I’ve finally gotten around to finishing my series on King Solomon that dates back to August 16 (scroll down to find). Here’s the second to last installment:

With King Solomon the earth had never seen a kingdom or king as prosperous or wealthy or as fully vested in kingship. Israel’s kingdom had reached its apex.

“It was Solomon that the Queen of Sheba came to see and said, ‘I’m speechless; the half has never been told.’ We’ve even got a song made off of that,” says Jordan. “She was like, ‘They didn’t tell me the half of it!’ She saw all that gold ascend up to his throne she got weak-kneed and starry-eyed. There was no way to communicate the wealth. And God was demonstrating to Israel, ‘I’ll be your king and your blesser; I’ll do it for you if you let me.’ ”

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Between their two 40-year reigns, David and his son Solomon represented an 80-year respite for Israel following their First Course of judgment and before the onset of the next four courses in God’s Five Courses of Judgment.

“God held back the judgment of the Second Course and literally demonstrated to and for Israel what would it would be like if they had His king,” explains Jordan. “Now David was a bloody man and God said, ‘You can’t build my house, but I’m gonna make Solomon a man of peace and he’ll build it.’ So, in David and Solomon, you have a two- fold picture of what the Messiah’s gonna do.”

Now, the crucial difference between David and Solomon is that, while David got caught up in many sins of the flesh, his heart never left the Lord and he never went out and worshipped idols as did Solomon, who forsook God’s wisdom in favor of searching out the wisdom of man.

“David and Solomon lived during the same time and most of these ‘heart books’ (Job-Song on Solomon) were written between the first and second course of judgment after God had poured out the judgment on Israel in the Book of Judges,” says Jordan. “Samuel came along and announced that the second course of judgment was ready to come upon them and yet God held back that judgment as though to say, ‘Okay, you see what judgment is like. Let me show you how I would bless you if you’ll just get on with the program and let me do it.’

“And He raises up ‘David the Great King’ and then makes a covenant with David, and then He raises up David’s son to demonstrate the blessings that David’s son is going to bring to Israel.

“David is a picture of the first coming of Christ and the Crosswork and winning the victory that Solomon in the kingdom then enjoys. Solomon is a type of the destructive nature of not following the wisdom of God and going after the wisdom of men and the corrupting nature of that.”

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Indeed, Solomon becomes a type of the Antichrist and is the Old Testament’s promoter of the number 666.

As I Kings 10:14 reports, “Now the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was six hundred threescore and six talents of gold.”

Jordan explains, “How many talents of gold did he get? 666. Now, when you read 666 in the Bible, what do you think of? Blessings from heaven? That’s somebody’s number. Yeah, it isn’t the right guy’s number, either, is it? And you’ll notice in Solomon’s life, from this point on, there becomes a downward spiraling fixation with sixes.”

Just five verses later in I Kings 10, we learn that when architect Solomon designed his throne, he “had six steps, and the top of the throne was round behind: and there were stays on either side on the place of the seat, and two lions stood beside the stays. And twelve lions stood there on the one side and on the other upon the six steps: there was not the like made in any kingdom.”

Jordan says, “Now do you think when Solomon sought wisdom from God, God divided the architecture like that? No! He did that from human viewpoint, and as you go on in Solomon’s ministry and life, you see Solomon just slowly drifting, falling down. And it’s at this point in his life, somewhere along in here, that Ecclesiastes shows up.

“Ecclesiastes is in these books, by the way, in order to demonstrate to Israel when they are in exactly the same situation; where the temptation, and the draw and the pull are to be part of the 666 system.

“You remember how we looked at Job and saw its fit in the tribulation? Or how we looked at the Psalms and saw how they prepare Israel in the tribulation? How we looked at Proverbs and saw over and over in the proverbs themselves that when they come into their own, and come into the place where they’re actually going to fit, it’ll be the Last Days?

“In fact, the last two chapters of Proverbs are prophecies that identify the timing of the application of the book in the last days in Israel. And the ‘believing remnant’ in Israel is going to face a seduction policy that’s going to try to pull them away from the wisdom in proverbs—that gives them the capacity to walk worthy in the details of their life—and into all this other wisdom out there that’s sought by looking at life and trying to look at things around you; trying to find by human wisdom all these things that were done under the sun and even possibly having the greatest motive for looking for the greater good. It’s called the sunum bonum in life, and what philosopher didn’t look for that?

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In I Kings 4:34, when Solomon set himself to look for the elusive sunum bonum, or supreme good in life, all the people of the world knew what he was doing. The verse says, “And there came of all people to hear the wisdom of Solomon, from all kings of the earth, which had heard of his wisdom.”

Jordan explains, “Solomon’s looking for the supreme good among man—‘What is the thing that is the best for man to do?’—and it says all these people came to hear the wisdom of Solomon.

