1 Kings 3:1-9, Luke
4:1-13 (NASB)
David Bruce Linn,
Pastor-Teacher
5 February 2006
All Rights Reserved
I watched as the beautiful girl with the raven hair walked down the high school walkway with Joey's arm over her shoulder. She was laughing and joking, perfectly comfortable with the attentions of another guy. As usual, she was wearing one of the beautiful dresses her mother made her and a signature pair of baby doll pumps.
That was my girlfriend, now past tense. Only she did not think so! "I don't understand what your problem is!" she had exclaimed when I confronted her new-found comfort with other guys' arms. Even after three years of dating she could not understand my concern at her willingness to be in a school theater production where she would portray a woman doing inappropriate things with male characters. Practicing those things on real guys week after week did not seem to bother her, and they, of course, loved it.
"You are the one I love!" she had said, yet there she was willingly snuggled up against Joey. I had put up with this for too long. Guess I was just stupid. Thus ended a starry-eyed high school love affair between the valedictorian and the female lead in the school play.
Do you believe the person who proclaims his or her love for you while stepping on your head or slipping a sharp knife between your shoulder blades? I hope not. And I can say with no fear of contradiction that God is not fooled by such behavior from professing Christians who will not put him first in their lives. If we believe in the supremacy of Christ, what should his place in our hearts be? And how do people who put Christ first live on a day to day basis?
1. THE CENTRALITY OF CHRIST VERSUS HIS SUPREMACY
David Bryant, in his book, Christ Is All, makes a very helpful distinction between the centrality of Christ in the church and his supremacy. Obviously, if Christ is genuinely supreme in our lives he is also central, but is it possible to live with Christ central but not supreme?
Bryant wrote to address his perception that many evangelical Christians of today reveal a dramatic diminishment of faith in the genuine Christ, and a corresponding loss of hope as a result. He explains: "When my commitment is only to keep him at the center of who I am, where I'm headed, what I'm doing and how I'm blessed, I'm just a few steps removed from assuming that He is there primarily for me. That perspective, if left to stand alone and taken to its logical conclusion, will eventually recast him as my 'mascot' -- 'the ultimate desktop' (as Lucado says) ready to print out my demands" (p. 203, Christ Is All, New Providence Publishers, 2004). While the mascot model seems to encourage us that Christ is always there for us, it is a twisted distortion because it is divorced from the reality of his supremacy. It is the King of Kings who is always there for us!
King Solomon was a man who struggled with the difference between having Yahweh God central in his life and having God be first. Although he lived under what we call the Old Covenant, the principle of living by the supremacy of God has been the same for every believer in every age. Most of us who have studied his life tend to see him as a man who started his rule well and ended badly. But can the seed of rebellion against God be seen in his life at the beginning? A look at how bad the end became will help us discern: "Now King Solomon loved many foreign women along with the daughter of Pharaoh: Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women, from the nations concerning which the LORD had said to the sons of Israel, 'You shall not associate with them, nor shall they associate with you, for they will surely turn your heart away after their gods.' Solomon held fast to these in love. He had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines, and his wives turned his heart away. For when Solomon was old, his wives turned his heart away after other gods; and his heart was not wholly devoted to the LORD his God, as the heart of David his father had been. For Solomon went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians and after Milcom the detestable idol of the Ammonites. Solomon did what was evil in the sight of the LORD, and did not follow the LORD fully, as David his father had done" (1 Kings 11:1-6).
Is there any evidence of Solomon courting this danger from the very beginning of his rule? 1 Kings 2 describes the circumstances of his coming to rule Israel and concludes with this sentence: "Thus the kingdom was established in the hands of Solomon" (:46b). The very next verse says: "Then Solomon formed a marriage alliance with Pharaoh king of Egypt, and took Pharaoh's daughter and brought her to the city of David until he had finished building his own house and the house of the LORD and the wall around Jerusalem" (1 Kings 3:1). The first thing the Lord wants us to know is that Solomon began by marrying a pagan woman to cement his diplomatic relationship with Egypt. Semitics scholars are quick to point out that Egyptians were not on God's original list of people that Israelites were to avoid marrying when they conquered the inhabitants of Canaan.
I have always seen it differently than the scholars, partly because I grew up with lots of Jewish friends. What Jewish mother would see the distinction the scholars make? No, the reason for not marrying outside of Israel was to prevent the loss of faith in the God of Abraham. Certainly an Egyptian woman was as much danger to that as a Hittite woman! So I see Solomon as playing word games with the word of God at the very beginning of his rule.
