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The Perils of Power--2

CONNIE: Hello, I'm Connie Jeffery,

LONNIE: and I'm Lonnie Melashenko.

CONNIE: What do you do, Lonnie, when you're faced with a tough decision that you just can't seem to settle? Toss a coin? Roll some dice? Play eeny-meeny-miney-moe?

LONNIE: HmmmY that's a good question, Connie. I notice one option you didn't suggest was casting lots.

CONNIE: Well, I guess that would be one biblical option--you read about people casting lots quite often in the Bible. But isn't that about the same as flipping a coin?

LONNIE: I suppose it's similar--it apparently involved tossing little pebbles and seeing how they landed. But casting lots was seen as something different from tossing a coin to see which side kicks off in a football game.

CONNIE: How's that?

LONNIE: Well, look for example at Proverbs 16:33:
The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD.

CONNIE: Oh, so you're saying that when people cast lots, it was a way of determining God's will.

LONNIE: That's the thought behind it Connie, but there's another proverb that I find especially important when it comes to making a decision. Here it is, Proverbs 3:5-8:Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths. Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD and depart from evil.
It will be health to your flesh, and strength to your bones.

CONNIE: Good counsel! And taken from the words of none other than Solomon.

LONNIE: Would that he had always taken his own counsel--but unfortunately he didn't, as David Smith and Ken Wade point out in our next segment.

KEN: Well David, as we look at the life of Solomon. He certainly was a great man in a lot of ways.

DAVID: He was hugely gifted. The Bible describes a tremendous resume.

KEN: As the wisest of men. No one like him in the whole earth it says, and what about this wisdom thing? Is that what we really think of as a wiseYsage sort of a person?

DAVID: Well, the word wisdom is pure in our thinking and Solomon had pure wisdom. The Bible recommends wisdom and yet so often in human experience what we think is wisdom is tainted with what we call cleverness, deviousness.

KEN: It can get down to that. In fact the Bible itself uses the term in that way sometimes. The Egyptians are mentioned in Exodus as being very clever--very wise--in the way they enslaved the Israelites.

DAVID: Which from a human point of view is wise. I was reading just the other day in an old Readers Digest, which of course is the source of all spiritual knowledge. It had a story of the chess champion Kasparov, you know the one that went up against Deep Blue the computer. The computer beat him by the way, but he is a man who apparently trusts in his cleverness. He knows that if he sits down with you he's going to beat you mentally at anything you go into together. The writer of the article just describes how following him around, whatever they got into, Kasparov bludgeoned him with cleverness. Whatever issue, whatever discussion, he relied on the sharpness of his slicing dicing brain. His own brain was his god. Kind of a scary thing and I think Solomon kind of went that way. He was smart, he was clever, and he knew it, and he began to lean on that.

KEN: Yeah, we have these wonderful stories of his experience with the two women who brought the one baby and one says AHe's mine." And the other says "No he's mine." and Solomon says "Let's cut him in half" and immediately the woman to whom the baby belongs to says "No No No!"

DAVID: And that was a trick that worked and the Bible doesn't tell us maybe in that case Solomon breathed a prayer saying "Lord this is a tough one, what should I do". But it's very clear in the Bible that Solomon got away from breathing prayers and he began to say "Man, I'm batting a thousand. Every time people come to me I have got a answer. I am it." And that's the deadly detour.

KEN: One of the interesting things you read when you read about Solomon in the Bible is that there are no prophets ever mentioned coming to Solomon. Telling him, "Hey you better straighten up your path." David his father is known as one of the righteous kings, but he had his Gad he had his Nathan, and they would come to him and say "Hey, you blew it". And David would repent, but you never get that with Solomon. Only time a prophet was mentioned during the time of Solomon is the prophet Ahijah who comes not to Solomon but to Jeroboaman says the kingdom is going to be taken away form Solomon because he's not following me as his father David did.

DAVID: Is that perhaps because God saw that Solomon put up a hand to Heaven and said I'm on my own and I'm doing fine and maybe subconsciously I'm on cruise control here.

KEN: That's an easy trap to fall into. When everything is going well, hey who needs to pray? And when things go wrong we appeal to God again. I mean you read the stories. There were billions of dollars in gold coming to this man every year in tribute.

DAVID: Kind of an interesting amount as you were studying.

KEN: It mentioned 666 talents of gold per year as mentioned in 1 Kings. That's the only time except in Revelation where the number 666 comes up in the Bible.

DAVID: And maybe there is a parallel, Ken. Who knows? That number signifies human plans, human desire, human agendas and Solomon fell into a kind of a Babylonian mind set of I will do things my way.

KEN: Yeah, 666 of course is listed as the number of man, man's wisdom, man's talent and here is 666 talents of gold and if you've got that kind of bank account refreshing itself every year, who needs God?

DAVID: Yes, the stunning thing to look back on for people today is to say here is a man with so many gifts. A kingdom with such abundance. Things are going so well and he turned away and began to run it himself. It's a story of ruin and you can't help, but say what might have been.

KEN: Oh, what might have been.

DAVID: What might have been

KEN: Such fantastic opportunities where there Solomon was king at the time when there wasn't much opposition. He allied himself with the Egyptians. Unfortunately that went kind of bad for him in the long run. But he was also a man of prayer at the beginning and I think at the end as well he learned to pray once again. Here's one of the great prayers of Solomon that's found in 1 Kings 8 when he dedicated the temple ,he praised can God indeed dwell on earth heaven itself the highest heaven cannot contain thee. Solomon had a concept of how small he was in relation to God, but he lost that.

