LECTURE I – William Elbert Munsey
ELIJAH.
” And the woman said to Elijah, Now by this I know that thou art a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in thy mouth is truth.” — I Kings, 17:24.
THE widow of Zarephath said to Elijah, ” I know that thou art a man of God.” No higher compliment could be passed upon any man. To be pronounced proficient in any science, art, or laudable pursuit, is a desirable compliment. To be pronounced a finished scholar, a consistent philosopher, a profound metaphysician, an erudite theologian, a logical and elocutionary preacher, a successful lawyer or physician, the consummate statesman and diplomatist, are indeed high compliments; but to be truthfully pronounced a man of God, is higher than all of them. Such was Elijah’s character. Let us evolve and elucidate it.
The Bible is a rare old book, and teaches in many ways. It teaches by declaration, explication, and exemplification. The exemplification of its teachings by the living characters who walk along its pages, is its most successful mode of in- struction, and cannot be adverted to attentively without profit. Every peculiar age has developed its peculiar spirits : especial men raised up by the Providence of God, adapted in their characters as teachers and exemplars of virtue, to the peculiar necessities of the ages in which they lived. Noah, Moses, David, and Paul, were the men for their times. Especial and peculiar times have demanded especial and peculiar men : especial and peculiar conditions of the church have demanded especial and peculiar types of religious character. Elijah was emphatically the man for his age.
With the solitary exception recorded in Second Chronicles, twenty-first chapter, Elijah appears to have exercised his functions as a prophet only among the ten tribes, called in this part of their Bible history the ” Children of Israel,” to distinguish them from the children of Judah and Benjamin, who still adhered to the dynasty of David, and from whom they had separated immediately after the death of Solomon. Constituting a distinct government from the children of Judah and Benjamin, the national and political interests of the ten tribes indisposed them to go to Jerusalem to worship, where God had placed His name. Jerusalem was not only the capital of the kingdom of Judah and Benjamin, but the metropolis of the Theocratic State. This indisposition to go to Jerusalem, upon their parts — in connection with the ten- dency to idolatry which was characteristic of the times, made their apostasy from the true and living God more easy and natural than those whose every interest, as well as the obligations of their religion, caused to go to Jerusalem several times in a year. In fact, the successive kings of the ten tribes, to prevent the Israelites from going to Jerusalem to worship, the capital of the kingdom of Judah and Benjamin, and to alienate as much as possible the affections of the people from the dynasty of David and Solomon which reigned in Jerusalem, built temples and introduced the idolatrous worship of the surrounding nations.
At the time when Elijah appeared the children of Israel were very corrupt. Ahab was their king. He was a thorough idolater, both in his principles and practice ; and he compelled the people to idolatrous worship by regular laws. He also married ” Jezebel, the daughter of Ethbaal, the King of the Zidonians” — the idolatrous daughter of the idolatrous king of an idolatrous people, who, herself, cruelly and fanat- ically persecuted the true religion, and who sustained, protected, and remunerated idolatry throughout the king- dom. While Ahab built an altar and temple for Baal, and enjoined Baal’s worship upon the people, Jezebel and her women worshipped Ashtoreth, the same with the Venus of the Romans, who, in all nations, however titled and named, was the personification of the most forbidding uncleanness, obscenity, and sensuality. This goddess had four hundred priests who constituted a part of Jezebel’s family, and ate regularly at her table. The example of such a king, and such a queen, hurried the people into the deepest pits of moral degradation.
Yet there were a few in the nation who still worshipped the true and living God, though secretly; and still a school of true prophets. The Lord, Himself, said, there were ” seven thousand,” meaning several thousand, of Israel, whose knees had “not bowed unto Baal,” and whose mouths had ” not kissed him.” Yet the moral prostitution of the people as a whole was general, and the moral tendency downwards. At this period, Elijah, of the city of Tishbeh, within the boundaries of the tribe of Gad, in the land of Gilead, beyond Jordan, suddenly made his appearance, a man for the times. He was one of the most exemplary human characters upon record. Noah and Lot were guilty of drunkenness ; Abraham and Isaac of falsehood ; Jacob of fraud ; Moses of arrogancy at the rock of Meribah ; Aaron of idolatry at the foot of Sinai ; Jephthah of rashness ; Samson of cruelty and revenge ; Eli of laxity of family discipline ; David of adultery and murder ; Solomon of the most reckless and stupendous apostasy ; Job of self-complacency, bitter recrimination, and sometimes a want of reverence for God ; and Jonah of petulance, presumption, disobedience, and culpable stupidity ; yet this holy man, living in one of the corruptest ages of the world, exhibited a character so pure, that some of the commentators and Biblicists have thought him an angel incarnated. He is gone from earth, yet no records or researches have ever revealed the least spot or blemish upon the escutcheon of his personal and moral worth, to dim the radiance of his life, or pale the splendor of his example. He was a man of God.
