Trampling the First Commandment (Part B)

Convert or be converted. Kill or be killed.

That's the idea. God's restrictions. Again, not without reason. In fact, he tells Ezekiel, I have done nothing without a cause. God is not whimsical.

I was just in the mood. You could be a lot of people that went to hell that day because God was just in the mood. Thank God he's not like that. That's why Jesus says I am the same yesterday, today, and forever. I change not. He said, I am a rock.

I don't change. This is Cross-Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the book of First Kings.

Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross-Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. And now here's Pastor Rick in the book of Ezekiel chapter 28 as he continues his message, Trampling the First Commandment. We're wiser than Satan because we don't rebel against God like Satan. Lucifer I'm talking about. Because when we say Satan, we mean all the enemy realm in the spirit world. But to single it down, to narrow it down to their leader, Lucifer himself, Daniel, as I mentioned, is held up by God, again by the prophet Ezekiel, which shows the influence that Daniel had.

Daniel was alive in those days. And he had such an influence that God spoke to Ezekiel about the people and he says, to the people through the prophet, behold. Well, he's speaking actually to the king of Tyre. And much of what he says to the king of Tyre is applicable intentionally to Satan himself, but also to the king. A dual application.

And to anybody else who wants to line up on that side of the road. Behold, are you wiser than Daniel? There is no secret that can be hidden from you. So Daniel was so, God was so spiritually in tune with God that it stands out even to the great prophet Ezekiel. Well, Solomon was not wise spiritually.

That's the point. He may have been smarter, he was smarter than Daniel. He could beat him in a spelling bee. He just could not carry out the righteousness like Daniel could. And God wouldn't speak to Solomon anymore like he spoke through Daniel. Daniel's prophecies are unfolding before us to this day.

Well, that's some of what was going on. We have this really intelligent man who spiritually let himself drift away and all he was left with was the one leg of intelligence without the spiritual. Paul was intelligent and he was spiritual. Peter, what he lacked in intellectual prowess, he made up for with his spirituality.

His closeness to God. It says here in verse one, as well as the daughter of Pharaoh. He married many foreign women as well as, he singles out now Pharaoh's daughter. This is the last of five references to that marriage. The historian just really, he writes as though he's just irritated with Solomon sometimes.

I get that sense. And how could he not be? Solomon built a house for Pharaoh's daughter, this princess whom he married, giving her a special status and privilege and of course it became the court for his wives. Just think about, just in ancient Israel when Jesus lived, what did people do with the trash?

Human waste? I mean, what did things look like then? And so you imagine this giant complex would have required an army to support, to keep it clean and the Jews were known to be clean. It was baked into their scripture. This was to have eight hundred wives, likely all of them living in Jerusalem because you just couldn't let them go out far away and then other people target them and become hostages and just things like that. So this was a significant complex and the Pharaoh's daughter, she was the queen.

But she's not called. None of the women in Israel were referenced as queens until we get to Athaliah and that's a whole dumb story. But this marrying, this Egyptian princess was going back to Egypt, another step away from the Lord because the kings were not supposed to do this. He secured this bride from Egypt and thinking he's going to better establish a relationship with the Pharaoh.

He's patting himself on the back. It was really the might, the military that kept the peace. Solomon's thinking it's his wheeling and dealing. Yeah, well if you take away your chariots and your cavalry and your troops, your treaties are nothing.

They just, you know, they're not arrow proof. So his father David had written some trust in chariots, some in horses, but we will remember the name of Yahweh our God. Well David trusted in chariots and horses, well whatever weapons he had available, but not without the Lord.

Solomon does it a little differently and it shows up. He wanted horses so he could not only have them for his military, but so that he can engage in trade and bring in revenue. So he thinks, he's thinking this is pretty good. I can buy these Arabian horses, I can buy these other horses and sell them to make this profit, and I can also build up a stronger military. Our horses will be superior to their horses. And the chariots of course, that was the mechanized army that he had during that day. And so these actions reveal Solomon's doubts about God, but his confidence in himself. So I can do better than God. Now if you would have walked up to Solomon and said, can you do better than Yahweh? Of course he would say, no I cannot. But that's not how he lived.

He lived as though he could because he's breaking these cardinal rules, as we would say, given to the Jewish people, particularly the Hebrew kings by Moses, whom he thought he was evidently, thought he was smarter than. All of this to me is something that is relevant today. People who have a lot of money, you know again, if you have a lot of money, people think you know everything, I guess.

