The translated prophet

Chapter I. Elijah's Mission In The Apostasy Of Isbaei

IF any household among us had now In its possession an ancient and valuable book, that, had belonged in the same family for over two hundred years, that had been especially esteemed as an heir-loom, inseparable from the direct line of inheritance, and that had been read by each father, and personally handed down to each elder son with a sacred injunction to pass it down to his successors, how would such a book be prized ! We would take pride in preserving uninjured the ancient binding, that could not be renewed by the taste of modern binders; we would read the lines with greater interest because our fathers had read them before us; we would decipher the antiquated type, and perhaps be puzzled by the strange abbreviations of the earlier printers ; and if the ancestors, in their reading, had made brief notes upon the margin, these we would carefully ponder, as indicating the topics in which they took a special interest, and as giving us their views upon them. No guest could be lono; beneath our roof till we had shown hira this family treasure. No costly piece of modern furniture could adorn our dwelling as compared with the interest and pleasure gathering about this venerable heir-loom.

But we have a book : not the original, time-worn copy, yet the very teachings which our spiritual ancestry in the Church of God have possessed for many generations. It is not a solitary volume, to be held exclusively in your household or in mine. For many ages back has it been a dweller in many hands : with many-tongued voices it addresses, as though they were one, the separated sons of men ; it is equally at home when the philosopher or the savage asks its counsels ; it has cast down tyrants, it has strengthened the oppressed, awakened guilt, allayed anxiety, instructed the ignorant, guided the perplexed, consoled the sorrowing, supported martyrs, confounded the wise, exalted the foolish, taught the very children, and spoken by the lips of babes. Especially if we belong to the great household of faith, to which belong still the oracles of God, then these sacred pages have been the delight of our spiritual ancestry in all the earth, in all the ages. We hold the book they held ; we read the words they read. They imitated the holy examples here recorded ; they died in the hopes drawn hence ; and, like interesting notes on the margin, the interpretations of some of the wisest and best, in the standard commentaries of the Church, teach us how tliev understood the sacred volume. Can we wisely refuse to cherish such a treasure? Shall we not join our fathers^ studies^ and hand down to later times the precious legacy — the incomparable Book ?

Our fathers have studied, let us also consider, the character and deeds, the history and influence of the prophet Elijah, one of the most remarkable of God's ancient servants. It may not be easy for us to enter fully into the spirit of such a life, to comprehend the times in which he lived, to understand the circumstances in which he was placed, to take in all the difficulties with which he must contend, and so to judge wisely of his personal and official character. We give our careful thoughts to these things. We know nothing of his ancestry ; even the place of his birth is doubtful ; but we have no sympathy with the idea, conjectured by some of the Fathers, that he was not a Hebrew at all — at least not a Jew nor an Israelite — but of Ishmaelitish descent. The prophet needed none of the blood of the wild race to make him bold for God. Yet in our thoughts of this distinguished prophet we are not to think of him as possessing a character in wdiich we can discern no flaw, and which we might vainly attempt to rival. With all his excellences, we have the best authority for declaring in terms the most express that he was a man of like passions w^ith ourselves, James v. 17 ; and we may justly reflect that upon this very account we should more carefully study his history.

We accord to him the reputation of a holy man ; yet can we not approve of his entire spirit and character. We recognize him as a man of great zeal and boldness in the service of his God ; yet was he not without the fears and misgivings and infirmities which bring him down to the level of our own frail and erring humanity. He stands forth upon the sacred page as one of the sternest reformers that ever called a guilty people to repentance; and yet beneath that rugged exterior there beat a heart of the finest and tenderest sympathy for human suffering, exemplifying a character, not seldom given in the Scriptures and found beneath their teachings, where an inflexible and high-toned sense of right is joined to the warmest and truest benevolence.

More perhaps than is true of any other character in sacred history, the life of this man of God contains many checkered scenes and exhibits many ■wide extremes of feeling. Here w^e have zeal as bold and fears as timid ; success as large and failure as decided ; faith as confident and yet unbelief as dejecting and despondent, as can be easily found in any wide experience of other men. If our earthly life is an ocean, and we are mariners upon it ; if the Psalmist^s description of sailors applies to us ; we mount up to the heavens, we go down to the depths, and we have melting hearts and are at our wits' end ; let this prophet teach us to underdcrstand llie loving-kindness of the Loid. And when we have learned all the lessons of his mortal life, and have gone through the annals of his earthly career, what shall we think of the further records that separated him widely from the ordinary experience of men ? When we have passed through his entire history, it shall be without any call to sympathize with him in suffering the last pangs of nature, and without the occasion of dropping tears upon his grave. For one thing of his remarkable history is the almost unexampled fact that he never did die ; and even this seems almost exceeded by the further truth that he appeared again upon the earth, nine hundred years after the great reformation which he effected in the Jewish Church.

