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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 343. Carmel
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Carmel
2. The meeting of the prophet and the king is very dramatic. Ahab has never been able to stifle the conscience of an Israelite, and cannot withhold his respect from the prophet of Jehovah. He bitterly accuses Elijah of being the troubler of Israel; but when the prophet flings back the charge, the king is silenced. Elijah challenges, or rather commands, him to summon the prophets of Baal to a contest between Jehovah and Baal on Mount Carmel. The worshippers of Baal will sacrifice to their God; Elijah himself will sacrifice to Jehovah; the god who answers by fire, he shall be God.
No living eye till then had witnessed an assemblage so grand in a need so dire as that which the despair and hope of king and people now gathered at Elijah's word upon the heights of Carmel. It is precisely the fit stage for such a drama. From its summit, as they looked westward and northward, they see the Mediterranean dotted with the merchant ships of Tyre and Sidon, outward or inward bound, with the riches of the world; and Tyre and Sidon in all their glory-the grand strongholds of Baal. As the people looked eastward and southward, yonder may be descried, far off, the Sea of Galilee gleaming in the morning sun; and as the eye sweeps round to the southward, the plain of Jezreel, and Mount Tabor shooting up out of it; and, southward still, Ramoth-gilead and Ebal and Gerizim and Shechem and Shiloh, and a hundred mountain-tops and villages, around which hang a thousand hallowed associations and memories of the marvellous power and loving-kindness of Jehovah to their fathers. Thus they stand as with two immense maps unrolled at their feet: on the one side the map of the kingdom of Baal, on the other side that of the kingdom of Jehovah. In the centre of the multitude the court prophets of Baal are gathered to confront the rude son of the desert, the solitary prophet of Jehovah. Then for the first time both king and people heard proclaimed the vital principle of true religion-no compromise of truth. The stern prophet brings them squarely to the issue, with a single sentence, whose tones thrill them as though Carmel shook under their feet, “How long halt ye between two opinions? if Jehovah be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him.” And, we are told, “the people answered him not a word.” The single sentence is a shot point-blank to the heart. Carried to its mark by the Spirit of God, the shaft quivers in ten thousand consciences; Baal is already defeated. All that follows of the proposed test and the altar, and the fire from heaven, are but the successive steps of the victor pursuing his vanquished and demoralized foe.
God, to the Hindu, represents gods and demons innumerable who are always at strife with him, and have continually and in every imaginable way to be propitiated and appeased. Small-pox is only the goddess Sitala Devi. Her headquarters are at Mantreshwa Kund, Ajudhiya, where prayers and offerings are made to her every Monday for deliverance from the scourge over which she presides. Yet, notwithstanding all the vigorous “puja” done to her, she is adding to the calamity of the plague by sending us small-pox. We also have a place for a rather frivolous goddess called Chhutki Devi, where, on the fourteenth day of any month, after paying her court and duly satisfying her demands, you spin round on your heels, snap your fingers, and attain all your desires. But neither this Devi nor, indeed, any other of the gods, is doing much for the Hindus just now. When the plague first broke out the temples and shrines did a roaring trade. Offerings poured in and the ceaseless cry, as of old, went up, “O Baal! hear us.” The plague first broke out in Ajudhiya; in a very short time its normal population of 20,000 went down to 5,000, and now I am told that there are hardly 4,000 left. When plague was at its height I visited Ajudhiya and went to all the big temples. I am well known in them. I, only a Methodist missionary, was earnestly entreated by the priests, in each temple I visited, to intercede on their behalf with the Government, firstly, to put an end to this plague and, secondly, to forbid the people running away and deserting their temples. “It's very rough on you,” I said, “very rough. Here are these fellows all bolting; how do they expect the temples to be maintained and the poor priests to be fed?” “Ah!” said the priests, “the fear of the plague has driven all this out of them.” “But what about yourselves,” I said, “and what about your gods? What about that lesser goddess, Chhutki Devi (to say nothing of big and powerful ones, like Ram, Hanuman, Ganesh and Mahadeo)? Why don't you make your offerings, spin merrily round on your heels, snap your fingers, and attain all your desires? You tell the worshippers that is all they have to do. Why don't you do it?” “Ah!” said they, “we don't know what to make of the gods; they neither hear nor do anything.” I got one of my best chances that day for preaching from the first and second commandments, and was quietly and reverently listened to.1 [Note: Padri Elliott of Faizabad, 258.]
