How Idolatry Corrupts

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If you would take out your Bibles and turn with me to the book of 1 Kings. 1 Kings chapter 11. A few weeks ago I was looking at some plants out in front of Charles’ mother’s house and I think they were crepe myrtles or something like that but it was hard to tell because there were these weird plants growing all over these vines and Charles said what do you think those are because they’ve been trying to figure it out and so I went and took a look and I’ve never seen anything like these before.

They were covered in these vines that grew up all over them. And they had these fruits that were hanging off of them. And I thought, I don’t know if it’s something poisonous, like even poisonous to the touch.

So I was trying to take my knife and whack one of those off of there and get it to fall where I could get to it and cut it open without touching it, see what it was. But they were these weird fruits. They were about the size and shape of ancho chilies, just to give you an idea of what this thing looked like.

About the size and shape of ancho chilies, and the skin was like okra. And you cut them open, and it’s like cucumber inside. Now, I don’t know if it tastes like cucumber.

I didn’t try that. I looked at it, and I said, this is the weirdest thing that I’ve ever seen. I told her, I said, you might check with the county extension.

I don’t know how else you’d figure out what the thing was. But it was growing and it was taking over these big crepe myrtle plants, especially the one that was closest to the driveway. And she said it had sprouted up in years past, and her mother had gone out there and cut them down and evidently, though, had not gotten to the root of it because this kept coming back, kept coming back, kept coming back.

And even to the point where there’s another crepe myrtle about three or four yards down the way, and the plant was apparently sending runners under the ground and climbing up this one too. It was bizarre. Bizarre looking plant.

Bizarre scenario. But we know that sometimes happens with these vines and things, these weeds, these noxious plants that you can prune them back and that’s good. I mean, it’ll help in the short term, help the plants that you’re wanting to cultivate, that you’re wanting to survive, if you prune these noxious plants back.

But anybody in here who’s ever had a garden or worked outside, tended a flower bed, anything like that, understands that unless you get down to the root of the plant and you pull that noxious plant out by the root, it’s probably going to come back. And some of these spread underground and some of these spread in ways that we don’t even know that they’re there. We don’t even know that they’re still there until they have come back again with a vengeance and they’re threatening to choke everything out.

Folks, idolatry is the exact same way. Idolatry is the exact same way. We can prune it back and we can get most of it.

We can get most of it and say, well, I’ll just leave that little bit for later. It’ll be fine. I’ll get most of it.

And in the short term, that helps. But unless we go in routinely and every time we see it, we rip that noxious plant of idolatry out of our hearts, it’s gonna come back and it’s gonna take over and we’re gonna have to fight that battle All over again. Now, I’ve given you this definition before, but just in case, I want to be very clear what I mean by idolatry.

Because as I’ve said, we think in our Western mindset, we look back at biblical times and we say, oh, they made statues of Baal. That was idolatry. And we’re absolutely right. Or we look at Asian countries today and we look at the massive statues of Buddha and we say, that’s idolatry.

Absolutely, that’s right. That’s idolatry. But we forget that there’s idolatry here in and among and around us also all the time.

Does anybody in this building go home and bow down to a statue? I highly doubt it. I really, I don’t think that for a minute.

But there’s still idolatry. There’s still idolatry in the Western world. You take anything.

Here’s the definition that I use of idolatry, my working definition. And if you’ve got a better one, I’d be glad to hear it. But idolatry is any time we take something that is not God and put it in the place in our hearts and our lives that only God properly occupies.

It’s idolatry. And for some people, the idol is not a statue. For some people, the idol is something else bad, like a bottle of something.

Alcohol becomes the idol. Sometimes sex is the idol. Sometimes violence is the idol.

Sometimes drugs are the idol. You name it, it can be an idol. But not every idol, ladies and gentlemen, is something bad.

I mean, Brother Williams talked about that this morning, talking about money. The Bible does not say that money is the root of all evil, does it? We hear that.

Oh, you know, the Bible says money is the root of all evil. Why didn’t I preach on that one in that series? That didn’t even occur to me until just now.

