Who's Got the Horses You Want

If you would turn in your copy of God's Word, the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 17, verses 14 through 17. Deuteronomy chapter 17, verses 14 through 17. Now the readings this morning came from Isaiah, which will not be our text this morning, but they really challenge and set us up and I believe open our hearts for the truth of God's Word and I will refer to them in the conclusion. What would it have been like if King Solomon would have been able to sing along with us in these songs? All we have, all we want, all we need is you. He's known for his divine wisdom, wisdom from on high.

He is known for his success in leadership, but seemed to have failed and as we will learn this morning, he failed by overstepping the very explicit words of God, given 400 years earlier specifically to the kings of Israel. I have a hard time believing that a man so gifted and so intelligent would not have simply read the Word of God. Let's read Deuteronomy chapter 17, verses 14 through 17. When you come to the land that the Lord your God is giving you and you possess it and dwell in it and then say, I will set a king over me like all the nations that are around me. You may indeed set a king over you whom the Lord your God will choose.

Even from among your brothers, you shall set as king over you. You may not put a foreigner over you who is not your brother. And just a bit of context, this is the Lord speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai. Verse 16, only he must not acquire many horses for himself or cause the people to return to Egypt in order to acquire many horses, since the Lord has said to you, you shall never return that way again. He shall not acquire many wives for himself, lest his heart turn away. Nor shall he acquire for himself excessive silver and gold. Let's pray together. Father, I pray you would use this text.

Use this glorious Sunday morning to capture our affections for the glory of Christ, that riches we would heed not nor man's empty praise and that we could see Christ as our inheritance all of our days. Jesus there is no one like you and may our lives reflect his truth. May the heart of hearts within this congregation be for the glory of Christ, even at our own expense and our own difficulty and our own hardship. It's in Jesus name that we pray. Amen. Well, last week we began a journey into the excellencies of Christ, seeing that Christ is preeminent. Christ is glorious.

And as we have begun the book of Hebrews, we will take a journey into seeing the Lord high and lifted up every Sunday morning for quite some time. In brother Chris's absence, I never seek to re-preach something he has preached. And I also have asked the Lord over these last 12 years of ministry never to preach ahead of something where he intends to go. I decided to preach to the right side to compliment what our Lord is doing through the preaching of the word. And I found it appropriate to ask this question. What happens in the life of a leader when God is not regarded as preeminent?

What happens when we do not see Christ as glorious and supreme? And if we're learning in Hebrews how awesome and how excellent Christ is, that Christ is greater than the old covenant and he's greater than angels and he's greater than temple worship, then we should also see what happens in our lives when we exalt anything and everything above that glorious Christ. King Solomon seems to be the perfect case study. He stands alone and unmatched for his God-given wisdom. Yet his leadership is not a temporary.

What I mean is he's arguably, apart from Christ, the greatest leader that has ever walked the face of the earth in terms of his practical application of leadership principles. We can look at our children and we could say, "Be like King David," or "Be like Daniel," or "Be like Joseph." But we would never tell our children to be like King Solomon. If you look at David, the guiding principle of his life was to ask the Lord God of direction before he did anything.

Now the Lord had told David to wipe out the Philistines, but when you see David, every time there is a group of Philistines who come near his camp, he always prays, "Lord, shall I attack these Philistines? Lord, shall I go up against this enemy? Lord, shall I build you a temple?" Even when it seems plainly obvious, he always prays. In fact, with his son, we see the opposite. We see the Lord telling him explicitly what to do and Solomon doing the opposite.

The purpose of this morning is not just to commiserate and to grieve at what Solomon did and did not do, but to use his blunder as motivation as we move into the book of Hebrews to put first things first, to live a life wholeheartedly devoted to the glory of God in the person and work of Jesus Christ. No supernatural gifts that you have will be complete without simple obedience to Scripture. So let's begin this morning as we seek to be humbled by Solomon's wisdom. The title this morning is "Who's Got the Horses You Want?" Who's got the horses you want? And that title will make more sense as we understand what the Lord had told Solomon.