In developing Elijah’s character from his scriptural biography, I present to you : 1st. His moral courage. There is a difference between bravery and courage. Bravery is constitutional, courage is acquired. Bravery is constitu- tional, therefore entitles the possessor to no merit or reward ; courage is acquired, and being an acquirement implies volun- tary action upon the part of the agent, therefore does entitle the possessor to both merit and reward. Elijah’s courage so positively exemplified in his history was moral — the highest and most splendid form of true courage. As distinguished from bravery it was courage, because it was a moral quality ; and man being fallen, all good moral qualities, with certain modifications and limitations, are acquired, not constitu- tional ; it was a moral quality, because it was an exhibition of moral character formed within the compass of moral rela- tions, and exerted against evil, and in defence of the good. Moral courage is defined to be ” that firmness of principle which prompts and enables a person to do what he deems to be his duty, although it may subject him to severe censure, or the loss of public favor.”
Elijah’s first appearance, which was as sudden as if he had fallen from heaven, was an illustration of his moral courage. Ahab was the head and front of Israel’s iniquity, and though he was a wicked, cruel, and capricious monarch, and held the lives of all the subjects “of his kingdom in his hands — as far as any man can be said to have such power over human life, — yet Elijah goes directly to him and pronounces in the name of the Lord a terrible judgment upon him and the nation for their sins. He does not write it and nail it to the gates of Samaria, to the portals of the cities of Israel ; not upon the trees at the passes of Jordan, or along the high- ways ; he does not preach it to the shepherds upon the plains, or the peasant in his cottage ; not to the poor, the un- armed, the irresponsible — not to the people ; but he tracks the stream of Israel’s idolatry to its corrupting and monarchal fountain, and presents himself in propria persona before the haughty Ahab himself, and regardless* of life or liberty, the kingly frown or royal anathema, with eyes flashing fire steadily fixed upon the confused and cowering face of the startled monarch, he lifts his voice like the trump of doom : ” As the Lord God of Israel li-veth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.”
The infliction of the awful judgment, pronounced by the prophet, fell heavily upon the land of Israel. The springs and brooks dried, the grass and herbage of the field withered and pulverized to dust ; there was no bread in the granaries of Asher, the olive yielded no oil, and the vines of the vine- yard drooped fruitless and dead. Dusty desolation reigned throughout the inheritance of the ten tribes ; there was no food for man or beast ; famine was sore, especially in Samaria the capital. The king and queen, in place of repenting of their sins, and ordaining a general fast, and causing the people to repent, and thus strike at the root of all their difficul- ties, attributed their sufferings to Elijah, the prophet of God. Had they lived in an age subsequent to ours, the future historian would have thought they had borrowed their prin- ciples from the habits of this generation.
Have you not seen the sinner bring evil upon himself by his own sin and recklessness, and then with assumed inno- cency try to hide his guilty head and heart under the over- shadowing aegis of that jewel of a truth : ” Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth ” ? Miserable reprobate, trying to steal the children’s bread. Have you not heard him, when he has by his own conduct brought upon himself the merited censure of the community, apparently forgetting the true cause, attribute his unpopularity to envy and slander? Have you not heard the criminal at the gallows, ignoring his offences against the laws of the land, blame the Judge, the Jury, or the prosecuting attorney for his fate ? Have you not heard the backslidden professor of religion, when reproved, proscribed, and ostracized by his church for his offences, overlook his every wrong and audaciously declare that he was persecuted for righteousness’ sake, and presumptuously appropriate the blessings pronounced by Christ upon all such ?
Have you not heard the clerical mountebank find the reason for the unoccupied pews in his church on Sabbath morning — not in his silly head, within whose empty cavities no idea ever crept, out of whose dusky nooks no thought ever peeped, and whose osseous dome would have cracked quite in twain had a syllogism wandering by chance out of the highway of intelligence crowded and wedged itself in there for a night, — but in the ignorance of his hearers to understand and appreciate what he believed to be his pro- found and philosophical expositions of Bible truth ? You never knew such a man to suspect the character of the food he served, but you have heard him rate most lustily the taste and appetite of them he wished to feed with his unsavory, unnutritious, indigestible busks. Have you not heard the medical charlatan, when a patient died who might have lived had he been undoctored, in the learned nomenclature of his profession which metamorphosed his hearers into gaping monuments of unspeakable wonder, pass by his own inefficiency, and animadvert upon the defects of nurses, the blunders of druggists, the mysteries of Physiology, the marvels of Pathology, the complexity of diagnoses, the arcana of Materia Medica, till the hearers felt profoundly grateful for deaths and funerals, and were willing ever after to ignore the vis medicatrix natures and the prophylactic, that they might be the happy beneficiaries of the doctor’s therapeutics ?
Attributing the evils of the famine to Elijah, and not to his and Israel’s sins, Ahab sent officers to seek the prophet in all the surrounding nations and kingdoms, with orders to arrest him that he might be brought to punishment. So zealous was the king in his search, and so determined upon Elijah’s apprehension, that he required of the nations and kingdoms, where he prosecuted his quest, an oath that they knew not where he was. In the meanwhile Jezebel, his idolatrous wife, slew all the prophets of the Lord in the kingdom, except one hundred, whom Obadiah, governor of Ahab’s house, a righteous man, hid in two caves and fed with bread and water.
