What Can We Learn From Solomon? — Spurgeon on Wisdom That Failed
⏱ 13 min read
You have read the chapters. The young king at Gibeon asks for an understanding heart, and God gives him more than he asked for — wisdom, wealth, peace, a temple, a name that travels as far as Sheba. And then, twenty chapters later, the same man is building shrines on the high places for his foreign wives’ gods, and the kingdom is splitting under his son before the body is cold. The arc unsettles you in a way the other Old Testament arcs do not, because the others fail for reasons you can name — David’s lust, Saul’s pride, Samson’s appetite — but Solomon had the wisdom. He had the very thing the rest of them were missing. And he drifted anyway.
This is the slow version of what Solomon’s life actually teaches. Not the sermon-handle version that ends at get wisdom. The harder one, the one Charles Spurgeon kept returning to in Morning and Evening — that wisdom is not a fortress, that gifts are not safeguards, that the soul which has been most given is the soul which has the most slowly to guard. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries this kind of slow reading into a daily place, if you want somewhere to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
Solomon ruled for forty years. The drift took most of them. He did not wake up one morning the saddest man in Israel. He woke up, year after year, slightly less hungry for the One who had given him everything, and the slight unhunger compounded until — by the time he sat down to write Ecclesiastes — every appetite he had once turned upward had been turned outward, and every outward thing had returned the same verdict: vanity. What can we learn from Solomon in the Bible? Most of all, this: the drift is rarely dramatic. The drift is the small daily lowering of the hunger, and the hunger is the thing the soul cannot afford to let slip. (For the companion arc of a king whose drift was loud and whose repentance was louder, what does the Bible say about death — Spurgeon on dying well holds the Spurgeon vocabulary for finishing well. The shadow side of Solomon’s drift — the slow descent into a place words could not reach — is what Bunyan named in the Slough of Despond — when faith sinks. And for the long Christian conversation about the very gifts Solomon could not steward, what does the Bible say about money — Wesley’s three rules sits beside this one.)
The first passage: the perfect peace that wisdom cannot manufacture
“I was sitting, the other night, meditating on God’s mercy and love, when suddenly I found in my own heart a most delightful sense of perfect peace.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Till He Come
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice what Spurgeon is not describing. He is not describing a peace he produced by thinking harder. He is not describing a peace that came at the end of a long argument with himself. He is describing a peace that arrived — suddenly — in the middle of a quiet meditation, while he was attending to God’s mercy and love. The peace was a gift, not an achievement. The meditation was the showing-up. The arriving was His.
This is the line that quietly undoes the Solomon problem. Solomon had wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to think well about a thing. But the peace that the soul is built for — the peace that passes understanding, in the older phrase — is not the fruit of thinking. It is the fruit of meditation on God’s mercy and love, which is a different action, slower than analysis, more receptive than argument. Solomon, in the long arc of his reign, kept thinking. He thought about justice between two women and one baby. He thought about the temple’s dimensions and the cedars from Lebanon. He thought about three thousand proverbs and a thousand and five songs. The thinking was real. The thinking did not produce the delightful sense of perfect peace Spurgeon describes, because thinking is not what produces it. Meditation on the mercy and the love produces it. Solomon, as the years went on, was less and less in the chair where that meditation could happen, because the chair had been filled by other things — by the building, by the trade, by the wives, by the diplomacy. The wisdom did not save him from the chair-loss. Nothing does, except the slow daily return to the chair.
What can we learn from Solomon at this point in the arc? That the chair must be defended. That the meditation on His mercy and love is not optional once the gifts have begun arriving. The more given, the more the chair must be guarded, because the gifts will, by their own logic, try to fill the time the chair was using. Solomon let them. He did not mean to. None of us mean to. The drift is the slow yielding of the chair to the calendar, and the wisest man in Israel yielded it.
Spurgeon’s line is also a gentle correction to the modern Christian woman who has been treating her devotional life as a problem to be thought through. The exhaustion at the end of the year is not, mostly, an information problem. You know what the verses say. You know what the saints did. The exhaustion is a chair problem. The chair where the meditation on His mercy and love could happen has been let to the calendar, and the calendar will not, of its own accord, give it back. You have to take it back. Twenty minutes. A morning. A Saturday. The chair is the practice. Spurgeon describes the fruit. The fruit comes to the chair.
