126

POWER IDENTIFIED WITH EVIL.

[Serm. and know that they were invoking another than the Lord God whose presence Solomon had prayed might fill his temple.

You see then why Ahab is said to have provoked the Lord God of Israel more than all that were before him. The Baal worship was essentially the worship of mere power. I do not say that abstractedly or originally it was the worship of an evil power. But it was the worship of power as distinguished from righteousness. It was the worship therefore of that which man sees without him in nature, not of that which he feels within speaking to himself. It may not have been wholly disjoined from the acknowledgment of an order and succession in nature. It is hard, almost impossible, for man to conceive of power apart from some order and government. But these ideas. become exceedingly weak when they are derived from nature to man, not through man to nature. When we think that the things themselves exercise the power, and do not receive it from One in whom dwells eternal justice and rectitude forms which denote the most violent and inexplicable outbursts of fury, the fire and the tempest, are speedily thought to represent the nature of the Baal or Baalim, of the lord or lords of the universe. At all events these are what man must address himself to. joyous feasts may be celebrated with wild and reckless licence to the gentler and humaner powers which manifest themselves in the propitious breeze, the quiet evening, the sun that ripens the autumn fruits. But the most serious services, the sacrifices which those very enjoyments have made necessary, the libations of blood, must be presented to some malevolent nature which would destroy unless it were soothed. Thus the worship of power becomes literally the worship of evil. By a regular and awful process Baal or

Some

VIII.]

THE MORALITY OF AHAB.

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Baal-zebub became in the minds of his devout servants, what his name imported to Jews of later time-the Prince of the Devils.

Ahab and his people may only by slow degrees have learnt to see their god in this portentous aspect. But the first conception of him as naked power is sufficient to explain all the acts which are imputed to the king as well as the slavery and cowardice of his subjects. The story of Naboth's vineyard sets forth in one instance the history of the reign. The king desires some land which belongs to another man; he is ready to pay for it. But Naboth will not sell the inheritance of his fathers. Ahab is wroth and will not

eat bread. Jezebel wonders at his weakness. "Dost thou now govern Israel," she says, "Arise and be merry. I will give thee the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite." The elders of his city are told in sealed letters to proclaim a fast, to set up Naboth on high among the people and to say, "Thou didst blaspheme God and the king." The command is faithfully executed. Naboth is stoned till he dies. Ahab enters and takes possession. Here as elsewhere, the man has still a troublesome conscience checking an evil will. "I dare not waits upon I would." The female adviser cuts the knot. She sees what his heart is, and if he has power, what should hinder him from carrying his purpose into act? She is perfectly sure that the nobles of the city will not refuse obedience to a request of their master if it only involves perjury and murder. The king and queen avail themselves of a religious act as the most obvious and easy means of accomplishing and hallowing their design. And it was the most fitting means of accomplishing such a design. It showed how deeds of this kind are generated and made possible. The worshipper has made

128

ELIJAH THE TISHBITE.

[Serm.

a god in whom he sees nothing but cruelty and self-will. There is an eternal law which binds him to exhibit the image of that god in himself.

Ahab and Jezebel and these elders of Jezreel who are no unfair representatives of the tribes generally, enable us to understand the character and work of Elijah. He is as different from the men of whom I spoke last Sunday, as Baal worship is different from the earlier worship against which they bore witness. One difference is indicated in my text and may be traced through the history. Elijah speaks with repeated and continual emphasis of the Lord God of Israel as opposed to the god of Ekron. The foreign Phoenician worship is denounced, in that character. I draw your attention to this circumstance because it has given rise to an objection like that of which I spoke a week ago. "Everything," it is said, " in these Jewish records is exclusive and national. The least intrusion of new ideas, even if they are more elevated and less animal than those which preceded them and which in part they displace, must be carefully watched and vehemently resisted. What is attempted in a great sphere and yet unsuccessfully by the ministers of the Celestial Empire was attempted on a very small scale in Palestine; the Prophets were the protectors of the old traditions of their little commonwealth from any external refinements."

In what sense this change is true; in what sense Elijah was a witness for a national God; how far he was therefore a witness for a local exclusive God or for a dead tradition of the past, the records concerning him must determine.

The first of these records is contained in the 17th Chapter of the 1st Book of Kings. "Elijah the Tishbite said unto Ahab, 'As the Lord God of Israel liveth before whom

VIII.]

ELIJAH COMMANDING THE RAIN.

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I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word." A strange speech certainly to be reported of a man of whom as yet we have heard nothing. What had been passing in his mind up to that day, what he had to do with Ahab, how he came to think that dew or rain would obey his commands, we are not told. We are to judge of these things as we can. Our only help for judging of them, lies in the words themselves. And there is the secret; "As the Lord God of Israel liveth before whom I stand." Here we have the key to the education and faith of Elijah, as well as to his relation with the king of Israel. "I have learnt that there is a Lord God of Israel and that He lives, and that I am in His presence. I am sure that He is my Guide and Teacher, and Judge; I am sure that he is the Guide and Teacher, and Judge of this land and of its king. And this, Ahab, is just what thou dost not believe, just what thou by thine acts art denying. Thou believest in a lord or in many lords, far off from thee, exercising no government over thy actions, enforcing no duties upon thee towards thy subjects; a lord seated somewhere in the clouds, or on the summit of some hill; a cloudcompeller, a giver of dew or rain when your offerings please him, or when of mere sovereignty he chooses to do it. And I tell you that it is not this lord or these lords who send rain and dew; but that it is the God of you and of your fathers, the God who has ordained the course of seasons, who has appointed summer and winter, seed-time and harvest, who has appointed you to till the land upon which His rain descends and His sun shines, who claims first of all your trust and your obedience, since though you stand as I stand before Him, it is not your eyes that will tell you of Him; you must believe in Him if you would know Him.

K

130 HIS MESSAGE TO THE SIDONIAN WOMAN. [Serm.

And as a sign and witness that it is even so, I declare to you, that the rain and the dew shall not come except at the word of me, a poor, insignificant, unknown man, by whom it pleases God to declare what He is, and what the being whom He has formed in His image is meant to be." Herein consists the force of this audacious sentence. It at once proclaims that relation between the unseen God and the spirit of man, which Jezebel's priests by their services, and Ahab by his tyrannical acts, were alike setting at nought.

The Lord God of Israel then, is declared by Elijah to be in His very nature the present God, the 'God with them' just as much as He had been with Jacob when he wrestled with the Angel, and He put on him his new name. Let us see what the next passage of Elijah's story tells us about the limitation or exclusiveness of this belief. It is the passage upon which our Lord commented when He was standing in the Synagogue of Nazareth. "I tell you of a truth," He said, "many widows were in Israel in the days of Elias, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when great famine was throughout all the land. But unto none of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow." So that the person from whom Elijah was to receive sustenance, and whom as a return for that favor, he was to teach trust in the Lord God of Israel, that her barrel of meal should not waste neither her cruse of oil fail, was a woman of that very country from which Jezebel had come, the very country from which the Baal worship had been imported. The Lord God of the nation then, was one in whom the weak and poor of all nations might confide, one from whom they might ask their daily bread, and on whom they might cast their heaviest cares. It is this same woman to whose son as we