If Solomon was so wise, why did he stray from God towards the end?

This question had puzzled me for a long time. If Solomon was the wisest man who ever lived, why did he later stray from God? Surely being so wise, he could see that it was important to be close to God?

Luckily, our pastor happened to work this question into a sermon. 

Yes, Solomon was wise, but he was human just like the rest of us. All of us are temped to stray away from God. And all of us are able to resist that temptation - when we ask for help from God.

In fact, the question of why Solomon strayed from God is not even the right question. In reality, we should be asking ourselves "If Solomon is so wise yet strayed from God, then how do we, as less wise people, avoid straying from God?"

It is clear from the Bible that Solomon did not wake up one day and say "OK, from now on I'll disobey God." It wasn't sudden like that. It was a gradual slow ignoring of God, by degrees. He married wives who followed other gods, which influenced his views gradually. This was something so gradual that he couldn't likely even tell it was happening. 

The answer for us is to understand that we are not immune to straying from God, no matter how wise we might be. The best defense against straying is prayer and reading the Bible. Most likely, Solomon stopped doing those things gradually. If we pray and read the Bible daily, it will be harder for us to stray, because we will have God in our thoughts daily. 

I've also written about why prayer and Bible reading is like food - you need to do it daily. You can't do a whole bunch in a week and then expect not to do any for the next several months. You wouldn't do that with your daily food, would you?

It was likely that Solomon strayed because he forgot to feed himself with spiritual food. It wasn't because he was "tripped up" by something tricky that someone else did to him despite being the wisest man in the world. But the good news is that it's easy to prevent this from happening to ourselves by reading the Bible and praying. This works to keep us from straying from God - and this is still the case even though we're less wise than Solomon.

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