After KING SOLOMON Died, 7 TERRIFYING Things Happened!

After KING SOLOMON Died, 7 TERRIFYING Things Happened!

Solomon was the wisest man who ever lived. He wrote 3,000 proverbs. He composed more than a thousand songs. Kings traveled from the ends of the earth just to sit in a room and listen to him think. He built the house of God with a precision and devotion that left the priests speechless. And he destroyed everything, not with an army, not with a plague.

 He did it slowly, quietly, one compromise at a time. And by the time he died, the damage was already done. Israel would never be the same again. What followed his death wasn’t just a political crisis. It was a chain reaction, seven events, each one pulling the next, each one worse than the last. A kingdom divided, a religion corrupted, enemies rising, cities falling, and finally, the temple itself, the house of God, reduced to ash and rubble.

Most people know the broad strokes. The kingdom split. Israel went into exile. Babylon came. But what most people miss is how connected it all was. How one decision made in a royal bedroom carried 300 years of consequence. How a king who asked God for wisdom ended up building altars to demons. This isn’t just ancient history.

 It’s a pattern. And once you see it, you’ll recognize  it everywhere. Seven events, one unbroken line, and a warning written in the ruins of a nation. One mistake,  300 years of ruin. There’s a moment early in Solomon’s reign that tells you everything about who he could have been. He’s at Gibeon,  the great high place, and God appears to him in a dream.

>>  >> Not a vision of conquest, not a promise of wealth, just a question. What do you want?  Solomon could have asked for anything. He asked for wisdom, the ability to govern justly,  to discern between good and evil, to lead a people too vast and complex for any ordinary man to manage alone.

 And God was so moved by that request, so genuinely  pleased, that he gave Solomon wisdom and everything else. Riches, honor, length of days, the full inheritance of  a king who had chosen rightly. First Kings chapter 3, verse 12. God tells him, “I will give you a wise and discerning heart, so that there will never have been anyone like  you, nor will there ever be.

” That is where the story should have ended. A young king humble before God, entrusted  with more than any man before him. But it didn’t end there. The temple he built  was extraordinary. Seven years of construction. The ark carried in. The cloud of God’s presence filling the house so thick the priests couldn’t stand to minister.

Solomon prays one of the most breathtaking prayers in all of scripture. First Kings chapter 8. And God answers with fire from heaven. For a moment, everything is  aligned. The covenant is honored. The presence is real. The kingdom is whole. And then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, things begin to shift.

 Deuteronomy chapter 17 had been specific. The Torah laid out the rules for any future king of Israel with unusual  precision. Don’t multiply horses. Don’t multiply wives. Don’t accumulate excessive  silver and gold. Those weren’t arbitrary restrictions. Each one was a door, and behind each door was a particular kind of corruption.

 Horses meant military alliance with Egypt. Wives meant diplomatic entanglement with foreign nations. Wealth meant the slow drift from dependence on God toward trust in systems. Solomon walked through every door. 700 wives, 300 concubines, a thousand women from nations God had explicitly warned against. Moabites, Ammonites, Sidonians, Hittites.

  Political arrangements, alliances sealed in bed chambers,  and each woman brought her gods with her. For a while, Solomon kept the two worlds separate. He still worshipped at the temple. He still wrote psalms and proverbs. He still governed with a brilliance that drew rulers from distant nations, including a queen from Sheba who came to test his wisdom and left speechless.

But First Kings chapter 11, verse 4, says something that should stop every reader cold. As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart was not fully devoted to the Lord his God as the heart of David his father had been. Not publicly, not dramatically.  His heart turned.

 Privately, gradually, he accommodated what he should have refused. He built a high place for Chemosh, the god of Moab, to whom children were sometimes sacrificed. He built one for Molech, the god of the Ammonites, and he allowed worship that should never have touched the land of Israel to take root on the hills outside Jerusalem.

This is what makes Solomon’s failure so devastating. He didn’t abandon God in rebellion. He added to God.  He kept the temple standing while building shrines beside it. He maintained the form of covenant faithfulness while hollowing out its interior. What leaders tolerate in private, nations eventually inherit in public.

 The division that would shatter Israel after his death wasn’t waiting for Rehoboam to make a bad speech. It was already forming in  the silent consent of a king who knew better, chose differently, and  never fully turned back. The kingdom broke in one day. Before Solomon’s body was cold, God had already spoken.

