Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - What Makes a Good King? | Historical Books | 1 Kings 9:10-28

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

Was Solomon a good king? How were Israel's kings supposed to be different from other nations? What did it mean for Israel to be the light of the world? In today's episode, Patrick shares how 1 Kings 9:10-28 encourages us to follow the world's true light, King Jesus. If you're listening on Spotify, tell us about yourself and where you're listening from! Read the Bible with us in 2025! This year, we’re exploring the Historical Books—Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, and 1 & 2 Kings. Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: 1 Kings 9:10-28

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. The Bible is startling. It's realistic. It's gritty. Coming on the tale of Solomon's greatest achievement, building a house for the living creator of the universe, the narrator takes a hard right. He paints a much more complex picture of Solomon as a leader. And I think it's helpful at this point to revisit a passage. we've hit some throughout the books of first and second Samuel, but I'm sure we'll hit quite a bit during the book of kings. Here's where it is. When God gave his law to Moses, he laid out provisions for Israel's future king. Now, God's chief concern in this passage is pretty clear. He wants Israel

to be a light to the world so that through Israel, the world might come to know God. But God understands that Israel could really only be a light if it rejected the darkness of the world around it. to that end, he wanted Israel's king to be quite unlike the kings of the nations around them. He wanted people to come inside this nation and see how their king operated and say, there's something different here. Is it the God that they worship? I'm going to read a passage from Deuteronomy 17. And as I do, I'll try to highlight how God's vision for kingship differed from popular ancient near eastern visions of kingship. And then we'll go back to the book of kings. And we'll see how the narrator there is,

using this passage from Deuteronomy as a rubric to evaluate Solomon's reign. So let's start in Deuteronomy 17 verse 14. When you come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you possess it and dwell in it, and then you say, I will set a king over me like all the nations that are around me. You may indeed set a king over you whom the Lord your God will choose. So let's pause for a second. God does give the people permission to have a king like all the other nations. But as we're about to see, he's not a king who's supposed to be like those kings. In fact, the first thing we notice here is that this is a king explicitly chosen, not by the people, not by military power, not by charisma, but specifically by God himself. Let's keep reading.

One from among your brothers, you shall set as king over you. You may not put a foreigner over you, who is not your brother, only he must not acquire many horses for himself, or cause the people to return to Egypt in order that he may acquire many horses, since the Lord had said to you, you shall never return that way again. And he shall not acquire many wives for himself, lest his heart turn away, nor shall he acquire for himself excessive silver and gold. Let's pause again. God is warning the people that they'll be tempted to go back to Egypt, which might not mean going back to Egypt to become slaves again, but to return to the nation, to build allegiances with Egypt, the nation that historically enslaved them. Obviously, that's problematic for those historical

reasons, but it's also problematic for practical reasons, first of which being that God banned them from doing this. But the second reason is that Egypt was a slave nation, and God wants them to be independent of Egypt's slavery. Beyond that, he wants them to be independent of their gods and their idolatry. He doesn't want them to become like the local superpower, the nation of Egypt. But then you'll notice that this passage goes one step further. It warns against the king accumulating horses, wives, or gold like the Egyptians do. Why? Well, horses were the military power of the ancient world. Later, God bans the king from establishing a standing army, and it's clear that he wants the people to trust in him when they're in a military conflict rather than trusting in their own

military might. As for wives, it's clear in the Bible that God's vision for marriage is one man and one woman. Harams, which are basically collections of women for a king's sexual pleasure, they are sexually abusive by their very nature. God values women. And so he bans kings from having these harems. But beyond that, God knows that if the king took foreign wives, which was incredibly common because in the ancient world, a way of making treaties with other nations was by giving away your daughters in marriage. He knew that if the king took these foreign wives, not only might he be relying on other nations instead of God himself, but even more importantly, he would be tempted to worship the foreign gods that his foreign wives worshipped. And he would do that to become like

the nations. And remember, the king is not supposed to be like the kings of the nations. Lastly, God bans collections of gold and silver. Okay, but why? Again, well, it's because the only way to get gold and silver is by either violent conquest, which God bans, or by overtaxing the people, and that's the far more common method. The king was meant to bless his people and lead them, not extract resources from them and make them poor for the sake of his own wealth. The passage goes on. And when he, this is the king, sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book, a copy of the law, approved by the Levitical priests. And it shall be with him, he shall read it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God by keeping

all the words of this law, and these statutes in doing them, that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers, and that he may not turn aside from the commandment, either to the right hand or to the left, so that he may continue long in his kingdom, he and his children in Israel. So this last provision is interesting, because it's ultimately not about what the king does, I mean, partially he has to write a copy of the law, but it's really ultimately about the king's heart. God wants the king to love him and obey him above all else. Notice that in this passage, it says that one of the purposes of him recording and meditating on God's law is so that he won't elevate himself above his brothers. He'll be humbled. He'll always remember, these are my brothers.

