Part 24

There are facts of a high and special kind, as well as what we commonly call facts, which are often but appearances and dramatic illusions. What about the secret ministry, the unnamable spiritual action, the holy, elevating and restraining influence? What is that hand which will write upon palace walls words of judgment and keep the world from plunging into darkness infinite?

Surely, God is in this place, and I knew it not. This--wherever it be, garden or wilderness--is none other than the house of God and the gate of Heaven.

Gehazi prostituted an inventive and energetic mind. He had his plan: “My master hath sent me, saying: ‘Behold, even now there be come to me from Mount Ephraim two young men of the sons of the prophets. Give them, I pray thee, a talent of silver and two changes of garments.”

The case was admirably stated. It was stated, too, with just that urgency which increases the likelihood of that which is declared.

Elisha spent his time among the sons of the prophets. They all looked to him as a father, as he had once looked to Elijah. He was the young man’s friend--the young minister’s asylum. They all knew the gracious, gentle, Christ-like Elisha--the ante-type of the Messiah; and what was more likely than that two of them, in the course of their journeying, should have called on Elisha unexpectedly?

It was a free and gracious life that the old ministers lived. They seemed to have rights in one another. If any one of them had a loaf, that loaf belonged to the whole fraternity. If one of them, better off than another, had a house or part of a house, any of the sons of the prophets passing by could go and lodge there.

It was a gracious masonry--a true brotherhood.

Gehazi was no model man in a moral sense. His invention was a lie; his cleverness was but an aspect of depravity; his very genius but made him memorable for wickedness.

But Gehazi was successful. He took the two talents of silver in the two bags, with the two changes of garments. He brought them to the tower, and bestowed them in the house. Then he sat down--a successful man! Now all is well; lust is satisfied, wealth is laid up. Now the fitness of things has been consulted, and harmony has been established between debtor and creditor, and Justice nods because Justice has been appeased.

Were the test to end with the twenty-fourth verse of the fifth chapter of the second Book of Kings, we should describe Gehazi as a man who had set an example to all coming after him who wished to turn life into a success.

Who had been wronged?

Naaman pursues his journey all the more happy for thinking he has done something in return for the great benefit which has been conferred on him. He is certainly more pleased than otherwise. The man of God has at last been turned, he thinks, into directions indicated by common sense.

All this has come about in the way of business; for nothing that is not customary has been done.

Gehazi is satisfied, and Elisha knows nothing about it. The servant should have something, even if the master would take nothing. It is the trick of our own day. The servant is always at the door with his rheumatic hand, ready to take any thing that may be put into it. We leave nothing with the master; it would be an insult to him.

So far the case looks simple, natural and complete; and we have said Elisha knows nothing about it.

Why will men trifle with prophets?

Why will men play with fire?

When will men know that what is done in secret will be published on the house tops?

When will men know that there can be nothing confidential that is wicked?

Observe Gehazi going in to his master as usual, and look at his face; not a sign upon it of any thing having been done that is wrong. Look at his hands--large, white, innocent-looking hands that never doubled their fingers on things that did not belong to them.

Look at Elisha. Fixing his eyes calmly upon Gehazi, he asks:

“Whence comest thou, Gehazi?”

“Thy servant went no whither.”

Gehazi meant it to be understood that he had been on the premises all the time; always within call; the lifting up of a finger would have brought him.

Then came the speech of judgment, delivered in a low tone, but every word was heard--the beginning of the word and the end of the word--and the last word was like a sting of righteousness.

“Went not mine heart with thee?”

Oh, that heart! The good man knows when wickedness has been done. Christ knows when He enters into the congregation whether there is a man in it with a withered hand.

“Went not mine heart with thee?” Was I not present at the interview? Did I not hear every syllable that was said on the one side and on the other? Did I not look at thee when thou didst tell the black, flat and daring lie?

Then came the infliction of the judgment:

“The leprosy, therefore, of Naaman shall cleave unto thee, and unto thy seed for ever.”

Thou, Gehazi, hast touched the silver, not knowing that it was contagious and held the leprosy; thou didst bring in the two changes of garments, not knowing that the germs of the disease were folded up with the cloth. Put on the coat; it will scorch thee.

“He went out from his presence a leper as white as snow.”

A splendid conception is this silent departure. Not a word was said, not a protest uttered. The judgment was felt to be just. “Cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness.” “These shall go away into everlasting punishment.”

Oh, the hush--the solemn silence! The judgment seemed to begin with the sound of trumpets and the rending of things that apparently could not be shaken; at the end there is simply a going away, a silent motion, a conviction that the sentence is right.

See Gehazi as he goes out of Elisha’s presence, and regard him as a specimen of those who, having been judged, on the last day will depart.

Men should consider the price which they really pay for their success.

