And when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon, she came to prove Solomon with hard questions at Jerusalem, with a very great company, and camels that bare spices and gold in abundance, and precious stones.
And when she was come to Solomon, she communed with him of all that was in her heart.
And Solomon told her all her questions; and there was nothing hid from Solomon which he told her not.
And when the queen of Sheba had seen the wisdom of Solomon, and the house that he had built, and the meat of his table, and the sitting of his servants, and the attendance of his ministers, and their apparel;
His cupbearers also, and their apparel, and his ascent by which he went up into the house of the Lord; there was no more spirit in her.
And she said to the king, It was a true report which I heard in mine own land of thine acts, and of thy wisdom:
Howbeit I believed not their words, until I came, and mine eyes had seen it: and, behold, the one half of the greatness of thy wisdom was not told me; for thou exceedest the fame that I heard.
Happy are thy men, and happy are these thy servants, which stand continually before thee, and hear thy wisdom.
Blessed be the Lord thy God, Who delighted in thee to set thee on His throne, to be king for the Lord thy God: because thy God loved Israel, to establish them for ever, therefore made He thee king over them, to do judgment and justice.
And King Solomon gave to the queen of Sheba all her desire, whatsoever she asked, besides that which she had brought unto the king. So she turned, and went away to her own land, she and her servants.
And he reigned over all the kings from the River even unto the land of the Philistines, and to the border of Egypt.
And the king made silver in Jerusalem as stones, and cedar trees made he as the sycomore trees that are in the lowland, for abundance.
When I first thought of talking about this—number ten in our series on the ark—I had one of two directions in which to go. I could have talked of the benefits that came to Israel, the people of God, when that ark finally came to rest in the temple that Solomon built.
Or I could have talked, as I shall do, of the visit of the Queen of Sheba and her reaction to her visit with Solomon. I chose the latter because this ark—its first name, its greatest name, most often used in Scripture—is the Ark of the Testimony, next perhaps to the Ark of God.
Now, we could go into reasons why this testimony is necessary. Like we say, it is simply because God is not getting His rights in the earth, as He was not at that day. He is not known as He should be among the Gentiles, the nations, because of a failure—the failure of the church—to rightfully portray Him.
The nations are getting so often only a caricature of the true God and the Lord Jesus Christ. But when God gets, at last, that ark into the house that He is building, the testimony goes forth in power, and He is rightfully known in His true character.
You know, I am often asked—and I have quite a few people to tell about our group here—“Well, what in the world are you going to tell people about us? We are not much of anything.” That is exactly what I tell them.
One of the things they want to know is, “How do people know where you meet? How are people going to find out where you meet? Do you advertise? Don’t you have some kind of paper you can give us?”
I say, “No. If we have anything there worth coming to see and to experience, you will hear about it. You will find out where we meet. And if you are the right person, you will come.”
This is a puzzle to them, just as the Lord Jesus was a puzzle to His own brethren. They said, “No man does things in secret and seeks to be known openly.” They could not figure Him out, because He would not go up to the feast and set Himself up as a great somebody.
Of course, we know the Lord later went to the feast, but He went in secret, so He would not have that kind of a position.
The minute that God got what He wanted in Israel—and it is tremendously important for us to see this—the news went forth. We were saying this morning about the psalm: did the nations of the earth know what God had done for Israel? They certainly did.
If the Lord gets what He wants in us, will we have to advertise and let people know where we are meeting? No, we will not. As a matter of fact, our problem will be to deal with the people who will come. There will be too many of them—a lot who should not come.
The Queen of Sheba had no problem hearing about Solomon. The fame of him went out into all the earth because God finally had His real testimony: the house, and the ark at rest in the house.
Here comes the Queen of Sheba with a very great company, a tremendous amount of gold and spices—an impressive array. She had a lot of questions she wanted to bring.
I am not going to dwell on who she was, where she came from, or what that was all about, because I am not really interested in the historical part of this. I am interested in its application to our modern, up-to-date Christian experience. What does that have to do with it?