Now, therefore, if there be any God, and if there be any virtue, and if there be any truth, choose ye this day, rulers of men, whom you will serve. Your hypocrisy is not in pretending to be what you are not; but in being in the uttermost nature of you-Nothing-but dead bodies in coffins suspended between Heaven and Earth, God and Mammon. If the Lord be God, follow Him; but if Baal, then follow him. You would fain be respectful to Baal, keep smooth with Belial, dine with Moloch, sup, with golden spoon of sufficient length, with Beelzebub;-and kiss the Master to bid Him good-night.1 [Note: Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, letter 84 (Works, xxix. 293)]
3. Elijah was now satisfied that the end had been gained. Baal-worship was overthrown. The national faith was restored. It would have been well had he rested with that victory. But the militant instinct was not dead within him. The meeting closed in bloodshed. In his fiery exultation, Elijah called for the destruction of the corrupters of Israel's faith; and the terror-struck and discomfited prophets of Baal and of the Asherah were hurried by the multitude down the mountain-side, and massacred at the brook Kishon.
That swift and terrible slaughter of the priests of Baal may be regarded as a solemn act of judgment. These men were not only priests of a false and degrading religion, but sinners against the State. Israel was still in principle a theocracy, and the deeds of those priests would be judged as acts of rebellion against the sovereign power, a crime for which the death penalty is written in the law of every nation in Christian Europe. Yet it was the fruit of one-sided passion, exaggerated self-assertiveness, and unconscious pride; and it brought a dark night to close a bright day.
To this day the names about Carmel shudder, as it were, with reminiscence of this religious massacre. There is El-Muhrakkah, “the place of burning”; there is Tel-el-Kusis, “the hill of the priests”; and that ancient river, the river Kishon, which had once been choked with the corpses of the host of Sisera and has since then been incarnadined by the slain of many a battle, is-perhaps in memory of this bloodshed most of all-still known as the Nahr-el-Mokatta, or “the stream of slaughter.” What wonder that the Eastern Christians in their pictures of Elijah still surround him with the decapitated heads of these his enemies? To this day the Moslim regard him as one who terrifies and slays. But though the deed of vengeance stands recorded, and recorded with no censure, in the sacred history, we must-without condemning Elijah, and without measuring his days by the meting-rod of Christian mercy-still unhesitatingly hold fast the sound principle of early and as yet uncontaminated Christianity, and say, as said the early Fathers, βία ἐχθρὸν Θεῷ. Violence is a thing hateful to the God of love.1 [Note: F. W. Farrar.]
4. As the drought had begun at the word of Elijah, its ending too must come as the answer to his fervent prayer. On the top of Carmel he threw himself on the ground, with his face between his knees, in the attitude of a solitary wrestler with God. Seven times he sent his servant to look towards the Mediterranean for the sign of an answer. At last it came. “Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man's hand.” At once the message was sent to the king, “Prepare thy chariot, and get thee down, that the rain stop thee not.” But before the king could do so, “the heaven was black with clouds and wind, and there was a great rain.” Through the deluge Ahab's chariot hurried to Jezreel, and Elijah, with supernatural strength, “girded up his loins” and ran before the chariot to the very entrance to the city.
“And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the inhabitants of Gilead, said unto Ahab, as the Lord God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.” Your modern philosophers have explained to you the absurdity of all that, you think? Of all the shallow follies of this age, that proclamation of the vanity of prayer for the sunshine and rain, and the cowardly equivocations, to meet it, of clergy who never in their lives really prayed for anything, I think, excel. Do these modern scientific gentlemen fancy that nobody, before they were born, knew the laws of cloud and storm, or that the mighty human souls of former ages, who every one of them lived and died by prayer, and in it, did not know that in every petition framed on their lips they were asking for what was not only foreordained, but just as probably fore done? or that the mother pausing to pray before she opens the letter from Alma or Balaclava, does not know that already he is saved for whom she prays, or already lies festering in his shroud? The whole confidence and glory of prayer is in its appeal to a Father who knows our necessities before we ask, who knows our thoughts before they rise in our hearts, and whose decrees, as unalterable in the eternal future as in the eternal past, yet in the close verity of visible fact, bend like reeds, before the fore-ordained and faithful prayers of His children.2 [Note: Ruskin, Notes for Readings in “Modern Painters” (Works, xxii. 532).]
