1 Kings 10:1-13 And when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the LORD, she came to prove him with hard questions.… What were these questions? They may have been riddles like the one which the story of Samson recalls. Asking riddles was a common pastime amongst the ancients, especially the Arabs. Still, it is hardly likely that a sensible queen would have journeyed all the way from Arabia to Judaea merely to have a game of conundrums. More probably she did so in order to get a solution of mental and moral difficulties of what we call the enigmas of life. A thoughtful, earnest woman she was, no doubt; perplexed by the problems of her day, as some of us are with those of ours, and she felt that it would be a relief to talk them over with one wiser than herself. There is a greater than Solomon, whom we can prove with hard questions, with whom we can commune of all that is in our hearts. Have we done so? If not, we cannot say that our doubts are unanswerable. A correspondent wrote to Canon Liddon: "The only thing that now attaches me at all to Christianity is that it alone of the systems of thought with which I come into contact seems to give a working answer to two questions: 'Whence am I?' and 'Whither am I going?' All else is dark, all else at least uncertain." Many of us are attached to Christianity for the same reason. We have proved its Founder with hard questions, and our creed has simplified itself into some such form as this: "About God, the soul, a future life, the sin and sorrow of the world — about such matters as these I know little, but Christ knows much, and any conclusion that was good enough for Him in reference to them is good enough for me." The German philosopher, Kant, tells us that there are three questions which mankind has always been asking: "What can I know?" "What shall I do?" and "For what may I hope?" What answer does He who called Himself the Way, the Truth, and the Life give to these questions? Some persons, says Bishop Butler, "upon pretence of the light of nature, avowedly reject all revelation as in its very nature incredible." Things have changed since Butler's day. Few now think that the light of nature is sufficient; with most of us it is Christ or nothing. We have come to see that the objections made to Christianity may be urged with equal force against natural religion — that the difficulty, for instance, of accounting on the supposition of a good Creator for the origin and continuance of evil in the world ought to be felt by the Deist far more than by the Christian because the latter has a theory of redemption to offer which at any rate professes to reconcile God's preknowledge of evil with His wisdom, power, and goodness. This, together with the history and present condition of the Church of Christ, .makes it easier to be a Christian than a Deist or Theist. But here comes the Agnostic, and he says to humanity, with its recurring questions, "Do not ask yourself or any one else what you can know about God, the soul, and a future state. These matters are unknowable, and you had better be humble, as I am, and acknowledge the fact." In reference to this state of mind it may be remarked that we can only assert the unknown to be unknowable on the assumption — surely, anything but an humble one — that we know all that can be known. If it be true that God cannot be known by man, it will be the last truth which man will ever learn. I heard lately an intelligent, sympathetic woman remark that there is no being in the Universe she so much pities as God, for if He has a heart, she said, He must feel terribly the responsibility of creating such a world as this. That God does feel for the sorrows of the world and does admit responsibility In the matter He proved when He gave His Son to die for it. What more could He have done for His vineyard? There is the pathos of a beautiful simplicity in those words in Genesis, "It repented the Lord God, and grieved Him at the heart." May there not have been some contrariness in the nature of things which it was as impossible for even Him to prevent, as it would be to make two and two five instead of four? May it not be said, for instance, in all reverence, that even God could not create a virtuous being without the discipline of trial — the very idea involving a contradiction? Plutarch tells us that Alexander, King of Macedon, used to say that he loved and revered his teacher Aristotle, as much as if he had been his own father, because if to the one he owed his life. to the other he owed his power of living well. What is it that we do not owe in this second respect to our Saviour? No Solomon has answered as He has the hard question, "What shall we do?" This is admitted even by those who do not accept the full measure of Christ's teaching. John Stuart Mill, for instance, has observed that it would not be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of virtue from the abstract to the concrete than to endeavour so to live that Christ would approve our life. In any moral difficulty we can and we should ask ourselves, "What would Christ have me to do in this matter?" But Christ does more than enable us to per-calve and know what things we ought to do. He gives us grace and power faithfully to fulfil the same. In this He differs from merely earthly teachers. They are like a man standing on the shore showing a drowning man how the arms should be moved in swimming. Jesus Christ rescues the drowning person, or at least gives him a helping hand, as He did to Peter when that apostle began to sink. Lord Tennyson, in the biography of his father, tells us that the late Poet Laureate had a measureless admiration for the Sermon on the Mount, and for the parables; "perfection beyond compare," he called them. At the same time he used to express his conviction that "Christianity with its Divine morality, but without the central figure of Christ, the Son of Man, would become cold, and that it is fatal for religion to lose its warmth." The question for what may we hope when the few years of life's fitful fever here on earth are over is answered by Christ as no mere man, though as wise as Solomon, could answer it. Apart from Christ we could not know whether death were a door or a wall; a spreading of wings to soar or the folding of pinions for ever. Before Christ's coming the human body was thought of as a mere instrument made use of by the soul, and no part of man's true self. The soul was considered to be free only when at death it was disunited from it, and became the "shade" of ancient classical poetry. This was a very shadowy belief, and one that physical research entirely contradicts. The fuller discoveries in modern days of the action and reaction of body and soul, of the need of physical machinery, not only for act and word, but even for thought, have shown that the body is a part of man's true self. In this matter Christianity agrees with science. It teaches the resurrection of the body, or that there will be a continued existence of soul and organism, that in the next world the soul will not be unclothed, but clothed upon. Jesus Christ is the Head and Representative of our race, and by rising from the dead Himself He brought life and incorruption out of the haze of speculation into the calm, clear light of fact. (E. J. Hardy, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: And when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the LORD, she came to prove him with hard questions. |
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