Turning our hearts from God – like Solomon – has led the world to worship Molech as it did with Solomon’s sin, which will bring destruction to the world as it did to Israel.

 

But not COMPLETE destruction.

 

There will be a remnant, and the promise of salvation does indeed come to the world in fulfilment of the promises God made to his chosen people.

 

Israel was to remain a nation to witness to the world of the “one-true God” and the promise of a coming Messiah bringing salvation to His people and righteousness and peace to the earth.

 

Similarly, Christians – believing Jesus is the promised Jewish Messiah – are to be witnesses to the world by displaying THEMSELVES the power OF THAT MESSIAH by doing the works of God, having His Holy Spirit making us able to do so, and testifying to the truth that the Messiah has indeed already come into the world.

 

Jesus made reparation for our “david-sins” so we would no longer need to wander so far from our true home in communion with God, who is truth and reality, traversing down a road of darkness leading us to the worship of Molech with “Solomon-sins” bringing death!

 

Johnathan Kahn’s book “The return of the Gods” offers a fascinating interpretation of many of the details surrounding this historical slide of the Jewish people from holiness and worship of the one-true God into pagan worship demanding the sacrifice of their own children. It not only destroyed the powerful nation of Israel, but led to enslavement under Babylonian rule for a few generations.

 

That all happened with Israel through the demonic influence of three key gods, according to Kahn, each coming in the rightful, logical order, interestingly, mapping-out the very same movement within the entire culture that we can observe in our INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY as we fall from grace:

 

(1) first we are seduced by false promises of what is good and fulfilling;

 

(2) then we are asked to become spiritually-compromised by turning away from God in pursuit of what we need to pursue to acquire those false ‘goods’ beckoning us, then finally,

 

(3) the fall from grace completes itself as we settle into complete spiritual blindness and live in the darkness of fear and ignorance, essentially destroyed spiritually.

 

This movement from ‘life’ to death is what we choose when we abandon dialogue with God so as to hearken to the voice of Lilith, to then consider engaging ourselves with the fascination and fantastical experiences in this world of passing pleasures and illusory carnal desires trying to seduce and destroy us.

 

Such is the interior life of those living in constant existential fear of the unknown, ever-anxious about the future, ever-defensive about protecting oneself, not at peace at all, but having abandoned the security of God and loss His peace that surpasses all understanding [because that peace ‘quiets’ the mind, and needs no ‘cognitive confirmation’ from us…which is a real and rare grace (just try to ‘stop thinking’ on your own for 20 seconds to see what I mean!)].

 

David, Solomon’s father, sinned gravely against God, but David repented. Concerning his ‘heart’, as it says in today’s reading, David NEVER turned his heart away from God, never worshiped any false god.

Not so for his infamous “wisest of the wise” son Solomon, who, in his old age, was seduced by lust (just like his dad) but not by ‘one’ woman, many wives, and thereby took the sin of ‘lust’ to a whole new level being leader and able to shape and transform the entire culture and practices of the people of God!

 

Solomon transgressed against God, but not simply by pursuing the satisfaction of his own personal lustful or greedy desires like David did in arranging to have a man killed on the front lines of a battle so he could then have his wife, but engaged in a process or ‘shift’ that incorporated and brought along in tow the entire nation of Israel!

 

Solomon’s sin was to turn himself and those under his rule from worship of God to the cultural and religious PRACTICES that offer sacrifice as HOMAGE or worship to satan, through pagan gods such as Molech.

 

So much is hidden and hard to see clearly for those who are not living in prayer and holiness, able to gain the perspective on the world that God has, which is to see everything and everyone through glasses where one eye sees through the lens of mercy and the other the lens of love, at all times, in all circumstances.

To pursue God is to decide NOT to pursue other gods, deceptive and seductive as they present themselves, which offers a security in itself that we are staying true to God by wanting to!

 

Prayer, in that regard, is it’s own greatest reward, putting us in the presence of God and protecting us from the darkness of evil now working frantically in these final end-days to envelop the entire world and everything in it to serve Satan, and not the all-deserving, one, our holy, almighty God, who is, who was, and is to come….the creator of heaven and earth, and all things visible and invisible therein. Amen!