5. Elijah imagined that the battle for truth had been fought and won, and that his task was virtually accomplished. But his triumph was brief. Before the day closed, an extraordinary and unexpected spectacle came to be witnessed. A message was received from the queen-the ablest and most determined enemy of the Hebrew religion-intimating that she was neither converted nor discouraged, and that she was preparing to take her revenge on the agent in the nominal reformation; and the night saw the valiant defender of the faith in ignominious flight.
Elijah's presence had never been so necessary as now. The work of destruction had commenced; and the people were in a mood to carry it through to the bitter end. The tide had turned, and was setting in towards God; and he was needed to direct its flow, to keep the people true to the choice which they had made, and to complete the work of reformation by a work of construction. From what we have seen of him, we should have expected that he would receive the message with unruffled composure; laying it before God in quiet confidence, assured that He would hide him, in the secret of His pavilion, from the wrath of man, and shield him from the strife of tongues. But we are told: “When he saw that, he arose, and went for his life.” The threat grasped his heart at the moment when his departing violence left him exhausted. Fear and deep depression seized him. He fled for his life into the wilderness. But as he wandered southward, and the first stun of the blow had lost its sharpness of acute pain and become a dull sense of injury received, he made for solitude that he might seek the ear of his God. A sense of the dreariness of a wasted life overspread his soul. He cast himself down, in the breathless solitude of the desert, under the poor shelter of a juniper bush, and poured out his soul to God. Alone and weary, he prayed for death: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers.”
A modern martyr dies appealing to posterity, invoking the judgment of the future. When prejudice and passion shall be no more, and truth shall have freer scope, then his cause, misjudged now, shall be held just; and his name, that goes down dishonoured now, shall shine with a perpetual lustre. So it has often been found to be; succeeding generations look back with wonder upon the mistakes and blindness of former times. And so it has come to be a settled belief that all who have done great deeds, shall yet, even here, receive the just award of praise or blame; and men who are conscious to themselves of insight or power can, when misjudged, make their appeal without fear to the better informed judgment of the time to come. But perhaps, in Elijah's days, this general truth had hardly been gained. At least, there is no sign that the thought at all sustained him; rather, all seemed to him lost, and he longed to die. In such moments men do not think. Neither can they look beyond the present. Neither is there any consistency in their feelings. God remained to Elijah; and yet God's cause seemed irretrievably lost. The truth is, his mind was quite disorganized. Like a warrior who has waged all day an unequal strife, and at the last received a mortal stroke, he retires from the field to die alone; and when the languor is falling on him, he says, “Now, O Lord, take away my life.”1 [Note: A. B. Davidson, The Called of God, 175.]
Sudden misgivings and agonizing doubts flashed upon John Stuart Mill. His implicit and complacent trust in his philosophical evangel was rudely shattered, and his mission to upraise a world of which he was woefully ignorant was abandoned in despair. For an interval everything on which he had depended tottered and seemed about to fall. He deeply realized that, if all his objects in life could be attained at that moment, the result would give him no lasting satisfaction. He says with melancholy emphasis, “At this my heart sank within me; the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm; and how could there ever again be an interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.”2 [Note: S. P. Cadman, Charles Darwin and other English Thinkers, 102.]
6. Some part of Elijah's despondency might be due to physical weakness; but it was almost altogether spiritual. The tide of spiritual power had never risen so high, even in his soul, as it had done on Carmel. Never before had he felt so confident, and wielded, with such absolute mastery, his sway over men's minds. Never before, perhaps, had such thoughts risen in his mind as rose then, of a kingdom conquered for Jehovah, and a nation born in an hour, and a realm cleansed from all impurities, and every knee bowed to the Lord. Victory for Jehovah was secure; and he was the conqueror. But now spiritual reaction has set in in his own soul; and he is a fugitive, crouching under a bush in the wilderness. The facile crowd has returned to its impure rites again, not one voice daring to raise itself on the Lord's side-the kingdom which seemed the Lord's not merely thrown back, but hopelessly Baal's; and all his efforts lost. And so his mind falls suddenly from the pinnacle of triumph and jubilation to the low dismal swamp of dejection and fear.
The prophet's despair was the natural effect of a great exercise of destructive power upon the mind of him to whom it has been entrusted. The sense of exhaustion, the cry, “I am not better than my fathers,” though I have done such wonders, the hopelessness of the future becoming all the more deep from the apparently useless triumph that had been won already-surely every prophet must have these bitter experiences if he is not to sink into a Baal-worshipper, and after all to regard the God of Truth and Righteousness merely as a God of Might. Elijah, though he wrought so many miracles, was comparatively still a novice when he sat down under the juniper tree.1 [Note: F. D. Maurice, The Prophets and Kings of the Old Testament, 139.]
