The Greatness of Christ as King
We begin now with the first—the Greatness
of Christ. He is brought into view by the foreshadowing in
Solomon, whose name, as you know, was alternatively Jedidiah:
‘Beloved of God’ (2 Samuel 12:25). How Solomon
was chosen is a very remarkable and very wonderful thing, and we
shall say something about that presently. But you remember the
statement made at Solomon’s birth: “David comforted
Bathsheba his wife... and she bare a son, and he called his name
Solomon. And the Lord loved him; and He sent by the hand of
Nathan the prophet; and He called his name Jedidiah, for the Lord’s
sake” (2 Samuel 12:24,25; ASV). Just store that up for
a little while.
His Sonship
But as we approach Christ through Solomon,
there are several fairly general things which lead us on.
Solomon, in the first place, was the one in whom the full thought
of kingship according to God’s mind is set forth, in
principle and type. We know that his reign was the peak of
Israel’s history. Although David is always referred to
as Israel’s greatest king, and rightly so, nevertheless
Solomon brings out all the glory of David; he is the full, ripe
fruit of David’s kingship, and he comes into his place as at
the very top of all kingship in Israel on one spiritual
principle, and that principle is sonship. Sonship is the full,
ripe fruit of Divine thought. There is no higher thought in
the Divine mind, and no possibility greater and higher for any
being, than that of sonship in the Divine sense. The
calling to sonship is the greatest thing that ever God has
extended to anyone. In Christ sonship is full, and Solomon
represents that truth and principle of sonship. “Solomon...
shall be My son, and I will be his father” (1 Chronicles
22:10). “Of all my sons, (for the Lord hath given me
many sons,) He hath chosen Solomon” (1 Chronicles
28:5). It is the gathering up of sonship in a full sense
and full measure in him, and that is a pointer to Christ.
That gives us a very full indication of what kingship is
according to the Divine mind; it is sonship.
All that is true of Solomon and is recorded of
him is just a shadow of what Christ is spiritually. You
begin at the top stone in the fullest sense, the full and the
final revelation of God, God’s speech. “God,
having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by
divers portions and in divers manners, hath at the end of these
days spoken unto us in His Son” (Hebrews 1:1,2), or, literally,
“hath spoken Son-wise.” You cannot go further
than that. He has reached the end of all parts, and found
inclusiveness and finality in His Son. That, then, is why
Solomon occupies the place that he does occupy as at the very
peak of kingship; it is the principle of sonship embodied.
He, then, is the ripe fruit, or full expression, of the Divine
idea—kingship. For kingship is a Divine idea, a
thought in the mind of God.
His Moral and Spiritual
Kingship
But now, in relation to what we have just said
about sonship, that Divine thought concerning kingship is not
just of an office nor of a position. Kingship, in God’s
mind, is a matter of a kind of person—but not any
person. God does not make anybody a king; it is a kind
of person. It is moral and spiritual. Moral and spiritual
factors support the Divine Throne, and God’s king must be
the full expression of moral and spiritual features. With
God, a king is only a king when he is of kingly character, and
not because he comes in a line of succession, nor on any other
ground of choice and selection at all. With God, kingship
is kingly character, and Solomon, marvellous to say, is brought,
in the sovereignty of God, to that place where kingship reaches
its full expression, so far as the type is concerned, though
that, of course, always falls short of reality.
When you pass from Solomon to Christ, then you
have this very thing in pre-eminence. “I have set My
king upon My holy hill” (Psalm 2:6). Why?
Because He is kingly. In the fullest, most complete sense,
He is the embodiment of all those high thoughts of God, both
morally and spiritually. When we speak about Jesus Christ
as being Lord, and when we think of Him in terms of kingship,
lordship, rulership, and of His kingdom, we are not thinking of
temporal things. We are thinking of spiritual things.
He holds His position in virtue of His character, and what He is
in person. There is none like Him.
