. . . the heavenly throne of God was a crucially important symbol of Jewish monotheistic faith. It was the throne from which God ruled the whole of the created cosmos, and so it symbolized the uniquely divine sovereignty over all things, which, along with the uniquely divine role of creating all things, entailed an absolute distinction between the one God and all other things. In the literature, I argued, only God himself sits on that throne. In a few texts the personified figure of Wisdom sits beside him as his counselor, but Wisdom was precisely God’s own wisdom, not something or someone other than God but integral to God’s unique divine identity. From this perspective the very early Christian belief that God had exalted Jesus of Nazareth to sit beside him on his cosmic throne (expressed in language borrowed from Ps 110:1) is a strikingly novel development. It means, in effect, that Jesus shared in the unique divine identity of YHWH. The worship of Jesus, another innovation in the earliest Christian movement, belonged very intelligibility with the exaltation of Jesus to God’s throne. In Jewish practice, worship was restricted to the one God of Israel, because he was the sole creator of all things and the sole sovereign ruler of all things. The early Christians included Jesus in the worship of God because he shared the divine throne. (Richard Bauckham, Son of Man [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2023], 1:17–one should compare Bauckham’s comments with that of Rev 3:21 where Christians are promised to sit on the singular throne of the Father and the Son)