DAVID: If he had held that relationship in front of him all the way through: God is on his throne, I am His servant. I receive wisdom form him and not from myself.

KEN: And think what could have happened.

DAVID: That's right.

KEN: And what can happen in our lives. If we'll just acknowledge God in that way.

DAVID: Very good point

LONNIE: One of the most poignant prayers in the Bible is found in 1 Kings 8. It's the prayer that Solomon prayed when he dedicated the temple of the Lord. You can sense his deep devotion, his radiant excitement in this prayer.

CONNIE: But, also you can sense his unerring sense of reality too.

LONNIE: He not only asks God to bless his people, but he goes on to ask God to continue to love and help them even when they (inevitably) go astray. Help them to remember to turn back to this place--to turn back to you--and pray. Even when everything seems to have has gone wrong, and they're at their wits ends in a troubled and troublesome world gone awry.

MUSIC 1: In This Old Troubled World, Del Delker

CONNIE: Guidance from the Lord--especially in troubled times. It's one of God's great promises to us.

LONNIE: As we learn to trust in Him with all our hearts instead of leaning on our own understanding.

CONNIE: Thank you, Del Delker, for that song.

As we look at the book of 1 Kings today, we're deep into the historical portion of the Bible--we call it sacred history. A history of God's people and the lessons they learned through their experiences.

LONNIE: Connie, I think that many people skip over books like Kings and Chronicles because the way they're written can be a bit confusing.

CONNIE: Not to mention that the names are unfamiliar and hard to keep track of.

LONNIE:Names like Joash, Josiah, Jehoash, Joram, Jotham . . .

CONNIE: Right. I can't keep them all straight.

LONNIE: You're not alone. And that's precisely why we're offering Bible Timeline charts to our listeners one more time. This is the last time we'll be offering these two charts, which really bring Bible history to life.

CONNIE: You can call right now 1-800-872-0055 and request the Bible Timeline charts. Remember that number--we won't be offering these again after today.

LONNIE: And that number is 1-800-872-0055.

CONNIE: Speaking of history, God brought Solomon to his throne at a very opportune time in history, didn't he.

LONNIE: Yes, he did, Connie. The book of 1 Kings devotes 10 of its 22 chapters to the story of Solomon.

Overall the book covers a period of time about the same as the time that the United States has been a nation. Just think of it. When you read these 22 chapters, you've read about a period just a few years longer than the time since George Washington was first elected president in 1789 up to today.
To put this in historical perspective, we're talking about the years from about 972 BC to 853 BC. A time when neither the Greeks nor the Egyptians nor the Babylonians nor the Asyrians nor the Romans were able to exert a dominating influence in Mediterranean politics.

Remember that God placed His people Israel on a very strategically important narrow piece of property in the Middle East. They were at the crossroads of the earth.

God presented them with the opportunity to share knowledge of Him with people from all over the world.

And now he placed Solomon on the throne at an extremely important crossroads of time.

Up to this time, things had had been rough for Israel. They had been beaten down by one marauding tribe after another--Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, and finally the Philistines, not to mention the Egyptians. But when Solomon came to the throne, most of these enemies had been subdued.
Egypt was in a time of transition and not able to muster much of an army. The Philistines weren't much better off--in fact they were vassals of Egypt at this time.

If ever there was a time when Israel had a chance to spread knowledge of God to the whole world, it was in Solomon's day.

It was a time of unparalleled opportunity.

But it was also a time of unparalleled peril. It was a time that called for the best that the wisest of men could give.

CONNIE: HmmmYsounds like exciting times.

LONNIE: Indeed they were. And Solomon was the right man for the job. He would do GREAT things, if he would remain true and trusting in his relationship with God. If he could handle the perilous times that power would bring to him.
CONNIE: I imagine that's why today's message is titled A1 Kings--The Perils of Power. Share with us, Lonnie.

The Perils of Power 2

LONNIE: If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.

Those are the words of a wise man, looking back over his life, wondering whether he had done the right thing with his time and talent. He was a man whose mind had grasped great things in ways that seemed improbable, if not impossible, to others.

He was so famous that when he died, he made special arrangements to have his body cremated and his ashes spread to the four winds, because he didn't want his grave to become a shrine for curiosity seekers. But a physician, fascinated by what made this man such a genius, stole his brain and preserved it, and it continues to yield secrets to us today.

And yet this wise man, this famous man--with one of the most widely-recognized faces in all the world--looking back over his life, said in all candor, If I had it all to do over again, I would have done things differently. I would have become a watchmaker. I would have stayed in a little village in Switzerland, unknown to the outside world, and applied my great intellect to the task of making the finest watches possible.

Do you know who I'm talking about? It was Albert Einstein who said that. His famous visage, with its wild, silver mane, gazed out like some sort of deity amidst a field of stars on the cover of the first issue of TIME Magazine in the year 2000. A Person of the Century, they called him. Because the things his mind figured out changed our world more than anyone else. More than Franklin Roosevelt, or Winston Churchill, or Mahatma Gandhi.

And yet in retrospect he could wish he had spent his life tinkering with tiny cogs and gears in a watch shop instead of tampering with the fundamental building blocks of the universe.

Because the unique intelligence of Albert Einstein unlocked the door of the nuclear age, unleashing upon the world the greatest power known in the physical realm.

He opened the door to great power, but also to great peril. And in the end he perceived that perhaps it would have been better if he had left well enough alone and not thought the great thoughts that changed our world.
Albert Einstein was, of course, not the only person to look back over his life and muse--AWhat if I'd done things differently?