The second passage: the soul learning to wait
“Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth! O that he would walk with me; I am ready to give up my whole heart and mind to him, and every other thought is hushed. I am only asking what he delights to give. I am sure that he will condescend to have fellowship with me, for he has given me his Holy Spirit to abide with me forever. Sweet is the cool twilight, when every star seems like the eye of heaven, and the cool wind is as the breath of celestial love.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Read it twice. The first time at speed, to get the shape. The second time slowly, one phrase at a time.
Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth. The line is Samuel’s, the boy who answered God in the dark while Eli — the older man who had had every spiritual advantage — slept through it. Spurgeon is borrowing the line because it names the posture that Solomon, his father David’s son, lost as he aged. The boy-prophet’s posture. The I am only asking what he delights to give. Solomon, by the end of his reign, was asking for what he delighted to be given — silver, gold, peace on his borders, the affection of his foreign wives. The asking had drifted outward. The asking had stopped being for what the Lord delighted to give. The drift looked like prosperity. The drift was, underneath, the slow corruption of the asking itself.
Notice the phrase every other thought is hushed. Spurgeon is describing a state Solomon would have remembered from his youth and lost by his middle age. The hushed state. The state in which the heart is quiet enough to hear what God delights to say. The young Solomon at Gibeon had it — that was why his asking was the right asking. The middle-aged Solomon, surrounded by counsellors and concubines and caravans and treaties, did not. The thoughts were not hushed. There were too many of them, and they were too loud, and the hush had been crowded out of the calendar by everything that arrived once the gifts began arriving.
This is the part Spurgeon makes available to you. You do not have to be Solomon at his middle age. You do not have to have the kingdoms and the treaties to have lost the hush. The modern Christian woman has lost it the same way — through the multiplication of legitimate things, none of them individually wrong, all of them collectively loud. The phone. The email. The endless small administration of a life that has, for legitimate reasons, become more complicated than it was at twenty. The hush is not the absence of these things. The hush is the deliberate making-of-space inside these things — a twenty-minute corner of the day in which every other thought is hushed, and the asking returns to what He delights to give.
Sweet is the cool twilight, when every star seems like the eye of heaven. The image is contemplative. The twilight, not the noon. The cool, not the heat. The slow descent of the day into the kind of quiet where the heart can lift. Solomon, in his last years, did not have the twilight. He had banquets. The banquet is not bad. The banquet without the twilight is the slow corruption Spurgeon names. The hush has to be defended somewhere in the day, or the asking will drift outward by Tuesday.
The somatic that goes with the unhushed heart
Pause here. The teaching has a body to it, and the body is where Spurgeon’s vocabulary becomes most translatable to a modern week.
Sit somewhere quiet. Close your eyes for a moment. Notice the small ongoing noise in the chest and the throat — the low hum of half-finished thoughts, the muscular bracing at the base of the neck where the day’s unfinished tasks are being stored. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the shoulders lower by a small amount — not by trying to relax them, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold them up. Let the breath go all the way out. Let the next inhale arrive on its own, slowly, without your help.
That single un-hurried exhale is the body’s equivalent of every other thought is hushed. The unhushed body cannot exhale all the way. The body learning to wait on the Lord is, at the most basic physiological level, the body learning to finish its exhale before the next inhale arrives. Solomon’s wisdom did not teach him this. Spurgeon’s quieter daily practice did. The chair Spurgeon sat in to write Morning and Evening was the chair the older Solomon had stopped sitting in. You can sit in it tonight, before the day is fully over, and the hush you let into the body for one minute will be a small return to the asking the boy at Gibeon knew how to make.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women is built around this kind of small daily settling. One page each day, a short passage, room for the honest sentence, no demand to perform. The workbook does not turn you into Solomon at his middle age, scrambling to govern more than the chair can hold. It returns you, page by page, to the boy at Gibeon — the posture before the gifts began to scatter the asking. The drift Solomon could not stop is the drift the small daily page is built to guard against.
