I Know It’s Wrong, but I Want It

Now King Solomon loved many foreign women . . . 1 Kings 11:1

Seared into my memory, are the thoughts I had when I relapsed in 2014. I knew it was morally wrong. I had been there before, and I knew the disastrous consequences. I knew what I stood to lose, but as I surrendered to the euphoria, I thought, This feels too good to quit. I’m not going to stop. I WANT IT.

Months later, in the midst of my wreckage, a counselor probed into my past, trying to identify the source of my destructive behavior. There is no particular trauma in my past that led to my drug use though. I simply always want more of whatever tastes good, despite the destructive consequences. Knowledge and wisdom have been no match for my voracious appetite.

King Solomon discovered this too. The Bible goes to great lengths to describe Solomon’s wisdom and devotion to God, but in today’s passage, the story, and Solomon’s life, took a dark turn. Solomon, like his father David, had a destructive appetite for women. He did not love just one or two, but rather had 1,000 wives and concubines. Solomon cannot claim ignorance. God explicitly warned him that his foreign women would lead his heart astray.

Solomon, like me, knew right from wrong. He knew the results of his destructive choices, but he allowed his defective desires to rule his mind and he suffered the consequences. He turned from God, worshipping the foreign gods of his foreign wives and incurred God’s judgement.

The reality is, we usually know what is right and we are usually aware of the consequences of wrong. We may possess impeccable Bible doctrine, but if we do not daily choose to deny ourselves and follow Christ (Luke 9:23), we will find ourselves pursuing our faulty desires, simply because that is what we want.

Thankfully, we do not need the wisdom of Solomon to follow God. All we need is to daily turn from ourselves to pursue Him. In doing so, God draws near to us, filling us with Himself, which, we will find, is what we truly needed and desired all along.