Solomon told her all her questions—told her everything that was in her heart. Then, in verse three, when the Queen of Sheba had seen a number of things, there was no more spirit in her.
What are these things that she saw? What are the things that are the result of the ark finally, really being at rest in the house that God is building?
The first thing that it says here is, “When the queen of Sheba had seen the wisdom of Solomon.”
Let us turn to 1 Corinthians 2.
And my speech and my preaching were not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power:
That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.
Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are full-grown; yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought:
But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the world unto our glory.
Often, when I hear people talk of these New Testament churches, they make two big mistakes—two huge mistakes. Firstly, they overmagnify the place that these churches had. They think they were greater than they were. They think they were perfect examples, in spite of the fact that Paul, writing every one of his letters except perhaps Ephesians, has a corrective pencil.
There were lots of things wrong in every one of them. The second big mistake is to think that these people were all in the darkness of a medieval kind of learning.
If it had not been for Athens at that time in Greece, Corinth would have come down to us as a city of great wisdom and wealth. Corinth was only overshadowed by Athens. It was a city of learning. Most people were smart. They were bright.
When Paul came among them, he could see that God’s people there were very likely to be influenced and overcome by the atmosphere around them. We are a lot more influenced, friends, than we know by the age in which we live.
It is an age when learned men tell us that science is doubling the knowledge that we have every ten years. Now, what that means is something pretty tremendous. You double something small and you have something twice as big; but when you double it the next time, it is four times as big. You double it again, and the first thing you know, it is all out of proportion. It increases in geometric ratio.
The wisdom that is in this earth today boasts itself as quite a great wisdom, as men measure it. But what is the wisdom of this world? It comes to nought.
As I hear Christians talking to one another quite often, I am impressed by a sense that they have left the ground of true wisdom.
How could we characterize this wisdom—the wisdom of our Solomon? Well, in the first place, it makes statements like, “He that would save his life shall lose it.”
It preaches a gain through loss. That is a strange wisdom, is it not? It has everything in reverse.
What it says, in effect—and listen carefully, because someday, someway, it has got to come home to us if we are going to adequately be a testimony to the Lord Jesus Christ in this earth—is that every human resource, every human activity, is not acceptable with God.
That is saying something. “Well, you could at least qualify that a little bit.” No, it does not require any qualification.
It is really saying that God has provided a kind of wisdom that is not only different from the wisdom that men have, but superior to it in every way—infinitely superior in every way.
The Lord is getting the enemy to really serve Him. Satan is God’s servant. He does not know it, and there is not anything he can do about it. God is really using all the devices of the enemy to serve Him.
Why? Let the enemy confound, confuse, and overcome every kind of wisdom but God’s own. This wisdom, which is Christ, is the only wisdom that can baffle and overcome the enemy. This is the only wisdom.
The problem is that this wisdom is to be so well known and made use of among God’s people that it makes an impact. This matter of no advertising is part of that wisdom.
Then you might write a book on how to be well known without advertising, because the world says you have to advertise. You have to put your best foot forward.
The Lord gets more out of many meetings here when we do not put our best foot forward. He is not interested in human excellence. That is a hard one for us—a hard one for me.
So the Lord has to take me, as He is taking you, and demonstrate quite adequately that my human excellence is pretty poor as compared to the excellence of Christ.
The Lord Jesus Christ is the wisdom of God. He is the wisdom that we must learn to utilize. Without our demonstration of that wisdom, there is no testimony. Absolutely not.
That has a lot of implications. Everywhere you go, people think that those who minister the Word and are leaders among God’s people must be learned men.
One of the things we are going to have to learn is that God gets His greatest value in lives in which there may not be very much learning at all. Some of the finest ministry going on in the earth today is not coming from the list of learned men.
We place far too much value on an external kind of erudition. It is no more than skin deep, and it is a very thin veneer, believe me. I spend a lot of time among the erudite. It is a very thin veneer, and I would hate to start to describe publicly what is underneath.
When she saw the wisdom of Solomon, it overwhelmed her. He told her all that was in her heart. There is a knowledge and an intelligence in the things of God that can make the human heart bow and worship.