Such was the state of things, when God said to Elijah in his hiding-place, ” Go, show thyself unto Ahab ; and I will send rain upon the earth.” Elijah did not attempt to cavil with Omnipotence ; he did not say, ” Lord, Ahab has sought me for punishment throughout all the kingdoms of Asia Minor and Northern Africa, and must I now go, voluntarily, and show my- self unto him ? ” No : but the intrepid soldier of the living God immediately girded up his loins, and started for the land of Israel. On his way he met Obadiah, who was seeking pas- turage for the few remaining mules and horses of the king, and said to him, ” Go, tell thy lord, Behold, Elijah is here.” Obadiah was perfectly astonished at what appeared to him to be consummate rashness, and replied substantially : ” As the Lord thy God liveth, there is no nation or king- dom whither Ahab, ‘ my lord hath not sent to seek thee ; and when they said’ they knew not where thou wast he made them swear to the assertion ; ‘ And now thou sayest, Go, tell thy lord, Behold, Elijah is here.’ And while I am gone to tell Ahab, the Spirit of the Lord will carry thee I know not whither, and when he arrives he will not find thee — and he has already heard that I saved the lives of a hun- dred of the Lord’s prophets from Jezebel’s general mas- sacre, and am now feeding them in caves, and he will slay me ; yet ‘ thou sayest, Go, tell thy lord, Behold, Elijah is here’: if I obey thee, and Ahab when he comes finds thee here, thy death is certain ; if the Spirit of the Lord should take thee away in the meantime, and he does not find thee here, my death is probable — yet, utterly reckless of results, thou sayest ‘ Go, tell thy lord, Behold, Elijah is here. ‘ “
Elijah said, “As the Lord liveth, before whom I stand, I will surely show myself unto him this day.” Seeing Eli- jah’s determination, and having all the apprehensions about his own life removed by the prophet’s oath, Obadiah carried the message, and Ahab went to meet the prophet; and when he saw Elijah, he said, “Art thou he that troubleth Israel?” Elijah hesitated not a moment — though he was in the presence of the man who sought his life and searched kingdoms to destroy it, and who commanded all the resources,, of Israel, yet he hurled back upon the astonished king a flat denial of the charge, followed by an awful accusation : ” I have not troubled Israel ; but thou, and thy father’s house, in that ye have forsaken the commandments of the Lord, and thou hast followed Baalim.” He spoke as if clothed with authority — and so he was. His idolatrous and regal persecutor felt the truth of the accusation, and stood in mute awe before the sublime moral courage of this man of God. ” Send,” said the prophet, ” and gather to me all Israel” — that was, the heads of the tribes and families of Israel — ” unto Mount Carmel, and all the prophets of Baal, four hundred and fifty, and all the prophets of the groves. four hundred, which eat at Jezebel’s table” — alluding to the four hundred priests of Ashtoreth, which, as it appears from the account of the sacrifice upon Mount Carmel, did not come.
Ahab obeyed, and now followed the sublimest exhibition of moral courage in the history of the world. Mount Carmel is a mountain upon the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, about fifteen hundred feet high. Its sides are steep and rocky, but upon its top it is flat. In the days of Elijah, upon this plateau were the ruins of an old altar, supposed to have been erected to God in the days of the Judges. It was morning There was no dew upon the ground ; and the sun rising beyond Jordan shot in slanting splendor his scorching beams athwart the dusty landscapes, his fiery lances breaking and shivering against every rocky bank and lichen crag, till the rarefied air hung quivering and rippling with heat over every valley, hill, and mountain of the land of Israel. The Medi- terranean lay off to the west in full view like a sea of liquid steel, blue-heated, under the fervid sky. The thousands of Israel convened by Ahab, with himself, the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal, and Elijah, the prophet of God, stood upon the summit of the mountain.
Elijah proceeded to explain to the people the reason of so extraordinary a convocation. Ahab had charged Elijah with being the cause of the famine and its consequent evils; Elijah had retorted the charge, and accused Ahab with being the cause in that he worshipped Baal, and had caused the people to worship him. The question had resolved itself into a direct issue between God and Baal. To settle the con- troversy, Elijah explained, was the reason of the convocation of the people that morning — and he exhorted them, without halting between two opinions to accept the decision of that day, and to act thereafter upon it. To bring the whole mat- ter to a final and satisfactory test, he said to the people ; ” Ij even I only, remain a true prophet of the Lord ; but Baal’s prophets are four hundred and fifty men — I stand forth to-day in this test as the representative of the God of Israel, Baal’s prophets stand forth as the representatives of Baal — I number but one, they number four hundred and fifty, therefore in the test which I intend to propose to settle this whole matter, if any advantage can be taken by either side, they are numerically the stronger, to say nothing of the advantage of having your sympathy and the sympathy of the king, and are able to use it, I cannot. Now, let them build an altar, and lay wood upon it, slay a bullock, cut the bullock in pieces, dress the pieces, lay them on the wood, and put no fire under, and I will do the same, and we will call upon our respective Gods, and the God that answereth by fire, let him be God.” And the people answered, …. “It is well spoken.”
