibility that God may be behind it.
The book of Revelation was written to 7 churches in what is now Turkey. It starts with a personal letter from the risen Jesus to each church. Several of them have become half-hearted towards Jesus. He warns them: Carry on down that path, their thriving church could become nothing. At least in the case of the church at Ephesus, that’s exactly what happened.
Children love to build sandcastles. When they’re just starting out they squash them the moment they’re built. Get past that stage, they want to keep them. Take them home. And the look of disappointment, as they try to pick up their beautiful creation, and it crumbles and falls through their fingers.
Solomon’s divided heart leads to Solomon’s divided kingdom. It was tragic. But there’s a warning here for us. If our hearts are divided, if our loyalty to God is split, is our church is not wholehearted in our devotion to Jesus, we could experience that same tragedy. Watching bits of our lives, watching our church, disintegrate and slip through our fingers.
Solomon’s divided kingdom.
The unifying king
The good news is that Solomon’s divided heart and his divided kingdom are not the end of the story. There’s a united kingdom to come, and we can be part of it.
Here’s the prophet Ahijah talking to Jeroboam: Chapter 11, verse 34: But I will not take the whole kingdom out of Solomon’s hand; I have made him ruler all the days of his life for the sake of David my servant, whom I chose and who obeyed my commandments and decrees. I will take the kingdom from his son’s hands and give you ten tribes .I will give one tribe to his son so that David my servant may always have a lamp before me in Jerusalem.
Or verse 39: I will humble David’s descendants because of this, but not for ever.
This split is God’s doing, but God has a bigger plan. He had promised that a son of David would bring blessing to the whole world as its king.
400 years later, the prophet Ezekiel foretold that another king would come. He’d be like David, but he’d bring the two halves of the kingdom together.
By the time Jesus came, Jeroboam’s northern kingdom have become the Samaritans. John chapter 4 tells of Jesus speaking with a Samaritan woman by a well. He explained how there’d no longer be two places for worship – one in the north and one in the south. Everyone would worship through him. Jesus is the king who will unify the kingdom, who will rule over the united kingdom.
It’s sometimes said that the Commonwealth was held together by the king or queen of England. I’m not sure that was ever really true. And in the Middle East, if only countries like Syria or Egypt could find a leader who would be respected by all groups and tribes. All the fighting would cease, people unified under a good, common ruler.
What this fractured world needs is Jesus the king. He’s the only one who can bring a scattered and divided people and make a united kingdom out of them. He can take the grains of sand, and build them together again.
Conclusion
Solomon’s divided heart leads to Solomon’s divided kingdom.
It was so sad to watch Solomon’s divided heart lead to Solomon’s divided kingdom. But God has a bigger plan than that. He’s building a united kingdom, with Jesus himself as king. He’s rebuilding this broken world.
And he calls us to be a part of his united kingdom.
It’s a sad story. Yet it’s also full of hope. It draws us in, to follow Jesus, the king over a united kingdom of God. Jesus calls us to follow him, not with divided hearts, but in wholehearted devotion.