There was a prophet named Ahijah from Shiloh, the old city where the ark had once rested. One day he found Jeroboam on a road outside Jerusalem. Jeroboam was one of Solomon’s own officials, a capable man, an overseer of the labor force from the house of Joseph. He had no reason to expect what was coming. Ahijah took off his new cloak, and he tore it.

12 pieces, one for each tribe of Israel. Then he handed 10 of them to Jeroboam. First Kings chapter 11, verse 31. “Take 10 pieces for yourself, for this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says. See, I am going to tear the kingdom out of Solomon’s hand and give you 10 tribes.” The sentence had already been passed.

The kingdom was already torn in heaven before it tore on earth. But God, even in judgment, held something back. One tribe would remain with David’s line, for the sake of Jerusalem, for the sake of the covenant made with David. Mercy running alongside judgment even at the moment of fracture. Solomon heard about Ahijah’s prophecy and tried to have Jeroboam killed.

Jeroboam fled to Egypt. He waited. And then Solomon died. His son Rehoboam traveled to Shechem  to be crowned. Shechem of all places, not Jerusalem. Shechem, where the tribes gathered, where Joshua had once renewed the covenant,  where the tension between north and had always simmered just beneath the surface.

The choice of location was itself a signal. This coronation would need to be negotiated, not assumed. The northern tribes came with a spokesman. His name was Jeroboam, back from Egypt, standing in front of the son of the man who had tried to execute him. The request was direct. “Your father made our yoke heavy.

  Lighten it, and we will serve you.” Rehoboam asked for three days. He went first to the elders, >>  >> men who understood the weight of accumulated resentment. They gave him measured counsel. “Speak kindly to these  people. Become their servant first, and they will be your servants forever.” He didn’t like that answer.

 He went to the young  men he had grown up with, men his own age, full of inherited confidence with no memory of what it had cost to build what they now enjoyed. First Kings chapter  12, verse 10. “My little finger is thicker than my father’s waist.” More taxes, more burden, more force. Rehoboam  stood before the assembly on the third day and delivered the harshest possible version of that counsel, word for word, without softening.

And the northern tribes answered with a phrase that had been waiting for years to be spoken aloud. “What share do we have in David? To your tents, oh Israel.” 10 tribes walked away. Just like  that. They had been waiting for a reason, and Rehoboam had handed them one without hesitation. He gathered an army, 180,000 men prepared for civil war.

Then the prophet Shemaiah came with a word from God. “Do not go up to fight against your brothers. This is my doing. >>  >> And Rehoboam, somehow to his credit, stopped. Two kingdoms now where there had been one. Israel in the north, Judah in the south. >>  >> The same language, the same history, the same God.

 And a border between them that would never fully dissolve. Everything that followed flowed from this moment. Religion, but not God. Jeroboam had everything he needed to lead well. A prophetic mandate, a kingdom of 10 tribes, a population that had just walked away from Rehoboam with energy and momentum. He had been handed one of the most remarkable political opportunities in Israelite history.

The chance to build something different, something better, something that honored the covenant that Solomon had compromised. He threw it away within months. The calculation he made was political, and on its own terms, it was almost logical. Jerusalem was in the south. The temple was in Jerusalem. The law required every Israelite male to appear before God three times a year.

Passover, Pentecost, Tabernacles. That meant his people would regularly travel south, stand in the courts of the temple that David’s line had built, feel the pull of the old unity, the old capital, the  old king’s city. And Jeroboam was afraid. First Kings chapter 12, verse 27. If these people go up to offer sacrifices at the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem, they will again give their allegiance to their lord, Rehoboam, king of Judah.

He made two golden calves. One placed in Bethel, the southern border of his kingdom. One in Dan, the far north. Strategic placement. No matter where his people lived, there would be a worship site close enough to make the journey to Jerusalem unnecessary. And then, he said the words. First Kings chapter 12, verse 28.

It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem. Here are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt. Any reader of scripture should feel something lurch in their chest at that sentence, because those words had been spoken before. Almost exactly. Exodus chapter 32. Aaron, standing before the golden calf at the foot of Sinai, telling the people, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.

