The weight of gold that Solomon received yearly was 666 talents [about 25 tons], not including the revenues from merchants and traders from all the Arabian kings and governors of the land.
King Solomon made two hundred large shields of hammered gold; six hundred bekas [7 1/2 pounds] went into each shield. He also made three hundred small shields of hammered gold with three minas [3 3/4 pounds] of gold in each shield.
Then the king made a great throne inlaid with ivory and overlaid with gold...all King Solomon's goblets were gold, and all the household articles in the Palace of the Forest of Lebanon were pure gold.
The king had a fleet of trading ships at sea along the coasts of Hiram. Once every three years it returned, carrying gold, silver and ivory, and apes and baboons....
Year after year, everyone who came brought a gift -- articles of silver and gold, robes, weapons, and spices and horses and mules....
King Solomon was greater in riches and wisdom than all the other kings....
1 Kings 10:14-25
Later, after Solomon's death, his son, Rehoboam, ascended to the throne.
Here's what happened:
After Rehoboam's position as king was established and he became strong, he and all Israel with him abandoned the law of the LORD.
Then the prophet Shemaiah came to Rehoboam and to the leaders of Judah who had assembled in Jerusalem...and told them, "This is what the LORD says, 'You have abandoned Me; therefore I now abandon you to Shishak.'"
Because they had been unfaithful to the LORD, Shishak king of Egypt attacked Jerusalem in the fifth year of King Rehoboam.
With 1200 chariots and sixty thousand horsemen and the innumerable troops of Libyans, Sukkites and Cushites that came with him from Egypt, he captured the fortified cities of Judah and came as far as Jerusalem....
When Shishak king of Egypt attacked Jerusalem, he carried all the treasures of the temple of the LORD and the treasures of the royal palace.
He took everything, including the gold shields Solomon had made.
So King Rehoboam made bronze shields to replace them and assigned these to the commanders of the guard on duty at the entrance to the royal palace.
Whenever the king went to the LORD's temple, the guards went with him, bearing the shields, and afterwards they returned them to the guard room.
-- 2 Chronicles 12:1-11
Their king had abandoned the law of the LORD (the text says, the king "and all Israel with him") and so lost his country's priceless heritage...all that Rehoboam's grandfather, King David, had set aside for the temple and royal treasuries, and all that his father, King Solomon, had later acquired...all gone...in the fifth year of his reign...what several generations accomplished was squandered in just a few years...
And those solid gold shields....
It's fascinating to imagine -- the guards probably polished the bronze to shining perfection -- but they were still bronze, not gold!
Who were they trying to fool?
So the guards, who had previously carried solid gold shields to escort their King, now carried cheap imitations!
Do we do this? Let what is priceless slip through our fingers and hold on tenaciously to what is without value? Polish it up and try to make it look good?
Not acknowledging that what we are grasping is only a substitute, a counterfeit, not the real thing!
Letting go of the important and holding on to the trivial.
It's time to reverse that - right now!
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