That’s one of the most misinterpreted passages of Scripture, or at least misquoted. it. The Bible doesn’t say that money is the root of all evil.

It doesn’t even say, like I heard a prosperity preacher teach one time, that the lack of money is the root of all evil. It definitely doesn’t say that. It says the love of money is the root of all evil.

The money is just a tool. The money is a neutral. It’s how you use it, like any other tool. Is a gun evil?

Now, I know that I don’t mean to be political. That’s just the first thing that comes to mind. Depends on who you ask. There yes, it’s evil.

But I submit to you, the gun is just a tool. If you use it to shoot up a kindergarten, it’s absolutely, it’s being used for evil. There’s no doubt about that.

If you use it to defend your home from somebody who wants to murder your children, then that gun becomes a tool for good real quick. Some things are good, some things are evil. Some things are just tools.

Voluntary can be a neutral, a tool like that money. I know of some people that I could say maybe the gun even is an idol. Folks, idols can even be something that’s good.

Family is a good thing. Family is a good thing. There are some people, and I might be one of these at times, who are dangerously close to putting family at a position that only God rightly occupies.

Family is a good thing, but it doesn’t deserve to be where God is. Your service to the Lord in church is a good thing. but if you worship what you’re doing if you worship what you do here if you worship what you do for this place how can I possibly do that if it becomes more important to you than what god says or wants then we’re worshiping it even something good taken out of its proper place and put into gods becomes an idol and idolatry is dangerous because I believe it’s at the root of all the other sins.

Idolatry, even if it’s something as simple as saying, I’m going to do what I want, then I put myself in God’s place in my life. If we’re taking marching orders from it, instead of God, it’s become God to us and it’s idolatry. And so idolatry very quickly leads to other things like drunkenness.

It leads to things like extramarital affairs. It leads to things, folks, you name it. And it all started in the Garden of Eden when they said, when the serpent told Eve, you will be like God.

Oh, that sounds good. Idolatry. And that’s where sin entered the world.

Idolatry is a dangerous thing because I believe it’s at the root of everything else. This idea that I’m going to let something else be God in my life is at the root of everything else. And it’s dangerous because it is so hard to get rid of once it takes root.

We’re going to look, if you haven’t already turned there, turn with me to 1 Kings chapter 11. We’re going to look very briefly tonight at the story of a good man who was brought down by his idolatry. He was brought down when he began to take God out of the place that he properly held in his life and put other things there.

And in his case, in his case, it was things that we would look at and say, well, those aren’t idols. yeah they are by the definition I gave you his wives became idols because he was taking marching orders from them instead of God and it eventually led to other kinds of idolatry that we would look at and more readily associate with idolatry but the man we’re going to look at tonight is Solomon Solomon started well Solomon was a good man Solomon was blessed by God not only with the kingdom of Israel but he was blessed with abilities and wisdom and riches to do that job effectively he was an incredible king because God made him an incredible king. And we would think if God has blessed you in such a way, you’re going to stick with God.

And yet Solomon fell very easily to idolatry. And it’s a reminder to all of us, it’s a reminder to all of us that we can just as easily fall to idolatry if we’re not careful. If we’re not careful, if we’re not on guard, if we’re not ripping out the noxious plant by the roots every time we see it.

So looking at verse one, it says, but King Solomon many strange women. That doesn’t mean that they were just odd. He didn’t have, he didn’t, when I was a teenager, my mother asked me, why do you always attract the weird ones?

I don’t know. It’s nothing I’m doing. Okay.

He wasn’t just, he didn’t just have a, a, an appreciation. I can’t think of the word I’m trying to think of. He didn’t just have an an appreciation for a strange kind of woman.

When the Bible says here that he loved many strange women, it’s talking about foreigners. When God prohibited, and God had prohibited this, God had said, don’t do this, don’t marry with the countries, don’t intermarry with the countries around you. Now, God didn’t tell them that because he said, oh, y’all don’t look alike, you shouldn’t get married.

You don’t talk alike, you shouldn’t get married. This isn’t a racial or ethnic thing. The problem for God with them intermarrying with the countries around them was a problem of religion, was a problem of faith, was a problem of morals.