She saw this wisdom, and there was no more spirit in her. Then she saw the house that he had built.
There is so much that we could say about that house. We could go from Genesis right through Revelation talking about the house of God, of which this was perhaps the highest type—if you consider that Ezekiel’s temple is a temple that many teachers of the Word of God think is actually going to be built on the earth one day.
I frankly doubt it. Maybe you can come to me someday and say, “See, you were wrong.” That is all right with me. It will not be the only thing you will be telling me that about.
See this house—the real type of the house God is building. Where did Solomon get all of his riches for the building of this house? David, his father, amassed them for him.
And guess what God the Father is doing for His Son. You may not believe it as you sit there, brother and sister, but you are a gift from God the Father to His Son, Jesus Christ. Do you know that?
The Lord Jesus could look up to heaven in John 17, and He could thank the Father for those men whom the Father had given Him. He said, “Those whom Thou hast given Me, I have lost none, except the son of perdition,” who is Judas.
If God has given you to His Son, He is not going to lose you. Then the Son is the builder of the house. Let us look at Hebrews 3, just in passing.
For this man was counted worthy of more glory than Moses, inasmuch as He that built the house hath more honor than the house.
For every house is builded by some man; but He that built all things is God.
And Moses verily was faithful in all His house as a servant, for a testimony of those things which were to be spoken after;
But Christ as a Son over His own house; whose house are we, if we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end.
“Whose house are we, if?” These conditionals you find throughout the book of Hebrews raise a lot of knotty theological problems for sincere believers. There is probably something attached to it, something conditional—remaining, continuing with God, being His house. Everything is conditional in the book of Hebrews.
The book of Hebrews had a hard time getting into the canon of inspired Scripture. It had to win its place by its very usefulness.
This house requires an activity of sonship. We are not going to go into that except to say that what God is doing in our lives for the building of His house is something more than just the elementary stages of Christianity. You will have no house on that basis.
The world is just littered with Christians and congregations in various places, but there is so little expression of the house. It requires something more than just the elementary bringing of material by the Father through the Son. The material is there, but there is a lot more to do.
There must be sonship and real activity for the building of that house. My friends, you and I have got to be very serious about this with the Lord. A lot of changes are necessary if God is to have a testimony that will bring the Queen of Sheba—the highest of Gentile and world intelligence—so that there is no more spirit in her.
Then there was the meat of his table—the meat of his table.
You can always tell where there is a true expression of the house of God, because one of the preeminent characteristics is food. I do not mean just Bible teaching, and I do not mean food in a general way.
This afternoon, we are going out to a restaurant to get some food. But you see, in this world today, the more discriminating and sensitive your palate happens to be, the less chance you have of finding satisfaction. We do not anticipate satisfaction in the place where we are going.
I am afraid that is true of all too many of God’s people this morning. They have gone to what they call the house of God, and they are not anticipating finding any kind of real satisfaction.
But in God’s house, the more discriminating you are in the matter of food, the more you will find. That is the wonderful thing about it. It will be the people who are satisfied with just any old thing who will come away dissatisfied.
They will say, “That meat was so tough, I could not chew it. That bread was too spicy for me. And as for the milk, I am sure it was sour.”
No, the house of God has food. It has food that meets the need for every stage of the Christian life. I did not mean to imply that it is all very deep spiritual teaching.
If your heart is right with God, you will find what you need at every stage. That means there is going to be something in every ministry that you and I do not understand. It is for somebody with a little more stature than we have got. Right?
But there will be food. The Queen of Sheba was impressed with the meat of his table. You could read on and see what was on that table, and you would be impressed: hundreds of sheep, lambs, venison, all kinds of meat. Look it up and read what follows.
Look at verse seven: “Happy are thy men, and happy are these thy servants, which stand continually before thee, and hear thy wisdom.”
What is the blessedness of the servant? Is it that he turns out a great job, and he stands back and says, “Look, I have done a tremendous thing here today. I take great pride in my work, and I make sure that the product is pleasing to the master”?