The proposal of Elijah was so fair and equitable, and so warmly sanctioned by the people, that the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal were compelled to accept it ; and they built an altar, laid wood upon it, slew a bullock, cut the bullock in pieces, dressed the pieces, laid them upon the wood, and put no fire under. And from morning till noon, they cried, ” O Baal, hear us ! O Baal, hear us ! ” But there was no voice, no fire. And what must have seemed most strange to the vast assembly was, that Baal was the Greek Apollo, representing the sun, the source of light and heat — the god of fire. They now threw their bodies into horrid contortions and sinuous windings, flexing in and writhing out, dancing and leaping around the altar, yelling like demons, ” O Baal, hear us i O Baal, hear us ! ” but still there was no voice, no fire — though the fiery beams of the burning orb of the god of fire were nearly smelting the rocks of Carmel, and simmering the face of the neighboring sea — still, there was no fire.
Now Elijah came forward the very embodiment and per- sonification of moral heroism. Here was the king, who both hated and feared him : here were the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal who thirsted for his blood : here were the idolatrous thousands of Israel with tempers whetted keen by famine, and inclined to attribute all their sufferings to him. Among them, in all the magnificence of his courage, the prophet stood the only avowed witness for the true and living God : in his own language : ” I, even I only, remain a prophet of the Lord ; but Baal’s prophets are four hundred and fift) men.” Yet with a kindled eye, and undaunted mien, he lifted his voice, at the sound of which infernal malice rankled in impotent silence, kingly hate froze spell-bound, and nu- merical power became powerless, and throwing a soul of withering contempt and scathing irony into it, he mocked them, and said, “Cry aloud : for he is a god : either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradven- ture he is asleep, and must be awaked.”
Cry aloud — that Baal is, and is a god, there is no doubt ; he may be now profoundly engaged in receiving his friends, and entertaining them ; he may be talking and roaring with laughter till the risibilities of all Olympia are aroused by the jocose volubility of the garrulous god. Or, he may be hunting, with bow, arrow, and spear, assisting Hercules to slay the lion of Nemea, the hydra of Lerna, and to capture the wild boar of Erymanthus, and the untamed bull of Crete ; or, he may be chasing the stag over the mountain, pursuing the cony to his lair, and upturning the turf and unearthing the mole — or such god-like pursuits. Or he may be gone on a journey — being the driver of the chariot of the sun, he may be visiting the boreal or austral pole to hear the griev- ances of their shivering tribes about a deficiency of heat in those quarters — or he may be visiting the nude and swarthy tribes of the tropics to hear their grievances about an excess of heat with them — or he may be gone to Media to get the Magi to solve the problem how he can drive his chariot close enough to the earth to make the denizens of the poles a little warmer, without scorching the Ethiopians. Or, worse than all, peradventure his godship is fast asleep — it is now noon and he may have dined too heartily, he may have been deprived of his rest last night, and the day also is unusually warm — any way, he may be soundly asleep, while his religion, worship, and honor are all at stake, and four hundred and fifty of his priests are in the most embarrassing predicament any body of men were ever in — he must be awakened — ” Cry aloud!”
Stung by Elijah’s irony, they cried the louder, and accord- ing to the manner of the ancient idolaters, they cut them- selves with knives and lancets till the blood gushed out. What a spectacle ! four hundred and fifty men, naked, red, and dripping with their own blood, twisting their bodies in eccentric and extravagant shapes, tossing their heads, fling- ing their hands and arms, and bounding up into the air, and all together crying till the ravines of Carmel were resonant with discords, and every smothering breath of the arid air trembled with the thunder of their prayer — ” O Baal, hear us ! O Baal, hear us ! ” — us ! The time of the evening sacrifice arrived, still they cried : but no voice, no fire. Ashamed, confounded, exhausted, and disgraced, they retired.
Now, Elijah said unto the people, ” Come near ” — he wished them to see that he practised no artifice to deceive them. He then repaired the fallen altar of the Lord, and dug a trench around it. He then laid wood upon the altar, slew a bullock, cut the bullock in pieces, dressed the pieces, laid them upon the wood, and put no fire under ; and com- manded tnat four barrels of water should be poured three successive times upon the whole, till the very trench was filled. There could have possibly been no fire concealed there. The intrepid man of God now approaches the altar. The circumstances were such, that we can safely suppose that the vast throng, with painful anxiety and breathless suspense, crowded and pressed around. The King, Baal, Baal’s prophets, the famine, were all forgotten : every eye was fixed upon the prophet. There stood the prophet, the central, absorbing subject of the hour. The smile of irony had faded from his face ; reverence, solemnity, confidence, and courage, magnificently blended, were enthroned in co- ordinate sovereignty upon his countenance. He prayed : ”Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Israel, let it be known this day that thou art God in Israel, and that I am thy serv- ant, and that I have done all these things at thy word. Hear me, O Lord, hear me, that this people may know that thou art the Lord God, and that thou hast turned their hearts back again.”
