1 Kings Blessing to the nations Part 9 By Graeme Goldsworthy

Okay, well, I guess you're all tired, I am, and a remnant has returned.
And what is more, I have never actually, well not in recent times anyway, preached on this passage.
It was when I did the seniors getaway for CMS up at Mount Tambourine.
They asked for four talks and so I said, well I'll do the fourth one on the Queen of Sheba.
I had planned to preach on it at some stage but I didn't actually make it part of the preaching series.
So I'll give you my sort of outline and the way my thoughts went
and some of these sort of little side tracks that I felt at liberty to dive up.
I think 1 Kings 10 does give us some light on the whole question of the blessing to the nations.
We started with, and this would be my first point, Solomon as the climax to the covenant promise.
And, you know, if you were simply looking at this passage on its own
you'd want to give some outline of the pattern of revelation from Abraham to Solomon.
So we won't go through all that again.
But I did in this circumstance because I hadn't done it in any great detail.
And it's good perhaps to remind people of it.
And my second point was about wisdom and the presence of God
as something which points us to the Gospel to the nations.
So Solomon's wisdom was, yeah, creation oriented.
I remember how back in chapter 4 it's told of the Proverbs that he wrote
and he spoke and the songs that he'd written
and he spoke about various aspects of nature amongst other things.
It's interesting how much it concentrated, you know, the reference was to some nature interest at that point.
Whereas, of course, when you go to the book of Proverbs
it's not that I'm suggesting that every single Proverb was necessarily composed by Solomon.
In fact, on that point, I don't think, I don't know what you think, I don't think Solomon, you know, on a rainy day
sort of said, oh, I've got nothing to do, why don't I sit down and write some Proverbs?
Proverbs aren't like that. Proverbs are the crystallization of experience.
And I would think that the authorship of Proverbs by Solomon
or the authorship of much of Proverbs by Solomon means that Solomon had a great interest in this kind of
intellectual activity and made it his business to collect it.
It may have come from all over the place.
A lot of them may have been his own, but a lot of this stuff would have been running around, you know,
by oral tradition, I'm sure, because Proverbs are a very ancient form of thing.
When I was working on this stuff I had reason to go back and look at stuff in translation, of course,
that actually comes out of Egypt, well, in the time of Solomon but before,
but Babylonian wisdom takes you back into the third millennium BC.
And, you know, so it really is just an activity of human beings trying to learn from their experience
how to live in the world which was complex.
How to make a sense of their lives which are complex and so on.
So the creation oriented nature of Solomon ought not then to be seen as something which makes it
completely different from the salvation history oriented material in the Bible
and the book of Kings helps us to see that.
It's not as if the wise men of Israel were a sort of a sect
who weren't interested in the covenant and in redemption
and just went around contemplating trees and animals and, you know, how to be practically useful.
They were people of the covenant just like anybody else, but this was a particular perspective on it.
So the framework they had, as we saw, was the fear of Yahweh
and as I indicated to you my conviction that the name Yahweh is a covenant name
and a salvation oriented name.
Solomon's wisdom was temple centered.
That is, he saw his wisdom here, if you like, is the spelling out of the covenant nature of wisdom
that it's now seen sort of encapsulated and crystallized by this climax of God's promise being fulfilled
amongst the people of God as he puts his name amongst them in Jerusalem and in the temple.
But it is also world conquering.
I think perhaps one thing that helps us to grasp this tradition concerning Solomon
is a quick look at what Psalm 72 is all about, which is, according to its title, a psalm of Solomon.
It always intrigues me that almost universally the English translations place the titles of the psalms in small print
and then they change the versification from the original, well, when I say original,
the versification in the Hebrew canon, the Hebrew Bible.
So instead of seeing these titles and these introductory verses as part of the inspired word of God
and part of the psalm itself, it is seen as something that somebody has added on just to fill us in with a bit of info.
Rather strange and it's very irritating too when you get commentators who are making reference to the psalms
according to the Hebrew versification and you've got to add one or take one off
because you're dealing with the English Bible.
However, there we go.
Psalm 72 says, Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to the king's son.
May he judge your people with righteousness and your poor with justice.
May the mountains yield prosperity to the people and the hills in righteousness.
May he defend the cause of the poor, give deliverance to the needy, crush the oppressor, and so on.
Then there is a series of petitions for the reign of the king.
May he live while the sun endures as long as the moon through generations.
May he be like rain that falls, etc. Marvellous stuff.
But look at verse 8.
May he have dominion from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth.
A prayer that the king of Israel may have dominion over the earth.
That's asking a lot, isn't it?
May his foes bow down before him, his enemies lick the dust.
May the kings of Tarshish and of the isles render him tribute.
You don't have to go very far into the prophetic eschatology to find similar verses, similar passages.
Which deal with the tribute of the nations to the king.
There are two slants.
You've only got to read through the latter part of Isaiah and you find two slants.
One is that when salvation is revealed in Israel.
And this is not the latter part, this is the first part of Isaiah in chapter 2.
When Jerusalem and the temple are restored then the nations will flow to it.
But there's another sense which is also given that the nations come and bring their tribute to the people of God.
The sense of the dominion of the people of God over all the earth.
And of course, may the kings of Tarshish and of the isles render him tribute.
May the kings of Sheba.
Assuming Sheba is the same Sheba as the queen came from and Sheba bring gifts.
May all kings fall down before him and all nations give him service.
So, yeah, then when you come towards the end of the psalm.
You have in verse 17, at the end of it, second part of 17.
May all nations be blessed in him.
May they pronounce him happy.
Now, just as a side line, I don't think you can do a half way complete biblical theology of mission.
Without at least starting from, and I would say myself, I would start from creation.
But at least from Genesis 12 and the promise to Abraham.
And then picking up as the process goes on.
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