BIG IDEA
Most leaders I know have people who could tell them they’re wrong. Very few have someone whose job it is. Solomon had the finest staff in the world and not one Nathan on it. The gap never looked like a risk, right up until it split a kingdom in two.
BACKGROUND
Three thousand years ago, an Israelite king named David slept with another man’s wife and then arranged for the husband to die in combat. About a year went by. The kingdom ran. The staff worked. Nobody said anything.
Then a court prophet named Nathan asked for a meeting.
Nathan didn’t accuse him. He told him about a rich man with enormous flocks who took a poor man’s only lamb. David got angry and said the man deserved to die. Nathan said, “You are the man.”
Consider the risk in that sentence. David had already had one man killed to keep this quiet. He could have done it again by lunch. Instead the king admitted it, and the kingdom held.
Now look at his son.
Solomon inherited the throne. He was David and Bathsheba’s boy. Born to the woman Nathan had come about, born after all of it. He existed because somebody once told his father the truth.
Solomon’s org chart is on the record. A priest. Two secretaries. A recorder. An army commander. A man over the district governors. A palace administrator. A chief of forced labor.
Competent people, every one. Not one of them had Nathan’s job.
Dr. John Oswalt, who teaches these texts at Asbury, stops on that list and points at what isn’t there. No prophet. Nobody on the payroll whose entire reason for being in the building was to tell the king he was wrong.
Watch what it cost.
Early on, Solomon made a treaty marriage with Egypt that broke his own nation’s rules about foreign wives. A few lines later he asks for wisdom instead of wealth, and it is the high point of his life. The writer sets both down on the same page and comments on neither.
Oswalt calls that marriage a seed. Somebody digs it out and nothing comes of it. Nobody does and it grows.
Nobody did. Not for forty years.
Warnings still came. Twice, and directly from God, according to the record . This is another way of saying they came from nobody standing in his office waiting on an answer. A warning with no person attached to it is an easy thing to sit with. You can plan to deal with it after the quarter closes.
By the end, he was funding shrines to gods his own law forbade. He was told the kingdom would split in two. It did, the moment he died.
Here’s what I’ve had to admit. I have people who could tell me I’m wrong. That is not the same as having people who do.
So I’ve stopped asking myself whether I’m open to correction.
I ask narrower things now. Who has the standing? Not who is smart. But who can say it to my face without doing quiet math about a paycheck or a friendship first. When did they last use it, because if I can’t remember, I shouldn’t file that under evidence I’ve been right. And what happened to them afterward, because the people around me are watching. If it cost the last one anything, I have already taught the rest to stay quiet, and I did it without saying a word.
Solomon had the finest staff in the world. He was missing one chair.
The question isn’t whether somebody has the standing to sit in it. It’s when I last let them.
The David and Nathan account is II Samuel 11–12. Solomon’s cabinet list is I Kings 4; the treaty marriage and the request for wisdom are both in I Kings 3; the reckoning is I Kings 11. The reading of that marriage as a “seed” comes from John N. Oswalt’s lectures on I Kings and II Kings at BiblicalTraining.org.
Want to go deeper?
“I know better” might be the least protective sentence I say. Six books; here’s a short review of each one:
- Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) — Carol Tavris & Elliot Aronson, on how the mind quietly rewrites the story to keep me innocent.
- Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman, who studied these traps for fifty years and admits he still falls into them.
- Cognitive Sophistication Does Not Attenuate the Bias Blind Spot — the study that found the smartest people can have the bigger blind spot.
- The Folly of Fools — Robert Trivers, on why we may deceive ourselves first in order to deceive others.
- How the Mighty Fall — Jim Collins, on how decline begins at the peak, disguised as success.
- The Slow Drift — Richard E. Simmons III, on how faith erodes through quiet neglect rather than sudden collapse.