FBC Morning Light – March 27, 2023

Well, a good Monday morning to you. Here we are, beginning the last week of the month of March, moving rapidly toward Palm Sunday this

Sunday, and then Easter Sunday, less than two weeks away. I hope your week gets off to a good start today, and you're getting it off to a good start with God's Word.

Today we're reading in Deuteronomy 17 and 18, Luke chapter 17 and the 61st

Psalm. I want to look at a couple of verses at the end of Deuteronomy 17. When I was reading these, it struck me how the very things that God enumerated as prohibitions for Israel's kings are the very things that one of the kings ended up accumulating.

Let me explain. In chapter 17, verses 14 and following, as a reminder,

Moses gave what's in the contents of Deuteronomy, at the end of the 40 -year wandering in the wilderness, they're about to enter into the land of promise.

He says, when you come to the land which the Lord your God has given you, and possess it and dwell in it, and say,

I will set a king over me like the nations that are around me. The Lord says, you will surely set a king over you whom the

Lord your God chooses, and one from among your brethren you shall set as king over you.

He says, you're not supposed to set up a foreigner over you, just one of your brethren. Then he says this, your king, he shall not multiply horses for himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt to multiply horses, for the

Lord has said to you, you shall not return that way again, neither shall he multiply wives for himself, lest his heart turn away, nor shall he greatly multiply silver and gold for himself.

Listen to those three prohibitions again, don't multiply horses, don't go to Egypt to get them, don't multiply wives, and don't multiply silver and gold for yourself.

Yet, if you know your history of Israel, you'll remember that the third king in Israel's history,

Saul, then David, then David's son Solomon, Solomon violated all three of these things.

He multiplied horses for himself and with them chariots, and he went to Egypt to get most of those horses.

By the way, he was probably able to successfully do that because of his marriage to the daughter of Pharaoh.

He had this alliance with the Egyptians. This is clearly something God prohibited.

He went to Egypt to get horses and he multiplied horses for himself, and Solomon is probably most well -known for the multiplying of his wives for himself, and hundreds and hundreds of wives and concubines, and all for himself.

During Solomon's reign, they were so prosperous that silver was counted as nothing, it doesn't mean much of anything because gold is so plentiful.

If you remember the construction of Solomon's palace, there was so much gold.

Oh my goodness, we can't even imagine such a stupendously luxurious setting, gold everywhere.

Solomon multiplied horses, wives, and silver and gold for himself in violation of what

God clearly said. What's more significant about that is what God says next here.

He says, it shall be when the king sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself a copy of this law in a book from the one before the priests, the

Levites, and it shall be with him, and he shall read it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the

Lord his God and be careful to observe all the words of this law and these statutes, that his heart may not be lifted up above his brethren, that he may not turn aside from the commandment to the right hand or to the left.

God gives the demands, the requirements, the stipulations, don't multiply these things for yourself, and furthermore, each king is to make sure that he gets a copy of these restrictions for himself, he is to have that read for himself regularly so that he doesn't turn aside.

Yet Solomon violated all these things, so you've got to wonder, did he not copy these laws for himself, or did he not bother to have it read before him regularly?

I wonder if this is what happened. We don't know for sure, but just using this little sanctified imagination and also based on experience with dealing with people,

I wonder if Solomon in his pride, his success, didn't let some of that go to his head, and he started to violate these commands.

Getting wives, thought it would be great if I get some horses and multiply my ability and power that way, and then when he started to do that, he knew that if he had this read before him, it would be convicting, and it would be clarifying that he was disobeying.

So he just kind of ignored that part of the command, to have this read before him.

I think that's probably what happened. I think that's what happens in the lives of those who profess to be Christians sometimes.

They know what God's Word says, they violate it because of what they want to do instead, and then they absent themselves from a situation where they're going to hear what

God says and thereby be convicted by it. They'll think that by not listening to what

God has said, not reading it for themselves, not putting themselves in a church situation, then they can stave off the conviction and the feelings of guilt.

I wonder if that's why some Christians don't read their Bibles. I wouldn't say that's always the case, not by any stretch of the imagination, but I wonder if in some cases that's not the problem, and if that's not why some professing

Christians, they're Sunday morning only Christians. They show up for church on Sunday morning to do their spiritual religious duty, but they don't participate in the

Bible study times, they don't participate in the evening services or the midweek services, they don't want to be confronted with God's Word.

I want to challenge us not to fall prey to that mentality, but instead to allow

God's Word to do its convicting work and its shaping work, and be sure that our lives are shaped by it, and then to the extent that we violate that Word, confess it, repent of it, and move on, get back to a life of obedience.

Let's be sure we follow that pattern and not Solomon's. Our Father in heaven, we do thank you this morning for your

Word and the challenge of it today to make sure we keep it before us, lest our hearts go astray after other gods of our own making.

We pray this in Jesus' name, amen. Listen, you have a good rest of your