Before the Altar part 10

The altar is a sanctuary, a place I can go and cry. (I Samuel 1:7; 1 Samuel 7:4) And I can go in front of Him, just as I am, a saved sinner, one who comes to Him with my broken heart. (2 Samuel 12:20). If I examine the Old Testament correctly, I see trouble from the start. While Solomon was indeed supposed to build the Temple which he did in I Kings 6:37, as well as in 1 Kings 7:40 and 1 Kings 8:10-63, he nonetheless took a foreign bride. This was not neccesarily a bad thing but in Solomon's case...well suffice it to say that he gave up God to follow foreign idols. He allowed his wives to tell him what to do interms of how to worship and that it would be OK if he wanted to use false gods as long as he mentioned God occasionally. God was a loving God that would forgive Solomon that. If there had been penitence. But the mere fact that the people around Solomon took an example and assumed that was OK resulted in doom. As I read it, it was because of this that Isreal fell finally in AD 70. It was the result of traditional practices that led to worship of false gods and muddying the waters for people that wanted to worship the True God. Isreal fell because of its laws, its practices of weighing to heavily upon rules, upon using the letter of the law to get what they could from poor folk in the guise of leading them to what it took to get them to heave. And being focused on the laws, not the end result of those laws. And that is me, when I tell God,"I did this, this, this and that and aren't I a good girl and when do I get my gold star, God?"