The prayer was short — but lo ! through the opening portals of the sky a stream of solid fire, deflecting from the altar of heaven, descended in a torrent flash, and consumed the sacrifice, consumed the wood, consumed the stones of the altar, and the very dust upon which it was erected, and licked up the water in the trench. The people immediately fell upon their faces, and said, ” The Lord, he is the God ; the Lord, he is the God.” The time was so auspicious for the extir- pation of the nation’s idolatry, that the prophet instantly commanded the people to “take the prophets of Baal,” and ” let not one of them escape.” The people obeyed him, and Elijah slew all of them at the brook Kishon. The prophets of Baal being slain, the controversy between the Lord and Baal being decided by the people in favor of the Lord, and that too right in the face of Ahab, the cause of the famine was removed, and the heavens were opened, the rains de- scended, and Elijah girted up his loins, taking his long robe into his belt, and ran before the chariot of Ahab to the entrance of Jezreel.
Emergencies do not make great men, as is generally believed, but they develop them. Men who fail in emergencies, however great their reputation, lack the stamina upon which true greatness is built, and are but mediocre men, or less. True greatness is always equal to the occasion, and rises with the occasion, and is not often known, and is never fully known, without the occasion to develop it. Elijah was equal to great emergencies ; and as the argentum vivum rises in its glassy tube with the increase of atmospheric temperature and marks off the degrees, so as emergencies became more pressing and important his character rose in the same ratio. And in the illustration just adduced, it towered into a sublimity which confounded his adversaries. Other illustrations, however, are necessary, to develop the nature of his courage, and to trace it to its source.
Ahab told Jezebel about the slaughter of the prophets of Baal; and “Jezebel sent a messenger unto Elijah, saying, So let the gods do to me, and more also, if I make not thy life as the life of one of them by to-morrow about this time.” Temerity would have stayed and doggedly braved her threatening. But Elijah, always fearless in the performance of duty, now that duty was discharged, acted with prudence, which is always an element in true courage, and arose and fled for his life. Here is a perfect man ; courageous always, yet never rash. Indeed, true courage can never assume the form of rashness. Courage is something so different in its nature from rashness, that for it to assume the form of rashness is for it to lose its identity, and become something else. Rashness is temerity acted, and temerity is a result of bravery, not of courage ; and I have already defined the difference between bravery and courage as qualities of character. In other words, bravery often degenerates into something whose abstract idea is temerity, and whose concrete idea is rashness. True courage, from its nature, considered in relation to the necessarily superior development and power of the mind able to acquire it, is logically incapable of such a degenerating tendency.
The quality in Elijah’s character I am examining is his moral courage. With him it was always exerted rationally ; it was always exerted within the boundaries of duty ; it was always exerted in obedience to moral obligation ; it was always exerted in obedience to the highest moral obligation. If its exercise had been irrational, it would not have been true courage ; if without the boundaries of duty, it would not have been moral courage j if in violation of moral obligation, it would not have been moral courage ; if in violation of the highest moral obligation, it would not have been moral courage. The obligation for the performance of some acts rests on higher reasons than the obligation for the performance of some other acts. When the obligation for the performance of these acts or works comes in conflict in point of time, so that but one or the other can be obeyed, the obligation to perform the higher absolves for the time being from the obligation to perform the lower. For illustration : God requires you to take care of your life. He also requires you to be religious ; the obligation to be religious rests upon higher reasons than the obligation to take care of your life ; hence, when the two conflict in point of time, you must be religious at the expense of your life. When an obligation rested upon Elijah to perform a certain work, he obeyed promptly and fearlessly, and independently of praise or censure, and at the very peril of his life. When the obligation in question was discharged, and there was no obligation for action resting upon him higher than the obligation to pre- serve his life, then he fled — and his flight was not inconsistent with his courage.
This is no ex post facto argument, no sophism, devised to reconcile Elijah’s flight from Jezebel with the highest form of true courage. True courage upon the battlefield often retreats, while temerity improperly fights ; true courage, independently of public opinion, will often refuse to fight, while fear of public opinion, the most debasing form of cowardice, will consent to fight.
But duty soon required Elijah’s services. God said to him, in his hiding-place, ” Arise, and go and meet Ahab, who is in the vineyard of Naboth in Samaria.” Ahab had coveted Naboth’s vineyard, and Jezebel had Naboth slain that the king might have it ; and he had now gone the day after Naboth’s death and taken possession of it. Elijah’s duty to his God called him, and the fearless hero with his wonted courage obeyed. Ahab had taken possession of the vine- yard of his neighbor, and was walking through it with a self- congratulatory and haughty mien, when he suddenly looked up, and lo ! confronting him was the redoubtable Elijah, the terrible prophet of God, right in the capital of his own kingdom, in the very shadow of the palace of his bloody queen. “
Hast thou found me, O mine enemy ? ” said Ahab. “I have found thee,” said the prophet with awful emphasis — ” I have found thee, and where ? In the very act of taking possession of that which is not thine own, in the very act of sin. Thou hast sold thyself to work evil in the sight of the Lord” — ” sold thyself to the Devil.” And in the name of God the prophet pronounced upon the king and his wicked family the most dreadful evils. Elijah’s inspiring courage was an alchemy which transmuted his every bone into solid brass, his every muscle into unyielding iron, his every nerve into fibrous steel, his face into unimpressible and invulnerable flint, when duty commanded him to action.
Ahab was slain at the battle of Ramoth Gilead, and Ahaziah his son was king in his place. Ahaziah fell through a lattice in his upper chamber, and was severely injured, and he sent messengers to inquire of Baalzebub, the tutelary god of Ekron, whether he would recover. By the commandment of God, Elijah met the messengers upon the top of a hill near Samaria, and told them to return unto the king and tell him that because he had sent to inquire of Baalzebub, the god of Ekron, and not the God of Israel, he should die. The king sent three several companies, each numbering fifty men besides their captain, to arrest the prophet, and bring him into the royal presence. The first two companies with their captains, at the word of Elijah, were consumed by fire from heaven. The third captain and his company, in answer to the captain’s prayer, were spared from so dreadful a fate.
Elijah refused to be arrested by the first two captains and taken to the king. He would not go, until the Lord said, ” Go down, …. be not afraid.” He then arose, immediately, and accompanied the third captain into the city, and entered into the very chamber of the king ; but oh, how dif- ferently from what the king had looked for. He expected the prophet to be brought before him under arrest, and to stand before him an humble, trembling suppliant for the royal clemency. But the prophet came voluntarily. He, who could command the fires of heaven, no earthly or infernal power could force. He approached the king, not to be tried, but to try the king; not to be judged, but to be the judge ; and at once, in the presence of the royal guards and astonished courtiers, arraigned the guilty monarch, charged him with his offence, pronounced the sentence, and turning away with the magisterial dignity of God’s vicegerent, left him to his fate. Knew you not, Elijah, that the royal nod of the dying monarch could have hung you upon a gallows, or stoned thee to death without the gates of Samaria ? God had said, “Go down, …. be not afraid,” and this was enough for the prophet.
This naturally introduces another trait in Elijah’s character for examination, clearly illustrated in his life.
2. His faith in God. Upon Elijah’s faith in God was based the distinctive qualities of his moral character. His moral courage did not consist in the aggregated strength of human powers and human resolutions ; it was not a dogged reliance upon himself; not the result of inexorable selfish- ness ; not the result of unbending pride ; not the result of presumption ; not the result of stubbornness — indeed, any quality based upon such principles would not be moral courage ; but it was the result of an unshaken confidence in God — it was grounded upon faith in God. As in the last illustration of his moral courage, he went not down to King Ahaziah, but sat still upon the hill, though sent for three times, till God said the third time, ” Go down, …. be not afraid.” To have gone before God commanded him to go, before in consequence of the command it became his duty to go, would have been rashness; to go after God commanded him to go, after in consequence of the command it became his duty to go, was moral courage founded upon faith in God’s sovereign protection and providence.
Temerity and pusillanimity are antipodes of character, which always show a character to be wanting in strength and development — a mental constitution unmethodic and unsymmetric. As traits of moral character they are criminally censurable. The concrete form of temerity in religion is presumption ; the concrete form of pusillanimity in religion is a base and dastardly fear of man, and suspicion and distrust of God. Both are to be avoided. Elijah avoided both, not by his art, but by the perfection of his character, and the perfection of his faith. Elijah’s history abounds with illustrations of his faith. In every exhibition of his moral courage, faith in God was the moving power. God said unto him, ” Go, show thyself unto Ahab ; and I will send rain upon the earth.” So implicitly did he believe this promise, that before a solitary cloud was seen in the sky he told Ahab to ” get up, eat and drink ; for there is a sound of abundance of rain.” Here we have one of the most pertinent illustrations of evangelical faith in the Bible. Elijah acted upon God’s promise to send rain before a single sign of the fulfilment of the promise was given. His faith was so strong that he acted upon it in advance of all sensuous and experimental evidence.
3. God’s sovereign protection of Elijah. God sent the prophet to do His work, and God intended to protect the prophet. The prophet trusted God, and courageously did the work God sent him to do, and God did protect him. At the beginning of the famine predicted by Elijah, God said to him : ” Get thee hence, and turn thee eastward, and hide thyself by the brook Cherith, that is beyond Jordan. And it shall be that thou shalt drink of the brook ; and I have commanded the ravens to feed thee there.” Elijah obeyed ; he drank of the brook ; and every morning as the sun arose and its dewless beams came shaving over the summits of Gilead and Pisgah, and every evening as the sun-god’s chariot rolled over the heights of Ephraim and shot back from the disk of his burning shield in level lines of fires his parting rays and hastened away to the west, the black wing of the raven was seen gleaming in the morning and evening light, skimming over the mountains and rocks of Palestine, or from beyond Jordan, bringing him his bread and meat.