” Jeroboam wasn’t building new shrines. He was reaching back to the oldest apostasy in Israel’s story and repackaging it as legitimate worship. The same language, the same image, the same betrayal  dressed in different clothes. Bethel made it worse, because Bethel was no ordinary location.

 This was where Jacob had slept on the ground and dreamed of a ladder reaching heaven, where God had spoken to him and renewed the Abrahamic covenant. Bethel meant house of God. And now it held a golden calf. The sacred corrupted into the counterfeit. The priesthood followed the same pattern. Levites were God’s designated priests.

Jeroboam dismissed them and appointed priests from any tribe willing to take the position. He also invented a new festival calendar, a feast in the eighth month, one month after the actual feast of Tabernacles. Close enough to feel familiar. Different enough to sever the connection to Jerusalem’s liturgical cycle.

This is how institutional corruption works. It rarely announces itself as destruction. It arrives wearing the vocabulary of the original. Same feast names, same altar language, same invocation of the Exodus, but the content has been replaced. The center has shifted. The phrase that would follow nearly every northern king was born here.

He did not turn away from the sins of Jeroboam, son of Nebat, which he had caused Israel to commit. 19 kings would rule the northern kingdom. That phrase would follow almost all of them like a shadow. Jeroboam didn’t just lead Israel into sin. He built a system that made sin structural, woven into the calendar, the priesthood, the geography of worship itself.

This became the spiritual DNA of the northern kingdom. And DNA, once written, is extraordinarily difficult to rewrite. Sin became normal. There is a difference between a leader who sins and a culture that has learned to sin without noticing. Jeroboam’s golden calves were visible, deliberate. You could point to them and name the problem.

 But what happened next was harder to see and far more dangerous, because it didn’t announce itself. It spread. High places multiplied across both kingdoms. These weren’t temples or grand structures. They were local shrines, hillside altars, community worship sites that had existed in Canaan long before Israel arrived. God had commanded Israel to destroy them when they entered the land. Many hadn’t been.

And now, with the covenant center fractured and royal example pointing away from Jerusalem, they came back, quietly,  naturally, the way weeds returned to an untended field. Asherah poles went up beside them. Her symbol was a carved wooden pole. You find them mentioned throughout Kings and Chronicles, almost always in passing, as though the writers can barely bring themselves to linger on the detail.

They were everywhere. And where they stood, other practices followed. Ritual prostitution, child sacrifice in the Valley of Hinnom, abominations performed within sight of the city David had built. First Kings chapter 14, verse 24, describes what had taken hold in Judah during Rehoboam’s reign. The people had committed every abomination of the nations that God had driven out before Israel.

 The very things that had disqualified the Canaanites from the land, Israel was now doing them in the same land, under the same sky. What makes this section  of the biblical narrative so difficult to read is the ordinariness of it. The high places weren’t shocking to the people who used them. They had become furniture, part of the landscape.

Religion had been democratized into something local, convenient, and entirely untethered  from Sinai. The prophets were screaming. Elijah stood before Ahab and Jezebel. Amos walked into the north with words that burned. Hosea married a woman who left him and used that marriage as a living sermon about what Israel had done to God.

 They were heard, and then largely ignored. Because by this point, the problem wasn’t ignorance. It was preference. The people knew what the covenant required. They had simply decided, generation by generation, compromise by compromise, that something else was easier. A nation does not fall in a day. It drifts, and the drift, when it goes unchecked long enough, becomes the direction.

Weakness attracted war. God had told Solomon directly what division would cost. First Kings chapter 11 names the instruments of pressure that God would raise against a kingdom that had turned away. And two of them were already moving before Solomon died. Hadad the Edomite had fled to Egypt as a child when David’s general Joab swept through Edom.

Pharaoh received him, housed him, gave him a wife from the royal family. Hadad grew up safe, comfortable, patient. When he heard that David was dead and Joab was dead, he went home, and he didn’t go home quietly. Rezon of Damascus had broken away from a defeated king and established himself in Syria’s most strategically significant city.

The junction of major trade routes connecting Egypt to Mesopotamia. Whoever controlled Damascus controlled movement, and Rezon was hostile to Israel for the length of Solomon’s reign. Neither of these men could have existed as serious threats during David’s years. David had subjugated Edom. David had defeated  Zobah.