Let's look at 1 Kings chapter 4 verses 29 through 34 as we see Solomon's wisdom. I think it's important to see that all wisdom is God given this morning. Any wisdom. The wisdom necessary to perform your job with excellence, the wisdom to organize your time, to balance a checkbook, all of those things come from God. Using the Lord for this help and realizing that you need help in an area is a tremendous step. Let's look at what happened in Solomon's life. He did some things right. He actually began very well. If we read 1 Kings chapter 4 verses 29 through 34, and this is quite lengthy, but I think it's important for me to read.

"At Gibeon the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by night, and God asked, 'Ask what I shall give you.' And Solomon said, 'You have shown great and steadfast love to your servant, David, my father, because he walked before you in faithfulness, in righteousness, and in uprightness of heart toward you. You have kept for him the great and steadfast love, and have given him a son to sit on his throne this day. And now, O Lord my God, you have made your servant king in place of David my father. And although I am but a little child, I do not know how to go out or come in.

And your servant is in the midst of your people whom you have chosen, a great people, too many to be numbered or counted for multitude. Give your servant, therefore, an understanding mind to govern your people, that I may discern between good and evil, for who is able to govern this, your great people.'" Now Solomon began well in simply realizing his wisdom need. Now that's a phrase I've been challenging our youth. We've been going through a John MacArthur study with a lot of Solomon, and so a lot of this has been influenced, but it's also been something burned into my heart.

I think it's important to see the great magnitude of Solomon's wisdom. Because he started well, he recognized his need for wisdom, he simply asked. Solomon could be regarded as the world's first great scholar. When God appeared to Solomon at Gibeah, this was the first of two divine visitations. So God visits Solomon twice. He also descended upon the congregation in the ordination of the temple. We could call Solomon's great learning and his great wisdom our equivalent of a university. So if we could use our Holy Ghost imagination for a second, what would it have been like if Solomon actually had a university?

We can see the University of Solomon would have had several colleges or schools. Solomon established, if I can be so bold, several different colleges within this university. We have the Solomon School of Leadership. The Queen of Sheba paid 25 tons of gold. That was her tuition. She came and she was amazed at Solomon's great leadership. She found his wives, his children, his servants and subjects all extremely happy and well cared for. In fact, scripture says that she was breathless. The actual verbiage in the original language could have been described as his leadership ability took her breath away.

I don't think that we can fully grasp it, but in studying this, you can see archaeological proof of things that Solomon built that still exist that have been uncovered. And you can see historically the genius that the Lord provided to him. In addition to the School of Leadership, we could see Solomon's College of Natural Sciences. He spoke over 3,000 proverbs. The book of proverbs is just a small excerpt of his writing, but he spoke a lot about nature. He composed proverbs of the cedars of Lebanon, the hyssop that grows from the wall.

And proverbs range from botany and forestry that we know of, but I would imagine all of nature, perhaps even entomology and stars. Scripture tells us that he collected apes and peacocks. Perhaps he was a zoologist. We could say that Solomon initiated the Institute of Maritime Science because 1 Kings 9 tells us he had an armada of ships from Tarsus. He had a fleet of merchant vessels as well as ships equipped for war. Solomon's School of Engineering and Technology, he constructed the Great Temple, Solomon's Temple.

He constructed several opulent palaces and he sourced these buildings with renewable resources of the finest cedar, a forest that he managed. We shouldn't forget Solomon's School of Philosophy. We can read some of this in Ecclesiastes where he deals with topics of vanity and meaninglessness and your purpose in life. When you read the book of Ecclesiastes, you will be edified. If you read proverbs, you will be challenged. In fact, the purpose of those books is to provide wisdom and they are scripture. All scriptures God breathed. You could see Solomon's School of Worship and choral music because he wrote 1,000 songs himself.

And each of his palaces, scripture tells us, was fitted with the harp, the lyre and trained musicians. He personally led the greatest worship service, this is debatable, but the greatest worship service in the Old Testament, in terms of magnitude, scale, offering, sacrifice, it was the largest. Now, there are some other Old Testament worship services that perhaps were true revival where people were more broken. This was literally the glory of God that descended upon the temple. Brother Chris referenced the Shekinah glory and we see that Christ is the glorious Christ.