There are some men indeed who are so self-satisfied, that they see no failure in anything they have ever put their hands to. They have built up the house from foundation to cope without flaw. They are well-satisfied with themselves and their work. They have realized their ideals; and it has escaped their notice, that that has arisen from the fact that their ideals were not of a high character. They have gained the little they aimed at, and they are well pleased because they have hit their mark, forgetting that that required no very lofty aim. Such men will never cast themselves under a juniper tree, bewailing a wasted life. But mark you, the man who is there under the juniper tree is a man of deep life, of high aim, of noble purpose; and the gloom which now overspreads his soul is the shadow cast by the disappointment of one, who, though his harvest is golden and bountiful, has reaped so little and so poorly, in proportion to his expectations, that his whole life appears shorn of all the brightness of colour by the uniform blackness of failure.2 [Note: A. Ewing, Elijah and Ahab, 247.]
7. Worn out with sorrow and hard travelling, he lay down and slept. But while he slept an angel came and touched him, and he awoke to find a cake ready baked and a cruse of water. In obedience to the angel he ate and drank, but, still wearied, lay down again. A second time the angel awoke him, bidding him eat as a preparation for a long journey. Elijah had simply been in quest of a refuge from Jezebel, but the God who permitted this had another object. The prophet was to regain his supernormal strength in the place which was fullest of divinity. Far away his steps were guided into the midst of the Sinai desert; for the first time since the days of Moses a prophet broke the solitude of Horeb.
Men flee to the wilderness of Sinai still, when they are wearied with the indifference and vexed with the laxness of those about them. There is an asperity in their frame of mind, a fierce earnestness, a longing, stimulated perhaps by opposition, for a sight of truth as it is; and that easy-going acceptance of it which satisfies most men they will not put up with. And it is the severer forms of truth that we then desire-law, right, justice, a word of God pure and simple. And our toleration for men whose thinking tends to soften truth, to rub away the edges of sharp doctrines, to run every doctrine into a region over which falls a mist of uncertainty, saying “this is mystery-this ends in God-we do not know, we can only guess”-our toleration for minds of this class is then very little. Their hesitation or reserve seems to us but inconsequence or sluggishness; and our mind, with its keen dogmatic edge, will have no compromise, our cry is Sinai, Law. This is the great evil of religious controversy. It drives men to extremes.
A great space in the Ideal Life was given to solitude. “After he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into the mountain apart to pray, and when even was come, he was there alone.” It was His way of realizing His undisturbed Communion with the Father. His chosen rest was the solitude in which He retreated from the bustle of the world to the refreshing calm of the eternal. He was the Image of God, in which we too are made; and if we are to realize our true life, of which His was the Model, we must learn to be alone. It is in solitude that we discover the secret of detachment, and realize that supreme relationship which is the fount at once of greatness and of peace-the relationship of the individual soul and God. Solitude is necessary for communion with God. It is in silence that the final truths assert and reveal themselves. It is through the intuitions of silence-the deep soul-convictions which escape words and cannot brook the atmosphere of the crowd and its chatter-that we reach God. “Be still, and know that I am God.”1 [Note: Cosmo Gordon Lang, The Miracles of Jesus.]
I hear the soft September rain intone,
And cheerful crickets chirping in the grass,
I bow my head, I, who am all alone;
The light winds see, and shiver as they pass.
No other thing is so bereft as I,-
The rain-drops fall, and mingle as they fall,-
The chirping cricket knows his neighbour nigh,-
Leaves sway responsive to the light wind's call.
But Friend and Lover Thou hast put afar,
And left me only Thy great, solemn sky,-
I try to pierce beyond the farthest star
To search Thee out, and find Thee ere I die;
Yet dim my vision is, or Thou dost hide
Thy sacred splendour from my yearning eyes:
Be pitiful, O God, and open wide
To me, bereft, Thy heavenly Paradise.
Give me one glimpse of that sweet, far-off rest,-
Then I can bear Earth's solitude again;
My soul, returning from that heavenly quest,
Shall smile, triumphant, at each transient pain.
Nor would I vex my heart with grief or strife,
Though Friend and Lover Thou hast put afar,
If I could see, through my worn tent of Life,
The steadfast shining of Thy morning star.2 [Note: Louise Chandler Moulton, Swallow Flights.]