Bible Commentaries

The Queen of Sheba

1 Kings 10:1-9

THE queen of Sheba was an earnest inquirer. She was not content with the reports which she had heard in her own land; she bethought her that she would put to the test this man of marvellous 1 Kings 10:2). How then could he but answer her questions? She half-answered them herself by her way of putting them. He sowed the seed on a prepared soil. He felt that he was in vital communication with a living soul—a listener who heard not only every word but every tone, and knew the spiritual value of the music which was being poured into the listening ear. We nowadays cannot get at people's hearts. Civilisation has lent new resources to hypocrisy. We now put questions merely for the sake of putting them, and to such questions kind heaven is dumb. Jesus Christ answered some people "never a word." He looked dumb. They were not speaking of what was in their hearts. Given a hearer who will tell the speaker all that is in his heart, and behold Jesus himself will draw nigh, and, beginning at Moses, he will pursue his way through prophets and minstrels and all writers, until the listening heart glows with a warmth hitherto unknown. Ye have not, because ye ask not. Ask, and receive! Is asking an exercise of the lips, a mere putting of phrases into an interrogative form? Asking is crying, demanding, beseeching, supplicating, weeping. Who has asked? We ask not until we reach the point of sacrifice. It is when the heart is in high agony that it prays; at other times it merely mutters to itself. What we want, then, is heart to heart communication. The great questions are in the heart. We have falsely supposed that great inquiries concerned the intellect alone, but when we come into a completer and truer analysis, we shall find that the great questions lie within the moral region, and are really affairs of the heart. Let the heart speak its doubts and fears, tell its tale of perverseness, selfishness, littleness, relate all that is in its secret places, and force itself to put into words things that shame the heavens; then we shall see whether the gospel leaves unanswered the great questions of the soul. But the gospel will not be trifled with. It will not be turned into a plaything. It will not condescend to be consulted as an oracle, to be used as a convenience for the gratification of intellectual desire or anxiety; it has a message to the heart: it stands at the heart, and knocks. Ye have not, because ye ask not! Your prayer was swift, shallow, an effort in words; you sweltered not in blood when you spake the poor prayer.

The queen of Sheba saw with a trained eye that the accessories were in keeping with the central dignity: "And when the queen of Sheba had seen all Solomon's 1 Kings 10:4-5). This was fair reasoning. We may reason from within, and say: Given such a spiritual state, and such and such accessories may reasonably be looked for. Or we may reason from without, and say: If God so cared for oxen, what will he do for men? If God so paint the lily, how will he beautify the soul? If God has lavished infinite wisdom and strength on the grass blade, what can he have done for all heaven? Men are at liberty to begin their reasoning from either of these points—namely, the inward, or the outward. Some cannot begin from the point that is within: for they have no experience that would warrant their assuming the right to reason from such an origin; but the open Bible is accessible to all men—namely, the open bible of nature, life, and the whole scheme of providence. Jesus Christ often trained his disciples to reason from the point that was external. When their faith was going down, he did not deliver long metaphysical lectures upon faith and upon the culture of the soul, because his scholars could not follow him in such high argument, but he said, "Behold the fowls of the air: consider the lilies: are not ye better than they? Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field------" and from that point he reasoned inward, until those who understood his reasoning felt themselves clothed upon with their house from heaven. The reasoning remains the same today in all its broadest effects. In some cases we are struck by the spiritual wisdom of men. They have intellectual penetration, moral sagacity—that keen, swift sympathy which understands without being told, which sees the prodigal whilst he is "yet a great way off;" they are seers and prophets, and men whose very voice may be an inspiration, and whose very touch may be the beginning of recreated strength. Others, again, can only judge the gospel by providence. Jesus Christ takes care to assure those who are concerned in his kingdom that God does not forget the outward. He says, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things"—lumping them, reducing them to a contemptible "etc."—"all these things shall be added unto you. Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of these things." So we reason from the care of the body to the care of the soul; and we are entitled to reason from his making of the world, and his governing thereof, to what he will do in all spiritual spaces, liberties, and processes. Take his world, and make that the beginning of your reasoning, and you will be compelled by a gracious necessity to acknowledge that he who has made even this little world we call the earth, must have made something larger and better: for there is enough in the very beginning to force the conclusion that it is but a beginning. Has God lavished all his strength upon the grass-blade, upon the daisy of the field, upon the fowl of the air? or has he made these but points of beginning, seizing which, we are struck with amazement, and the amazement becomes another point of ascent, and every new wonder is turned into a new question, and so the soul is cultured by gracious and gradual processes.

How very vividly the queen of Sheba represented faith as over-taxed—"Howbeit I believed not the words" ( 1 Kings 10:7)—"I loved to hear them, but they were too much for me; it seemed to me impossible that any man should have reached this height of 1 Kings 10:7.) Here is truth again. This woman is true from the beginning of the interview unto the end. And all that Christ asks of us is to be true, and in our own way to say what we have seen him do, and especially what we have seen him do for ourselves. "He is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think." "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of 1 Kings 10:8). O to be a servant of thine, king Solomon; to be permitted sometimes to overhear thy conversation, to catch even a stray word now and then!" Happy are these thy servants;" they must often listen when they do not seem to be listening; they must serve thee with both hands earnestly, because they get back from thee such gleams of light, such words of revelation and soothing as men never heard before. And is the servant of Christ unblessed? Are they who are humblest and lowliest in all the Church without benefaction? Nay, do they not all live in the sunshine and eat at the hospitable table of God's own summer? Is there a servant of Christ who has not a heaven of his own? We should be happier if we knew our privileges more. It is an awful thing to have outlived Christian privilege. It is a sad thing to imagine that we have outgrown our teachers, and have no further need of their assistance: then indeed the teachers can do no mighty works, because of the unbelief of the learners. Who would not give much to have one long day with the Apostle Paul? Yet he was stoned whilst he lived; he was persecuted unto the death. Who would not wish to have one long day with Martin Luther? Yet the men of his age did not understand him, nor care for his great messages. Who would not love to have one whole summer day, the longest in the year, with Frederick William Robertson, of Brighton, the greatest teacher of his day, the child- Matthew 12:42 :—"The queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: for she came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than Solomon is here." She was drawn by a strange magnetism. The queen of Sheba was of the Semitic race, and was not therefore wholly alien from the seed of Abraham: and who can tell how the principle of heredity works in souls, and draws them in this direction or in that, and enables them to sustain great cost of time and strength and money in order to reach the culmination of their spiritual desires? "A greater than Solomon": he answers greater questions, he distributes greater blessings, he reigns in more glorious state. When he sees Solomon in all his grandeur—sees the man who made of the almug trees pillars for the house of the Lord, and for the king's house, harps also and psalteries for singers—when he beholds this great song, he takes up a blade of grass, and plucks a flower of the field, and says, "Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." When a man can so interpret nature, he never can be poor, and he never can be alone.