If thus far we had withheld the name of this wonderful personage, any intelligent reader of the Scriptures could decide that these things apply to but one man in the world's eventful history. The prophet Elijah, the great Reformer of TsraeFs days of apostasy, is one of the favoured two to whom God hitherto has granted the privilege of departing from the earth without the pangs of death ; he is one also of another favoured two whose privilege it was to return to earth for a time, and to talk of heavenly things in mortal ears in company with the transfigured Son of Man.

The great value of biography is to give us true views of what life is ; we are strong ourselves to do the work which our life sets before us when we sympathize with the struggles and successes of those

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who liave iiianfully addressed themselves to their duties; and though great differences may exist between their times and our own, the principles upon which they lived are of sterling value for our guidance. Here we chiefly search for the great religious teachings that may reasonably be looked for in the lives of inspired proj^hets; the sacred writings, which purport to give us the history of Israel's kings, here expand their instructions, so that the religious condition of the people occupies more attention than the civil affairs of the kingdom; yet the mingling of history with religion only better adapts the whole to our profit. All we can expect in any such teachings is to find principles of permanent value, enclosed like the kernel of a nut in a shell of circumstances, that protects their value till we can secure them ; it is ours to separate between the transient that may be thrown away and the permanent which we may use. These things have still their needful connection. The shell and the kernel, taken together, make a nut; nor does the kernel ever grow separately. A man and his times make a life ; nor can we ever appreciate a man unless we know his times. Our weak judgment may think that sometimes a man forms his aee : that one mind directs the current of human events for his generation ; and that, but for him, his entire nation might have known a different history. Yet indeed, thegreatest men and those of largest influence upon the world have been indebted to circumstances and occasions they could neither create nor control, and we must never consent to lay aside that largest view of human history which gives free scope to human agencies, yet places every man and all generations under a Supreme Euler.

But neither is it desirable nor possible to separate the life of any man, especially the life of one who has accomplished either very great good or very great evil, from the history of his times. To present the lives of such men as Alexander the Great, Mohammed, Philip the Second of Spain, or Voltaire, on the one hand ; or on the other the lives of Luther, William of Orange, Cromwell, or Washington, is to compose the history of their respective ages ; and we are obliged to weigh somewhat their influence upon their own and succeeding generations. And sometimes it occurs that rival characters in the same age must be crowded into the same historic records, and placed in contrast with each other ; the one a worker for evil, and the other, withstanding him, a worker for good. He who would give a just account of the Reformation in the sixteenth century might write a life of Luther. For he was a chief providential instrument in awakening the public mind of Europe, and of forwarding that beneficent revolution ; he had much to do with all the great men who were his contemporaries ; and his life involves the history of his times. Or such a writer might reach substantially the same result — as has indeed been done by a standard historian iu

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our own language — by composing the history of Charles the Fifth, Emperor of Germany, whose power and historical wisdom as a monarch, and whose fanaticism as a bigot, had great influence on those times ; and whose history, therefore, as truly as that of Luther, is interwoven w^itli the Reformation annals. The history may be written in connection with either life ; these important personages stand so antagonistic to each other in character, in purposes and in success, that a true life of one must give just views also of the other. We cannot judge of such a man's character or success unless we estimate the difficulties he overcomes; and to tell his life is to tell who his foes were.

So it is with Elijah, as a Reformer, in Israel's degenerate days. With his life and history we must necessarily connect the life and character of his sternest foe. Bring before your mind a personage of royal blood ; of a proud, stern and decided bearing ; impatient of contradiction ; bold, cruel and unprincipled; liberal-handed toward every friend ; vigorous and relentless in pursuing every foe ; seated upon the throne of Israel in direct transgression of Israel's ancient law^s; opposing those laws and trampling upon them, by injustice toward man and by leading the nation to wider apostasy from God ; filling the kingdom w^ith outrage and desolation, yet never once flinching before the stern words of the prophet of the Lord, nor standing in awe of the sterner judgments of God's own hand ; living an unmitigated curse to that generation ; dying for those long-continued crimes by ungrateful violence; and then, without even the humblest burial, eaten by the dogs of Jezreel ; it only adds to our horror and disgust at such a history to say that this is the character of a woman. Thus Elijah and Jezebel stand face to face in these historic scenes ; to write the life and history of one makes us necessarily acquainted with the other ; their common age owed its wickedness and its desolations largely to the influence of Jezebel ; and the dawn of better days for Israel and the Church of God among the ten tribes is as largely owing to the reforming efforts of Elijah. A life-like history and biography miust seem to stand before us, as some well-pictured scene from the hand of a great artist. But as the art of the skilful painter consists, not so much in the correct outlines of his figures and their due proportion in the picture as in the proper mingling of light and shade, which gives a just conception of the perspective, makes the dark equally necessary with the light, and causes each figure to stand forth in its due relief; so must a wise historian — who is the noblest style of an artist — exhibit the dark and the light. Every beholder may learn as much from the one as from the other ; and the light itself appears brighter when put in contrast with the darkness from which it emerges.

