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Bibleline Bibleline, here God’s word on Bibleline, here God’s truth on Bibleline. Welcome to Bibleline with Dr. Ralph Yankee Arnold, pastor of Calvary Community Church in Tampa, Florida, clearly declaring the Gospel of Jesus Christ through the radio and the Internet. Your regular prayers and monthly support make it possible for Bibleline to continue on the air. and reach us toll free at 1-800-576-3771. Online donations may be made by clicking on the donations link on the BibleLineMinistries.org homepage. We pray that you will enjoy our commitment to the clear gospel of Jesus Christ, and that today’s concluding message of this teaching will be a blessing to you and your family.

But notice what he says here. What he asked for, please the Lord. Verse 10, and the speech, please the Lord. Solomon had asked this thing and God said unto him, because thou hast asked this thing and hast not asked for thyself long life. You didn’t ask for a long life. Neither has thou asked for riches for thyself nor asked the life of thine enemies. Thou hast asked for thyself understanding to discern judgment. Behold, I have done according to thy words, though I have given thee a wise and understanding heart, so that there was none like thee before thee, neither after thee shalt any arise like unto thee.”

Well, there’s no sense trying to pray that you’ll be as wise as Solomon, because he said, it’s not going to happen. But you see, that was a long time ago. But we can still be wise today and get the wisdom that comes from God. And that’s what we have the Word of God. So we pray for guidance and wisdom as we go. The thing is, is he got his wisdom without having to maybe do too much study and I don’t know.

But God gave him wisdom and an understanding heart. Sometimes I think, then I wish I was a little bit like that. Understand, I wish I could understand everything. I still make so many dumb things, you know. And sometimes you hurt people and you don’t want to, don’t intend to, but does it happen? Say things maybe a little sharp didn’t have to say that. So we often do things that hurts. I got a nice little letter today, believe it or not last night.

My wife says, yank, you get the phone. I says, all right. So I got the phone. She says, put it beside your bed. I always leave my phone in the other room. She says, put it beside your bed. She says, you know your daughter’s going to call you tonight after 12 o’clock, and you’re going to answer the phone. Because she knows if it stays in the other room, I I won’t hear it. And she’ll have to answer the phone.

So anyway, she said it beside the bed, 1201, my alarm goes off. And my daughter’s on the phone. And she has to say, be Father’s Day to you. Hello, Trina. And so she just got off work at 1130. She’s wide awake. She won’t go to work. I mean, the bed told, you know, 1.30 in the morning. Well, God bless my daughter. And so anyway, she said a few nice things. So I was glad to hear from my daughter. And I imagine that my son and my grandkids will call later this afternoon.

They always do it in the afternoon. But my daughter, I can count on 12.01, she’s calling. But you know, in spite of all of that, I’m glad she did. I’d rather be remembered than forgotten. But anyway, he says, I’m going to give you this wisdom and this stuff. So look in verse 12, Behold, I have done according to thy words, lo, I have given thee a wise and understanding heart and so forth. Verse 13, and I have also given thee that which thou hath not asked, both riches and honor, so that there shall not be any among the kings like unto thee all thy days.

So I’m not only going to give you wisdom, I’m going to give you all this honor and all this wealth to be one of the richest kings there ever was. And Solomon was. He says here. In verse 14, and if thou will walk in my ways to keep my statutes and my commandments as thy father David did walk, then I will lengthen thy days. Now I’ll give you a long life. Now I don’t know how long, long life is.

But I know that David didn’t live much longer than 70 years. Well, I’ve already reached that, but I’m not worried. Dr. Pulsen’s way ahead of me. And I think if Dr. Pulsen can make it, maybe I can hang in there and get a couple more years out of this whole body. So anyway, Solomon woke, and behold, it was a dream, but it wasn’t just a dream. He began to act upon it, and God gave him great wisdom. And then there’s a story that everybody likes to tell, a how that there was these two women, and they both had a little baby, and they evidently were together and one of them rolled over and killed smothered her little baby.

So the woman says, this is my baby. And the other woman says, no, no, no,ONDON, that’s my baby. So there arose an argument. So they went to Solomon and of course everybody wants to know how is Solomon going to solve this problem? How does he know which one is the baby? So he decided, let’s just take the baby that’s alive and cut it in two. Give half of it to one and half to the other. And so when they raised the knife and got ready to the real mother jumped in and says, no, give her the baby.

Well, then Solomon knew that’s the real mom. So, he was so wise and evidently it affected a lot of people all over the world because people came from everywhere to see and to hear of the wisdom of Solomon and to see what great wealth that he had. And so look there in chapter four. In chapter four, you’ll notice what he says in verse 29, he says, and God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding exceeding much and largeness of heart even as the sand that is on the seashore.