They're not my servants. But it's also important on a spiritual level. You see, a king that honors God and obeys God, well, he's a king who's going to encourage other people to do likewise. Again, God says that this is supposed to be a nation, a kingdom of priests, the salt of the earth, the light of the world. And to do that, they have to be different than the world. They have to reflect God's love, justice, and mercy. And God understood that as the king goes, so the people go. So if you have a king that loves God and obeys God and studies His word, then you'll have a king. And you'll have a king that, a people that love God, obey God, and can be a light to the world. God wanted other nations to see the nation of Israel and say, who else is like this nation? Who else has a God living among them

like this God? Who else has a God that gives them such beautiful, good and true laws? To lead such beautiful, good, and true lives. They must know something that we don't know. Maybe we should go to them and learn the way of the Lord. That's what it meant to be a light to the nations. As we closed out the last chapter, 1st Kings 8, it seemed like Solomon really is the right kind of king. I mean, there's small signs that maybe something's wrong, but he leads the people in worship.

He calls on God to be their shield, and he worships in God's holy presence. Isn't this precisely the kind of king that Deuteronomy envisioned? But on the heels of 1st Kings 8 comes 1st Kings 9 and 10, and today we're in the first half of a passage evaluating Solomon's reign. and it's clear that he does not measure up. First, the author tells us that Solomon gave Israelite cities full of Israelite people to a foreign king. Verse 10.

At the end of 20 years, in which Solomon had built the two houses, the house of the Lord and the king's house, and Hiram, the king of Tyre, had supplied Solomon with cedar and cypress timber and gold, as much as he desired. King Solomon gave to Hiram 20 cities in the land of Galilee. This is not Solomon's to give away. The people are God's people. This is not treating the people living in Galilee as people, as Solomon's brothers, as he was supposed to as king. Instead, he's treating them like ponds and resources to be brokered. And then the passage goes on, and it describes how he made an alliance with Egypt. He returned to Egypt just as God said not to, and how he took on an Egyptian wife to build an alliance with Egypt. Verse 15. And this is a the account of the forced labor that Solomon drafted to build the house of the Lord in his own house in Milo and the wall of Jerusalem and Hazor and Megito and Geyser. Pharaoh, king of Egypt, had gone up and captured Geyser and burned it with fire and he had killed the Canaanites who

lived in the city and he had given it as a dowry to his daughter Solomon's wife. So Solomon rebuilt Geyser. So on the one hand Solomon isn't literally taking the people back to Egypt. Instead, he's bringing Egypt and all of its idolatry and all of its slavery. I mean, did you notice that his house and the temple were built by forced labor, slave labor? And that means, again, he's not taking the people to Israel. No, he's bringing Egypt and its culture of slavery to Israel instead. In fact, the passage highlights that while Solomon didn't conscript Israelites into slavery, he did, he really did become like Pharaoh, conscripting foreigners into slavery. Add to that, Solomon begins to collect heaps of gold, just like Deuteronomy 17 said not to.

Verse 26. King Solomon built a fleet of ships at Izer Geber, which is near Eloth on the shore of the Red Sea in the land of Edom. And Hiram sent with the fleet his servants, seamen who were familiar with the sea, together with the servants of Solomon. And they went to Ophir and brought their gold, 420 talents. That's a lot of gold, by the way. And they brought it to King Solomon. So Solomon is collecting gold, exactly what the book of Deuteronomy warned against. So what do we make of all of this? Well, perhaps it means that even at its best, Solomon was still sick with sin. Perhaps no matter how well a human king did, he would never really become the light of the world that

Deuteronomy imagined. Perhaps this entire story is designed to fill us with a longing. longing for a truer, better king, who would actually lay down his wealth in his life for his people rather than taking for himself. Jesus is that king. He is the one that the prophets and Moses hoped for, and Solomon wasn't that guy. So when you think about who you want to follow and what you want to become, ask yourself this. Am I being drawn to the true light of the world?

Do I desire to become like that light to become like Jesus? Because if you do, you must turn to Jesus. He is the only king who is a truly good and perfect king. He's the only king who will never lead you astray.