The borders had been secured by a king who understood that spiritual faithfulness and military strength  were not separate categories, that a nation walking in covenant with God carried a different kind of authority in the world. Solomon inherited  that security without fully understanding what had produced it.

And now, with the kingdom  split, the external situation deteriorated fast. Both kingdoms had to maintain forces facing inward, toward each other, which meant neither could project power outward the way a united monarchy could. The trade networks, the arrangements with Hiram of Tyre, the shipping ventures to Ophir, all of it depended on stability that was now gone.

Further northeast, Assyria was stirring. Tiglath-Pileser III would eventually reorganize Assyrian military strategy around something new and devastating, deportation. The systematic removal of conquered populations, a policy designed to prevent  nationalist resistance across generations. Israel, weakened and divided, was drifting into exactly the kind of vulnerability that empire builders look for.

Divided kingdoms rarely project strength. They project opportunity. The enemies waking up along the borders were not accidents of history. They were the consequence of decisions made in Jerusalem, in Bethel, in Dan, in the hearts of kings who had chosen convenience over faithfulness and assumed the consequences would stay private. They never do.

Israel was erased. In 722 BC, the northern kingdom of Israel ceased to exist. Not defeated and rebuilt, not conquered and reorganized. Erased as a political entity, as a culture, as a people in the land. What Jeroboam had constructed over two centuries of kings and compromises and golden  calves simply stopped being.

It didn’t happen suddenly. The end had been visible for years to anyone willing to look. The Assyrian empire under  Tiglath-Pileser III had already begun absorbing Israel’s northern territories during the reign of Pekah. Galilee, the tribes beyond the Jordan, populations deported east before the final blow ever landed.

 The kingdom was shrinking from the edges inward like a fire consuming its own perimeter. Then came the siege of Samaria. The city held for 3 years. 3 years of siege warfare, starvation, disease,  the slow collapse of everything that sustains human life inside walls. The city fell. Sargon II recorded the victory boasting in his royal annals of deporting over 27,000 Israelites to Assyria, to Hala,  to Gozan on the Habor River, to the cities of the Medes.

Second Kings chapter 17 verse 6. The king of Assyria captured Samaria and deported  the Israelites to Assyria. One sentence. The weight of it  lands quietly. The Assyrian deportation policy was identity dissolution. Conquered populations were moved far from their homeland and scattered among foreign peoples.

 New settlers arrived in Samaria from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, Sepharvaim, each group carrying their own gods. The result was a hybrid religion that would reach all the way into the New Testament. The 10 tribes were gone. Second Kings chapter 17 doesn’t just record the fall, it interprets it at length with unusual directness. God had sent prophets  repeatedly. Israel had not listened.

They had walked in the statutes of the nations, rejected the covenant, passed their children through fire. The text says, God removed them from his sight. That phrase carries a finality that should not be softened. A nation can survive war. It can survive famine, plague, invasion, economic collapse. But a nation that has dismantled its own foundation, that has systematically replaced the thing that gave it coherence with a series of convenient substitutions, has nothing left  to rebuild from.

The northern kingdom didn’t fall because Assyria was strong. Assyria was always strong. It fell because two centuries of accumulated compromise  had left nothing inside worth defending. The temple was burned. Judah watched the north fall and had 135 years to learn from it. They didn’t. That’s the quiet tragedy of the southern kingdom, not that they had no warning, but that they had the most vivid warning imaginable and still chose in the end the same road.

 There were exceptions and they matter. Hezekiah became king while the north was still in its final death spiral and he did something none of his predecessors  had fully done. He tore the high places down. Not reformed them, demolished them. He broke the bronze serpent Moses had made in the wilderness because Israel had been burning incense to it and it had become an idol.

Second Kings chapter 18 describes him with the directness the text reserves for almost no one else. He trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel. There was no one like him among all the kings of Judah, either before him or after him. When Sennacherib surrounded Jerusalem with an army that had just dismantled every other city in the region, Hezekiah spread the threatening letter before God in the temple and asked him to read it.

In a single night, 185,000 Assyrian soldiers died in the camp. Sennacherib went home and was murdered by his own sons. Jerusalem survived. The temple stood. But Hezekiah’s son Manasseh undid  everything his father had built and went further. He reestablished the high places.

