Solomon and his Wisdom

I was thinking about Solomon and his wisdom. In 1 Kings Chapter 3, we get a glimpse into something rather remarkable. I mean that in the sense that if it happened to any of us, we’d probably be flabbergasted beyond comprehension.

At Gibeon, the Lord appeared to Solomon during the night in a dream. In the dream, God said, “Ask for whatever you want me to give you.”

In response, Solomon answered, “You have shown great kindness to your servant, my father David because he was faithful to you and righteous and upright in heart. You have continued this great kindness to him and have given him a son to sit on his throne this very day. Now, Lord my God, you have made your servant king in place of my father David. But I am only a little child and do not know how to carry out my duties. Your servant is here among the people you have chosen, a great people, too numerous to count or number. So, give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong. For who is able to govern these great people of yours?”

God was pleased by this response. He said to Solomon, “Since you have asked for this and not for long life or wealth for yourself, nor have asked for the death of your enemies but for discernment in administering justice, I will do what you have asked. I will give you a wise and discerning heart, so that there will never have been anyone like you, nor will there ever be. Moreover, I will give you what you have not asked for, both wealth and honor, so that in your lifetime, you will have no equal among kings. And if you walk in obedience to me and keep my decrees and commands as David your father did, I will give you a long life.”

Upon waking up, Solomon realized it was a dream. However, those who know the rest of his story know that God delivered on his promise to Solomon. He was granted the wisdom and he went on to have a life that was vastly different from the life that his father David had.

Overall, this story is interesting because it encompasses the age-old question, “If you could have anything you wanted, what would it be?” I’ve personally asked this question or some variation of it to quite a few people. Typically, in the context of a date. The answer to this question tells you a lot about the person you’re dealing with. The variation I usually go with is, “If you had $100 million, what would you do?”.

When I ask this question to a girl on a date, I’m usually looking for a specific answer but no matter how she responds, I end up learning a lot. Ultimately, I suppose the question is essentially the same as asking, “In a situation in which we remove external financial factors, what are your primary priorities in life?” This information is useful because it tells you who you’re dealing with. If she responds that she would drop everything and go travel the world, you know quite a bit about her.

A girl who spends her $100 million traveling is vastly different than the girl who pays off all the debt of everyone in her whole family, donates some of it to charity, and then invests the rest. I’ve met quite a few of the former but only several of the latter. I bet you can guess which group of respondents is of higher quality.

Consequently, when we see God asking Solomon asking the same question, it’s rather interesting. For starters, unlike when I ask girls the question, God can actually deliver. He was truly able to give Solomon whatever he asked for. That’s one of the perks of being God after all. You can pretty much do whatever you want.

What is more interesting is Solomon’s response and how God handles that response. Solomon asked for the right thing. Instead of asking for the desires of the flesh like many of us would, he asked for something of true value. Specifically, he asked for wisdom. The response was that God gave him wisdom along with everything else he could possibly want.

Reflecting on this, I don’t think this gift was as unique to Solomon as one would expect from reading the story. C.S. Lewis once said that if you pursue things of this world, you’ll fall short and miss out. However, if you set your mind on heavenly things, you’ll get it and have the worldly things tossed in along with it. This seems to parallel well with what happened for Solomon. The whole incident boils down to a case of having your priorities straight. If you have your priorities in the proper order, then you’ll probably get your lesser proprieties while also achieving your greater priorities.

In other words, if you want the right thing, you’ll get everything. If you want the wrong thing, you’ll get nothing. Consequently, this whole story seems to boil down to a matter of knowing what is and what isn’t valuable and then setting your priorities accordingly. From my lowly vantage point here on the mortal plane of existence, it seems to me that placing God as your top priority is the way to go.

Proverbs 9:10, which was presumably written by Solomon, says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” Proverbs 1:7 says something similar. The Hebrew word for fear is yirah (yir·’aṯ, יִרְאַ֣ת) which can also mean respect, reverence, and worship. Thinking about this, it more or less tracks with reality. As time has progressed, our society has grown more and more irreverent concerning God every year. In recent times, we’ve seen levels of stupidity that are almost beyond comprehension.

This also makes sense. If you remove God from the top of the hierarchy, you descend into a sea of meaningless where you end up adrift, completely devoid of purpose. In this context, where nothing means anything, everything can fall apart because there’s no longer a sorting mechanism on account of everything being equally meaningless. Contrasting this to having God at the top of your hierarchy, in this case, you have meaning because there’s an order to things. God provides a value structure. Stuff further up the hierarchy is closer to God and more in touch with reality. Things of low-value filter down the hierarchy until they eventually fall off.

Related to this is how it’s interesting that Christianity was behind the development of science. Science is the pursuit of knowledge more or less. So, it would seem that the proverb is correct. A fear (respect, reverence, worship) of God is the beginning of understanding. Society and people as individuals would do well to put God back in his proper place. Things would probably go better for us then. Even if things don’t go better, it would be difficult to argue that we’d be much worse off.