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.… I. CHRISTIANITY CHALLENGES THE GREATEST OF THE WORLD TO INVESTIGATE ITS BOLD CLAIMS FOR SUPREMACY AS THE ONE RELIGION FOR THE HUMAN SOUL. It was not mere curiosity which brought this Queen of the South to see Solomon. A question was raised; it could be settled by nothing except rigid experiment. Christ has represented Himself in Christianity; He is to be tested in the system of faith He came to proclaim. And what we insist upon is, that every thinking soul is bound to seek, search, sift, and examine what this Son of God, who was the Son of Man, has to say. This revelation from heaven for men's salvation is either everything or nothing to each immortal being going to God's judgment. For it claims to be all that any one needs for the final redemption of his soul. II. SCEPTICS MIGHT AS WELL PAUSE IN UTTERING THEIR DECISIONS OF PERSONAL REJECTION OF CHRIST TILL THEY HAVE FULLY UNDERSTOOD HIM. It is not every one that is competent even to disbelieve. It requires much thought to dispose of Christianity thoroughly. It is a system that stands very determinately upon conduct; and it insists that, before any intelligent investigator shall come to a fixed conclusion, he shall follow up what he already knows by working it into his life. And then he will, quite possibly, be surprised by further disclosures which he did not previously suspect. There is a great pertinence just here in the splendid figure of the traveller Humboldt; he says: "At the limits of exact knowledge, as from a lofty island shore, one's eye loves to glance towards the distant regions. The images that it sees may be illusive; but, like the illusive images that people imagined they had seen from the Canaries, or the Azores, long before the time of Columbus, these may also lead to the discovery of a new world." There is no field of study of which this remark is truer than that which religious investigation offers. III. RELIGIOUS INQUIRERS SHOULD NOT HESITATE IN COMING TO JESUS CHRIST FOR A SATISFYING ANSWER TO ALL THE SOUL PERPLEXITIES WHICH BESET THEM. If there were only the revelations of God in nature for a direction and a comfort, there would be no small gain over what the heathen have in their poems and dreams; for what would come to us would be at least trustworthy, because it would be true. The best minds have often found solace in the mute world around them. Chaucer used to say that walking in the meadows, at dawn of day, to see the blossoms spread against the sun, was a blissful sight which softened all his sorrows. Henry Martyn, lonely and sad, in his far-away mission-field, exclaimed, "Even a leaf is good company." And Ruskin writes in his essay: "What a fine thought that was, when God Almighty earliest thought of a tree!" Even with this for our Bible, our Lord would excel Ecclesiastes: "Consider the lilies," etc. But the living Word and the written Word are better for a man, immortal and sensitively intelligent, than all this friendly communing with nature only, for he is pondering questions in his heart. (C. S. Robinson, D. D.) 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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