That is only right for a servant to do, but do you think that is where their happiness lies? Where was their happiness? Verse seven: they stand continually before thee.
Friends, it is possible—and this is the greatest deficit in all of Christendom today—for the least member to know not just the things that Christ can give: salvation, answers to prayer, peace with God, deliverance, and all of these things.
Frankly, if I had all of that and that was all I had, life would be too tame for me, and I would give it up. That is what has happened to a lot of people. They have gotten all the gifts and emoluments that Christianity has to give them, and they are bored stiff.
There is nothing in all the universe, apart from what they need, that can keep the human heart from becoming satiated and consequently unhappy. That one thing is what Solomon’s servants had and what we need to gain.
They stood before Solomon. It was the man himself, and their association with him, that gave them their greatest joy. If you like, they basked in just a little gleam of his glory.
That is all right, friends. We ought to have some real dealings with the Lord: “Lord, I hear—it comes to me by insistent rumor—that I ought to have more than just a mere salvation, that a personal knowledge of Your Son is available.”
You have to tell the Lord, “I insist. How about You and me? You go to work on me until I know what I am supposed to know, because my Christian life is not really filled with the happiness, excitement, and joy that people tell me it ought to have.”
No, only the Lord Himself can meet that need of the human heart and keep us from being religious stiffs, which too many of us become all too soon after we are saved.
As our brother told us last week, the Lord can put something in our spirits and let a gleam of His glory touch our lives so that we go on and keep on going on—not for just a little while, not in brief spurts, and not waiting for some other bandwagon to come along so we can jump on.
That is the most wonderful thing in the world about Christianity: the simplest, humblest soul can have fellowship with the Lord of glory.
That is the greatest hindrance to sin and worldliness. Once you have that and you lose it, you are miserable until you get it back.
Then there was the attendance of his ministers. I have to bring up this word here because some of you are going to learn to hate this word, but it really says, “the ordering of his ministers.” Here we go again: the ordering of his ministers. There had to be an order there.
Do you know that Christendom, again, has departed from all of God’s divine order found in the Scriptures, and they do not even know it exists? They have substituted for it one-man rule in general and one-man ministry.
No matter how you slice it, that is what happens when you have a strong individual at the head of a company of people. We would like to point our fingers at those people and say, “Look at those guys. They sure missed the way.”
On the other hand, I am sorry to say it is quite possible for us to miss the way even worse by saying that we are radically independent and every one of us will do just exactly what we are led to do—no more and no less. If you do not have the leading, you do not have to do it.
You know what we have done? We have taken this old one-man ministry and multiplied the evils of it. That is all, if we take that attitude.
Do not think simply because you do not have one-man ministry that you have divine order. As a matter of fact, in what I have seen of what passes for divine order, most of what I have seen, I would prefer the one-man ministry myself.
We must make sure that when we throw off clericism, we do not adopt something worse. That means among us here we are going to have to have some real heart exercise about it and learn some things from God.
She probably saw the ministers and their apparel. She looked at their apparel. We spent a couple of Sundays looking at the consecration of the priests, the Aaronic priesthood, and the apparel that they wore.
Friends, if I seek to minister for God and stand here before you, my apparel is not just this old outdated suit. I am sure some of you noticed that. It is not suitable. I have got to have something else on.
When Scripture talks about putting on Christ, it means just that. It requires a lot of real, deep, personal exercise to learn how to come before God’s people.
You say, “Well, that is okay for you. You have to stand up there and minister. If we saw very much of you, we would be repulsed.” And I am sure you would. But it is true of every one of us.
Every one of us has got to learn to come in among God’s people wearing other garments than our own. We have got to see how people come in wearing their Christian garment, their religious garment.
The stern, stiff-necked self-righteousness of the modern fundamentalist prig—how do you like that language? That is not Christ. That is not Christ. It is the wrong kind of apparel.
We are all wearing something. It is a great shock when we find out that all our lives we thought we had on linen shirts and polyester and all the rest of it, but we were really wearing something else all the time.