You can tell them about anything. After all, you figured out how to get money. Well, some people, that's all they can do is get money and keep it.

And not a lot more. I mean, what's the stock guy? Oh, I don't want to say his name and don't say it. But he's all about making money. He writes books to tell you how to make money so he can make more money, selling the books. But I bet you he can't fix a flat tire. I bet he probably can't even, you know, can he bake a cake? There's a lot of things he can't do, but he's very rich. And he said, well, he can outsource it.

He hires somebody. Yeah, but that's not the point. The point is that people who have a lot of money don't know everything. And Solomon, he knew a lot more than everybody else and he didn't handle it the right way. Egypt represents bondage of the old life, the old world, and the wilderness that the Jews experienced pictures the consequence of doubting God after coming out of the bondage, after seeing God work, and then doubting God, the consequence was the wilderness.

Well, Solomon, he saw God work, but he doubts God and he begins to break the commandments thinking that somehow he's an exception. He's entitled to do this. Entitlement is a very sneaky thing. People who visit this church think that they are entitled to do things their way and they're quite, quite shocked when we say, you crazy?

What do you think this is? But I'm just, I'm a good people. I'm not questioning them, but it's just, I don't, it's something that can happen very, you're just not even conscious of it. And for Solomon, I don't, I don't know to what degree he was conscious of it, but I know he did it. They wandered and they failed to lay hold of the inheritance that God had, that generation had for them. It says here the women of the Moabites, Amorites, Edomites, Sidonians, and the Hittites, and that's not even an exhaustive list.

Well, these are the surrounding kingdoms. The forbidden marriages are explicitly recorded in Exodus, Deuteronomy, Numbers, Joshua, Judges. They show up in Ezra and Nehemiah, and yet to this day we have Christians that want to marry an unbeliever and you say, listen, this is explicitly forbidden in the New Testament.

We're talking, if it wasn't in the New Testament, maybe, you know, but it is in the New Testament. This is not wise, and they do it anyway. And that doesn't mean we should judge them and hold them for, you know, accountable, but you cannot support that. You cannot say this is obedience. You can say it's disobedience. And I know it's tough.

You're growing up, you're young, you think that you're going to make the difference and be the exception, and you're entitled to this, and it's just a trap. Anyway, this brand of Solomon's disobedience created problems years later for Ezra and Nehemiah. In fact, 400 years later they're still dealing with this stuff. Ezra 9 and Ezra 10 and Nehemiah 13, Nehemiah knew how to deal with people. So I struck them. I pulled out their hair.

I flattened their tires. He's my kind of leader, although I don't want him to lead me, but I want to lead like him. Anyway, that 13th chapter of Nehemiah is just worth reading by itself. Anyway, Solomon, I think some of it wasn't that he was trying to imitate the surrounding eastern potentates. You know, all the kings do it that way. I mean, at the beginning, I don't think he was imitating them.

I think he was trying to blow them away. What do you got in your harem? What, 10? 20?

How about a thousand? I'm serious. I think that's what was part of what was happening. He said, look, if I'm going to sin, I'm going to really sin. He just went crazy.

700 wives, 300 concubines. Why? This is almost a psychosis. There's a madness that belongs to this at some point in the world. The world is one Christian writer. This is a good time to read this to you. One Christian writer long since gone. The world is that collection of men in every age who live only according to the maxims of their time. The world lives according to the culture.

That's what he's saying. And that's what Solomon, the culture is the kings have harems. My dad had, you know, I don't know, I don't remember off time, seven, eight wives. Many scholars like to say, yeah, but you know, they were just, no they weren't because if they were just political, he wouldn't have had 300 concubines. They didn't have political clout. David, could you imagine David as an idolater?

You can't. If you go by the scripture, you can't even think that David would have been burning incense to some fake god or allowing somebody to do it without wanting to do harm to that person, another covenant child that is. David's fall was passion of the flesh, not the spirit.

Solomon is slowly crumbling of this great character until finally we have this 11th chapter that is a sad ending. Verse two, from the nations of whom Yahweh had said to the children of Israel, you shall not intermarry with them, nor are they with you. Surely they will turn away your hearts after their gods.