 He built altars  to Baal. He put an Asherah pole inside the temple itself. He practiced divination, sacrificed his own son in the Valley of Hinnom. Second Kings chapter 21 says he led Judah to do more evil than the nations God had destroyed before them. Manasseh reigned for 55 years. 55 years is long enough to raise two full generations  inside a corrupted normal.

Long enough for children who have never seen the high places torn down to become grandparents who cannot imagine them gone. Josiah came later, young, serious, genuinely broken when the rediscovered book of the law was read to him because he immediately understood how far Judah had drifted from  everything it was supposed to be.

He tore his robes. He wept. He initiated the most thorough reform in the southern kingdom’s history, tearing down altars, burning bones on the high places, destroying the shrine at Bethel that Jeroboam had built three centuries earlier. The prophetess Huldah told him the truth plainly.

 The judgment on Jerusalem would still come because of everything Manasseh had done. But it would not come in Josiah’s lifetime. Josiah died at Megiddo, killed by Pharaoh Neco. After him, Judah unraveled quickly. Four kings in rapid succession, then Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar had already besieged Jerusalem once, taking Daniel and others into captivity in 605 BC.

  He came again in 597 BC, deporting Ezekiel and 10,000  others, the people most capable of organizing resistance. When Jerusalem rebelled again, he came a third time with a patience and thoroughness that left no room for hope. The siege that began in 588 BC lasted 18 months. The walls breached, Zedekiah fleeing at night through the king’s garden, >>  >> caught on the plains of Jericho.

 His sons killed in front of him. The last thing he would ever see because his eyes were put out immediately after. Brought to Babylon in bronze shackles. Then Nebuzaradan, the commander of the imperial guard, arrived in Jerusalem. He burned the temple. The house that Solomon had spent 7 years building, the cedar, the gold, the cherubim with their outstretched wings, the bronze pillars Jachin and Boaz, the sea of cast metal resting on 12 bronze bulls, the lampstands, the altar, all of it destroyed or carried to Babylon. The

walls of Jerusalem torn down. The city emptied. 587 BC. Psalm 137 was written in the aftermath by people sitting beside the rivers of Babylon >>  >> unable to sing. Their captors asked for songs of Zion and they hung their harps on the willow trees and wept. How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land? The line from Solomon’s compromise to Nebuchadnezzar’s fire was unbroken.

300 years long, but unbroken. The pattern repeats. The exile was not the end of God’s story with Israel, but it was the end of something. The end of the assumption that covenant blessing was automatic, that the temple’s presence guaranteed God’s protection, that belonging to Abraham’s lineage was sufficient regardless of what you did with it.

Those assumptions had been building for centuries, quietly becoming the foundation of a false security. The exile shattered them completely and that shattering was, in a strange way, the most merciful thing that could have happened. The prophets who had been ignored before the fall were suddenly essential reading in Babylon.

Jeremiah’s letters to the  exiles, preserved, copied, circulated. Ezekiel’s visions on the banks of the Chebar River, where the glory of God appeared to a priest far from the temple, making the devastating point that God was not confined to Jerusalem. Isaiah’s earlier words about a servant who would carry the sin of the people, those words came alive in ways they hadn’t when life was  comfortable.

Exile does that. It strips away everything that was substituting for the real thing. The pattern the exile revealed was sobering. Compromise invited consequence. Consequence ignored deepened into captivity. And captivity, when  honestly faced, became the ground where genuine return was possible.

 But here is what the exile also revealed. God’s  justice and God’s mercy are not opposites. They operate together in sequence toward a single end. Jeremiah chapter 29 verse 10. “When 70 years are completed for Babylon, I  will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place.” A number, a deadline, not abandonment,  a sentence with an end written into it from the beginning.

 And it happened. Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon in 539 BC. Within a year, he issued a decree permitting the Jewish exiles to return and rebuild  the temple. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah record what followed. The return, the opposition, the laying of foundations, the weeping of old men who remembered the first temple, the slow reconstruction of a community trying to remember what it had nearly forgotten entirely.

The Davidic line had not been extinguished. It had gone quiet, preserved through the exile, carried through the darkness. The promise God had made to David in 2 Samuel chapter 7 was still standing. That from his line, a king would come whose kingdom would have no end. The fall of Solomon was not the end of the story.