Solomon’s wisdom excelled the wisdom of all the children of the East Country and all the wisdom of Egypt and all these people. His fame was all over the nations of all the world. Pretty great fellow. And then Solomon is used by the Lord to build the temple of God. And he builds this temple and that’s what you see in chapter five and chapter six. And he built his own house, 13 years. Imagine what kind of a house that looked like.

And so when you go through here, you hear all of these things about what he did and he brought the ark into it and Chaconic glory comes down and takes up residence in that place. But look over there in chapter 11, 1 Kings chapter 11. Chapter 11, you find also that there was a problem with Solomon. He didn’t just love the Lord, he didn’t just love wisdom. He probably loved the wealth, the fame, he also loved women. When you said it to Bible, you’ll find out a lot of great men were brought down because of the lust of the flesh.

God gave it to everybody, but it has to be controlled. There has to be restraint. Some people don’t restrain themselves at all. So here in 1 Kings and chapter 11, he says in verse 1, but King Solomon loved many strange women. Together with the daughters of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites and Edomites and the Zetunites, he said, and hit heights of the nations concerning which the Lord said unto the children of Israel, ye shall not go into them.

Neither shall they come in unto you for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods. Solomon clave unto these in love. Now is this with the Lord’s blessings? No. He violating the scriptures and is recorded here That It was not the will of God, but because he had such wisdom and power, you think sometimes power can go to your head and you think you can be excused from. I think we have politicians that day to think, well, the law applies to everybody but me.

WellFalley applies to everybody. And so he says in verse three, and he had 700 wives. These are the ones that considered to be married to, maybe because of their prestige and their position in the land. Conquibines were people that he would have intimate relations with, but their kids could not inherit anything and they were not considered to be a wife in a sense because of several reasons, and mainly because of their social status. Maybe they were just beautiful and he didn’t care anything about where they came from or anything like that.

He had 300 of them. This is why some people think that this is maybe why he’s so wise. He had all these advisors. He had a thousand advisors. Well the Bible says that God don’t want a man to do that and to take wives from these other nations because there’s the tendency of them pulling you away into a different religion. Or now you’ve got to humor these women who don’t believe like you believe. So he broke the law and there was problems with this.

So he says here in verse 4, and it came to pass when Solomon was old, that is wise, turned away his heart after other gods. And his heart was not perfect or mature with the Lord his God as was the heart of David his father. And Solomon went after, and he talks about all these different women that he went after, and they’re gods in the abomination. So in verse eight, Solomon did evil in the sight of the Lord. When did he do this?

When he got older. But see, he sold the wild oats when he was young, and now he’s going to reap the consequences of all of them wild oats when he gets older. So instead of ending well, he doesn’t finish very well. This is why you find about the Apostle Paul, he says, I want to finish my course with joy. In other words, I want to run well. In the book of Galatians in chapter 5, he says, he did run well.

Who did hinder you that you should not obey the truth? Running Well is obeying the truth. You want to run well, obey truth. You want to finish well, keep obeying the truth. Just because you get old is not an excuse not to obey truth. We still have to obey what the Word of God says and just because we get older it should not be an excuse to let the lust of the flesh control our lives or our minds. So be careful, always be wise.

Now you notice what he says here in verse 6, and Solomon did evil in the sight of the Lord. Was God upset with all of this? Yes, he was not looking in verse 8. And likewise did he for all his strange wives which burnt insist and sacrifice unto their God. So he did some bad things. And because of the sin, the Bible tells us that God split the kingdom from his two sons. God says, I’m not going to let this happen in your day, but I’m going to let it happen after you’re passing on.

Because I’m doing this for David’s sake, because I promise Dave. And so the Lord loves David and he had blessed this young man with such wisdom because in the days of his youth, he was wise. So he makes a statement up here in verse 11, wherefore the Lord said unto Solomon, for as much as this is done of thee, and thou have not kept my covenant and my statutes and which I have commanded them, I will surely rent the kingdom from thee and will give it to thy servant, notwithstanding in thy day I will not do it for David thy father’s sake.

But I will rent it out of the hand of thy son. So you’ll know because of your sinfulness, your wickedness. I’m going to take the kingdom away from your sons. Who was supposed to rule? And why say sons? Because he was going to divide the kingdom. One was going to have the northern tribe of the 10 tribes and one the southern two tribes. So the northern 10 tribes was called Israel and southern two tribes, Judah. So as you go through you’ll find out there’s sometimes kings that seem like they have the same name.

ruling at the same time, but they’re different people and one is over Judah and one is over Israel. And so God says in the book of Ezekiel 38 and so on, He says, I’m going to take and take these two sticks and make them one again. In other words, one day the time will come where all of them will be one nation again. And that is coming down the road. It’s going to be happening. So because of Solomon’s disobedience, and he had lived for so long and done so good and didn’t mess up at the end.

So God says, I’m going to bring adversary against you. So you see there, when he makes the statement in verse 14, and the Lord stirred up an adversary on the Solomon. See sometimes you might try to excuse yourself and think it’s not going to matter, and God will send you problems because of your bad choices. He doesn’t even have to tell you why. It just happens, and you’re under one to some time. I wonder why that happened. I wonder why that happened.

I wonder why that. I wonder why why why why’s everything all of a sudden smack is going wrong there might be a reason and God may not even tell you but You’re supposed to understand if you’re doing right you don’t have to worry about it But if you’re not doing right it should plague your mind and you have a sense of guilt Maybe it’s because of what I said or did or thought or something like that and you want to correct that problem But if you don’t correct the problem You’ll never have the peace of God that it’s because, well, he’s just simply testing me to make me better.

It could be he’s whipping the tar out of you because you were disobedient. And nobody else might not be able to tell except you. And so you can always tell, well, I know why this is happening to you. Well, you may know and you may not. You have to be very careful of that. of that. So anyway, he has to go through this and the problems arise. Look there in verse 41 of chapter 11 and the rest of the Acts of Solomon.

Now all that he did and his wisdom are they not written in the book of the Acts of Solomon? And the time that Solomon rained in Jerusalem over all Israel was 40 years and Solomon slept with his fathers and was buried in the city of David, his father. And Rebaum, his son, reigned in his dead. Now Solomon was used by the Lord to write some books of wisdom. And so we have the Book of Proverbs, we have the Song of Solomon, and we have the Book of Ecclesiastes.

So I want you take a look there and just ecclesiastes real quick. Look in the book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 12. Ecclesiastes is written as a man who has wisdom and has done everything without the knowledge of God. He writes it as though as a man under the sun. In other words, as a man sees life. So that’s why he says over and over again, it’s just like, you know the clouds come over the land, rains, goes into the rivers, goes down to the sea, evaporates, becomes the cloud, and rains again, he says just one vicious cycle.

What’s the purpose in it was the reason for it. All of vanity and vexation of Spirit, a man lives, a man dies. Without the knowledge of God or the purpose of God, it seemed like it’s just wasted, useless living. So however a man can see life, try in everything Solomon did. He knew what it was like to have all the women he ever wanted. He knew what it was like to have great power. He knew what it was like to have great wisdom.

He knew what it was like to build whatever he wanted to build, plant whatever he wanted to plant. And he says, when it’s all over with, all we’re going to do is die. And when we die, we left whatever we did to those that did nothing to get it. Sometimes we might feel like that whenever we get ready to die and we leave our kids all of our great wealth. My dad left me. He left me. We’ll just leave it with that.

He left me. But anyway, I think there’s a lot of good things we can learn. But here in Ecclesiastes in chapter 12, he tells us this as the concludes, remember now thy Creator in the days of thy what? Youth. While the evil days come not nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say I have no pleasure in them. While the sun or the light or the moon of the stars be not darkened nor the clouds return after the rain.

In other words, the time is going to come when you’re not going to be able to see so good. And in verse 3, I believe he’s talking about the house here is just, this is your body. This is that body you live in, that house. And the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble because you’re getting old. The strong men shall bow low themselves And that grinders, ah, your teeth are gone, because they’re a few. Those that look out of the windows, be darkened, you can’t see like yaw to see, you wanna see.

You’re getting old, things are beginning to happen. And he says, and you can’t hear. And he shall rise up at the voice of the birds and all the daughters of music shall be brought low. What did you say? I can’t hear you. Your ears begin to go, your eyes begin to go, Your teeth begin to go, your memory begins to go, your bending over and your body begins to shake and travel. We’re getting old. What’s going to happen next?

You’re gonna die. You’re gonna die. And so he goes through and he says all this in verse seven, then shall the dust return to the earth as it was and the spirit shall return into God who gave it. Vanity of vanity, Seth, the preach all is vanity. What’s the purpose of life? We’re born, we live, we die, we’re born, we live, we die. The same for everybody. So he says down here in verse 13, let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter.

Fear God and keep his word, his commandment. For this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil. In other words, serve the Lord in the days of youth because the day will come when this old body is gonna fall apart and you gotta move out and you’re gonna have to face God. And so God’s gonna bring everything. And then you’ll see the reason and the purpose behind everything.