God gave us a garment, which is Christ. A very secular garment, you know. That is the problem: Christ is so secular. How do you like that language?
There is no theological or religious Christ in the New Testament or in the Old Testament. The Lord did everything to make Himself accessible in ordinary life. Our biggest problem is that we think Christ is a theological garment that we wear.
Then there was another echelon of ministers: cupbearers. They also had apparel. These evidently were the highest kind.
The cupbearer was the one who brought the drink—whether wine, juice, or water—to the king himself. But let me tell you something about this cupbearer that you may not keep in mind. Can somebody give me a deadly secret about the cupbearer?
Yes, he had to taste some first. There was a chance of poison. The reason he tasted some first was that he had to take a drink of it, not just let it touch his lips, because somebody might be watching. In that day, everybody poisoned everybody whenever they got a chance, if they did not like them.
Especially were kings in danger of being poisoned. It was a rough world. So the cupbearer had to taste the cup first.
Now, you want to be a cupbearer for the Lord? Well, I used to say I wanted to be a cupbearer for the Lord. I still do, but I am not so sure now.
Because I find, when I take the cup myself, that this cup is a cup of real suffering. The Scripture is full of it. Part of that hidden wisdom God has decreed shall be in the lives of all His own is that the only way the Lord can make us what He wants us to be as His cupbearers is to have us drink of the cup first.
When we bring the cup to Him, He can have a cup that is good, and we minister personally to His pleasure—personally to His pleasure.
I have heard these likened to Lazarus, Martha, and Mary. Lazarus was on resurrection ground, and he served the Lord. He loved Christ. But Martha busied herself around, and she served Him in a much more personal and real way.
But Mary—the Lord Himself says she had what? The better part. She had the better part.
This kind of Mary ministry—we do not want to set these over against one another; they all have their place and their turn—but, friends, the highest kind of ministry to the Lord is to be His cupbearer: to drink of the cup ourselves and see what is in it.
There is suffering, sorrow, strife, tribulation, difficulty, and loss. But then drink a little further and find that there is a draught there, the like of which the average earthling never dreamed of.
Then take that cup and minister back to the Lord Himself, as some of us did here this morning. It proves great joy to His heart.
There is a testimony.
Some of us come in here with our long faces, as some of us did this morning. Mine was not too short either. I had some real problems this week and yesterday.
If we are suffering and getting through to God about it, and bringing Him the joy, praise, and honor that are due Him, our faces will not be long. When you smile, it kind of widens the face, does it not?
There will be a spiritual smile there. It may not show on the outside, but it will come from within. This is necessary for the testimony. The Lord is not going to send many folks here to see how gloomy we are, I assure you.
When the Queen of Sheba saw his ascent by which he went up into the house of the Lord—I looked through the Bible and through a couple of books, and I cannot find a word about this ascent that she marveled at.
If you find something in the Scriptures, I wish you would tell me what it is. But there is one Scripture above others, perhaps, that talks about the marvel of our access to God. Again, we go to Hebrews.
It is Hebrews 10, which probably has more about entrance into the sanctuary than any other Scripture in the New Testament.
Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus,
By a new and living way, which He hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, His flesh.
I think the marvel—the real marvel of true New Testament Christianity—is contained right here in these verses: access to God in a new and living way.
I heard a brother in Christ talking once to a Jehovah’s Witness. He was a good brother, and he was really getting the best of the Jehovah’s Witness. Finally, the Jehovah’s Witness said, “Well, what do you think I need to do to get saved?”
I sat there in amazement. I was standing, really. I was absolutely and utterly amazed.
He said, “Well, you need to start reading the Bible. You repent of your sins. Then you get baptized. Then you get the Holy Ghost according to Acts 2:4. Then you continue in this all the rest of your life, and you will be saved.”
I do not know whether the Jehovah’s Witness thought maybe the works he was doing were easier or not. So I asked the brother later, “Really, do you think all of that is necessary for salvation?”