Solomon clung to these in love. Well, this is not an ethnic thing. This is a spiritual thing because if they converted, the marriage was for Rahab. She married a Jewish man. You know, she converted to Judaism and it's the same for us today.

If someone converts to Christianity, then the Bible smiles on that. Of this list of names that we had in verse one, the Hittites are the only ones explicitly stated in the letter of the law in Deuteronomy 7, which I have open here, but I'm not going to read it because we're already late and I don't know how much time we have left, you know, three, four hours, but so the Hittites, they're on that list, but the Jews understood the spirit of the law, the righteous Jews understood that, and the spirit of the law was anyone outside the covenant was off, period. It didn't have to be a Hittite.

They could have been from anywhere. If they were not a believer in Yahweh, they were out and that is, Solomon knew that too. A Jew could marry a convert to Moses' law, but not outside of it. And Numbers 25 and Ezra 9 point that out because there you have other people barred, forbidden from marriage with the Jewish people and they weren't part of that list. Here in verse two, surely they would turn away your hearts after their gods. Well, God is saying, this prohibition is not just because, you know, I just like making rules and it's sad, you know, even in churches, you know, you have rules because something has happened or we know it's going to happen and the other person hasn't figured it out yet.

Well, we can't wait for them to figure it out. I mean, how about just something simple that won't sting anybody? You know, suppose we had a rule, you can't play with matches by the paper pile and someone protests, why?

Why can't I? That when you strike it, that sound and smell of sulfur is so nice. Well, because it's going to fire you out of control, burn everything down. Oh, come on. So you make a rule. We're not going to wait for you to burn everything down so we can say, see it told you and God is this way.

God is saying, I'm not going to wait for you to figure it out. Here's what I would like. That's leadership.

This is what I want. I mean, ideally leadership is, hey, you know, get everybody's idea, but the final act at the end of it all, the leader is saying, here's the direction we're going in. Sink or swim, this is it. Anything other than that, you have mayhem. You have just, you have a spastic approach to life. A two-headed anything is wrong. It's not supposed to be that way. If you come across a two-headed cow, you know something went wrong. And if you come across a two-headed leader, you got problems. Isn't that the God Janus amongst the Jews? He's facing both ways.

Anyway, wherever I was. Surely they would turn your hearts away from God. So convert or be converted, kill or be killed.

That's the idea. God's restrictions. Again, not without reason. In fact, he tells Ezekiel, I have done nothing without a cause. God is not whimsical. I was just in the mood. There'd be a lot of people that went to hell that day.

Why? Because God was just in the mood. Thank God he's not like that. That's why Jesus says, I am the same yesterday, today, and forever. I change not. He said, I am a rock.

I don't change. Anyway, the restrictions are not without reason. They have everything to do with morality and morality has something to do with eternity. The two are joined together. Solomon clung to these in love. It's an imperfect love. It's a love that overrules God. It's a one thing to struggle.

It's another thing to just completely sell it out. J. Vernon McGee. Now I won't do his voice, but I want to quote his comment on this Solomon clung to these in love. J. Vernon McGee. Because if I don't say Vernon McGee, and I just said it to you, maybe you'd raise an eyebrow.

But if I say Vernon McGee, oh, okay, okay, that's good. He's okay. He's smarter than you. Well, he is. He's also better off than me right now.

Only for a little while I'll catch up. I think this is, says Vernon, the one place in scripture where the word love can be changed to sex. Solomon clung to these in sex.

That's what it was. It wasn't love. You can't love a thousand people. I mean, not like that. You can agape a thousand people. We even kind of look at that as a little crazy because when you see somebody, you know, the pope, not our pope, blessing, you know, the masses. Come on, give me a break.

These guys could be felons and murderers and many of them are. Bless you, my son. It loves a little bit more intimate than that. Anyway, Solomon enjoyed his lifestyle. That's what's going on and he did cling to them. He wouldn't turn them loose.

That's the idea. These inter-marriages, again, not against the race of the people, but the idolatry in the people. Deuteronomy 17, 17, neither shall he multiply wives for himself, lest his heart turn away, nor shall he greatly multiply silver or gold for himself. Well, he broke both of those.

We'll review those in a little bit. And again, when he broke a commandment, he went all out. Verse 3, and he had 700 wives. How many of you remember the names? I mean, really, he has to have an aide there to say, okay, this is, thank you. I couldn't remember.

