Greater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 339. The Prophet and the King

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Greater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 339. The Prophet and the King


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The Prophet and the King



1. The startling suddenness of Elijah's leap into the arena, where he appears without preface or explanation, helps the impression of extraordinary force which his whole career makes. He crashes like a thunderbolt into the midst of Ahab's court. He comes before us as the Christ of St. Mark comes before us-full-grown, developed, equipped for his mission. He stands forth all at once in the political arena. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, we are confronted by a spectral form denouncing idolatry, predicting vengeance. Nothing is told us of his descent; it is even questionable whether the reading which calls him “the Tishbite” is correct. We know only that he was of Gilead, and therefore used to a ruder, freer, simpler life than in the kings' palaces. He is plain in his garb, rough, an hairy man, wearing the skin of some animal, but bearing also the mantle which is the badge of the prophetic office. He is a man of few wants, and asks little of the earth. He needs nothing that Ahab can bestow, and he is independent of all human help. He has been much in solitude, and in the awful silence of the desert he has thought and prayed much. His independence of mien, his fearlessness of king or courtier, his lofty sense of a Divine vocation and a Divine message, will not suffer him to confer with flesh and blood. There is an appearance of austerity about him; and, when you look more narrowly at him, you see that he is simply dead to the world, and that the form of deadness to the world which he has taken on is simply that which his high vocation, in such times, necessitates. He is stern in manner, stern as the unbending truth; he is intolerant in spirit, but it is the holy intolerance which cannot brook the effrontery which has substituted the cruel and abominable rites of the most degraded forms of paganism for the pure worship of the Lord God of Israel. He has so strong and vivid a sense of the claims of conscience, of righteousness, and of the Lord God of Israel, that he is filled with a holy impatience and indignation at the thought of other claims which dare presume to compete with these.



Moses was all impatient to deliver the people in his own way. He had to learn that to do God's work he must follow the Divine method. In the solitude of the wilderness he found time for reflection, meditation and prayer. And he returned to deliver God's people in God's way. There was also need of such a discipline in the soul of that fierce prophet Elijah. He had to lose much of his austerity and despondency, and to grow more sociable and self-controlled, before he could be a fit instrument for the purposes of the Almighty. He was, indeed, very jealous for the Lord of Hosts, but he stood in danger of sinking, like the Baptist of after ages, into the darkness of gloom and despair. For his nature was not evenly balanced. There was a lack of harmony and proportion between will and spirit, mind and soul. He had to learn and to suffer many things-



That mind and soul, according well,

May make one music as before,

But vaster.



2. Elijah has come out from the presence of God where he has long prayed-prayed, and prevailed in prayer. He has prayed that God would interfere in those troublous times, and maintain the witness of His own being and glory. He has prayed for judicial drought, for the closing of the heavens for three years and six months; he has prayed and prevailed; and he is sent to the court of Samaria as the messenger of Him who controls all nature's forces,-the witness to the fact, by pre-intimation, that the coming scourge of drought was from the hand of Jehovah, that he might one day be witness to the fact that the returning blessing of rain was from that God who had given Israel drink in the wilderness. He has come out from the presence of God, and yet he has the consciousness of standing in it-the power with whom he has wrestled in prayer being in him and round about him. And so, appearing suddenly, and having the consciousness not only that he is the messenger of God, but that God the Lord is with him, he hurls his terrific message into that apostate and idolatrous court, fearless of consequences, though he stands alone.



In later literature and thought, Elijah stands as the classic example of a brave, effective herald of reform. In times of moral and religious degeneracy, later Judaism looked for his return or for the appearance of one who in his spirit would denounce all forms of apostasy and injustice, even though these were intrenched under the shadow of a throne or of a sanctuary. Elijah's conception of Jehovah, however, appears to have been the same as that of Moses and the earlier leaders of his race. They were quite willing that Baal should be worshipped in Phœnicia; but in Jehovah's land there was no place for a heathen god. His recognition of the Arameans as agents in accomplishing Jehovah's purpose also suggests that broadening conception of the sphere of Jehovah's influence which became an accepted fact in the thought of Amos and Hosea. Elijah's great work, however, appears to have been done not as a theologian but as a reformer, who stayed the encroachments of Baalism and championed the rights of the people against the fatal tyranny of their king. He was therefore the forerunner of the great social reformers of succeeding generations, who defined religion not merely in terms of belief and ritual but also in terms of justice and mercy. While he himself did not see the popular acceptance of the principles which he proclaimed, Elijah was the great informing spirit of his age, inspiring the activity of his disciple Elisha and preparing the way for the epoch-making prophets of the Assyrian period.1 [Note: C. F. Kent, Kings and Prophets of Israel and Judah, 29.]



Had Elijah been merely a patriot, to whom the State stood above every other consideration, he would have condoned the faults of a king who did so much for the greatness of his nation; but the things for which Elijah contended were of far more worth than the national existence of Israel, and it is a higher wisdom than that of patriotism which insists that Divine truth and civil righteousness are more than all the counsels of statecraft. Judged from a mere political point of view, Elijah's work had no other result than to open a way for the bloody and unscrupulous ambition of Jehu and lay bare the frontiers of the land to the ravages of the ferocious Hazael; but with him the religion of Jehovah had already reached a point where it could no longer be judged by a merely national standard, and the truths of which he was the champion were not the less true because the issue made it plain that the cause of Jehovah could not triumph without destroying the old Hebrew state. Nay, without the destruction of the State the religion of Israel could never have given birth to a religion for all mankind, and it was precisely the incapacity of Israel to carry out the higher truths of religion in national forms which brought into clearer and clearer prominence those things in the faith of Jehovah which are independent of every national condition and make Jehovah the God not of Israel alone but of all the earth. The work of Elijah was not so much that of a great teacher as of a great hero. He did not preach any new doctrine about Jehovah, but at a critical moment he saw what loyalty to the cause of Jehovah demanded, and of that cause he became the champion, not by mere words, but by his life.2 [Note: W. Robertson Smith, The Prophets of Israel, 78.]