And we know this because there are instances where there were people in the Old Testament who married with people from the other countries around them, and those marriages were blessed because they married people who believed in the one true God. Rahab, the harlot, was a Canaanite, married into the Jewish nation, And God was very okay with that. Ruth was a Moabite, but she had respect and reverence for the one true God, believed in and followed the one true God.

And so God was okay with that. Both of those women were part of the ancestry of Jesus Christ. So when God said, don’t intermarry with the pagan tribes around you, it wasn’t, oh, I hate foreigners. It wasn’t, let’s keep the bloodline pure.

It was about keeping the heart and keeping the faith pure. And so God had said, don’t do this. Say, what’s the big deal?

Well, even now, the Bible teaches that Christians aren’t to be unequally yoked with unbelievers. There’s a line from the movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, that came out when I was in high school, where they’re discussing, you know, the dad, there’s a wedding and the dad’s not supportive of it and the mom’s trying to reassure the daughter and says, the man may be the head, but the woman is the neck and can turn him wherever she wants him to go. You know what?

ladies since it’s mostly ladies here tonight there’s a lot of truth in that and Solomon fell prey to that God understood that God understood that that yes he had given the husband say in the household but what man what wise man is not going to listen to his wife certainly not a man who values peace he’s men take into consideration what your wife says but God realized this was dangerous if they were intermarrying with pagan tribes well honey in my family you know we have these altars can’t we just do a little bit okay and so God had prohibited this because it would be very easy it would be very easy for pagan wives to turn the hearts of the Israelite men away from God and after idols Solomon thought he was above this prohibition from God Solomon thought he was bigger than this commandment and the king loved many strange women wow we’re not even through verse one yet together with the daughter of pharaoh there’s an egyptian women of the moabites ammonites edomites zidonians hittites and we won’t go through all those tribes today or tonight to explain what they all are but just suffice it to say if you start in turkey and you work around clockwise and you end up in egypt that covers everything that surrounds israel except for the the mediterranean you’ve just about married into every tribe that surrounds Israel.

So not only did he break that commandment he broke it as much as he could. He married into every pagan tribe. Of the nations concerning which the Lord said unto the children of Israel you shall not go into them neither shall they come in unto you for surely they will turn away your heart after their God Solomon claimed unto these in love and he had 700 wives, princesses and 300 concubines and his wives turned away his heart.

okay so he’s already messed up there’s a there is already idolatry here because god very clearly said don’t marry into these pagan tribes and what did he do he said it doesn’t matter what god wants we’re going to do what I want so who had become god in solomon’s life solomon I’m going to do what I want to do on top of that god had said don’t multiply wives unto yourself okay they did that early on didn’t mean god approved of it it just it just happened and god even said I think it’s Deuteronomy 17, 17. You’ll look that up later. He said, don’t multiply wives unto yourself.

No kidding. You may love your wife, but every wise man knows you couldn’t handle two more just like her. Most men have their hands full.

And I don’t mean this in a mean way. Most men are doing the best they can keeping up with one wife. Solomon had 700 wives.

Let that sink in for a minute. Because I don’t think I still have let that sink in completely. 700 wives.

And that wasn’t enough. He had 300 concubines. I still don’t completely understand what the word concubine means because it’s apparently somewhere between a wife and an affair that was somehow permissible.

How they thought that was okay, I don’t know either because God had rules about that as well. So in several instances, marrying a pagan wife, marrying several women, and then keeping women on the side who were not his wife. Solomon was just breaking the commandments of God when it came to marriage left, right, and sideways.

And surprise, surprise, surprise, just as God had warned about, it said they turned away his heart. Not away from other women, but away from God. For it came to pass, verse 4, came to pass when Solomon was old that his wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not perfect with the Lord his God, as was the heart of David his father.

Wow, we’re using David as the standard of a perfect heart. That does not mean sinless, could not mean sinless if David is the example. Because David many times got himself into trouble by rejecting God’s word and God’s will and doing things that we would be scandalized by today.