What number is she? This is crazy. And I think that God, when we come across this, he doesn't want us to applaud this and admire it. The men would have to be told that. The women, like, you don't need to give me any help in not liking what's going on here. This is slavery. Anyhow, he had 700 wives, princesses, and 300 concubines, and his wives turned away his heart.

Well, the team, 700 versus one. Mathematically, it makes sense. Not only was this a multiplication of wives, but they were foreign also.

So that's not just, you keep stabbable. Look, I already messed, I'm already wet. What difference does it make? Polygamy. There are still those who try to use the Bible. Mormons and morons, there's a very thin line there in speaking about those.

I almost said, well, look at the morons. And it really wouldn't have been in need of correction. Still trying to justify polygamy. God had said, a man shall be joined to his wife, not his wife. So this reason, a man shall leave his mother and father and be joined to his wife, not wives.

And certainly, this was before the fall, but God knew what was coming. And God said that the two, not the multiple, shall be one flesh. This is upheld in the New Testament.

Matthew 19, 5, 1 Corinthians 6, 16, it is upheld. Listen, men and women are equal, they're not identical. One's not inferior to the other. They have different roles. God has assigned these roles. And in the New Testament, all things are lawful for me, but not all things are edifying for me.

Well, that leaves a lot of margin, a lot of space to get a lot of things done that you otherwise could not get done under a strict law. Christianity, Paul had the insight to know that, listen, Judaism was the foundation of the church, but we have now built a top of that, but not, according to our own understanding, it has been given to us by God. And that's, can you imagine a New Testament without the apostles? There'd be no authority. It would just be this guy said this, this guy said that, but the apostles locked that down.

When they spoke, that was it. There's just no changing it. And God designed it that way. And yet you just get somebody that's going to come along and try to make women look inferior to men. Are you going to have somebody else come along and try to make a woman one of the guys? Satan is the one that kills femininity, and Satan is the one that makes men feminine. Who else could it be? Who else has got that great of an influence over invisible things in an evil way?

It's the devil. I, like C.S. Lewis said, that he loved the sound of men laughing, because it was just that there was something right about the masculinity in its proper place. He didn't say a man laughing.

He meant men together in camaraderie. Well, there are things that goes, you know, we love to see children playing with each other peacefully. We're not excited about it when one's trying to, when they're fighting or fussing, but there are these things that are okay to like and to understand, but you would think that they're common sense and they're not. We're living in a time where things that, boy, that is just not only wrong, it is devilish. Tell a little child they need a sex change. Somebody ought to beat the snot out of somebody for thinking like that. There's no other cure.

They should have, they should make me the czar of beating the snot out of people who do things like that. I mean, and I'm not using a newspaper. What are you going to do with that stick? Go find a bigger one.

That's what I'm going to do. I mean, it just has to, to act so shocked or to protest and threaten life threatening. Oh, come on.

Let me get, I try not to, I don't want to talk about this stupid culture. Other generations have been more evil. This one has been stupid.

I don't know about more evil as evil. This one has been the stupidest one. I say generation. I mean from 100, whoever's alive buying into this junk. I'm not talking about one particular age group who would disagree with that.

Who would have imagined? Okay, this is a rant. This is a rant.

All right. These princesses here, of course, we've already covered the political side of that. Downsizing this again, keeping it in all this political, I think is wrong. There's more to it. 300 concubines. They were not acquaintances. A thousand in a harem. How shallow.

I need to just keep moving. And his wives turned his heart, turned away his heart here in verse three. As God said, it would happen.

It has happened. And we are supposed to pay attention to this. This is not true.

This is true not only with marrying or unevenly yoked relationships. It's, it's true of unbiblical thinking. Galatians three. Oh foolish Galatians who has bewitched you that you should not obey the truth before whose eyes Jesus was clearly portrayed among you as crucified. Are you so foolish having begun in the spirit?

Are you now being made perfect in the flesh? Does that not fit Solomon? Can you not say Solomon, are you so foolish who's bewitched you? You, you, God showed himself. You have four visions of God. God speaking to you directly. Your kingdom was given to you by God. Everything that David handed to you was because of his relationship with God.

A man after God's own heart. Thanks for joining us for today's teaching on Cross Reference Radio. This is the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia.

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