Satan’s Counterfeit
But then note another thing. Here is this
Divine thought and idea about kingship which is represented by
Solomon in such a full way, but where you have a Divine thought
carrying a Divine intention, you will always have another
thought, something which is intended to take the place of the
Divine thought. So in the matter of kingship you have to go
back in the history of Israel, and you find the Divine thought
subverted. The first of the line of actual, temporal kings
was Saul, and Saul was not God’s thought, but the embodiment
of man’s thought. At a point when the spiritual life of
Israel was very low, and spiritual matters were not dominant,
Satan found his opportunity—as he always does when the
spiritual life gets low. He rushed in, took advantage of
the spiritual condition, and suggested the idea of kingship to
men of low and poor spirituality, which meant that, not having
God’s thoughts and God’s mind (because they were not
men of the Spirit) they accepted the suggestion and found a king
after their own mind. Thus they precipitated this matter,
forestalled God’s thought, and pushed Saul in. Do you
notice how that has happened again and again—a Divine
thought carrying a Divine intention, and then the enemy seeking
to forestall and putting in something on the same principle, but
of a different kind? It nearly happened with Solomon
himself. Solomon was chosen and David had given his word
about him; then Adonijah, his brother, worked subtly and gathered
leaders around himself. He made a feast and was proclaimed
king, in order to carry away the throne from Solomon. Thank
God, it did not work, but you can see what took place, and how
exactly this is in keeping with something that commonly
happens. It is going to happen in the supreme way.
God is about to bring in, finally and fully, His King—His
Son—and Satan will have Antichrist, the embodiment of all
human thoughts about kingship, pushed to the fore to try and
anticipate God.
Let us note that, not only in these great ways,
but in every way, a low state of spiritual life is always Satan’s
opportunity for giving something on a Divine principle, but which
is itself false. The only safety is in a fulness of
spiritual life. That is what came out in Solomon—safety
when things were at fulness in Israel. There was no chance
for anything else to come in. Safety is not along the line
of suspicion, watching like dogs for every bit of heresy, and
seeing whether things are sound. Safety is in the absolute
lordship of Jesus Christ, and all that that means. If the
people of God get there, they need not worry about the success of
these other things at all. I said at the beginning that
there are all kinds of maladies afflicting the Church which are
due to this smallness of spiritual life, and these maladies are
suspicions, prejudices, fears, all this which is going about and
which is deadening and crippling and paralysing the life of the
Church. If we were only in the full flood of spiritual life
and all that Christ in His place means, we would be delivered
from all these things and would be getting on with the work of
building the House, instead of all the time being taken up with
the question: ‘Is this quite safe, quite sound?’
Well, Saul was the embodiment of man’s idea, not God’s,
and he was the attempted forestalling of that Divine thought,
as Antichrist will be; but it is doomed, as are all man’s
ideas when they get in the way of God’s. Ultimately,
they are doomed.
Sovereign Grace
One further thing about Solomon. He came
to his place, and held it, by Divine sovereignty because he was
beloved of God. Those two things must always be kept
together. Sovereignty, yes, but because he was beloved of
God. There is the mystery of Solomon’s birth. We
know who Bathsheba was and what happened, the tragedy and the
breakdown in relation to Solomon’s birth, and if we begin to
ask questions we get into difficulties; but we have to see a
sovereignty at work behind this. And, while we do not link
that with the Lord Jesus, there is a line, even in His case,
which carries this wonderful principle. It is sovereign
grace. Oh, if anybody is the embodiment of sovereign grace
in full expression, it is Solomon. Do you remember the genealogy
of the Lord Jesus at the opening of the Gospels and some of the
people mentioned in it? Rahab the harlot—and Christ
came of her. And Ruth the Moabitess. You say that
these are dark steps leading up to Christ. But are
they? It depends upon how you look at it. They lead
right up to Him Who is the embodiment of sovereign grace, and
that is all you have to say about it. Grace to Rahab!