And you know many of those stories. But David was always one to say, you know what, I’ve done wrong, and I want to get right with God again. And he would come back and he would repent.

And folks, God, I believe, understands. His standard is perfection. His standard is holiness.

God also knows that we don’t meet up to that. That’s what repentance and confession and the atonement of Christ on the cross were about, realizing that we could not meet that standard. And yet what God is looking for in people who serve him are people who, Even though we mess up sometimes, we don’t just, when we fall in the mud, we don’t just wallow in it.

We come back to him and we repent and we get right and we try to do better with his help. And so he was not even willing to do that. He was not even willing to repent of his sins as David had done.

For Solomon went after Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Zidonians, and after Milcom, the abomination of the Ammonites. That’s interesting to me that it doesn’t call him the god of the Ammonites. calls him the abomination of the Ammonites.

This was a really, not that there’s a good false god, but this was a really bad one. This is, and we’ll come back to this in a minute, but this is on par with Baal. We hear a lot about Baal in the Old Testament. Milcom was another word for Baal, another name for Baal. He went after them.

What does that mean he went after? Not he’s chasing them down. It means he’s worshiping them.

He’s pursuing the worship of these false gods. And Solomon did evil in the sight of the Lord. Now, the evil was not just that he now believes in these false gods.

We’ll get to what this evil entails in just a moment. And Solomon did evil in the sight of the Lord and went not fully after the Lord as did David his father. Okay, there is a problem here.

There is a problem here that the pagan tribes and the pagan wives would not have understood. They had dozens of gods. They had hundreds, maybe even thousands of gods.

And so for them, adding another one was not a big deal. It was an easy compromise for them. Can we just, you know, we’ll worship your God too if we can just worship ours. That sounds reasonable.

Let’s meet halfway. I heard a statement about the Iran deal last week, where apparently the leaders of Iran are saying to each other that they want to kill every American. Kill every American.

That’s what they’re telling their people. And the administration is talking about compromise. Compromise.

Compromise. So the joke was, the joke was told last week, if you can joke about such a thing, the joke was told last week that the mullahs are saying they want to kill every American and that John Kerry said, can we just meet halfway? I’m sorry, killing Americans is not an issue we should be able to compromise on.

You either kill us all or you kill none of us because we stop it. Folks, there are some issues we can’t compromise on. As believers in the one true God, this is not an issue we can compromise on and say, Well, that’s fine.

We’ll worship God and maybe even we’ll worship God first and foremost, but we’ll worship these others over here on the side. It’s okay because he’s still first. That was okay for their pagan gods, but the God of the Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob said, I don’t want half your heart. You worship me only or you don’t worship me at all.

And yet Solomon tried to say, well, let’s just meet halfway here. It doesn’t work that way. If you’re meeting halfway, you’ve already abandoned the worship of the one true God.

You’ve already lost in the negotiation. It says he went not fully after the Lord. That word means he didn’t go solely, only after the Lord God.

Then did Solomon build, it gets worse from here, then did Solomon build a high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab. Another one that instead of calling a god or a deity, they call an abomination. These high places were shrines that they would put up in the mountains, up in the hills, up on the top of something, Because the pagans believed if they could get closer to the sky, they were somehow closer to God.

Completely inconsistent with what the Jews and the Christians have known to be true, that you don’t find God in the mountains, that you don’t find God getting closer to the sky, we serve a personal God who knows us and sees us wherever we are. As David said, if I go down to the very depths of hell, you are there. If I take wings and fly to the.

. . Wherever you go and read Psalm 139, he lists everywhere he could possibly go, and God is there.

We don’t have to go on top of the hills. So he says they build these high places for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, and the hill that is before Jerusalem, right there by the temple of the one true God that he had built. And from Molech, this, we’re going to talk about Molech in a minute.

This is a bad deal. The abomination of the children of Ammon, and likewise did he for all his strange wives, all his strange wives which burnt incense and sacrificed unto their gods. It lists Ashtoreth and Milcom and Chemosh and Molech. It mentions these four deities but folks don’t kid yourselves and think that’s the only idolatry that’s the only pagan worship that he opened his home and his country to because it said he did the same for all of his wives.

700. I don’t know that that means 700 shrines because some of them probably came from the same places and worshiped the same gods. But that means that Israel would have been literally overflowing, figuratively overflowing with shrines to false gods when God had said, don’t let that be found among my people.

Even in the royal palace, even in his own home. And so as you can imagine, God was not happy with this setup and said in verse nine, the Lord was angry with Solomon because his heart was turned from the Lord God of Israel, which had appeared unto him twice and had commanded him concerning this thing. He had, okay, God had not only told the people of Israel, but God had appeared to Solomon twice specifically to tell him, don’t do these things.

He’d gotten special warning that he should not go after other gods, but he kept not that which the Lord commanded. Wherefore the Lord said unto Solomon, for as much as this is done of thee, for thou has not kept my covenant and my statutes, which I have commanded thee, I will surely rend the kingdom from thee and give it to thy servant. Notwithstanding in thy days, I will not do it for David thy father’s sake, but I will rend it out of the hand of thy son.

Howbeit I will not rend away all the kingdom, but will give one tribe to thy son for David my servant’s sake and for Jerusalem’s sake, which I have chosen. So God says here, you have not chosen to honor the covenant that you’ve made, that we’ve made together. You’ve chosen not to honor your promises.

And this is not just something simple, something innocent that I can let go. You have led the nation astray. He said, and there will be punishment.

There will be consequences for it. We see this later on because when Solomon died, God says, I could do it now, but for the sake of the promises that I made to your father David, I’m not going to do it now. But understand this, judgment day is coming.

And later on, when Solomon dies, Israel falls into civil war. Kings were always worried about the succession. They were always worried about a legitimate heir who could succeed them and hold the kingdom together and build on what they had built to continue on their legacy.

And God’s warning of judgment gets right to the heart of that because Rehoboam, his son, within a year or so of coming to power, would lose the kingdom because he would just rule so unwisely that Jeroboam, Solomon’s servant, would cause ten of the tribes to rebel and be led astray. That’s where we have the beginning of the northern and southern kingdoms, Israel and Judah.

God said this idolatry is going to have long-lasting consequences and make no mistake about it our idolatry today still has consequences so we see in this situation Solomon was warned multiple times not only warned from the word of God that had been given to all the Israelite people in the law and in the teachings of the prophets but he had also had a special warning from God on two different occasions to knock this off and he still wasn’t willing to do it I would like to think that even if we don’t listen to what the scriptures teach even if we ignore those I would like to think that we would be wise enough that if god himself showed up and said stop that we would stop it but who knows if you’re that given over to idolatry we might not do much better and so what has happened he’s taken these wives he’s multiplied wives he’s taken pagan wives he’s taken mistresses and he’s now letting them lead spiritually in his home, in his nation.

This idolatry, this idolatry like a noxious vine is growing all over everything and it’s pulling everything down. So three things that we can learn about, that we can learn about idolatry and the process and how it corrupts and how to be on guard. Three things that we can learn from Solomon’s story is that idolatry starts when it corrupts the heart.

The first thing it does is idolatry corrupts the heart. You’re not going to just go out and buy a statue and bow down to it when you woke up that morning and thought, hey, I’ll go buy a big statue. No, it started somewhere earlier.

It started in the heart. And it says that Solomon’s idolatry started when he set his heart on what God had forbidden. Yes, eventually it says that they turned his heart away from God, but somewhere in the inner recesses of his heart, he’d already thought, I’m going to let something else be God in my life, even if that’s my own will.

when he flagrantly violated so many of the things that God had said about marriage and home and family. And he began to bring these pagan women into his home. Folks, his own desires were more important to him than God’s desires.

That’s idolatry. It had corrupted his heart. We see that in the first three verses.

He loved many strange women. God warned him, they’ll surely turn away your heart after their gods it didn’t matter it says he claimed to those in love a thousand of them a thousand and idolatry started idolatry started in Israel Israel’s troubles started when Solomon’s heart became corrupted by the idolatry of saying you know what what I want is more important to me than God and Solomon at least in the beginning became his own idol folks our idolatry doesn’t start when we just wake up one morning and say You’ve got to worship money today. It starts way back before that.