The grateful Syrian would gladly have pressed upon Elisha gifts of high value, but the holy man resolutely refused to take any thing, lest the glory redounding unto God from this great act should in any degree be obscured. But his servant, Gehazi, was less scrupulous, and hastened with a lie in his mouth to ask, in his master’s name, for a portion of that which Elisha had refused.

The illustrious Syrian no sooner saw the man running after his chariot than he alighted to meet him, and being glad to relieve himself in some degree under the sense of overwhelming obligation, he sent him back with more than he ventured to ask.

Nothing more is known of Naaman.

We afterward find Gehazi recounting to King Joram the great deeds of Elisha, and in the providence of God it so happened that when he was relating the restoration to life of the Shunnammite’s son, the very woman with her son appeared before the king to claim her house and lands, which had been usurped while she had been absent abroad during the recent famine. Struck by the coincidence, the king immediately granted her application.

As lepers were compelled to live apart outside the towns, and were not allowed to come too near to uninfected persons, some difficulty has arisen with respect to Gehazi’s interview with the king. Several answers occur. The interview may have taken place outside the town, in a garden or garden house, and the king may have kept Gehazi at a distance, with the usual precautions which custom dictated. Some even suppose that the incident is misplaced, and actually occurred before Gehazi was smitten with leprosy. Others hasten to the opposite conclusion, and allege the probability that the leper had then repented of his crime, and had been restored to health by his master.

HEZEKIAH.

So far in our Bible studies we have had many weary wanderings among bad men. The fear was that, to some extent, familiarity with them might blunt our own moral sensibility.

Man after man has passed before us out of whose very countenance the image of God had faded. How pleasant it is, and how spiritually exhilarating, to come upon a case in which we read of a different pattern of man! Of Hezekiah it is recorded in the eighteenth chapter of the second Book of Kings:

“And he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord, according to all that David, his father, did.”

After a long journey underground we seem to have come suddenly upon a sweet garden, and the sight of it is as Heaven. The charm is always in the contrast. If things are not quite so good as we supposed them to be, they are all the better by reason of circumstances through which we have passed, which have made us ill at ease and have impoverished or disheartened us; then very little of the other kind goes a long way.

A man comes up out of the underground railway and says, when he emerges into the light:

“How fresh the air is here! What a healthy locality! How well to live in this neighborhood!”

Why does he speak so kindly of his surroundings? Not because of those surroundings intrinsically, but because of the contrast which they present to the circumstances through which he has just passed.

Hezekiah was no perfect man.

We shall see how noble he was, and how rich in many high qualities, yet how now and again we see the crutch of the cripple under the purple of the king.

It is well for us that he was occasionally and temporarily weak, or he would have been like a star which we can not touch, and at which we can not light our own torch.

Even Hezekiah was a man like ourselves in many particulars, and therefore what was good and sound in him is all the more attractive and is all the more possible to us.

Who can mistake an honest man?

If all men were upright, where would be the peculiarity of any individual man’s integrity? But, given a corrupt state of society, when the honest man appears we say: “The wind has changed. It blows balmily and healthfully. It comes from a fine origin, and brings with it many a blessing.”

Who can mistake the atmosphere of the sea? How it blows away all the city dullness! How it quickens the blood! How it throws off increasing years, and makes the voyager feel almost young again!

It is so with honesty, nobleness, charity and goodness of character when the surrounding air is charged with some kind of poison or pestilence.

So it is that we come upon Hezekiah.

Perhaps it is well for him that we approach his case after such an experience. He thus gets advantages that otherwise might not have been accorded to him. He looks the higher for the dwarfs that are round about him, the whiter because of the black population amid which he stands--at once a contrast and a rebuke.

But from Hezekiah’s point of view the case was different. Behind him were traditions of the most corrupt sort. He was as a speckled bird in the line of his own family. It is hard to be good amid so much that is really bad. All attempts at goodness are accounted examples of affectation, conceit, vanity and pharisaism; and under such circumstances sometimes a man’s foes may be the people of his own household. They wish he was more pliable, less sabbatarian, less devoted to his Bible, less constant in his attendance at church. He might go once a day, and give himself one end of the rope not tethered to the altar; but he will not.

Has that man an easy time of it?

No hard word may be spoken to him--certainly no bitter word--and yet all the while he may be made to feel that perhaps, after all, he may be affecting somewhat of piety and purity, and that those who are looking on may be better critics of him than he is of himself.

At all events, there come to him periods of trial, and sometimes he says within himself:

“Shall I today be as constant as I have been, or may I not break away now? Have I not built up a character, and may I not retire upon my moral competence, and live henceforth the life of a latitudinarian? After a long spell of many years, surely I might intermit just a little.”

Who shall say that the temptation is not subtle and strong? Some men have to force their way to church through innumerable and unnamable difficulties. This ought to be reckoned. Some credit must be due to men who are thus constant to their sense of public duty and religious obligation. Men are not always at church with the entire consent of those who are round about them.

What, then, must be done?

One of two things. Either yield to the temptation or resist it. You can not trifle with it. You can not compromise, and then recur to firmness, and again connive, and again balance, consider and hesitate. Virtue is not an intermittent grace. We must stand, or we must fall.

Hezekiah had a wicked father. How will that wickedness come out in the son? Not, perhaps, as wickedness, but as infirmity, weakness, and want of constancy in some directions, though there may be no want of firmness in others.

Can a man wholly escape the bad blood inherited of his father?

We must not forget that Hezekiah’s mother’s name was Abi, the daughter of Zachariah. How she came to marry a wicked husband must remain a mystery. But the mother will come up in the son.

She was the daughter of Zachariah, and Zachariah was a prophet, or seer--a man with double sight--one of those strange men who can see beyond the merely visible and palpable, and can read things that lie behind.

Zachariah came up again in his daughter, and the mother came up again in the son, and so there was a mysterious play of inheritance, transfer, transition, reappearance, somewhat of resurrection--a great tragic mystery of transformation and representation.

We speak about a man as if he were self-contained--just standing upon so much ground, without relation behind or before, on the right hand or on the left. But no man is thus insularly placed; no man is an absolute solitary.

Every man has in him the blood of the past and the life of the future.

Can a son of a good mother be altogether bad? Most surely not. You must have mistaken the case if you thought so. Your very thinking so may constitute an element of hopefulness in your case. Take comfort from that suggestion.

So long as you can think of yourself seriously and of the past and of your advantages, and can compare what you are with what you might have been, there is hope of you.

But can there be in all history such an irony as this, that a man should have had a praying mother and himself be a prayerless man?

No! It can not be. Somewhere--at some time and in some way--the better nature will assert itself, and out of a good seed surely there will come a good harvest.

But the lesson does not lie upon one side only. Here is encouragement to the praying fathers and to praying mothers.

Zachariah, read on; read between the lines of things; interpret events symbolically; read the apocalyptic sense of what is happening--and out of all this mental elevation and spiritual conduct there will come results in your daughter or your son.

Abi, pray on. Be just to your father’s memory, and say: “He was a holy man. I must prove it by being a holy woman. He can not live upon a written character; he must live in my life. I will prove that such a child must have had a good father.”

So the vital lessons fall--on the right hand, on the left, and around about us. Shame be to us if, amid this shower of monition and encouragement and stimulus, we be deaf and dumb and blind, unfeeling, unresponsive.

Hezekiah will now go to work and prove himself to be an energetic reformer.

“He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made; for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it; and he called it Nehustan.”

He must have been a strong man. He had no colleague, no ally; no one to say to him: “Be brave, be true.” He went straight against the hardest wall that ever was built by the stubbornness and perversity of man.

It is not easy to begin life by a destructive process of reformation. Who would not rather plant a tree than throw down a wall? Who would not rather plant flowers and enjoy their beauty and fragrance than give himself the severe toil and the incessant trouble of destroying corrupt and evil institutions?

Whoever attempts this kind of destructive work, or even a constructive work which involves preliminary destructiveness, will have a hard time of it. Criticism will be very sharp, and selfishness will be developed in an extraordinary degree.

If a man be more than politician--if he be a real born statesman, looking at whole empires at once and not at mere parishes, and if in his thought and purpose he should base his whole policy upon fundamental right--he will not have an easy life of it, even in a Christian country. In proportion as he bases his whole policy on righteousness, temperance and judgment to come, he will be pelted with hard names and struck at with unfriendly hands.

This holds good in all departments of life, in all great reformations, in all assaults made upon ignorance, selfishness, tyranny and wrong of every name.

The children of Israel always seemed to live a foolish life. They were the veriest children--so, at least, we would say but for fear of branding sweet children with an evil stigma.

They were infantile, weak, treacherous to themselves, uncertain at every point--and so, having kept the brazen serpent, they burned incense to it. They liked a visible God. When the calf appealed to their religious feelings they danced around it as if at last they had found a deity.

But who can worship a spirit--invisible, impalpable, far away, near at hand, without a name, without a shape which we can verify and say: “It comes to thus much, and this is the weight and this is the value of it?”

It requires a mind of some mental strength to stand up, take hold of the brazen serpent and call it “Nehushtan”--a contemptuous term, meaning a piece of brass; dead brass, useless and worthless brass, a relic but not a God.