At the expiration of six months, when the brook was dried, God sent him for the remaining three years of the famine to the widow’s house in Zarepfiath, whom He had commanded to feed the prophet. Though God had the interests of worlds to engage His constant attention, yet when the last cup of water in the brook feebly rippled into the Jordan, or evaporated, leaving Cherith’s rugged channel dry, God saw it, and immediately made provision for His faithful servant. God would let worlds go to naught before He would disappoint the faith of the least of them who trust Him
But let us retrocede in our narrative. Elijah had fled from the threatened cruelty of Jezebel into the solitudes of the wilderness. His life so far had been an eventful and stormy one ; he had seen but little quiet. The purity of his character and life had virtually separated him from the rest of man- kind, and he had no congenial associations among men. Heaven could only furnish such a man with congenial companions. He sat down under the juniper-tree and prayed : ” It is enough ; now, O Lord, take away my life ; for I am not better than my fathers.” He then fell asleep — but the Lord heard his prayer and commissioned the angel to go and feed him miraculously, and then to send him in the strength of that food one hundred and fifty miles to ” Horeb, the mount of God,” the Olympus of the Bible.
After refreshment by sleep and food, Elijah, in obedience to God’s command, commenced his journey to -Horeb, and at the expiration of forty days and nights of continuous travel, he arrived at the mount and lodged in a cave. God loved His persecuted and faithful child, and there, upon His Sinaitic throne of rugged and granitic grandeur, met him to hear his grievances. “What doest thou here, Elijah ? ” said God. Every word burned with love, and Elijah felt it and was encouraged. He answered, «’ I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts : for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword ; and I, even I only, am left ; and they seek my life to take it away.”
Elijah ceased and waited for the answer : and lo ! an awful hurricane furiously vaulting and whirling with confounding din, as if the dread spirits of the wind were holding a maddened carnival among the anarchic sands, granite ruins, and splintered mountains of the desert, suddenly burst upon the scene, screaming through every fracture and yelling around every rocking crag, and howling down the mountain-sides, till every ravine and every gorge had a tongue of resounding rage, and obstreperous thunder ; ” but the Lord was not in the wind.”
The dismal moaning of the wilderness succeeding the departing storm had scarcely ceased, when giant earthquakes planting their brawny feet upon the metamorphic granite forming the thoracic walls within whose circumference the great heart of the globe beats with thunder throbs, and sends from its ventricles along aortic channels lined with scoriae and cindery rock streams of lavic fire spouting from three hundred volcanic cones, bended their stalwart backs and shouldered the mountains, loosing their rocky roots, and wrathfully shook them till their jagged peaks nutating and colliding threatened to beat each other down to dust ; ” but the Lord was not in the earthquake.”
The quaking peaks had scarcely settled back with a deep, hollow, and crashing growl into their places, when suddenly the whole mount was wrapped as with a garment in sheets of lire — climbing, wreathing, entwining, dissolving, rolling, till the igneous sea lifted its fiery tongues and licked the firmament above — “but the Lord was not in the fire.” The fire was scarcely extinguished — save here and there a burning bush, as if God the second time was present with Moses, and saying, ” Put off thy shoes from off thy feet : for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground,” — when there was heard “a still small voice,” in which God was pleased to manifest Himself.
How well was this manifestation of God adapted to the occasion. He did not manifest Himself to the prophet in winds, earthquakes, and fires, His appropriate manifestations in the stern administrations of His providence in the government of the nations of earth. These were but the heralds of His presence then. The intercourse between God and Elijah was to be purely confidential and sympathetic, hence the manifestation was the soothing, still, small voice of God- like sympathy. When Elijah heard the voice he knew that God was present, and ” he wrapped his face in his mantle,” in token of reverence, and went and stood in the door of his cave. The question was again : ” What doest thou here, Elijah ? ” Elijah answered as before, with his prayer under the juniper-tree : ” It is enough ; now, O Lord, take my life.”
God told him in reply to return by the way of Damascus, and while there to anoint Hazael king of Syria ; and up- on his arrival in the land of Israel to anoint Jehu king of Israel, and Elisha his successor in the prophetic office. God told him furthermore there were several thousand in Israel who were not idolaters. Elijah, in answer to God’s question, had complained of the wickedness of the people, and that he was the only true worshipper of God remaining alive in Israel. God’s command to the prophet was intended for his comfort, in that He made the prophet the instrument in the appointment of three men ” to vindicate His own insulted honor,” assuring him also that he was mistaken about him- self being the only true worshipper of God left alive in Israel. Elijah felt, also, that his prayer under the juniper-tree would shortly be answered, else, why was he commanded to anoint his successor ? But how was it to be answered ? Elijah had prayed to die, but God intended to give him some- thing better : He intended to take the prophet away from a world to which he was not adapted, by being better than other men, to a congenial heaven, without dying.
