“People to meet in heaven: the Queen of Sheba”
I Kings 10:1-13
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus.
In his book, More than a Carpenter, author Josh McDowell writes, “I wanted to be happy. I wanted my life to have meaning. I became hounded by those three basic questions that haunt every human life: Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? I wanted answers, so as a young student, I started searching for them.”
Since he felt education could answer his quest for meaning, he enrolled in a university. But he soon discovered that his fellow students and even faculty members had just as many problems and unanswered questions as he did. Then when he saw a student wearing a T-shirt that read, “Don’t follow me, I’m lost,” he decided education was not the answer.
So he tried to find happiness and meaning in prestige, and got elected to various student offices. It was a heady experience, he said, to know everyone on campus, to make important decisions, and to spend university money on speakers and parties. But he soon came to live only for Saturday and Sunday, and dreaded Monday through Friday.
Then when he found prestige was just a sham, he said he felt like a boat on the ocean, tossed back and forth by the waves. He had no rudder, no direction, and no control.
That’s when he noticed a small group of people, eight students and two faculty members, who seemed different from the rest. They seemed to know who they were and where they were going. They had something he didn’t have.
A couple of weeks later, he sat and talked with some members of the group. He said, “Tell me, why are you so different from all the other students and faculty on this campus? What changed your life?”
Without hesitation or embarrassment, one looked him straight in the eye, and said, “Jesus Christ.”
He answered, “Don’t give me that kind of garbage. I’m fed up with religion. I’m fed up with the church. I’m fed up with the Bible.”
So they challenged him to examine the claims of Jesus Christ—that He is God’s Son in human form, that He died on the cross for all sin, that He was buried and rose again in three days, that He’s alive and can change a person’s life even today. As a pre-law student, he said he welcomed the challenge.
And as months passed, he found evidence, quite a lot of evidence. And he came to discover that the Old and New Testaments were the most reliable writings in all of antiquity, and that Jesus was everything He claimed to be.
He was, in McDowell’s words, More than a Carpenter.
In the Bible, there were many who sought Christ. Nicodemus, a member of the Sanhedrin, came to Jesus in the middle of the night. A Philippian jailer said, “What must I do to be saved?” And a rich man said, “What good thing must I do to have eternal life?” All of them were seekers. All of them sought Christ.
So it is in the words of I Kings chapter 10. If you would, please turn in your Bibles to page 369 as I read the words of our text. I’ll start where it says, “The Queen of Sheba,” at chapter 10, verse 1: “Now when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord, she came to test him with hard questions. She came to Jerusalem with a very great retinue, with camels bearing spices and very much gold and precious stones. And when she came to Solomon, she told him all that was on her mind.”
“The queen of Sheba,” it says. Where’s Sheba?
It’s in the southernmost part of Arabia, beside the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, east of Ethiopia, west of Iran--modern day Yemen. It’s about 1500 miles south of Jerusalem.
And notice, she was the queen! She could have sent any prince or princess, any ruler or governor. After all, she was the queen!
Besides, she already had her share of advisers, wise men. But she wasn’t satisfied with what they knew. She wanted to learn from King Solomon himself.
We wonder why. Maybe she had heard his words from Ecclesiastes chapter 3: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die…a time to weep, and a time to laugh…a time for war, and a time for peace.” Or the words of Proverbs 22: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Or the words of Proverbs 29: “When the righteous increase, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people groan.”
So as it says in verse 2, “She came to Jerusalem with a very great retinue, with camels bearing spices and very much gold and precious stones.” She set aside all the affairs of State, and made that dangerous, months-long, 1,500 mile journey just to meet King Solomon, to tell him everything that was on her mind.
Verse 3: “And Solomon answered all her questions.”
What were her questions? Eastern legend offers two of them.
The first is this--calling in two children, a boy and a girl, of the same height and dressed exactly alike, she said, “Tell me, in your great wisdom, which is the boy and which is the girl.”
And setting a basin of water before each of them, he said, “Wash your hands.”
Immediately, the boy plunged his hands into the water, while the girl carefully rolled back her sleeves.
“This is the boy,” he said, “and that is the girl.”
