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1Ki_14:1-18
Now observe that woman stealing down the street, and seeking the old prophet’s house. By her guise she is of the peasantry, and she bears a basket. Yet her gait scarcely befits her garb; and the quick furtive glance she casts around under her coarse hood-veil, betrays some conscious concealment, some fear of recognition, some purpose she would not wish to have known.
This woman, mean as she seems, is the lady of the land; and although her basket contains but a few cakes and biscuits, and a little honey, she might, if she pleased, have filled it with precious and costly things. She is the wife of Jeroboam—as far as we know, his only wife—the mother of his heir; and therefore, if he had a score of wives, the chief of them all. That heir, by name Abijah, is alarmingly ill; and, at the instance of Jeroboam, and impelled by motherly love, that royal lady has come all the way from Tirzah, in this disguise, that she may learn of the prophet what is to become of her son; and the things in her basket are gifts for the man of God, suited to the condition she had assumed. The disguise was thought necessary to conceal this visit from the people, and partly in the idle hope of obtaining, in the semblance of another, the desired answer, unmixed with the reproof and denunciation, which Jeroboam knew that his conduct had been calculated to draw down, from the prophet who had foretold his exaltation. He thus foolishly thought to cozen the Lord, through his prophet, out of an answer of peace, and slyly to evade the judgment he feared might be connected with it; and he idly calculated that the prophet, whose view could extend into the future, hid in the counsels of God, could not see through a present matter wrapped up only in the thin cover of it woman’s hood. “There was never,” says Dr. Hall, “a wicked man who was not infatuate, and in nothing more than in those things wherein he hoped most to transcend the reach of others.”
All this fine contrivance was blown to pieces the moment the wife of Jeroboam crossed Ahijah’s threshold; for then she heard the voice of the blind prophet—“Come in, thou wife of Jeroboam; why feignest thou thyself to be another? for I am sent to thee with heavy tidings.” He then broke forth in a strong tide of denunciation against Jeroboam, because he had sinned and made Israel to sin; and the voice which had proclaimed his rise from a low estate to royal power, now, with still stronger tone, proclaimed the downfall and ruin of his house—quenched in blood—its members to find tombs only in the bowels of beasts and birds. There was one exception—only one. The youth of whom she came to inquire—he only should come to his grave in peace, by dying of his present disease, because in him only was “found some good thing towards the Lord God of Israel in the house of Jeroboam.”
Woeful tidings these for a mother’s heart; and scarcely, perhaps, intelligible to her stunned intellect. Here was beginning of judgment upon Jeroboam, and upon her, because she was his. Judgment in taking away the only well-conditioned and worthy son; and judgment stored up in and for the ill-conditioned ones who were suffered to remain. God, when it suits the purposes of his wisdom and his justice, can afflict no less by what he spares than by what he takes.
Yet there was mercy in this judgment; mercy, strange as it seems to say—to him on whom the sentence of death was passed. It is so stated; and it is more intelligible, than it seems. It was because there was some good thing found in him that he should die. Death was to be for him a reward, a blessing, a deliverance. He should die peaceably upon his bed; for him all Israel should mourn; for him many tears be shed; and he should be brought with honor to his tomb. More than all, he would be taken from his part in the evil that hung over his house; and the Lord’s vindicatory justice would thus be spared the seeming harshness of bringing ruin upon a righteous king for his father’s crimes. Alas! how little do we know the real objects of the various incidents of life and death—of mercy, of punishment, and of trial! In this case the motives were disclosed; and we are suffered to glance upon some of the great secrets of death, which form the trying mysteries of life. Having the instance, we can find the parallels of lives, full of hope and promise, prematurely taken, and that in mercy, as we can judge, to those who depart. The heavenly Husbandman often gathers for his garner the fruit that early ripens, without suffering it to hang needlessly long, beaten by storms, upon the tree. Oh, how often, as many a grieved heart can tell, do the Lord’s best beloved die betimes—taken from the evil to come—while the unripe, the evil, the injurious, live long for mischief to themselves and others! Roses and lilies wither far sooner than thorns and thistles.
Doleful were the tidings the disguised princess had to bear back to the beautiful town of Tirzah. All remoter griefs were probably to her swallowed up in this—which rung continually in her ears in all her homeward way—“When thy feet enter into the city the child shall die.” It is heavy tidings to a mother that she must lose her well-beloved son; but it is a grievous aggravation of her trouble that she might not see him before he died. They who were about him knew not that he was to die today, and therefore could not estimate the preciousness of his last hours, and the privilege of being then near him, and of receiving his embrace. She knew; and she might not be near, nor pour out upon her dying son the fulness of a mother’s heart. Knowing that her son lay on his death-bed, her first impulse must have been to fly home to receive his dying kiss; but her second to linger by the way, as if to protract that dear life which must close the moment she entered the city. Never, surely, before or since, was a distressed mother so woefully torn between the contrary impulses of her affection!
At last her weary steps reached the city; and, as she entered its gate, her son died, and she was only just in time to press to her arms the heart still warm, although it had ceased to beat.