It has been well said of the abrupt appearance of Elijah's name upon the sacred pages, that this

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propliet seems like one dropped from heaven in the midst of an awful night-piece.* It was his lot to live in the calamitous days of Ahab, king of Israel. Yet, indeed, in human experience great wickedness is not usually of rapid growth. Individuals depart gradually from the paths of rectitude, and nations seldom reach the summit of iniquity within the lifetime of a single generation. Yet the progress of corruption had been rapid in the kingdom of the ten tribes, though we must not charge all the evils of his times upon Ahab and his queen. At the time when Ahab began to reign, the separate kingdom of the ten tribes — ever spoken of as the kingdom of Israel, as the house of David reigned over Judali — had been in existence for about sixty years. A slio;ht review of the annals of this kino;dom may better prepare us for the intelligent understanding of Elijah^s history. We may here see the danger involved in any people's departing from the service of God, and the truth of the prophet's declaration : " The nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish." Isa. Ix. 12.

For some three centuries or more after the children of Abraham possessed the land of Canaan, they were under the authority of no one civil ruler, but judges held authority, usually over limited districts ; and the union of the people w^as chiefly in these

*So Matthew Henry: "He drops, so to ppeak, out of the clouds ;" Krummacher and Bishop Hall : " He comes in with a tempest who went out with a whirlwind."

things : that they were of the same race, language and history ; that one statute-book was recognized by all the tribes as the law of their God ; that they were one people in reliance upon the same covenants ; and, that they were united in the avowed worship of the same Jehovah. But when, at their request, God gave them a king, the entire twelve tribes were united in one sentiment of loyalty toward this anointed sovereign. At the death of Saul an unhappy division took place, which lasted seven years and perhaps laid the foundation for the permanent and disastrous division which occurred in less than a century afterward. Ten tribes adhered to the house of Saul, refusing even the divine sanction of David^s claims, though their leaders well understood that these were justly founded, 2 Sam. iii. 9. But the death of Ishbosheth, the son of Saul, gave the entire authority into the hands of David ; and so all the tribes were one till after the death of Solomon. Yet the seventy-five years had not so united them but that discontent and ambition could make their former division the pretext and the basis of their later separation. The rule of Solomon was magnificent, but the heavy expenses of so splendid a reign laid a weight of taxation upon the people which they were not ready to endure ; and in their madness they hurried to results which made all matters, and this among the rest, incomparably worse. The ill-advised course of Rehoboam drove off those whom he should have conciliated ; the murdor of an enrolling officer declared the stern determination of the malcontents ; yet an express command from God forbade liehoboam to make Avar upon the separating tribes. From that time forward, for a century and a half, there were two separate and often warring kingdoms among the sons of Jacob.

Unhappily a famous but a very bad man was called by Israel to the throne of the new kingdom. Some years before this, a widow's son had attracted the attention of King Solomon for his valor in Avar and his energy and industry in peace. Yet he proved to be as unprincipled as he Avas enero-etic. AVe know too little of his dealino;s Avith Solomon to decide whether he gaA^e the aged monarch any just cause for jealousy ; but because of the prediction of a prophet, that Jeroboam the son of Nebat should reign o\^er ten tribes, or because the young man attempted dangerous things through this encouragement, Solomon compelled him to flee for his life. Upon learning of the death of Solomon, Jeroboam returned from Egypt in time to take part in the popular discontents toAvard Eehoboam ; and when the final breach occurred, became king of the new empire. Thus far no ca^I record is made of him. He was a man of energy and ability, and he held the reins of power firmly for OA^er twenty years, until the time of his death. But the grand Avickedness of his life, which made the name of Jeroboam the son of Nebat infamous as the man who made