Have you ever done that? You want something really badly but you know God's word is against it, so you start twisting the intent of the Lord's words? It is a key diagnostic sign that Christ may be central in your life, but he is not supreme.
The very next words in the passage raise another problem with the beginning of Solomon's rule: "The people were still sacrificing on the high places, because there was no house built for the name of the LORD until those days. Now Solomon loved the LORD, walking in the statutes of his father David, except he sacrificed and burned incense on the high places. The king went to Gibeon to sacrifice there, for that was the great high place; Solomon offered a thousand burnt offerings on that altar" (1 Kings 3:2-4). Again scholars argue about whether keeping the high places was wrong or not. Certainly for Solomon to sacrifice to the true God at Gibeon was no problem. The wilderness tabernacle was set up there, though the ark of the covenant was in Jerusalem. Furthermore, there was no problem with Israel using bumps in the ground as places to build altars to God so long as they wiped every vestige of pagan worship off those same bumps (see Numbers 33:52).
And there's the rub. Did they really do that? Verse two indicates that the people used those sites appropriately, at least at first. Then verse three makes us wonder why God constructed this verse to make Solomon's loving him and sacrificing on the high places appear to be things in conflict: "Now Solomon loved the LORD, walking in the statutes of his father David, except..."
The answer is found by seeing Solomon's main spiritual conflict. The Lord God was central in his life. He loved God, but he would not honor the supremacy of God in every part of life. Someone who appreciated the intoxicating effect that paganism had exerted on Israel for centuries during the time of the Judges would not think of sacrifice on the high places as a safe thing to do. If he would want to be certain that Yahweh God would be exalted as supreme, he might have made a different choice about how Israel should conduct worship. Even though Solomon loved God, in short order the whole nation was sacrificing to the pagan gods on those same high places.
One more evidence of Solomon's failure to humble himself under God's mighty hand is seen in his wise solution to the problem of the two prostitutes in this same chapter. One day two prostitutes came to him with a custody dispute over a baby. They lived together and because of their profession had both given birth at the same time. One mother accidentally rolled over on her baby in the night and smothered him, so she took the other woman's baby and claimed him as her own. Solomon's lightning solution to the problem was to order the baby chopped in half with half given to each mother. The real mother immediately relinquished the baby to the other woman out of love for her child. Thus Solomon, who had asked God for wisdom to judge the people, knew who the real mother was and gave her custody.
So Solomon relied upon God to do what he needed to do. But where was his concern for the holiness of God? He made no rebuke whatsoever of the abomination these women practiced as their profession. He was fabulously rich, so if he needed to give each of them a micro-enterprise loan to start a garment business to get them out of prostitution he could have done it with ease. Was this a genuine full application of divine wisdom? No, it was not. Solomon applied God's wisdom to get what he wanted, namely a good earthly solution. He did not apply it to get what God wanted from those women, which was holy living.
Right at the beginning we see that Solomon had a heart love for God which was nevertheless flawed. God was central to his life and reign, but not supreme. We have already seen the horrible outcome of such spiritual confusion. It is a pattern which cannot hold and which dissolves under the stress of temptation into rebellion against God.
2. JESUS' EXAMPLE OF LIVING UNDER THE SUPREMACY OF GOD
Centrality versus supremacy might seem like a fine distinction, but it is not hard to see. It is revealed when push comes to shove and we just won't listen to the voice of God. Christ confronted that scenario: "Why do you call Me, 'Lord, Lord,' and do not do what I say?" (Luke 6:46). I am convinced that this is the greatest challenge the church in the West faces today.
So how do we live under the supremacy of Christ? It is much more than mentally affirming the doctrine found in Colossians 1:8, where God explains his purpose for his Son's rule over creation: "... that in everything he might have the supremacy" (Colossians 1:18 NIV). It is getting that truth into our lives. In short, what is Christ's place in our hearts? Is he first, or are we snuggling up to Joey?
Here we benefit greatly from the incarnation because Christ's manner of interacting with the Father becomes a moving picture of what we need to learn. One particularly vivid example is from the inauguration of his earthly ministry: "Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the desert, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry" (Luke 4:1-2). Already we can learn our first principle. If Christ is supreme in our lives there must be times and seasons devoted only to him where everything else in our lives is shut out. This is the purpose of retreat, and reaches its highest expression in a fast. It is our way of saying to Jesus: "My life is in you, Lord!" It is the purpose of sabbath. We put everything else aside, rest, and worship the Lord. If you are a believer in Christ and you observe no sabbath you are a disobedient child. You have put something above Christ in your life.