 It was the warning embedded inside the story. >>  >> The testimony that human wisdom without continued faithfulness to God collapses under its own weight. >>  >> That no achievement, no temple, no accumulated glory is immune to the slow erosion of a heart that turns away. It would be easy to look at Israel’s story and keep it at a safe distance.

Ancient kings, Bronze Age politics, a land far away and a time long gone. We can study it, admire its complexity, appreciate its theological depth, and never once let it ask us anything. But the biblical writers didn’t record this history as a museum exhibit. They recorded it as a mirror. The pattern isn’t unique to Israel.

 It’s the pattern of every civilization, every institution, every community of faith that has ever drifted from the thing that gave it  life. And the mechanics are always the same. It never begins with dramatic rebellion.  It begins with accommodation. The decision that a particular compromise is small enough to absorb, private enough  to contain, reasonable enough to justify.

Leaders carry an unusual weight in this pattern because what leadership normalizes, communities eventually inherit. Jeroboam’s golden calves didn’t appear spontaneously in every Israelite home. They were installed by a king  who made a political calculation and called it religion. This is why leadership accountability runs through almost every page of Kings and Chronicles.

 The repeated evaluation of each king by a single question. Did he walk faithfully or did he lead the people away? Cultural compromise follows the same slow logic. The Israelites burning incense at local shrines in the 8th century BC were ordinary people. Most of them were doing what their parents had done, what their neighbors were doing, what the community had long since stopped questioning.

Faithfulness, the biblical narrative suggests, is something that requires active, repeated choice. In the face of inconvenience, in the face of social pressure, in the face of the perfectly reasonable argument that one more small adjustment won’t change anything fundamental. Solomon knew that. He had written it.

Proverbs chapter 4 verse 23. “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from  it.” He didn’t guard his. And the question his story leaves hanging in the air, the question worth sitting with longer than is comfortable, is not really about ancient Israel at all. Where does compromise begin? In policy or in the heart? Solomon asked for wisdom.

God gave it to him without reservation. And yet here we are, having traced 300 years of consequence that flow directly from the moment that same man decided his wisdom was sufficient to manage what God had explicitly warned him against. That tension never fully resolves. It just sits there in the text, patient and uncomfortable, waiting for honest readers to feel its weight.

Because the story of Israel after Solomon is about ordinary men, men who inherited a compromised normal, who made decisions inside systems already bent away from the covenant, who occasionally tried to straighten things out and discovered how deep the roots of the drift actually went. The temple fell. But God had not abandoned the story.

 A remnant returned from Babylon, humbled, stripped of every false confidence, carrying nothing but the memory of what they had lost and the word of the prophets who had told them this day would come and the day of return would also come. They rebuilt the walls.  They rebuilt the altar. They read the law aloud in the public square  and wept when they heard it because it had been so long since anyone had read it plainly that it landed like something entirely new.

>>  >> The temple was rebuilt, smaller than Solomon’s, without the ark, without the cloud  of glory, without the fire that had once consumed the first sacrifice. The old men who remembered the original wept when they saw the foundation. The younger ones who had never seen it shouted for joy.

 Both responses were appropriate, and the story continued because God’s purpose was never the building. The building was a signpost pointing toward something it could never fully contain. A king was coming from David’s line, not to restore the political kingdom of Solomon, but to do what Solomon’s wisdom had ultimately failed to do.

To hold together what human faithfulness had always allowed to fracture. To build a house made of people, living stones gathered from every nation. The boundary between north and south and exile and homeland finally dissolved. That king came, and the question he asked wasn’t so different from the one God had asked Solomon at Gibeon.

 “What do you want?”  The ruins of Jerusalem, the ashes of the temple, the long journey back from Babylon, all of it was  preparation for an answer given with full understanding of what the wrong answer costs. Israel’s story doesn’t end in exile. It ends in  a garden, a resurrection, an empty tomb outside the city walls.

 The same city where  the temple burned, the same land where the high places had stood. Redeemed by someone  who did what no king in the long, painful catalog of Kings and Chronicles  had ever managed to do. He guarded his heart completely to the end. But to understand what was lost and what it cost to redeem it, you have to go back to where it  started.

 To a young king at Gibeon, humbled before God, asking for wisdom. Solomon’s full story, the slow drift, the silence of God, is on this channel. Click on the video on screen to watch it now.