Now Solomon didn’t have the rest of the Bible like we have. We have things and no things Solomon never knew. So I believe that we ought to be thankful and don’t believe that everything is vanity and vexation of Spirit unless you walk in the flesh and live in the flesh. It’s all a wasted life. That’s the flesh. That’s as a lost man living without God, but we know God and that makes a difference. So even in Solomon’s last few days, upon the earth he wrote some good stuff that God used them to help us.

Look up here. This hand represents Yudhmeen. The wallet represents sin. We all have sin on us. God loves us. Now He hates our sin, but He loves us. He loves you. And so because we have all sinned, that means we’re all condemned and we’re all in the same above. Everybody in the world. Nobody’s going to heaven because they live better than you. going to hell because they live worse than you. You see, the Bible says we have all sinned and we’re all condemned, the whole world guilty.

And go to heaven, we have to get rid of the sin. And none of us are perfect. We cannot save ourselves. We need to be born again, born without a sinful nature where we will not produce this. So the Bible says, Jesus Christ was God’s Son. Came into the world because He loves us, hates our sin because our sin separates us from Him. So Christ took the sin of all the world, paid for it on the cross, came back from the dead, and He says, whosoever, believe it, receives it, accepts it.

You get to go to heaven because of what Christ did on the cross for you. You didn’t earn it, you didn’t work for it, you don’t buy it. It’s the gift of God. And yet to be born into God’s family is something that can happen to anybody that hears the Gospel and believes it. That’s why it’s so simple to be saved. Otherwise, some children couldn’t understand it, but children can understand a free gift. gift. They can understand that. It’s older folks that have a harder problem believing that it can’t be free.

It just can’t be that way. That’s too easy. It’s got to be more complicated. I got to do something. And God says, not one work. By grace are you saved through faith that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God not of works lest any man should boast. We all get to heaven because we all trust Christ as our Savior or you don’t get there at all. There is no other way. There’s no option be. I pray that you have accepted Christ as your Savior and that you have been born from above.

Let’s pray, shall we? With every head bowed and every eye closed and no one looking around, I pray that each one of you here have trusted Christ as Savior. But just in case, Just in case you may be here and you say, I’ve never heard that before. I’ve never really understood. But I want to go to heaven when I die. And I realize that I can’t recall any time that I’ve ever really trusted the Lord. It’s my Savior. I’ve heard about it, but I just never did.

So, friend, why not right now? And the kindness of this moment just talked to the Lord. He knows your thoughts. You can’t make a mistake this way. Only the true and living God knows who you are, what you’ve done, what you’re going to do. And He’s the one that loves you. I’m just trying to get you to trust the Lord, not me, not this church. Over the head by night, close. You say, preach to that made sense to me, and I’m going to trust Christ as my Savior this morning, right now.

And if you’ll make that decision, I’d like to know, and I’d like to have prayer for you. I’m not going to embarrass you. I’m not going to have you stand up or come forward. But I’m going to ask you if you just slip in it very quickly, put it right back down. And by that, that means, yes, I will trust Christ as my Savior. And I’d like for you to pray for me. Is there any one at all? slip it up very quickly, put it right back down.

God bless you, buddy. You can put it down. Anyone else? So yes, that made sense to me. I want to know that I’m going to heaven and I will accept Christ this morning to my Savior. Anyone else? Anyone else? Yes, God bless you. Anyone else? Wait just a moment. It’d be a shame to walk out of this room and never trust Christ as your Savior to realize the awful consequences of not believing on Christ. Anyone else? Let’s pray. Father, we thank you so much for all that you’ve done for us, for the wisdom of the daddy David, given such good charge to the son Solomon and father for the admonition in the end of his life.

Bless us today and give us a good service in Christ’s name we pray. Amen. Hello friends, thank you for listening to Bibleline and thank you to those who write in and tell us how Bibleline is making such a big impact in your lives. It’s such an encouragement when we receive your letters and emails. Can I ask, how is your prayer life? Does it need some help? Most Christians think of prayer as a secondary or last resort. Do you realize that Jesus spent hours upon hours in prayer to His heavenly Father?

And yet we so often fail to practice prayer as a priority in our lives. Well, during this month, for a gift in any amount, we’re going to send you Dr. Arnold’s Four Sermon Series on the Power of Prayer. Perhaps prayer is a shortcoming in your life and this teaching is surely able to help. Our mailing address is 4811 George Road, Tampa, Florida, 33634, and don’t forget to include your mailing address as well. God bless you and thank you again for supporting Bibleline.

Thanks for joining us on Bibleline. If you are in the area, we welcome you to visit us. The address for Calvary Community Church is 4811 George Road, Tampa, Florida, 33634. and now a closing thought from Pastor Arnold. Friend, one day it will happen. The trumpet will sound, and we will be changed. Caught up to meet the Lord in the air. So live today and every day. Believing that the Lord is coming soon, just keep looking up.