Mack presentation - Solomon (Feb 2007)

NOTE - This is a subjective piece, and thus I don't want to hear about the disputable authorship of Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes. No, really, I don't care.

When I was asked about my favourite Bible character, I almost immediately thought of Solomon. I’ve spent most of my time since trying to pinpoint exactly why. Peter offered to help me, but his suggestion was, "Solomon’s my favourite person in the Bible because he was rich, had as many women as he wanted, and still got to go to heaven". So after I hit him for saying that bit about the women, I decided to go with what I had written.

So, why Solomon? It’s not as though there’s a lot I can identify with in Solomon’s life. Immeasurably rich, king of his country, with his famous entourage of wives and concubines - it’s nothing that really strikes a chord in the life of a young, British girl with just the one husband.
What drew me to Solomon was my love of ideas. I’ve always been an enthusiastic reader, and my favourite authors have always been those who really empathise with their characters, and explore human nature by exploring the human soul - writers like Sebastian Faulks, Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Heller. My sister was always of the opinion that I lived inside my own head most of the time, and the writings of Solomon spoke to the philosopher in me. I knew very little of the king who lived, ruler of a desert kingdom, born into a troubled family full of both love and bitter enmity, where those closest to the king were also among his most vicious rivals. It wasn’t until later that I learned of the man, his history, his wisdom and his wives.

No, it was his own writings that led me to understand him. As Philip Yancey said, or words to that effect, it’s through writing that you really get inside a person’s head. And of all the people in the Bible who speaks to us directly, it wasn’t King David’s lyricism, or the eloquent theology of Paul that I connected with as wholeheartedly as the poetry of Solomon.
At the age of sixteen, I sat down one evening at a summer camp and read through the whole of Ecclesiastes. My melancholy teenage soul in search of angst - when there was in my life, to be truthful, little angst to be found - found expression in the utterance, "Everything is meaningless...all is smoke...there is nothing new under the sun." And yet there are also phrases of breathtaking beauty and remarkable clarity. Something in me always stirs when I hear the phrase, "He has…set eternity in the hearts of men." I could talk for a long time about the nature of desire and the longing of mankind, based on that single sentence. But I won’t.
Again, when I was a bit older, and had stopped giggling at the images portrayed of cavorting stags and ripe fruit, I was struck by those words about the power of love, "its jealousy unyielding as the grave", and by the timeless warning, learnt by me the hard way, "not to arouse or awaken love until it so desires." His words, written so long ago, seem proof to me of the unchanging nature of mankind.

It’s not just the writings of Solomon, though, that appealed to me. It has to be that he was the wisest man who ever lived, and yet he still messed up.
Why is it that our favourite traits in Biblical characters is sually the fact that they did something unutterably stupid? The greatest, godliest men in history, and what do we love about them? Moses - killed a man. Peter? Denied Christ. And David, the man after God’s own heart? We love David the most, because when he fell, he went for the triple. Deceit, adultery AND murder.
But, I have to admit, part of the appeal of Solomon for me is the warning that he poses. As a student, and especially in teh culture today, when the focus is on everything that's palpable, proveable and logical - even as a Bible student - there seems to be the assumption that knowledge is everything. And Solomon - reputedly the wisest man in history - proved in his life that knowledge means nothing unless you apply what you know. How many of us have been told what we must do, and we know we must do it, yet we still disregard it? As Terry Pratchett points out, there are certain things like the opposite of urban myths, that we all know are true, and we still ignore them - wise phrases like, "Money can’t buy happiness," and "It wont get better if you keep scratching it."

More than that, Solomon’s story shows that as important as knowledge is, it comes second to obedience to God. As Jesus remarks, to see the Kingdom of God requires the faith of a child. Children aren't stupid, and they always ask questions. To become like a child is not a case of following blindly, but it is a matter of trust. Not to mention the clarity which comes with innocence, and strikes fear in the hearts of all children's entertainers - so that you’re not playing along with intellectual games and modes of thinking, but so you can see past the magician’s tricks and declare that he’s got "something funny up his sleeve." Wise as serpents, innocent as doves.

And of course, you need devotion. In short, both the highs and lows of Solomon’s career, and there were real highs, show that wise thinking amounts to little unless your heart belongs to God. Unless I have love, I am nothing. And for someone who has a tendency to live inside my own head and rely upon my own reserves,someone who tends to withdraw from the world when things get difficult, and someone who has to constantly, reluctantly, pray the prayer for God to break my heart for the things that break his, it’s a lesson that I’m constantly having to learn.