As glorious as that event was in Old Testament history, it was orchestrated and led by a man who was a sinner. We have among us this morning the glorious Christ. He walks among us as one who walks among the lampstands. The problem is that we can be too much like Solomon, I'm afraid. We can get our eyes off of the glories of Jesus. We begin to chase other things. We should also remember Solomon's College of Law and Public Policy. He judged the toughest cases in the land with equity and divine wisdom and it blew Israel away. Actually you're familiar with 1 Kings chapter 3 verses 16 through 28. This is a wonderful story.

I remember learning this as a child. Two women lived together. They were women of ill repute, but both gave birth to children at the same time. One of the women accidentally suffocated her child while sleeping and she escaped her east newborn for her roommate's child. Both of these women brought this case to local magistrates and it went up the ladder to our equivalent of the Supreme Court, which was Solomon. Solomon wisely saw who the true mother was. So he formed a ruse and he said, "Bring a sword.

Let's just simply chop the child in half and both women will have half of the child and the problem will be solved and of course the true mother was broken hearted and said, "No. Let the child live. I will consent." And Solomon in his wisdom said, "This is the true mother. She gets the child." We are still amazed at that judgment. We have to see that that was God's doing. The mistake is to marvel at Solomon and overlook the glorious Christ who is right here this morning. The mistake is to look at Solomon in his gold and his learning and his wisdom and to overlook the very Jesus who gave him that wisdom who is here with us now.

And the real point this morning is that God gives wisdom but he gives wisdom to you. That Jesus is our source of wisdom. We must not see that wisdom was given to Solomon but it's not given to us. That's not true. I've been challenging the youth from James chapter 1 verses 5. We're memorizing this and learning this. It tells us that if anyone lacks wisdom he should ask God who gives generously. There's no wisdom need in your life that God will not supply. The world would have you believe as a Christian that great learning that we find in academia only exists and that they have a corner on the market.

As I have been blessed by God to teach higher education for nearly 18 years I think there's a lot of times when I felt prey to that lie and believing that academia belongs to the world. The scripture I believe would tell us that no the first great university in the world was King Solomon. He was a university and I think that the encouragement to Christian parents is that you can send your child anywhere. If they seek wisdom and they ask for wisdom, if they believe in asking and there is no reproach in their life God can not only sustain them in the academy. God can cause them to be the best. What does scripture tell us?

Scripture tells us that Joseph was the best in Egypt, Daniel was the best in Babylon and Solomon was the best in the world. And we have walking among us this morning someone who is better than Solomon who tells you to come and ask. Recently I had a friend and fellow minister give me a call. His son is in another town far away. His son is taking sociology which I happen to teach.

He said, "Brother Keith, this discipline is rife with godless philosophy." And I said, "Yes it is." He said, "My son is really struggling." And I said, "That can happen when you have a teacher who believes that this is fact." We talked for some time and he said, "Would you be willing to maybe meet us for lunch?" And I said, "I'd gladly do that." I think the problem comes in is that when we allow the world to tell us that they are the source of wisdom which is not the case. Our great God is the true source of wisdom and the problem is we don't believe Him enough to ask and to trust that He will give us what we need when we need it.

If any of you lacks wisdom, let Him ask God who gives generously to all without reproach. So what are the conditions? Ask without doubt and ask without reproach. And reproach is simply known sin that you are cherishing. We can see from Solomon's life when you cherish sin, you and your children and your children's children pay the consequences. Wisdom is not only given to us but it's given generously, James 1.5 tells us. God wants to give us an abundance of wisdom but we fail to see our greatest wisdom need. We may even love our sin as we will see in Solomon's life.

James 4 tells us covetousness, corolling, and even killing with envy and hatred. These are the great wisdom killers. If I can ask where the wisdom voices were in Solomon's life. Was there some prophet that he pushed aside? Was there some great source of counsel? I'm afraid he was the wisest in the land. And the voice that came to him, he stiffed armed. See he had God himself come to him on two occasions. And he had the words of God to Moses 400 plus years earlier. We will see that if God's word is not enough, then nothing is enough. We see Solomon's wisdom. Secondly, today we will see God's wealth. Excuse me, we will see Solomon's wealth.

First Kings 4-9. It pleased the Lord that Solomon had asked this. And God said to him, "Because you have asked this and have not asked for yourself long life or riches or the life of your enemies, but have asked for yourself understanding to discern what is right, behold, I now do according to your word. Behold, I give you a wise and discerning mind so that none like you has been before and none like you shall arise after." If we pause right there, that's your verse when you go to college. That's your verse when you send your children to college. That person at the front of the room he's lecturing is not the Lord.

In picking this up, "I give you also what you have not asked, both riches and honor, so that no other king shall compare with you all your days. And if you walk in my ways, keeping my statutes and commandments as your father David walked, then I will lengthen your days." We will be more quickly moving through each of these next points, but with the wealth that God gave Solomon, this was a tremendous blessing that Solomon did not ask for. Just how wealthy was Solomon? Scripture says there was no way to count it. He had more wealth than sand on the seashore. But just to illustrate this, let's count his wealth.

He will actually be able to tell us, Scripture tells us, at least how much gold that he brought in every year. The annual national revenue of gold into Jerusalem under Solomon's leadership, 666 talents of gold. The equivalent is 25 tons of gold annually. Just so you know, 25 tons of gold annually is a lot of money today. How much money was that then? No way really of knowing, but it would be the equivalent. 25 tons of gold today would equal 67 million dollars for 40 years. 67 times 40 is 1,000 talents of gold. So we're looking at about 67 billion dollars, if my math is right, if it's not, just let it go.

It was a lot of money, 67 billion dollars, that was just in gold. Scripture tells us that the market value of silver crashed. It was so abundant there that it would have been like a penny. Just pick up a penny today, people don't really care much for pennies. You might collect them as a novelty, but that would have been silver coins. Silver coins, on the other hand, were very useful. In fact, Scripture tells us how much silver it cost to buy a horse. Now horses will come to the surface for us in just a second. But we now revisit God's warning.

The third point this morning, at Gibeah, the Lord says, "If you walk in my ways, keeping my statutes and my commandments as your father David walked, then I will lengthen your days." God actually warned Solomon three times. First at Gibeah, again at 1 Kings 9, verse 2, "But he also gave a warning to all the kings of Israel through Moses and what we know as the cyanatic covenant." God comes down to Moses for 40 days, Moses fasted. He comes down, the people were in idolatry. He throws the stone tablets on the ground. They deal with the discipline. And then he comes back up to Mount Sinai for another 40 days. And this is what the Lord tells him.

The Lord tells Moses, and obviously Solomon would have read this. He would have known this. But the people of Israel will demand a king. They will go into the land. They will inherit the land. And eventually they will demand a king when they look around and see all of the nations around them have kings. It's never God's will, but the Lord predicted, "I will allow it." As long as this is a brother and a foreigner is not your king. But when they do, and when I give them a king, these kings must not do four things. They must avoid four pitfalls. You could read this in Deuteronomy 17, verses 14 through 20.

Our verses for the morning I recommend you go back and study this. According to the instructions for kings, they were not to, number one, accumulate many horses. Secondly, they were not to marry many wives. Three, they were not to gather much gold. And fourth, they were not to accumulate much silver. As I've already illustrated, Solomon's entire 40-year career involved those four things. Blatantly disobeying scripture. So then you might ask, "What's the problem with horses?" God, you made horses, everybody loves horses. Why could Solomon not have a horse? Well, he could have a horse, just like he had apes and peacocks.

But scripture said there was a problem with horses because horses symbolized power. They symbolized military might. When you had horses, it was our equivalent of a tank because you could have chariots. And where you have horses, you got to go down to Egypt to get horses. See the Egyptians cornered the market on the horse trade. All wealth and all power went through Egypt. So really, God didn't have a problem with a horse. He had a problem with a word we know as syncretism. Syncretism is when you begin to take Jehovah worship and mix it with the things of the world. He said, "It's not safe for my people if they start to depend on Egypt.

So I don't want you to have a bunch of horses and I don't want you to send people down there to get them." This would apply for Abram every time he went down to Egypt in the famine. Any time in Old Testament history when there was a dependence on the power of Egypt, you see it as depending on the world. And this was the problem. The question I ask you this morning is who's got the horses that you want? In your heart of hearts, what is it that you crave? Where is the area of covetousness? Perhaps what are the things that most grab your attention away from the glorious Christ who walks among us?