Ought she to be in the Divine line? And ought Ruth
to be here? A Moabitess, concerning which people and nation
the word had been uttered: “A Moabite shall not enter into
the assembly of the Lord; even to the tenth generation shall none
belonging to them enter into the assembly of the Lord for ever”
(Deuteronomy 23:3)! What has gone wrong? Grace has
triumphed over law—that is all! “Where sin abounded,
grace did abound more exceedingly” (Romans 5:20), and in
Christ that is gathered up. And, mark you, it was at that
place where in type He had fulfilled all the work of grace for us
in death, burial and resurrection—at Jordan—that the
heavens were cleft, and the voice was heard: “This is My
beloved Son” (Matthew 3:17)—beloved of God. On the
other hand, belovedness is all on the ground of grace: “He
hath made us accepted in the beloved” (Ephesians 1:6);
“Who delivered us out of the power of darkness, and
translated us into the kingdom of the Son of His love”
(Colossians 1:13). So Solomon has his place in sovereignty,
but only because he is beloved of the Lord. Of course, I am not
touching upon the Divine rights of the Lord Jesus as equal with
God, on His rights to reign, or to be Lord; for what I see is
that the Bible is not, in the first place, occupied with what God
and Christ are in Themselves, outside of this universe and remote
from us. The Bible is concerned with how They have come into our
life, into our world, and the ground upon which They have adopted
this world, this creation—and that is grace. And sonship, so
far as the New Testament is concerned, is always linked with
Divine grace. You find sonship in redemption,
reconciliation, justification. It is a spiritual, not an
official, matter, through the grace of God.
Why did God act so lavishly and unrestrainedly
with Solomon? It takes a lot of room in the books of
Samuel, the Kings and the Chronicles, far more than I shall be
able to give you as a background even for what I have to say, but
it seems, as you read, that the Lord was just falling over
Himself where Solomon was concerned to lavish good things upon
him—give, give, give! The Lord gave him riches and
honour (2 Chronicles 1:12), and it seems that He found no
restraint whatever in just letting go to Solomon.
Why? Because He was seeing through Solomon to the One Whom
He intended Solomon to represent as fully as ever one can be a
representation of the Lord Jesus. God was saying, in
effect: ‘If we are going to have a representation of the
real thing, we will have a real representation and do it
thoroughly.’ He went as far as He could go with a man
who was not His Son in reality in this spiritual sense, because
He saw the other Son all the time.
Dear friends, does that not come right back to
us with this: that a true apprehension and appreciation of the
Lord Jesus is the way right into the countenance of God? Do you
want spiritual fulness? Do you want to know all this wealth
of which we shall speak as possessed by, and given to,
Solomon? Do you want to know where God’s smile can
rest upon you, and He be without restraint in your spiritual
enlargement? How can it be? Not by straining, nor
searching, nor any kind of inward scrutiny, struggle, or effort,
but by appreciating His Son rightly, being occupied with Christ,
seeing and apprehending God’s Son in reality by the Holy
Spirit. The way to walk in the light of the Divine
countenance where God can give to you, can lead and teach, and
can enrich and enlarge you, is an adequate apprehension of the
Lord Jesus. Be occupied with Him and the strain goes out.
You notice that in those days when Solomon was in his place there
was rest round about (1 Kings 4:24); the land had rest and the
people had rest—they found rest unto their souls. It
is just like that when the Lord Jesus has His place and we, by
the Spirit, are seeing Him. The strain goes out, rest
enters in, and the inward civil war stops. Yes, it is all
bound up with God’s Son having His full place, with our
being occupied with Him and seeing Him by the Spirit.
This is only a glimpse, a fragment, of the
greatness of Christ, but, oh! it is so true that if conditions
spiritually are to be in the Church again as they were typically
in Israel in the days of Solomon, we shall have to get away from
the littleness of our apprehension of truth and have a great
enlargement of heart. May the Lord grant us eyes to see
a larger Christ than ever we had imagined, a larger Cross, a
larger Church, and a larger Word of God!