"Bring Me the Sword"
All right, bring me a sword." So a sword was brought to the king.
Then he said, "Cut the living child in two, and give half to one woman and half to the other!"
Then the woman who was the real mother of the living child, and who loved him very much, cried out, "Oh no, my lord! Give her the child—please do not kill him!"
But the other woman said, "All right, he will be neither yours nor mine; divide him between us!"
Then the king said, "Do not kill the child, but give him to the woman who wants him to live, for she is his mother!" (1 Kings 3:24-27 NLT)
I'll be honest, I wouldn't want to be in Solomon's shoes here. No eyewitnesses, shady moral practices, & two angry women make for a mess. How does one navigate this one?
Solomon relies on the wisdom God promised to give him by seeing through one mother's bitterness & another mother's heartache. Bitterness & headache can often seem to be the same thing. One mother says, "If I can't have a child I don't want anyone to have a child." The other says, "I just want my child back." Both are devastated & both deal with loss in different ways.
This is what Solomon gets at here. He reveals one to be a fraud & the other to be the real mother. Justice comes even to a prostitute in Israel!
How does Solomon accurately navigate this one? Where does he get the ability to make sense of this situation? Is it just through a thorough analysis of the facts? Is he just a good detective? I don't think so. We already know the Lord granted his request for wisdom & it is the Lord's wisdom that carries him through. This is the same guy that writes in Proverbs 3, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, & do not lean on your OWN understanding."
Solomon is able to be wise because God is his source of wisdom. He trusts the Lord & depends on him to lead His people & live his life in a way that pleases the Lord.
Who are we leaning on for wisdom? Us? Our experience, our knowledge, our education or on God? Are we leaning on our own understanding or in all our ways acknowledging him?
The source of wisdom is God. And if we long to live wisely, we must depend on him above ourselves to supply it!
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