It starts way back before that when our hearts begin to get corrupted. Folks, the Bible teaches that what’s inside will come out. What’s inside will come out.

That’s why Jesus said that out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. What happens in the heart eventually manifests itself outwardly. That’s why the second step in this corrupting process of idolatry is that idolatry corrupts our behavior.

It doesn’t start with our behavior. It starts with the heart. But you can’t have a corrupt heart and very long avoid corrupt behavior.

And he went just as we would expect from corrupt heart to corrupt behavior. If we don’t pull out that weed of idolatry from our hearts when we find it, if we allow it to corrupt our hearts, make no mistake, it’ll corrupt our behavior. It’ll change the way we live.

It’ll change our service to the Lord. Solomon had already abandoned wholehearted devotion to the living God. I don’t think Solomon had abandoned God in his mind.

It wasn’t, oh, I no longer believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It was just, let’s compromise. Let’s compromise.

And what God expects is the wholehearted worship of him. And so while in Solomon’s mind he hadn’t abandoned God, in reality he had abandoned what God expected from him. And so when he did that, it was just a slippery slope.

It was just a little further to go to allow himself to be led into the worship of false gods and goddesses by his pagan wives. And make no mistake on this. Even if he didn’t go and worship at these shrines, he was allowing it to go on in his home.

He was okay with it. There was something in his heart, something in his mind that said, this is okay. I’m going to allow this.

And God evidently held Solomon responsible for what he was allowing to go on. When he was old, his wives turned his heart away. his heart was not perfect and he went after Asterith he went after Milcom we don’t know if that means that he went and worshiped at their shrines or not but we know that in some way he was pursuing the worship of this that these at least pursuing it enough to let this take place he was at least somewhat interested in what should we do that’s going to make Asterith and Milcom happy.

For any Israelite that was corrupt and completely unacceptable behavior. Folks, this was not an issue that he could compromise on. You think, what’s the big deal?

Religious freedom and all that. I’m all for religious freedom. But God had said for this kingdom, no. For your household, no. And we’re not talking about, oh, it’s okay, we’re Christians and we’re Baptists and they’re Methodists down the street and they’re free to do what they want to do and the Lutherans and There are Jewish people in their freedom.

Folks, they were essentially worshiping Satan. Ashtoreth was the Phoenicians’ false goddess of love. And if you’re familiar with the Greeks and Romans at all, the Greeks worshipped, a lot of times these pagan countries would have the same gods, just with different names and slightly different stories.

The Greeks worshipped Aphrodite, and the Romans worshipped Venice. The Romans worshipped Venus. They were Ashtoreth.

And all the wicked things that were done in the name of those two goddesses, in Roman culture, in Greek culture, in the name of the goddess of love, and you can just imagine what all was done in the name of the goddess of love. Didn’t start with them, but started earlier on with Ashtoreth or Asherah. Milcom.

Oh my goodness, Milcom. Milcom is also called Molech in other places in the Bible.

he was the main god of the Ammonites and had a lot in common with the Canaanite and Philistine god Baal and if you study up on old Baal and his characteristics it’s not too big of a leap to go from Baal to Lucifer and I’m not sure that they weren’t the same entity you want to talk about corrupt behavior we talked about all the the icky things that went on in the in the worship that’s a very distinguished pastoral word isn’t it icky sometimes that’s just the only word that fits all the icky things that went on in the worship and service of the goddess of love let’s talk about molek child sacrifice burning live children to death come to think of it molek maybe ought to be the uh the new logo for planned parenthood folks they were sacrificing their children we’re not talking about religious freedom here we’re talking about compromise with absolute cruelty and evil.

And this is what Solomon was pursuing. This is what he brought into his country. This is what he brought into his home.

This is what he tried to compromise with. Don’t be fooled. If we allow it to take root in our hearts, idolatry will take root in our behavior as well.

And it will lead us to do things that we never thought was possible. So first of all, idolatry co