EIGHTEEN
THE THRONE ROOM OF GOD
One night near Christmas 2003, I followed Colton into his room at bedtime.
According to our usual routine, he picked a Bible story for me to read to
him, and that night it was The Wise King and the Baby. The story was
based on the one in the book of 1 Kings in which two women live together,
and each one has an infant son. During the night, one of the babies dies.
Overcome with grief, the mother of the dead child tries to claim the other
boy as her own. The real mother of the living boy tries to convince the
grieving mother of the truth but can’t persuade her to give up the surviving
baby. Desperate to get her child back, the mother of the living boy
suggests that King Solomon, widely known for his wisdom, could settle the
matter and determine who the real mother was of the living infant. In the
biblical story, King Solomon devises a way to find out what is in each
woman’s heart.
“Cut the child in half!” the king decrees. “Give half to one and half to the
other.”
The grieving mother agrees to the solution, but the real mother reveals
her love, crying out, “No! Let her have the child!” And that’s how the wise
king figured out which mother was telling the truth, and it’s where we get
the common phrase, “a Solomonic solution.”
I came to the end of the story, and Colton and I had our usual good-
natured argument over reading it again (and again and again). This time, I
won. As we knelt on the floor to pray, I laid the book aside on the carpet,
and it fell open to an illustration that pictured King Solomon sitting on his
throne. It dawned on me that the Bible talks about God’s throne in several
places. For example, the author of the book of Hebrews urges believers to
“approach the throne of grace with confidence,”^1 and says that after Jesus
had completed his work on earth, he “sat down at the right hand of the
throne of God.”^2 And there’s that glorious chapter in the book of Revelation
that describes God’s throne: