Part 25

The servants of Hezekiah said to him: “What Rab-shakeh has said may come to pass. Let us go to Isaiah and tell him all.”

Hezekiah himself thought that perhaps there might be something in it, after all. There he and his servants fell into a state of incertitude.

“So the servants of King Hezekiah came to Isaiah.” They came to the right man. Standing up like a king, he said:

“Thus shall ye say to your master: Thus saith the Lord: ‘Be not afraid of the words which thou hast heard, with which the servants of the king of Assyria have blasphemed Me. Behold, I will send a blast upon him, and he shall hear a rumor, and shall return to his own land; and I will cause him to fall by the sword in his own land.’”

He would make no violent attack on the men. He would summon no legion of angels to overwhelm this great Oriental potentate. He would simply “send a blast.” He would change the wind; he would scatter something upon it and bid it blow across the brain of the king of Assyria, and the king would not know his right hand from his left, nor the morning from the night; he would be calling everybody by the wrong name, and be asking for things that he did not wish to possess, and be, generally, thrown into a state of unbalanced and wandering mind.

“I will send a whisperer to him. He shall simply go to the ear of the king of Assyria and say something, and the king will take fright and fly away in a panic. O Hezekiah, continue thy prayer, repeat thy morning sacrifice and thine evening oblation; and, as for the king of Assyria, I will send a blast and a rumor. I will answer Rab-shakeh.”

Let the contempt of the enemy be answered by the contempt of Heaven.

Rab-shakeh, having found that the king of Assyria was warring against Libnah, returned; and when he heard that Tirhakah, king of Ethiopia, was come up to war, he once more addressed Hezekiah in terms of exultation and contempt.

Rab-shakeh was pretendedly anxious that Hezekiah should not be deceived by the Lord, his God, and then he taunts him with many a history in which Assyria had been conqueror over opposing nations. He completes his taunt by asking:

“Where is the king of Hamath, and the king of Arpad, and the king of the city of Sepharvaim, of Hena, and Ivah?”

This message came to Hezekiah in the form of a letter, or letters, and he instantly “went up into the house of the Lord, and spread it before the Lord.”

There is no need to regard this as in any sense involving a heathenish custom. The meaning simply is that Hezekiah consulted the Lord on the whole matter, and declined to take any thing into his own counsel or power. He acknowledges the dignity of God by the expression: “O Lord God of Israel, which dwellest between the cherubims.”

Then he pointed to the letter which more immediately concerned himself, thus showing his consciousness that the majesty of the Lord did not separate Him from taking an interest in earthly things. We are not to stop at the point of majesty, but are to reason that, because God is so majestic and august, He will pay attention to the prayers and desires of the beings whom He has created in His own image and likeness. The divine majesty is not a rebuke to human approach, but is an encouragement to human prayer. When Hezekiah says “Thou art the God,” the emphasis is to be laid on the pronoun. Thou art the true God, and Thou alone. When he desires God to bow down His ear, and hear, the reference is not so much to listen to Hezekiah’s prayer as to the words of Sennacherib.

The meaning of the whole petition may be:

“Interpose immediately and energetically between me and mine enemy. Let Thine ears hear, let Thine eyes see, and let Thine arm be extended.”

Hezekiah acknowledges that the kings of Assyria had destroyed the nations and their lands, and had cast the gods of the nations into the fire. By so much he gives the Assyrians credit for having spoken the truth, and for having thus founded their project against Israel upon the success which they had already attained.

Hezekiah acknowledges, indeed, that the gods of the nations were no gods. At the same time he feels that to the minds of the Assyrians they may have been as real deities, and their overthrow may have encouraged the Assyrians to believe that Jehovah was like unto them.

Thus the prayer of Hezekiah was argued and ordered in logical and historical form, and was intended to excite, as it were, the very jealousy of the Lord God of Israel.

We now turn to the reply which was made to Hezekiah through the lips of Isaiah, the son of Amos. The reply was manifestly given in a contemptuous tone:

“The virgin the daughter of Zion hath despised thee, and laughed thee to scorn; the daughter of Jerusalem hath shaken her head at thee.”

This is a poetic personification of place, Zion being regarded as mother of the people dwelling there. While the term “virgin” may denote the inviolable security of the citadel of Jehovah, it may also intimate that a woman--even a solitary woman--was enough, when under the inspiration and protection of God, to repel the assault of the most boastful and audacious king.

The expression, “hath shaken her head at thee,” has been literally rendered: “Hath nodded behind thee.” It signifies an act of security--as, for example, in the Twenty-second Psalm: “All they that see me laugh me to scorn; they shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying: ‘He trusted on the Lord that He would deliver him. Let Him deliver him, seeing He delighted him.’”

The people of Jerusalem are represented by this expression as nodding their heads in contempt at the retiring envoys of Sennacherib.

The answer of Isaiah to Hezekiah was a religious revelation to the king of Assyria.

The twenty-second verse puts into interrogative form a reproach against the ignorance of the king:

“Whom hast thou reproached and blasphemed? And against whom hast thou exalted thy voice and lifted up thine eyes on high?”

The meaning evidently is that the king did not know the real nature of the God of Israel and Judah, and that he was making an infinite mistake in confounding that nature with what he had already seen of the idols of the nations.

Humiliation is promised to the king of Assyria. A hook is to be thrust into his nose, a bridle is to be put on his lips, and he is to be turned back by the way which he came.

While the king of Assyria is humiliated, the remnant that escaped of the house of Judah is promised again to take root downward and bear fruit upward--literally, shall add root to root, shall take firmer root than ever, as a tree often does after a storm; the ravaged land was to be newly stocked by the remnant that was to be saved out of Jerusalem.

All these statements are supported by the declaration: “The zeal of the Lord of Hosts shall do this.”

Thus the promise is not made in any human name or guaranteed by the conquests of human history. It is immediately connected with the very purpose and power of the Most High. Nor is this the only instance in which divine strength is promised on behalf of Judah and of Israel. We read: “For I will defend this city, to save it, for mine own sake, and for my servant David’s sake.”

We must always be careful to notice that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, and that no occasion is ever given for man to glory in man, but that everywhere from the beginning of religious history, as given in the Bible, it is God who is King, Ruler and Protector, and to Him all the glory of deliverance and conquest undividedly belongs.

And that night “the angel of the Lord went out and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand; and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.”

Again and again we say: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

Let Rab-shakeh talk--let him deliver his burning messages--and when he has ceased his mockery it is not necessary for us to answer. God will defend His own cause.

Here we stand. We think all history is on the Christian side. But let us not forget that the finest argument in favor of Christianity is a Christian life.

JABEZ.

The ninth verse of the fourth chapter of the first Book of Chronicles contains a reference to Jabez. The whole history is brief:

“And Jabez was more honorable than his brethren; and his mother called his name Jabez, saying: ‘Because I bear him with sorrow.’ And Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying: ‘Oh, that Thou wouldst bless me indeed, and enlarge my coast, and that Thine hand might be with me, and that Thou wouldst keep me from evil, that it may not grieve me!’ And God granted him that which he requested.”

Nothing more is known of this Jabez or of his brethren. “The Speaker’s Commentary” regards the fact as remarkable that Jabez should be introduced without description or patronymic, as if a well-known personage, and supposes that he was known to those for whom the Book of Chronicles was written, either by tradition or by writings which have perished.

The word Jabez signifies sorrowful.

Jabez was distinguished in some way above his brethren. By this distinction we are not to infer the exercise of an undue partiality in the spirit of his parents. Account for it as we may, some men appear to be born with what may be called a larger religiousness of nature than other men. It is easy for them to pray; it is a delight to them to peruse all sacred writings; it is a positive pain to them to be deprived of religious privileges.

We must leave this mystery as insoluble. It is a very pleasant mystery to those who are gifted with religious intuition; but, on the other hand, it is a most appalling mystery to those who seem to be what we can not better describe than by calling them natural Atheists.

The name which Jabez bore was a memorial of his mother’s sorrow--not a prophecy of his own. Yet Jabez was animated by that inexplicable superstition which discovers in names and circumstances omens and predictions which the imagination can never treat with disregard.

Jabez might intellectually know that his name did but represent what his mother had endured, yet a subtle feeling took possession of him, as if he himself would in some way be involved in the same sorrow. Nor was this an irrational conclusion.

As a matter of fact, some men are born to more sorrow than others--as certainly as by constitution some men are more religious than others.

Here, again, is a dark and painful mystery. We see the operation of this mystery even in the same family, where one of the children may be full of sunlight, hope and music, and another may be doomed to walk in darkness throughout a lifetime--unable to discern between Summer and Winter, loaded with trouble and oppressed with undefinable apprehensions.

Jabez is known to history as pre-eminently a man of prayer. Although it has been considered that the prayer of Jabez was uttered in view of some imminent battle or other dreaded experience, yet by common consent Jabez has been regarded by Christian students as a typical man of prayer.

Judging the case within the narrow limits of the history given in verses nine and ten, it would seem as if Jabez started life in an act of prayer. The image is at once graphic and beautiful. Think of a young man standing at the door of his house, looking abroad at the unknown and unmeasured world, listening to the conflicting voices which troubled his native air, and then turning his eyes to Heaven and asking divine direction before he would take a single step from the threshold of his home.

Nothing of the nature of mere romance attaches itself to this picture.

This, indeed, is what every young man ought to do before going out to battle or labor. It would appear, from instances which have come under our view, that God condescends to receive from men promises of religious life on certain providential conditions. We can not understand this now, but it is perfectly clear, from such instances as Jacob and Jabez, that God was willing to respond to propositions of obedience founded upon the realization of specified blessings.

The prayer of Jabez must be judged to be good, for the sufficient reason that it was answered--“and God granted him that which he requested.”

Is the conduct of life, then, open to regulation upon such high and sacred lines? May a young man come before the Almighty, speak out all his heart and receive promises of continual guidance and defense from the Living One?

If we could realize the certainty of this holy commerce as between Earth and Heaven, our whole life would be lifted to a noble level, our spirit would be released from the dominion of fear, and instead of laboring in toilsome prayer, we should be filled with the spirit of triumphant thankfulness and praise.

What privileges are open to the young! It lies within their power to give a whole life-time to God. Those who have advanced considerably in life can now but give a fraction of their days, but the young soul can give God the brightness of the morning, the glory of noonday and the tranquility of evening.

Let the young think of this, and give themselves diligently to the study of such instances as that of Jabez, knowing that if they remember their Creator in the days of their youth increasing age will mean increasing joy.

JEHORAM.

Jehoram undertakes an expedition against King Mesha, but in doing so he pays a tribute to the power of the king of Moab by allying with himself Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, and also the king of Edom. A remarkable character is given of Jehoram. He was not an imitator of the evil of his father as to its precise form, but he had his own method of serving the devil.

We should have thought that Ahab and Jezebel had exhausted all the arts of wickedness, but it turns out that Jehoram had found a way of his own of living an evil life.

Warned by the untimely fate of his brother, which had fallen upon him expressly on account of his Baal worship, Jehoram began his reign by an ostentatious abolition of the Phenician state religion, which his father had introduced.

Jehoram went back to the olden times, and re-established the worship of the calf, after the pattern which Jeroboam, its founder, had patronized. His doing so, however, he found to be quite compatible with a secret allowance that the people should practice their own form of worship.

There is room in wickedness for the exercise of genius of a certain limited kind. The limitation is imposed by wickedness itself--for, after all, wickedness is made up of but few elements.

Many persons suppose that if they do not sin according to the prevailing fashion they are not sinning at all. They imagine that by varying the form of the evil they have mitigated the evil itself.

A good deal of virtue is supposed to consist in reprobating certain forms of vice. A man may be no drunkard, according to the usual acceptation of the term, and yet he may be in a continual state of intoxication. It is possible to shudder at what is usually known as persecution, and yet all the while to be beheading enemies and burning martyrs.

Jehoram made a kind of trick of wickedness. He knew how to give a twist to old forms, or a turn to old ways, so as to escape part of their vulgarity and yet to retain all their iniquity.

A most alarming thought it is to the really spiritual mind that men may become adepts in wickedness--experts in evil doing--and may be able so to manage their corrupt designs as to deceive many observers by a mere change of surface or appearance.

We do not amend the idolatry by altering the shape of the altar. We do not destroy the mischievous power of unbelief by throwing our skepticism into metaphysical phrases, and thus making verbal mysteries where we might have spiritual illumination. We are deceived by things simply because we ourselves live a superficial life and read only the history of appearances.

What is the cure for all this manipulation of evil, this changing of complexion and of form, and this consequent imagining that the age is improving because certain phenomena which used to be so patent are no longer discernible on the face of things?

We come back to the sublime doctrine of regeneration, as the answer to the great inquiry: “What is the cure for this heart disease?”

“Marvel not that I said unto thee: ‘Ye must be born again.’”

We may change either the language or the manners of wickedness, or the times and seasons for doing wicked things, and we may decorate our wickedness with many beautiful colors, but so long as the heart itself is unchanged decoration is useless--yea, worse than useless; for it is a vain attempt to make that look true which is false--an endeavor even to deceive Omniscience itself.

“And Mesha, king of Moab, was a sheepmaster, and rendered unto the king of Israel an hundred thousand lambs and an hundred thousand rams, with the wool. But it came to pass, when Ahab was dead, that the king of Moab rebelled against the king of Israel.”

Enduring masteries are not of a physical kind. Ahab held Mesha simply by a strong arm, and the consequence was that, as soon as Ahab was dead, Mesha refused to render the tribute.

This historical circumstance, limited so far as the mere letter is concerned, is full of significance to the Christian Church and to all Christian countries.

Let us not call ourselves masters of positions or of men, simply because we happen to have the stronger arm. The dominion which is acquired by mere strength and held by superior force is an illusion wherever it is found.

The men whom we may so hold may be hypocrites enough to assume an acquiescent attitude, or even to display a complacent demeanor; they may even go so far as to appear to be grateful for the rule which they can not set aside. But all such appearances are of necessity without reason, and therefore without continuance. They are always to be suspected.

This would be so in the case of the Christian faith, had we the power of imposing even its nominal belief upon any nation. Suppose we say that any man not professing the Christian faith shall certainly be fined, imprisoned or otherwise punished. It is easy to see that such a threat might in many instances bring about an appearance of acquiescence. But it must be, by the very necessity of the case, appearance only.

Faith is a question of the individual judgment and of the individual heart, and can not be controlled in any degree by external authority.

Suppose we create a law making it penal to open places of business on the Sabbath day. Looking upon all commercial houses whose business was suspended for a particular time, we might say: “See how unanimously and happily the Sabbath day is observed in this country!”

But such would be an altogether superficial and mistaken judgment. The Sabbath day can not be kept by law. If the Sabbath is not kept by the reason, and is not hailed with thankful delight by the very heart, it can never be kept at all.

All shops may be closed, all places of amusement may suspend their entertainments, all toys may be put away from the nursery, all out-door enjoyments and avocations may be withdrawn for the time, but the people who have retired in apparent acceptance of these conditions, but not in heartfelt acquiescence with them, are breaking the Sabbath every moment they breathe.

Here is a great law for the house, the church and the nation. The head of the family who rules by mere dread or tyranny is not training an obedient household, but he is preparing an outburst of sedition, which sooner or later must transpire, and when it occurs his ruin is certain.

The same law applies in the matter of capital and labor. The man who only works that he may receive his wages never truly serves or makes his labor into a delight. The man who can threaten the laborer by withdrawment of pecuniary recognition never elicits from that laborer a response to duty, though he may insist on a formal compliance with law.

What a blessed mastery is that of Jesus Christ in this respect.

For Christ reasons with men, and addresses the very highest form and quality of mind; He sets before men the alternative courses of life, and beseeches them to accept the straight and narrow way leading to repentance. Certainly he threatens, He denounces, He declares an awful issue for the wicked man, but it is not mere threatening or mere denunciation; it is the solemn disclosure of a sequence which even Almighty God could not suspend and yet retain the integrity of His throne and the security of the universe. We must never accuse Jesus Christ of what is termed “threatening.” His denunciations are revelations, and not the expressions of merely angry feelings.

The way of the approach having been settled, the kings proceeded to fetch a compass of seven days’ journey around by the south end of the Dead Sea. They little knew the difficulty that would arise in their way. We do not read that they made any religious inquiry at the outset of their journey, and therefore no responsibility could be charged upon God for the misadventure which occurred. The three kings seem to have consulted only with themselves, and to have resolved in their own counsel and strength upon their expedition against Mesha.

What was the misadventure which occurred? It is related: “And there was no water for the host and for the cattle that followed them.”

Even kings are dependent upon nature. Think of three kings, who supposed themselves at least to be very mighty, and all their people, stopped in their career simply for want of water!

A very pitiable and yet very instructive picture is this of three kings and their armies standing still merely for want of water. The so-called little things of life are often turned into not only things that are great, but into things that are vital.

Blessed indeed would be the man who sees even in natural arrangements and daily providences a call to him to lift up his head toward the heavens and ask great questions about being and duty and destiny.

So we have the usual religious appeal: “Is there not here a prophet of the Lord, that we may inquire of the Lord by him?”

Elisha now assumes a new attitude, and one certainly not destitute of spiritual grandeur. Turning to the king of Israel, he said:

“‘What have I to do with thee? Get thee to the prophets of thy father, and to the prophets of thy mother.’ And the king of Israel said unto him: ‘Nay; for the Lord hath called these three kings together, to deliver them into the hand of Moab.’”

Observe that this address was made to the very king of Israel. It simply means that the God of Israel had nothing to do with the king of Israel, and yet Israel was understood to be a theocracy. The form was theocratic, but not the power.

Think of a man bearing the name of God, and yet being godless! A temple deserted of its deity is surely a melancholy sight, but what shall be said of the man from whose heart the Spirit of the living God has utterly departed?

Elisha seems to have inherited the taunting spirit of his great predecessor: “Get thee to the prophets of thy father, and to the prophets of thy mother.”

Who can say with how bitter a taunt the word “mother” was pronounced in this connection?

The evil that men do goes on for many a day--not only to the end of their life-time, but it lives after them.

This is a taunt that is founded on reason. If men have been serving a god for seven years past, surely it can not be unreasonable to refer them to that god in the time of their extremity. What is faith if it can not be tested? What is the value of an altar if you can not go to it and find lying upon it direct answers to your prayer?