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The Dream of Solomon (Luca Giordano)
1 Kings 9:1-9 ~ Yahweh appears a second time to Solomon
In the twenty-fourth year of Solomon's reign, when all the building projects were completed, Yahweh appeared to Solomon a second time to reaffirm the Davidic Covenant that God promised David. However, Yahweh also gave Solomon a very stern warning concerning the conditions that would allow an unbroken line of Davidic kings to rule over Israel and for God's continuing protection of His Temple.
His successors must faithfully keep God's laws and ordinances. Failure to keep the laws outlined in the Ten Commandments and enumerated in the expanded law of the Torah, especially the command not to worship other gods, would result in:
- Israel being exiled from the land (verse 7a).
- God disowning the Temple (verse 7b).
- Israel being known among the other nations for having deserted Yahweh their God (verse 9).
It is a dire warning for both Israel's kings and the covenant people as a whole. David was a model king of God's people in his role as the shepherd who guides and prays for his people. His submission to the will of God for his life, his praise for God, and his humble repentance when he sinned became a model for kingship and for the prayers of the people in the beautiful psalms, many of which are attributed to David. As God's "anointed" representative, David's song of praise for Yahweh (2 Sam 22:1-51) and his last words (2 Sam 23:1-7) express a loving and joyful trust in God who David acknowledges as the only God and the only King and Lord. His descendants, even Solomon, will not live up to his model of servant kingship.
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CHALLENGE: “An all-good, all-powerful God would not tolerate evil; thus, God either is not all-good or not all-powerful.”
DEFENSE: This presupposes that God cannot have good reasons to tolerate evil, but he does. One is that he values free will.
The abuse of free will is the definition of moral evil. Nobody sins except by misusing his free will. Sin, in turn, can produce suffering, as when one person unjustly harms another. Moral evil thus can cause physical evil, and free will can produce both. This is important because we have a good idea why God allows free will: to allow love.
The two greatest commandments are to love God and to love your neighbor (Matt. 22:36–40). Love is the fundamental thing God wants from us. But if we had no free will, we would not be capable of freely choosing love. We might be able to simulate love, but it would be the programmed “love” of a robot, not the real thing.
It would be like Ira Levin’s book The Stepford Wives, in which a group of husbands replace their wives with robots programmed to be the perfect homemakers. The robots are always attractive, always submissive, always ready to do whatever their husbands want. But there is no love in the town of Stepford. The husbands do not love their “wives”; they treat them merely as instruments for their own pleasure. And the “wives” don’t love their husbands; they are robots with no free will.
For love to be real, it must be freely chosen, and so God has given us free will, knowing that precisely because it is free—we may choose not to love. We may choose to act unlovingly, to sin against him and our neighbors.
God thus allows moral evil in the world to make it possible for us to choose love. By creating room for free will , he must also create room for its misuse and the consequences that follow from that. When we act unlovingly, we harm others, and this causes some of the suffering in the world.
Jimmy Akin, A Daily Defense: 365 Days (Plus One) to Becoming a Better Apologist
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