The third passage: the heart in right tune
“‘Come, then, my Lord, and give me Thy love with Thy grace.’ Take good heed, Christian, that thine own heart is in right tune, that when the fingers of mercy touch the strings, they may resound with full notes of communion.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Till He Come
This is the most piercing of the three passages, because of the image at the centre. Read it once at speed, then read it again slowly.
Spurgeon imagines the heart as a stringed instrument. The strings have to be in right tune before they will resound. The fingers of mercy — God’s mercy, touching the strings — will find the heart in whatever tune the heart has been left in. If the strings are slack, the touch produces no music. If the strings have been retuned to other gods, the touch produces dissonance. Take good heed, Christian, that thine own heart is in right tune. The image is exact, and it is the image Solomon’s life is an extended case study of.
Solomon’s heart was, in his youth, in right tune. The fingers of mercy touched the strings and the Song of Solomon came out, and the Proverbs came out, and the dedicatory prayer at the temple came out — full notes of communion, by any measure of Israelite worship. And then, slowly, the strings were retuned. Not by a single act. By a thousand small adjustments. The wife from Egypt brought her gods and her tuning. The wife from Moab brought hers. The wife from Sidon brought hers. Each tuning was small. Each tuning seemed politically necessary. By the end, the harp that had played Proverbs was playing the music of Milcom and Chemosh, and the fingers of mercy, when they touched it, did not resound the way they had resounded at Gibeon.
The line that should haunt you is the one in the middle: Take good heed, Christian, that thine own heart is in right tune. Spurgeon is not addressing kings. He is addressing the woman reading Morning and Evening in a small parlour in London in 1869, and he is, by extension, addressing the woman reading this article now. The retuning of the heart is not a thing that happens to other people. The retuning happens slowly to every soul that does not take good heed. The small adjustments come from the things the calendar is full of — not from idols, in the cartoon sense, but from the slow privileging of legitimate things over the One who gave them.
What can we learn from Solomon in the Bible at this third passage? That the heart’s tuning is the work of a lifetime, not a youth. That the Proverbs-writing twenties do not guarantee the Proverbs-living sixties. That every gift the Lord gives is, by the same gesture, an invitation to keep the heart in tune while receiving it — because the gift, ungratefully held, will retune the heart faster than the gift, gratefully held, will keep it.
What the chair looks like in your week
The drift Solomon could not stop is a drift you can, slowly, learn to recognise and refuse. Not by reading his life as a cautionary tale, although it is. By instituting the small daily chair in your own week — the twenty minutes in which the asking returns to what He delights to give, the hush is allowed to happen, the strings are gently re-tuned by being placed near Him. Spurgeon, who wrote Morning and Evening for the woman whose week looked nothing like a king’s, knew the chair was the practice. The page, the passage, the honest sentence. The slow re-tuning of the heart through the daily proximity to the One who made it.
You are not Solomon. You will not lose a kingdom to your drift. But you can lose the hush. You can lose the delightful sense of perfect peace Spurgeon names in the first passage. You can lose the right tune of the heart, and the loss will not announce itself — it will appear, years later, as a low-grade weariness that the calendar cannot explain. The chair is what guards against it. The chair is the small daily defence the wisest man in Israel did not, in the end, keep.
Get Seven Days of Stillness — free
A free gift from Hayley Louisa Mark. A short devotional companion drawn from the 140-Day series — seven passages, seven contemplative practices, sent to your inbox over the coming week.
No noise. No spam. Unsubscribe whenever you wish.
A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each day a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that keeps the heart in right tune long after the early wisdom has been given.
The sibling articles in this Bible-figures series sit at what can we learn from King David — Spurgeon on the man after God’s heart and what can we learn from Paul the Apostle — Owen on Paul’s sufferings.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Spurgeon’s slow vocabulary — the hushed thought, the right-tune heart, the fingers of mercy on the strings — into a daily companion built for the woman who would rather guard the chair than learn Solomon’s lesson the long way.