Why cannot you just tell folks how simple it is to bow their heads and say, “Lord, I am a sinner. I believe Christ died for my sins. I want You to come into my life and make a real Christian out of me,” and leave the rest to God?
Bring them into touch with God’s Son. We are not Christians unless we are in touch with God’s Son.
He said, “Well, you are a once-saved-always-saved man, and I just do not believe that. It is the doctrine of the devil.” So he told the man what he thought was the only way he could be saved.
Well, friends, I think one of the greatest testimonies that can come forth from our lives is to show people that we are exactly the same kind of people they are by nature, and that God has made a wonderful way for us to come into His house and make contact with His life—a new and living way through the blood of His Son.
While I was with this brother, I went out on the street and preached with him, and I witnessed to a lot of people. Things happened in their lives that had not happened ever before.
They had been dealt with for many years on the basis of God’s simple way. If I say “easy,” easy for us, yes, because it cost Him so much.
I am convinced that there are many people with whom we are in touch, who have known the Lord in times past, who have never known the Lord at all, who would find their way to God if we were better able to tell them the real simple, direct, living way that we have.
Friends, I really suspect a lot of us do not believe it. How is that for an accusation? We really give more credit to our works than we do to the power and activity of the Holy Spirit and the grace of God—perhaps unconsciously.
We give the impression that we are Christians because we are such good people, and they are outside of Christ because they are such bad people—which is the biggest lie in the world.
I do not know what it was about the Queen of Sheba’s ascent, or what she saw in Solomon’s ascent, that brought her spirit low. But I know what it was that made me a worshiping, conquered servant of the Lord for the last twenty-five years and more.
It was because I found out God’s new and living way really worked—that He had made all the provision, and all I had to do was come just as I was and let Him do the work.
Immediately afterward, I came into contact with people who put me into fearful bondage. It was a miserable time. I really thought every time I picked up a tract, every time I read something that said salvation was by grace, that it was of the devil. I really did.
I was working so hard, and I was barely making it, and I wondered how long I could hold on.
I think, friends, that we have closed up the way to the kingdom with a lot of “Thou shalt” and “Thou shalt not,” and we are sure they are Scriptural. We have got two dispensations all mixed up.
I am sure of this. Some of us sitting here are not. We are just as sure that we have the Spirit and the blessing because we work so many works.
We do not realize that this wisdom we talked of right at the beginning can show us that all our human activity, all our human resource, and all our Bible knowledge have to be relegated to a secondary place.
The grace of God, whose activity by the Spirit sets the flesh completely aside, must take preeminence. I have just said a tremendous thing.
We have got to finish now, and let me just say that this was not merely someone who came from a far country. Get this point very, very carefully: the Queen of Sheba came from a far country.
A lot of us can go fifty miles from home and become wonderful Christians. In fact, I have seen it many, many times. Or we can go to work every day and give a testimony that sounds good, while things are a mess at home.
If you look at verse twenty-six, in Solomon’s case, he reigned over all the kings from the River, even unto the land of the Philistines and the border of Egypt. He reigned over whom? Not just over subjugated people that he had never heard of—all the kings.
Right next door to where Solomon lived, there were kings. Solomon’s ascendancy made itself immediately known right where he lived.
I think in many of our lives, God is waiting for us to get through right where we live—at home, right at home. Friends, if you do not have a testimony at home, you do not have a testimony anywhere.
That gets down to the real nitty-gritty of this whole matter. That is where it all begins. For some of us, it is going to take a lot of prayer. We are going to have to get real with the Lord.
We are going to have to quit blaming our husbands, our wives, and our children, and put the blame where it rightfully belongs. Number one: if I have not any victory, joy, or peace; if I cannot bring an atmosphere into my house of the glory of God; if I cannot see the spirits of people changed—then the problem is with me.
I have some people at my house that literally think they are the Queen of Sheba. Well, when they hear this one—if I cannot bring in the Lord Jesus Christ there, I am a failure.
If their spirit is to have no more strength in it, they may have to admit, “Oh, that is the Christian testimony.”
How is the ark? We hope to be one of those. May the Lord help us.