By T. Austin-Sparks
Ultimately it is sonship which represents and embodies all God's thought. So the one thing that is constantly reiterated about Solomon is sonship. "Solomon thy son shall build My house and My courts; for I have chosen him to be my son, and I will be his father" (1 Chron. 28:6). "Thy son... My son." David said, "Of all my sons (for the Lord hath given me many sons) He hath chosen Solomon my son" (1 Chron. 28:5) - the inclusiveness of sonship, and in a certain sense the exclusiveness also.
It is this word "son" that rules where Solomon is concerned. And when we come over to Christ, to the greater Son of David, we find that everything heads up to, and takes its character and its meaning from, His Sonship.
We find that in this matter John and Paul are the great exponents. John presents Christ preeminently as the Son. He sums up all his Gospel in a statement that everything written therein was with one object, that the readers might "believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing they might have life in His Name (John 20:31). John, then, presents Christ as the Son. It is the Person that John has in view.
Paul also represents Christ as the Son, but he goes further. What I mean is this: Paul goes on to open up the content of sonship and to show that there is an aspect of it which is a related matter. By the Holy Spirit we are sons. Christ a first one, the Firstborn; and (leaving out the factor of deity) sonship as a relationship is something into which we are called; and that is Paul's great theme, the meaning of sonship: the content, the explanation, the relatedness, the inclusiveness of it.
I think it is quite patent that the things said by God to and concerning Solomon were not meant to be fulfilled in their entirety and fullness in him. The Lord was speaking with a further thought, with a mind beyond Solomon. He was really, in His own mind, speaking about the Lord Jesus. Solomon would be but a temporary, partial fulfillment of what God said about sonship, and about the kingdom and the house. God was thinking further on. "I will be to him a Father, and he shall be to me a Son"; "I will establish his kingdom" - these words were spoken of Solomon, but it is not difficult to see that in the case of the Lord Jesus there is an infinite transcendence. There is something here in connection with Him which goes far beyond anything that was possible in the case of Solomon.