Again, if we look at 1 Kings 10, verse 26, "And Solomon gathered together chariots and horsemen." He had 1,400 chariots and 12,000 horsemen. So stretch of the imagination to say 12,000 horsemen, 12,000 horses. That would be a violation of scripture. Had to go down to Egypt to get those. "And the king made silver as common in Jerusalem as stone, and he made cedar as plentiful as sycamore of the shephala." Would God not have made Solomon wealthy without the horses? Without acquiring the gold? Without acquiring the silver? God told Solomon he would make him wealthy. And God is not the source and author of sin.

We see Solomon's wisdom, we see his wealth, we see God's warning. We must look at Solomon's wives. Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines. In his 40-year reign, that's exactly 14,600 days. So the question came to me, how often would he have to marry someone in order to have 700 wives? He averaged a new wife every 21 days. He averaged a new concubine every 50 days. And who were these women? Well, scholars will tell you it was a common thing in the day to actually marry someone's daughter as part of a peace treaty. So who were these wives? Scripture tells us that Solomon married Moabites. Moabites were descendants of Lot.

They lived in the east of the Dead Sea between the Arnon River and the Brook Zared. They worshipped Chimash. Chimash was a false god and the practice of infant sacrifice was part of that worship. That's right. The worship of Chimash would have been to take a precious baby and to burn them in fire. The Ammonites descended from Lot as well. They lived 25 miles east of Jordan and they worshipped Milkom, also known as Molech. Molech worship also involved child sacrifice. The Edomites, these were descendants of Saul and sworn enemies of Israel. The Sidonians could read about them in 1 Kings 6. They worshiped Astaroth.

Astaroth was a Canaanite deity and was a fertility god that involved a lot of gross perversion. Hittites were enemies of God. Let's not forget Solomon's alliance to the daughter of Pharaoh. Now this is something that we should say, the Pharaohs did not marry their daughters out. So the fact that Solomon had a wife of Pharaoh is pretty significant. Those can only suggest that there was some land that Solomon had that King Pharaoh wanted. And so the deal would have been, I'll give you this land, but you were going to give me something in return. How about your wife, which was a direct violation of scripture.

But in conjunction, we probably would think that there was an open relationship flowing once a daughter or a princess came to live in Jerusalem. This would have opened up trade routes. It brought in a great deal of wealth, which God was not dependent on. God did not authorize that. This is simply God promising Solomon wealth and him going about in a manner of disobedience to get it. How did God end up judging the Egyptian gods? We have to realize that when Pharaoh's daughter came to live in a palace right next to the temple, she unlikely would have brought with her Hapi and Osiris.

These were the Egyptian gods of the Nile, and this was what God judged when he turned the Nile waters to blood. Perhaps she would have brought Hecate, the Egyptian god of fertility. This was the plague of frogs. You might remember the plague of dead livestock. This was again against Absas, the god of livestock. The plague of darkness was against Ra, the god of sun. The plague of the firstborn was against Pharaoh himself, who was regarded as God. The key thing to hold on to was that syncretism was the blending of worship of Yahweh with these other gods.

Solomon did not stop worshiping Yahweh, neither did Israel, but they simply added on to worshiping him all of these other detestable worship practices. So I would ask you this morning as you are here, again, are there certain horses that you find yourself longing for? Are there certain relationships that you find yourself a little too close to? Your relationship to media and social media, perhaps family. Is there anything in your life that seems to be more glorious than Jesus? Now I think if we're honest, we could all find something. I think it would be important to be humble.

Scripture tells us that God opposes the proud, but he gives grace to the humble. And so if we realize how great our own wisdom needs are, how great our own missteps and sins can be, then there's hope. And I think the greatest desire of our hearts can change simply by realizing, Lord, you know I've longed for something other than you too long. Was there anything wrong with God that he was not the most significant for Solomon? Was there anything missing or lacking in Jesus that makes him less glorious to us?

You know college sports are great, hunting is great, food is wonderful, but any one of these things can rob us, rob God of the attention he deserves. It was Calvin who said, "The human heart is an idle factory." I want us to think of him, turn your eyes on Jesus, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in light of his glorious grace. So in conclusion, I think it might be important to return to the passage of Scripture that Brother Travis read to us shortly before the preaching. So if we could turn again to Isaiah chapter 55 verses 6 through 7. Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near.

Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts. Let him return to the Lord that he may have compassion on him and to our God for he will abundantly pardon.