But the main conflict Christ faced was about to begin: "The devil said to him, 'If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.' Jesus answered, 'It is written: 'Man does not live on bread alone''"(Luke 4:3-4). This is the first of three temptations which have different subjects but which all have the same format: Trust yourself and use God to get what you want. Jesus was no doubt feeling the effects of his fast in a dramatic way. We also have needs which are crucial to life itself, and other needs which affect the quality of our lives powerfully.
The question is how we go about meeting those needs in a universe under the supremacy of Jesus Christ. Do we really believe that when we trust Christ that our lives are in God's hands? Did you know that the five missionaries who were speared by the Waodani tribesmen on the bank of the Curaray River in Ecuador had weapons with them? At the least, they had a revolver and a twelve gauge shotgun. They could have slain the warriors who killed them, but they trusted Christ's supremacy even to the death. They had gone to this violent tribe with the message: Waengongi's Son [Jesus] was speared for you and did not spear back. Waengongi's followers do not spear back. And that's why a full twenty-five percent of the Waodani people walk Waengongi's (God's) path today.
So if you and I need intimacy we can get it by stealing it outside marriage, or we can trust in the supremacy of Christ and wait. If we want certain things to happen in our family or church, we can try to manipulate people or we can pray, love and trust Waengongi. Christ defeated this temptation by trusting implicitly in the provision of his Father.
The second temptation as Luke records it goes to the issue of our destiny: "The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, 'I will give you all their authority and splendor, for it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. So if you worship me, it will all be yours.' Jesus answered, 'It is written: 'Worship the Lord your God and serve him only''" (Luke 4:5-8). There is a false claim implicit in this temptation. The plan of God from eternity past was to exalt Jesus Christ over every earthly rule (1 Corinthians 15:24-25) so the best the Devil could offer was the temporary and limited control he possessed under the sovereignty of God.
The specific temptation was for Jesus to wrench control of his own destiny from the Father's hand and make something different happen than what God had planned. This included the temptation to avoid the cross. This is a second way of tempting Jesus to trust himself rather than relying totally on the goodness of God. I could paraphrase Satan's words like this: "Is God really good and worthy of your total trust if he is going to send you to the cross? Forget him! Just worship me instead and I'll deliver your millennial kingdom immediately." Jesus defeated this temptation with the word of God again, pointing to God's unique claim on the worship of all people.
If we also believe in the supremacy of Christ, our practical worship will include the entrusting of our destinies into his hand. We will never abort a baby to recover the original life path we had planned. We will not cry out when our marriages become difficult: "I want my life back!" and try to flee into our fantasy. We will not try to trick people into coming to church by pretending that heart-rending repentance is not necessary, or in any other way.
Finally, Jesus faced the temptation to use his connection with God for his own private purposes: "The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. 'If you are the Son of God,' he said, 'throw yourself down from here. For it is written: ''He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.'' Jesus answered, 'It says: 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test''" (Luke 4:9-12). By definition, any test for God originates in a human purpose, not a divine one. I wonder if Satan knew that the godhead would explode if he could get one member of the Trinity to act independently of another.
It was a trick question: "If this is really your identity then do this thing which is a denial of your identity." The same temptation comes to us every single day: "If your sins are covered by the blood of Jesus then why not just sin and enjoy it? You can always repent later." But what would that behavior reveal about Christ's place in our hearts? It would be spitting on his suffering and sacrifice for our sins. It would be despising the Father's predeterminate choice to lay the sins of the whole world on his beloved Son. One might do this if Christ were merely central to our lives, sort of a mascot who fixes our problems. But the heart that honors Christ as supreme beats with his and honors his sacrifice, fighting every temptation to the last with the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
CONCLUSION
How do I know that Solomon had placed Yahweh God in the role of mascot from the beginning of his reign? As the foundation stones of the temple and the king's palace were being laid in Jerusalem he was also laying the foundation for his harem. By the end of his life the Lord was not even central because that pattern cannot hold. No pattern of devotional life can long survive which does not place the Lord first in our lives in the most practical of ways.
For almost three years I was both central and first in my high school girlfriend's heart. Then she switched me to central but not first. That was the end of our relationship, and I was too dumb to understand it months earlier.
Trying to keep Christ central but not honoring his supremacy will eventually end our relationship with him as well. It amounts to following a Christ who does not exist. The real Christ is the source of our life, he holds our destiny in his hands, and he establishes our identity in the universe as his children. Waengongi's Son was speared for us and did not spear back. He reigns in heaven above, upon the earth, and under the earth. If that does not deserve first place in our hearts then nothing does. I invite you to pray: "Lord, teach me to live the truth of your supremacy every day." I am confident he will answer that prayer.