Beloved: grace, mercy and peace be yours without measure from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour. I rejoice in the Lord with you as we come into another week of the month of October 2024. My prayer is that your feet will be kept away from the path of destruction in the week and throughout the remaining part of the year, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
As we begin this new week, I want to admonish you with the words of Solomon that say: “Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD and shun evil. This will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones.” (Prov 3:7-8NIV) What is the instruction here? It is that we should not be wise in our own eyes, as far as our dealings with God are concerned. In other words, we should never think that we know better than God, our Maker. That is because we don’t know better than Him or even as much as Him. And if we agree that we don’t know as much Him in any matter, we will humble ourselves before Him and walk in His fear.
Unfortunately, even Solomon who said these words to us failed to keep them in handling his own marriages. How? Well, God, in His wisdom, had told the Israelites not to intermarry with the people of the nations around them. Why? Was it because He did not love those people? No! God loved them as well. But they were not worshipping Him but idols and demons. That being the case, if the Israelites should begin to intermarry with them, it would not be long at all before they started luring them too into idol worship. So, God warned them solemnly not to intermarry with them. (Cf. Ex 34:16; Deut 7:3-4)
But Solomon totally ignored this word of wisdom from God and went on to marry all kinds of foreign women. Why? It must have been because he felt that he was wise enough to handle those women. Remember that God had given him wisdom and understanding as measureless as the sand on the seashore. And that must have given him the impression that he would be the one leading those women to the worship of God and not the other way round.
However, it was the same God that had given him wisdom that instructed him and his people not to marry foreigners. And if he had believed his own words that say, “Do not be wise in your own eyes,” then, he would have known that any deviation from God’s instruction is not a demonstration of wisdom at all. Rather, it is acting wise in our own eyes. In other words, it is acting according to our own wisdom. And when we ignore the wisdom of God in order to act on our own wisdom, we will eventually find out that our wisdom is nothing but foolishness.
Now because Solomon ignored the wisdom of God and acted according to human wisdom in matters of his marriages, he ended up becoming a foolish king. Look at what the bible says about that:
“He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray. 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. He followed Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, and Molech the detestable god of the Ammonites. So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the LORD; he did not follow the LORD completely, as David his father had done.” (1Kings 11:3-6NIV)
Did you see that? Solomon’s foreign wives ended up leading him astray when he grew old and was no longer strong enough to handle their nagging. So, what God’s wisdom had said would happen was exactly what happened. And that made Solomon to lose the larger part of his kingdom to one of his subordinates. What a shame! (Cf. 1Kings 11:26-39)
What, then, is the point of this? It is that once the wisdom of the word of God has spoken to us about a matter, we should just embrace it and not look for an alternative, whether it is a convenient alternative or not. That is because any alternative to the wisdom of God is foolishness. And that alternative will not bring health and peace to our lives but will drive them away, as it was the case with Solomon. So, be careful of acting wise in your own eyes in your business, workplace, school, neighbouhood, finances, Christian service, marriage or friendship. That is because doing so will prove to be nothing but foolishness in the end.
Have a lovely week.
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