“Now, in my Bible, by that word ‘hear’ I drew a little line years ago up into the margin and wrote ‘and to plagiarize the wisdom of Solomon.’ Because as you study Ecclesiastes, it doesn’t take long to realize, if you know much about the various philosophies of the world, that those things are found in the book of Ecclesiastes.

“When I was in high school, there was a little book kind of like Cliff’s Notes that made simple all the philosophies and religions of the world. I took that book and listed the philosophies. There were 35-40 of them, and I went back and took Ecclesiastes and read it over and over—maybe 30 times—before going back to the other book and taking the summaries of each of those philosophies and trying to understand where they were, and you know I found EVERY one of them in the Book of Ecclesiastes!

“Now, mind you, all the people on the earth knew about Ecclesiastes before Aristotle showed up. It was in print, published, on the record. You know what happens today if you repeat something somebody’s got in print?

“One novelist sues another for plagiarism and it can be over a three-word phrase used once in a novel that was written 12 years beforehand. Three words put in succession together. Do you think there’s the realm of possibility that that might have been an accident? You could have gotten it from anywhere but you’re being sued for 5 million dollars in recovery of damages.

“Well, it’s something a little different when you take the very core basis of a man’s philosophy and all of his works and there they are. So it’s always been fascinating to me, and while I understand that Ecclesiastes is there to alert the ‘believing remnant’ in Israel to the avenues that the Adversary and the 666 program is going to use to try to seduce them into worldly wisdom—it’s always fascinated me that all the seduction of the Adversary is going to be something that was just plagiarized out of the Bible when the Bible expressly put it in to warn people about the seduction’s that’s coming!

“Don’t ever let somebody just go, ‘Hee-hah, hee-hah, hee-hah,’ at you when you tell them you’re a Bible-believer. Everything they ever thought, or believed or tried to develop as a philosophy or way of life, was already critiqued in the Word of God 2,000 years before they showed up and rejected it.

“Now, you say, ‘Well, you sound kind of arrogant, Brother Rick. No, I’m just confident. You need to have that kind of confidence.

“I remember being in an English lit class as a junior in college and the professor, bless her heart, thought the Greeks were the greatest things going. And I came within that close of flunking that class because I told her that the Greeks were just plagiarizers of Solomon.

“Whew, she didn’t like that, and if I hadn’t made good grades in that class, I wouldn’t have gotten out of that class with anything that looked like a passing grade. I would’ve got bounced right out on my noggin. She didn’t like that but, you know what, I understand that people honor and worship at the altar of ancient Greek education.

“But where they got that stuff from was from a man who had rejected God’s wisdom and gone after and intermeddled with man’s wisdom when he should have just been going by divine truth.

“I don’t remember the 30-40 from that book, but I can identify a few of them from what I do remember. Solomon writes in Ecc. 1:12-13, ‘I the Preacher was king over Israel in Jerusalem. And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven: this sore travail hath God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith.’

“The issue of searching out all things that are done under heaven; there’s a system of metaphysics or cosmology, which is an attempt to figure out a system, and to analyze a system and a universe of ideas, so you can understand and know what it is. And Solomon is the guy who developed that kind of an approach to things.

In verse 16 of the same chapter, he starts out, ‘I communed with my own heart, saying . . .’ I love that! ‘I communed with my own heart.’ It’s like, ‘I couldn’t find anybody wiser to talk to than myself so I talked with myself. ‘I communed with mine own heart, saying, Lo, I am come to great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all they that have been before me in Jerusalem: yea, my heart had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.
And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit.’

”Now, there’s a system of thought called empiricism where you learn things by experience. That’s learning by what you see; what you can experience. ‘If I can’t see it, if I can’t experience it, if I can’t replicate it, if it can’t be there, it isn’t right.’ And Solomon says, ‘That’s how I got this information. I did this. I went out and worked at it.’ ”

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Epistemology can be found in Ecc. 2:3, where Solomon says, “I sought in mine heart to give myself unto wine, yet acquainting mine heart with wisdom; and to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was that good for the sons of men, which they should do under the heaven all the days of their life.”

Jordan explains, “Epistemology is simply the method that you’re going to go about to get info and the first thing Solomon tries is what the philosophers call hedonism. Chapter 2:10—this is the Playboy philosophy: ‘And whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them, I withheld not my heart from any joy; for my heart rejoiced in all my labour: and this was my portion of all my labour.’

“In fact, if you look at Acts 17:18 you’ll see this show up in Paul’s ministry. The verse says, ‘Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoicks, encountered him. And some said, What will this babbler say? other some, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods: because he preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection.’

“See, you see the Epicureans—the hedonists—show up in Ecclesiastes. We’ll also see the Stoics show up in Ecclesiastes. The people that Paul, in Athens, Greece, refutes on Mars Hill had all that they say already in the Bible way before they said it.”

(Editor’s Note: To be continued . . .)