Israel to sin, was to repeat in the new kingdom the very crimes for which God had rent the dominions of Solomon ; and the prophet in the original call of Jeroboam, had forewarned him of this, 1 Kings xi. 31-33. He took a most important step, influenced by shortsighted reasons of state policy. His reasons may have seemed plausible to a mind not controlled by true religious principles, yet the results of this policy were exceedingly disastrous — indeed were fatal to the permanence of his own family and to the prosperity of the kingdom through all subsequent times. Political cunning and a certain unchanging consistency Jeroboam had ; but it tells badly for his true wisdom that neither forewarnings, 1 Kings xi : 38 ; nor reproofs, ch. xiii ; nor judgments affecting directly his own person, ch» xiii : 4, and in the most painful manner reaching his own hearthstone, xiv. 17, could avail to change his chosen course of wickedness.

It was Jeroboam^s evil pre-eminence to begin among the sons of Abraham the legal establishment of an idolatrous worship.* From the days of the

■^ It is with great surprise that I find Dr. Stanley, from whom a wide diversity of views and sympathies separates me, making the affirmation tliat " the kingdom of Israel was the National Kingdom, and the Church of Israel was the National Church" after the division. A larger and more populous territory belonged to the ten tribes. But the temple at Jerusalem was the lawful place of Jehovah's worship ; the priests of Judah were in a lawful descent, as those set up by Jeroboam were not ; above all, the promise of the Messiah belonged to 2

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Exodus, the covenant people liad been prone to the worship of images, of which the golden calf at Sinai was the first example. During the period of the Judges we find traces of the same bad tendency. But during the reigns of Saul and David and Solomon there had been a better regard to the fundamental law of the Hebrew commonwealth, which made their God their King. Especially after Jerusalem became the capital of the kingdom, and Solomon had built there his magnificent temple, there was a union of the people around that sacred spot for these sacred services. There were placed all the cherished memorials of their past national history; there the God of Jacob gave special tokens of his presence between the cherubim ; there three times a year the tribes went up, ^^ the tribes of the Lord, unto the testimony of Israel,^^ Ps. cxxii : 4 ; and God's covenant people found holy communion with each other as they bowed before his altars, and longed for the forgiveness of iniquity through the symbols of atonement. Evidently the building of that tern- David's house, and the Kingdom of Judah survived to witness its fulfilment, after the other kingdom was utterly destroyed. All these are proof that the National Church had its central place of worship in Solomon's temple. Israel had prophets and prophetical books, because God did not give them up ; yet many prophets and many reproofs show rather Israel's greater guiltiness than that Judah had lost the National Church. Was restoration made when the ten tribes were carried away ? Or was the " National Church" then for ever dissolved. — Stanley's Jevsish Church, sect. xxix.

I pie, the regular, solemn assemblies of the whole people there, and their union in religious duties under the same priesthood and before the same God, would have a strong tendency to hold together the twelve tribes of Jacob as one people. There is no stronger bond of union than the union of religious sentiments and feelings. A union of piety must ever have great influence to prevent — perhaps also to heal— the separations caused by blinded passions and prejudices.

Jeroboam, in the ambitious prospects that filled his mind, wished for no such healing influence over IsraeFs divisions. He looked at the whole matter as one to be governed by state policy, and the fear w^as exceedingly natural, that if the kingdom of the ten tribes remained still united to Judah by such strong religious associations and affections, there would be the gradual allaying of political asperities^ and perhaps, at some future time, the reuniting of the people in political relations. But the merging of the kingdom of Israel in the dominion of the house of David was of course as contrary as possible to the mind of the new sovereign. If he had been a godly man, and worthy to rule over God^s covenant people, he might have escaped this snare. Reasoning justly from God^s usual dealings with his faithful servants ; remembering that for idolatry had Solomon been rejected ; recalling the special assurance given to himself by the prophet Ahijah, 1 Kings, xi. 38, Jeroboam should

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have sought in tlie path of duty to God, his own well-behig, the prosperity of his kingdom, and the permanence of his family upon the throne. But wickedness is never wise, and apostasy from God can never bring true prosperity. King Jeroboam adopted means that were indeed calculated to separate his people as widely as possible from Judah, and to prevent all likelihood of a future reunion ; but, like many schemes of wickedness, he secured the minor end with the defeat of the main purpose. He did effectually separate his kingdom from that of Judah, so that they were never again united. But his success was the ruin of his own family, and the introduction of a long train of evils that brought desolation and destruction upon the kingdom ; if indeed we may not lay largely at his door, the evils that resulted in the decay and dissolution of both the kingdoms.