Then holding two sets of flowers in her hands, one artificial and the other real, she asked, “Tell me, wise Solomon, which are the real flowers and which are the artificial.”
And commanding a servant to open a window, as bees immediately flew in, they ignored the artificial flowers and came to rest on the real flowers. He said, “These are the real flowers and those are the artificial.”
Did that happen? Probably not, for neither the Queen of Sheba nor King Solomon would have bothered with questions like these. After all, as the Bible says, she came to tell him “all that was on her mind.”
So what did she have on her mind? Maybe she asked some hard ethical and diplomatic questions, like how to best care for her people and how to deal with the affairs of State, about trade, economics, and politics. Even more, since she knew Solomon was a godly man, she might well have asked, “How can your God punish sin and yet forgive?” and “Does it really matter how I live?”
She opened her heart to him. She poured out her heart to him.
And in his wisdom, he told her about creation and the fall of man, about the importance of the law and the sacrifices, and the promise of the Redeemer. He said, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding” (Proverbs 9:10).
“Solomon answered all her questions,” the Bible says. “There was nothing hidden from the king that he could not explain to her.”
And when the queen of Sheba had seen all the wisdom of Solomon, the house he had built, the food on his table, the seating of his officials, and the attendance of his servants, their clothing, his cupbearers, and the burnt offerings he offered at the house of the Lord, the Bible says, “There was no more breath in her.” She was in awe. She was overwhelmed!
So she said in verse 9: “Blessed be the Lord your God, who has delighted in you and set you on the throne of Israel! Because the Lord loved Israel forever, He has made you king, that you may execute justice and righteousness.”
But she wouldn’t leave without first giving a gift—120 talents, (4 ½ tons(!)) of gold, as well as crates packed with spices and chests full of precious stones.
And Solomon gave her gifts too. Verse 13: “And King Solomon gave to the queen of Sheba all that she desired, whatever she asked besides what was given her by the bounty of King Solomon. So she turned and went back to her own land with her servants.”
In his last year on Wall Street, Sam Polk, a hedge-fund trader, received a bonus of $3.6 million. But he was mad because it wasn’t enough. He was thirty years old, had no children to raise and no debts to pay. He simply wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink—he was addicted.
He had learned the importance of being rich from his father. He was a salesman with big dreams, but empty pockets, who was often known to say, “Imagine what life will be like, when I make a million dollars.”
And since his father believed money would solve all of his problems, at twenty-two years old, he did too. And when he walked onto the trading floor for the very first time, and saw the glowing flatscreen TVs, telephones, and high-tech computers, he felt like he was in the cockpit of a fighter plane. And he knew that’s what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.
Over the next few years, he worked hard and began to move up the Wall Street ladder. At 25, he could go to any restaurant in Manhattan, just by picking up the phone and calling one of his brokers. He got second-row seats at the Knicks-Lakers game just by hinting he might like to go to a game. His first bonus had been $40,000. Now it was $1.5 million.
But when he began to learn that every broker was in it for themselves, that they despised anyone or anything that threatened their paycheck, that’s when he started to see Wall Street with different eyes. It was all about power and money and the bottom line. “We’re smarter and work harder than everyone else, so we deserve all this money,” they would say.
So he chose to leave it all behind. And in the three years since he left, he married, he’s taught classes, and he’s spoken in jails. He’s even started a nonprofit group called “Groceryships,” to help poor families that struggle with food addiction.
You can read about it in his book, For the Love of Money.
You know, this isn’t the last time we hear of the Queen of Sheba. Jesus spoke of her once more in the words of Mathew chapter 13. He said, “The queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon.” But then He said: “Behold, something greater than Solomon is here.”
Do you stand in need of God and His forgiveness? Tell it to the King. Do you wonder if you’ve been washed in His blood? Tell it to the King. Do you feel threatened by enemies from without and within? Tell it to the King.
Bring all your questions, no matter how deep, or personal, or hard, and tell them to the King.
Dear Father, as the Queen of Sheba once came to King Solomon, so we come to You. Receive our gifts, strengthen our faith, and hear our prayer, for Jesus’ sake. Amen