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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 338. A Prophet's Preparation
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It is impossible to have any doubt of the extraordinary nature of the prophetic career of Elijah. It is exhibited forcibly enough in the whole course of the history; for it was he and he alone, with no other instrument than the simple power of his spirit and his speech, who achieved no less a marvel than a complete revolution of the existing condition of the kingdom of the Ten Tribes.1 [Note: H. Ewald, The History of Israel, iv. 63.]
1. There had always been, in Israel, an idolatrous, disbelieving party. The nation's history, throughout its whole length, shows a polluted stream of idolatrous worship running side by side with the true worship of Jehovah; and sometimes this idolatrous current became so broad that it gave its own colour to the whole stream of the people's religious life. They were idolaters in Ur of the Chaldees-“Your fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood in old time, even Terah, the father of Abraham; and they served other gods.” They were idolaters in Egypt. In the wilderness their idolatry broke out when they joined themselves unto Baal-Peor, and ate the sacrifices of the dead. They were idolaters in Canaan. Even David's wife, the daughter of Saul, possessed idols, with one of which she deceived the hired assassins of her father, and saved her husband's life. The idolatrous elements were numerous and pervaded every class in the nation, and they only awaited some hand skilful and strong enough to combine them, in order to acquire the command of the people's thoughts and assume the place of the national faith.
2. The apostasy of Jeroboam, who set up the golden calves at Bethel and Dan, produced its necessary results. The people were gradually alienated from the worship of Jehovah, and found the voluptuous ceremonies associated with heathen cults more congenial to their taste. When Ahab ascended the throne, this degrading process reached its culmination; with little difficulty he introduced a number of abominable practices hitherto unknown. Personally, he was not unfavourable to the old religion, whose grand traditions appealed to his racial pride; he would fain have allowed it to remain side by side with the foreign intruders. But he was a weak prince, and easily dominated by a stronger will. His marriage to the Syrian princess, Jezebel, put him in the clutches of a woman whose wayward fanaticism knew no bounds. She was herself the daughter of a priest of Ashtoreth, and she made it her chief purpose in life to establish the worship of the Phœnician deities, Baal and Ashtoreth, in Israel, to the exclusion of all others, that of Jehovah included. A magnificent temple was built to Baal in Samaria, and another to Ashtoreth at Jezreel; and to each was attached a formidable array of priests. For the first time in history, religious persecution was resorted to; the prophets of Jehovah were mercilessly put to the sword; and it seemed as if nothing could arrest the wave of moral ruin which swept over the land.
3. But the religious crisis produced its hero. It was necessary that some one individual, endowed with supreme energy, should first sustain the contest on behalf of all; and Elijah accordingly effected, for the first time and in the most forcible manner, what his example gradually taught the whole nation to achieve upon the path originally laid down by him. It is this that constitutes the true and lofty significance of Elijah's career. He attains the sublime altitude of Samuel, not, like his great predecessor, in contest with the human monarchy, which had yet to be placed on a firmer basis, but in a struggle of a very different character against heathenism, whose only protection lay in a monarchy already degenerate; he even manifests the heroic greatness of Moses, not, however, as founder of a new institution, in which capacity he cannot be compared even with Samuel, but only as the champion of an old organization. Rugged, stern, solitary, he has no commission to reveal new truth. He is not a “prophet” like later ones whose words were revelation. He is not so much a prophetic teacher as the precursor of prophetic teachers. As his likeness in the Christian era came to prepare the way for One greater than himself, so Elijah came to prepare the way for the close succession of prophets who, for the next hundred years, sustained both Israel and Judah by hopes and promises before unknown. As of Luther, so of Elijah it may be said that he was a reformer and not a theologian. He wrote, he predicted, he taught, almost nothing. He is to be valued not for what he said, but for what he did; not because he created, but because he destroyed. His task was to reform and restore, not to advance; and his endowments of “spirit and power” correspond to his work.
The place of the prophet is in a religious crisis where the ordinary interpretation of acknowledged principles breaks down, where it is necessary to go back not to received doctrine but to Jehovah Himself. The word of Jehovah through the prophet is properly a declaration of what Jehovah as the personal King of Israel commands in this particular crisis, and it is spoken with authority, not as an inference from previous revelation, but as the direct expression of the character and will of a personal God, who has made Himself personally audible in the prophet's soul. General propositions about Divine things are not the basis but the outcome of such personal knowledge of Jehovah, just as in ordinary human life a general view of a man's character must be formed by observation of his attitude and action in a variety of special circumstances. Elijah's whole career, and not his words merely, contained a revelation of Jehovah to Israel-that is, made them feel that through this man Jehovah asserted Himself as a living God in their midst.1 [Note: W. R. Smith, The Prophets of Israel, 82.]