Let us give credit to the men who have been bold--religiously intrepid--in the midst of circumstances of a most discouraging and overbearing kind. They are the men to whom we owe our present privileges. We have the Bible in our mother tongue because they were valiant. Not a church would have been built today in which men could assemble with a sense of freedom--sweet, joyous liberty--but for the Hezekiahs and others who went forth and, at great cost and great peril, destroyed things evil and black, by the power of God’s almightiness--overthrew them, and set up a better kingdom.

What was the root of Hezekiah’s character? At present we have seen phenomena of a gracious kind; we like what we have seen of this man.

“He trusted in the Lord God of Israel; so that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah nor any that were before him. For he clave to the Lord, and departed not from following Him, but kept His commandments, which the Lord commanded Moses.”

At length a man arose who said: “I will do God’s will, God helping me. I will not only read the commandments, but I will incarnate them. I will not only speak religious words, but live a religious life.”

Tender and yet emphatic are the words: “He trusted,” “he clave,” “he kept.”

He “trusted”--that is to say, he had no other trust. His religion was not a convenience, one thing among many things, an occasional exercise in piety; but it was a perpetual confidence, the one trust, the all-centralizing and all-ruling fact.

Then he “clave”--he kept close to. He would not allow any thing to come between his hand and the God he seized. The hand could do nothing except cleave to God and what was possible through that cleaving; and much is possible of a helpful and beneficent kind.

He “kept the commandments”--counted them one by one; examined himself in them; took himself daily to task about the whole ten. We live an off-hand life.

Religion is now as easy as a wave of the hand, a salutation across a thoroughfare; it is something that can be taken up, laid down, forgotten and resumed.

What wonder if the Rab-shakehs of the age come and taunt us, mock our piety and blow back our prayers before they get to the skies?

We want more trust, more cleaving piety, more keeping of the commandments, living in them and having no other life that is not consonant with them.

Now came, as we have often seen, the inevitable temptation. We pass instantly to the visit of Rab-shakeh. This Rab-shakeh was an eloquent man. He had the gift of mockery; he could gibe well. He was not without a certain logical qualification.

He made a long and offensive speech to the people under Hezekiah’s rule, and he thought he had them at both ends of the argument.

Having mocked their piety, laughed it down, challenged it, spat upon it, he said:

“Perhaps you will say: ‘We trust in the Lord, our God,’ but you forget that this very man, Hezekiah, has thrown down His altars, has taken away His groves, has rooted up the house of your God by the foundations.”

Rab-shakeh did not understand the destructive reformation wrought out by Hezekiah. He heard of the groves being cut down and the holy places being removed, and he said:

“This is so much to our advantage. The king of Assyria shall hear of this, and we shall make good commerce of it.”

Rab-shakeh did not distinguish between idolatry and piety--between a reform essential to health and a mere accident in history. That which was good in Hezekiah seemed to be wickedness to Rab-shakeh.

Rab-shakeh assaulted the people, trampled on them, leaped over their bodies, mocked their refuges and their trust, and thrust his fist into the face of Egypt and said:

“Come away from Hezekiah. Trust him not; he is blind; he is incapable. Leave him, and I will tell you what the king of Assyria will do for you.”

And he held this out to them:

“I will come and take you away to a land like your own land--a land of corn and wine, a land of bread and vineyards, a land of olive oil and of honey--that ye may live, and not die; and hearken not unto Hezekiah, when he persuadeth you, saying: ‘The Lord will deliver us.’”

It is but an empty saying: “Come, and I will give you a great Canaan!”

Sometimes it does seem as if the enemy had the best of it. Every thing lies so handily to him. He says:

“I will get you through this difficulty. I know a lie that would deceive a king. I can instruct you in a policy that would blind a judge. I could get the money for you; you need have no difficulty about that. Why, I say, in confidence, I can let you have it now!”

What can the preacher do in the presence of such a Rab-shakeh?

Or, he may not offer temptation in that direction, but in another. He may say:

“All these arguments I could answer, if I cared to do so. Who wrote the Bible? Who has seen the original manuscripts? Who has ever seen God? It is utterly impossible to know the infinite. Come, and I will make you rich at once in real, solid, practical things. I can give you work instantly, and wages immediately the work is begun. I can give you something in advance. Leave the preacher, the altar, the Bible and the church. Come and work in the open streets, and be doing something that you can handle and about which there is no manner of doubt.”

People begin then to wonder.

They should adopt the policy which was imposed on the children of Hezekiah:

“But the people held their peace, and answered him not a word, for the king’s commandment was: ‘Answer him not.’”

Nothing is to be got out of wordy controversy. Live the Christian life; grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. While the controversialist is contemning you, taunting you and smiting you, show to him that you are growing broader, more massive in character, more tender in disposition, more benevolent in every aspiration and desire and purpose, and thus by well-doing “Put to silence the ignorance of foolish men.”

Defend your Christianity by the eloquence of your life.