Elijah made his first appearance nine hundred and ten years before the coming of Christ. With equal abruptness, at intervals during a brief ministry of fourteen years, did he appear upon the historic arena of these eventful times. He left the world as suddenly as he came into it, eight hundred and ninety-six years before Christ. Of the decalogue he was a living incarnation. He was the terror and purity of offended law in sublime personification. He was the unforgiving and inexorable commandment in vital embodiment. He was Sinai concreted in personality in a glorious and royal humanity. He was God’s, the Lawgiver’s vicegerent. Living almost equidis- tant between Moses and Christ, he exemplified and vindicated mercilessly the Mosaic and legal system, and became the forerunner and type of a higher system in its spirituality, aims, and aspirations. In the execution of his mission he burned along the circle of law’s dispensation, and shaking hands with Moses in the presence of God on the granite rocks of Horeb, where this dispensation began, he completed the cycle. He marked out the boundary-line between the two distinct epochs in the history of the world’s religious development. He marked the point where the red and fiery beams of Sinai and the mellow rays of Calvary met.
Behind him all the finger-posts along the road of the world’s historic travel pointed back to Sinai ; before him all the finger-posts pointed forward to Calvary. Before Elijah’s time the eye of the religious world looked back ; after his time it looked forward — retrospection was changed for prospection. With him the Mosaic dispensation verged into the prophetic, which had only an eye to the coming Christ. As the sublime vindicator of the law of Moses he followed Moses, yet he heralded in the prophetic dispensation, as a dispensation, and in his spirit and power was to be Christ’s forerunner. Like Moses and Christ, he stands out in living light as the type and inaugurator of a respective dispen- sation. And when all postdiluvian dispensations were to be united into one, Moses, Elijah, and Christ celebrated the union on Mount Tabor, making as the subject of their com- munion the basis of such union the death of Christ. Like Moses and Christ, Elijah fasted forty days and forty nights, and Like them he left no tenanted grave that men can mark.
But the time of Elijah’s departure has come. There is no grave-digging, no coffin-making, no burial-clothes preparing, no mourners employed. The school of the prophets is ex- cited. Elisha looks sad and thoughtful. Elijah looks like the grand old hero of God which he was. His majestic faith and lofty courage had written with more distinctness than an angel’s pen upon his brow — ” King of the Ages ” — and his devotion to God was his royal robe, and the blessings of heaven his crown. But the day is at hand. Elisha has taken an oath that he will not leave Elijah alone. They walk together from Gilgal, where the prophet is residing, to Bethel, from Bethel they go to Jericho, from Jericho to Jordan.
Fifty sons of the prophets stand awed in the distance as witnesses. Elijah’s probation is finished. A crown and palm are prepared ; a throne is erected on the right hand of God by the side of antediluvian Enoch. A deputation of extraordinary magnificence leaves heaven and starts earth- ward. The reason of its departure is quickly known. And the citizens of God’s metropolis, the New Jerusalem, gather near the gates of the city facing this way ; patriarchs lining both sides of the gates, and Jezebel’s martyred prophets climbing higher and standing upon eternal arches of translucent pearl spanning the way, while angels still mounting higher, with harp in hand, rest with balanced wing upon lofty turrets and beetling battlements of blazing jasper — while far back roof, wall, and tower are crowded, crowded with heaven’s beauty ; all looking, and peering this way with in- tensest gaze down the paths of space, to greet with a shout the first appearance of the returning cavalcade, and assist in honoring the hero of Carmel.
In the meantime, Elijah and his companion stand upon the margin of Jordan. The old river rushes down its steep and rocky bed, as it did when Joshua five and a half centuries before smote its waters, and a nation passed over to its in- heritance dryshod. Elijah folds his mantle and smites the flood, and the waters roll hither and thither, and in like manner they pass over on dry ground. They ascend to the other bank and walk on in sweet conversation. The royal deputation from heaven descending like light, flashes along down the ranges of the milky way, passes the sun, and is in sight. They look up, and behold a point of light rapidly nearing. Soon they see steeds of fire shod with meteors and wings of speed, whose quivering manes drop golden frost, and whose neesings were as the morning light. Behind them a chariot of fire, whose wheels of flaming ruby singing upon their axes down heaven’s blue pavement struck lightning. Elisha falls back overwhelmed, and Elijah, flinging down his mantle, mounts the wondrous car, and disappointing death and the grave, waves ” good-by ” to earth, and straight turning wheels above the constellations, and hies away to the city of God. But a moment elapsing till the fiery rims of his chariot wheels are flying through the portals of the heavenly city, welcomed by the thunder anthems of heaven’s orchestra, and the thunder shouts of heaven’s hosts. I wonder if his chariot will ever come for us.