To secure the loyalty of his subjects toward himself and his house, Jeroboam sapped the very foundations of religion. He overlooked or despised the important truth that tlie fundamental law of man's allegiance to his God underlies and supports all meaner laws, and that we cannot depend upon the influence of sterling principle in any man as a citizen who consents to be an apostate from his God. Jeroboam should have known that by destroying the loyalty of his people toward Jehovah he made it impossible that they should show much attachment to a miserable race of profane kings. Yet this was his policy. Israel had been idolatrous before. We shall take further occasion to notice that even Jeroboam did not attempt to annul the existing laws^ that were derived from Moses, but rather superimposed others. But, for the first time now, idol-worship and priests for these services were established by law, and drew their support from the public treasury. Borrowing, as did the fathers at Sinai, the services and gods of Egypt, he set up two golden calves one at Dan, and the other at Bethel ; made these the objects of national worship, and experiencing some faithful opposition from the priests and Levites, whose place it was to keep the people obedient to the laws of the Lord, he banished them from office — perhaps also from the kingdom, 2 Chron. xiii. 9. In their stead he elevated the basest men to the priesthood, the tools of his own despotism, thus subverting the laws of Moses, though perhaps not without the pretence of keeping these ordinances and of serving Jehovah, even through these images.

Thus his reign was in reality the apostasy of the ten tribes. Faithful men remained among them, but the kingdom declined ; and this the more because through these very evils it was wretchedly governed. From the death of Jeroboam to the accession of Ahab was a period of but forty years. During this entire forty years one quiet and pious king of the house of David reigned over the sister kingdom of Judah ; but, reckoning both Jeroboam and Aliab, that one king of Judali lived to see eiorht kinoes of Israel. That miserable kinordom, established by disunion and rebellion, and nourished in apostasy from God, was torn to pieees by internal troubles ; massc^ores and conspiracies succeeded each other ; the only virtuous son of Jeroboam died beneath his father's roof during his father's lifetime ; another son succeeded his father, but in two years was killed in a rebellion. Thus the succession which Jeroboam paid so dearly to secure departed for ever from his family. But the troubles of the kingdom went on. Two years later the drunken murderer was himself killed ; one usurper strove with another; and when, thirty years after the death of Israel's first king, the crown was settled upon Omri, the father of Ahab, it was by a military despotism — the power that usually settles the disorders of a weak and wicked government.

"We shall further see that the iniquities of Israel grew still more flagrant before the coming of the stern Reformer whose character and history we desire to study. Ahab, we are told, "sold himself to work evil.^' He did not begin these miserable scenes. But he was wicked enough to carry them on with a high hand ; to refuse the warnings by which he, at least, was sometimes appalled ; and to maintain his rebellious and impenitent mind till his dying day.

It is lamentable to recognize that all times and ages testify to the wickedness of man. Sometimes we are startled as we open the pages of history upon some period of abounding iniquity ; deeds are recorded that seem beyond a parallel, and scenes pass before us that are too shocking for apology. Let us judge righteous judgment. By such men as ourselves were these things done; and if we differ from them, it is for no reasons that give us occasion for self-gratulation. And let us not suppose that only national evils grow strong with years and indulgence. In every individual there is the same vitality, the same deceitfulness, the same gathering strength in evil. Every germ of indulged sin makes the salutary changes of life more unlikely; we live in defiance or neglect of God to our own increasing peril ; and many who go not far enough in evil to incur the reproval of men for notorious infamy, may yet go far enough to lose their own souls.

Chapter II

AHAB came to the throne of an unhappy kingdom in declining times. But it ^vas the great misfortune of his people that, bad as they were, tlieir ruling prince was in advance of them. It should give us an impressive lesson of the superior responsibility of official authority to notice that far more censure is cast upon the kings of Israel because they led their people to evil than for all the depravity of their personal characters. We cannot entirely se23arate between a man^s character and his influence, since influence flows from character and accords with it. And because of the influence belonging especially to official station should rulers be held responsible for their leading of the people. The expression used respecting the iniquity of Ahab is very strong : '' There was none like unto Ahab, which did sell himself to work wickedness in the sight of the Lord.^^ — 1 Kings xxi, 25. A voluntary slave, sold to evil, thouo;h the kins^ of Israel! Yet this man ruled the land for nearly a quarter of a century, and filled it w^ith wretchedness and desolation.