The Magnitude of the Temptation

Faced with sufficient, ongoing sexual temptation, almost any man will succumb. Women will get the job done when nothing else works. That was certainly the case with Solomon. I note that in describing his descent into idolatry in later life, the writer of 1 Kings makes this comment: “His heart had turned away from the Lord, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice.”

That’s mind boggling to consider, isn’t it. God appeared to Solomon twice. You would think that validating a man’s belief in the transcendent so thoroughly, and doing it not once but on two separate occasions years apart, would guarantee lifelong faithfulness to the Lord and his commandments.

That was not the case with Solomon. Actually, it was not the case with many men and women privileged to experience a personal encounter with God.

Holiness and Proximity

Adam and Eve had regular personal encounters with their Creator, then committed acts of rebellion that plunged his entire creation into sin. God corrected Cain’s flawed worship practices personally, right after which he murdered his brother. Abraham met the Lord on many occasions; it didn’t stop him from siring Ishmael with his wife’s servant or displaying cowardice before foreign dignitaries more than once. Moses talked with God in a burning bush, then almost got himself killed on the way back to Egypt for failing to keep the covenant of circumcision. Rebekah got a personal prophecy from God, then sinned against her husband and son trying to make it come true. Balaam met the angel of the Lord in person and later died conspiring against him.

That’s all just in the first few books of the Bible. I could go on all day. Proximity to God is no assurance of holiness. Based on the records of men and women to whom God spoke and to whom he appeared, direct revelation is no more likely to result in a lifetime of godly decision-making than a written word or second-hand message from God. It’s no wonder the Lord so greatly values faith.

Egregious Spiritual Swerves

Still, Solomon’s late-life reversal has to be one of the most egregious spiritual swerves on record, both in terms of the magnitude of the evil in which he indulged and in the long term effects his sin had on his family and his nation. Noah had personal dealings with God, then embarrassed himself while drunk and cursed his grandson. The result: today, we fuss about the IQs of black people. Compare that to Solomon, who had personal dealings with God, then build high places to worship the Ammonite abomination Molech and the Moabite deity Chemosh, two false gods whose worship was accompanied by human sacrifice. Those most affected by his sin did not pass on their genes at all, let alone fuss about how the world regarded them.

Somehow, Solomon’s sins seem orders of magnitude worse, probably because they were. Solomon’s error was horrendous in a way that beggars parallel. Then again, so were his temptations. The man had a combined thousand wives and concubines. That he would eventually begin to cater to their wishes and enter into the worship of their gods was probably the easiest bet any Israelite gambler ever took to his bookie. We should not overlook the fact that Solomon deliberately and recklessly exposed himself to this sort of temptation in direct violation of both the written commands of God and his own conscience. He knew exactly what he was doing and where it normally leads. Presumably he thought himself immune.

Solomonic-Level Temptation

Proximity to God is no guarantee of holiness. The size of the sin is directly correlated to the magnitude of the temptation.

In the last seventy years or so, Christians have used mass media to take the gospel to places it could never have gone any other way, much to the glory of God. But that same mass media exposure has also facilitated the creation of religious empires of such size and reach that their balance sheets run into billions, not millions. Other than perhaps the papacy, nothing like this has ever existed in the history of the church. With leadership of these massive organizations comes near-Solomonic temptation to sex, greed and status-chasing, to which many have surrendered. These things are obvious, and Christians point them out to one another all the time, though far too few of us make it a policy to reject and avoid allegedly-Christian ministries whose size and reach exposes their leadership to constant and absolutely unnecessary temptation. “They’re not all like that,” we say. “There was Billy Graham.”

Of course there was. Can we get a second example, please? That one is getting long in the tooth.

The size of the sin is directly correlated to the magnitude of the temptation. We’d best let that one sink in. Andy Stanley’s net worth is estimated at $40-45 million. Think those numbers might tempt a man to compromise a little? Or maybe a lot?

Flee, Flee and Flee Some More

The biblical way to deal with temptation is to flee it. The Lord Jesus taught drastic risks merited drastic actions, even if they came at great cost. If that’s true of the much smaller temptations you and I face daily, then it is most definitely true for the power brokers and personalities of the Christian world, who are constantly exposed to it, and for whom eventual catastrophic, public failure is not only likely but inevitable.

Now, I’m pretty sure Andy Stanley doesn’t read this blog, and Solomon has been dead for almost three millennia, but there is a practical point I am trying to make to our ordinary, everyday readers whose personal temptations are, relatively speaking, microscopic. If giving a man a pedestal all but guarantees a fall, then you and I have a moral obligation to stop giving men pedestals.

It’s really not that complicated.