meek he will guide in judgment, the meek he will teach liis way ? " Let us take encouragement and go unto him ; for we have advantages which the Queen of Sheba had not. Solomon could impart knowledge to her, but could not enable her to comprehend it : but Jesus can both " open to us the Scrip- tures," and " open our understandings also to miderstand them : " yea, and if we go humbly unto him, he will return with us to our respective homes, and be our instructor even unto death. Let us then " buy the truth," whatever it may cost us, and " not sell it" for the whole world. Methinks the Queen of Sheba never afterwards regretted the labour she had bestowed on that great object ; and sure I am that none who seek the Lord, shall ever have to complain that " they have laboui'ed in vain, or spent their strength for nought^."]
== Isai. xlix. 4,
cccxxxvn.
Solomon's fall.
1 Kings xi. 9. And the Lord was angry ivith Solomon , because his heart was turned from the Lord God of Israel, which had ajipeared unto him twice.
IF we had beheld the temple of Solomon, with all its exquisite workmanship, destroyed, as soon as it was finished, methinks we should have wept over it as a calamity never to be forgotten. But we are now called to survey a far more grievous desolation, even the destruction of the fairest edifice that ever was raised, — the soul of Solomon. Most eminently had the grace of God wrought in him, as all his pre- ceding history informs us. Since the foundation of the world there was not a grander spectacle, than that of Solomon elevated on a brasen platform in the midst of the temple, and crying unto God with bended knees and out-stretched hands in the behalf of himself and people to their latest posterity. But " how is the gold become dim, and the most fine gold changed!" We behold in nature some clouds occasionally obscuring the brightest sky, and some- times even the meridian sun eclipsed ; but here was such an eclipse as never had been seen, since Adam
337.1 Solomon's fall. 365
fell in paradise : here was the brightest day turned suddenly into the darkest night ; the most eminent of saints relapsing into a state of most aggravated and abiding transgression.
Let us turn, like Abraham surveying the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrha the morning after they were destroyed^ and contemplate,
I. The fall of Solomon —
In order to get a just view of it, let us distinctly notice,
1. How it began —
[It began the very instant he was raised to the throne, though in a way that was not perceived by him at the time. We do not condemn him for marrying Pharaoh's daughter, because we take for granted that she was a proselyte to the Jewish faith. That she was so, may be presumed from the very circumstance of his connexion with her ; for we cannot conceive that he would have so grossly violated the divine law as to marry an heathen woman, at the very time that his piety was so transcendently conspicuous: and this presumption is confirmed by the circumstance, that amongst all the idolatrous temples that he built for his other wives, he never erected any for the idols of Egypt. But the evil of which he was guilty in the commencement of his reign was, the offering of sacrifice in high places, instead of confining himself to the altar which was in the tabernacle. We are decidedly of opinion that he should not have done this himself, nor should he have suffered his people to do it^: and we are persuaded that this error, continued as it was for eleven years at least, rendered him less averse than he would otherwise have been, to the erection of temples afterwards to heathen gods.
Other evils of his which gradually crept in, were, the multi- plying of gold and silver /or himself ; the multiplying of horses also, and that from Egypt ; and, above all, the multiplying of wives. All of these things were forbidden in as plain and ex- press a manner as could be conceived"^: yet, as if he had never read any such prohibition in the word of God, did he go on violating it from day to day*^.]