'And Elisha said to the king of Israel, Put thine hand upon the bow.
And he put his hand upon it: and Elisha put his hands upon the king's
hands.'--2 KINGS xiii. 16.
This is part of one of the strangest narratives in the Old Testament.
Elisha is on his deathbed, 'sick of the sickness' wherewith he 'should
die.' A very different scene, that close sick-chamber, from the open
plain beyond Jordan from which Elijah had gone up; a very different
way of passing from life by wasting sickness than by fiery chariot!
But God is as near His servant in the one place as in the other, and
the slow wasting away is as much His messenger as the sudden
apocalypse of the horsemen of fire. The king of Israel comes to the
old prophet, and very significantly repeats over him his own
exclamation over Elijah, 'My father! My father! the chariot of Israel
and the horsemen thereof.' Elisha takes no notice of the grief and
reverence expressed by the exclamation, but goes straight to his work,
and what follows is remarkable indeed.
Here is a prophet dying; and his last words are not edifying moral and
religious reflections, nor does he seem to be much concerned to leave
with the king his final protest against Israel's sin, but his thoughts
are all of warfare, and his last effort is to stir up the sluggish
young monarch to some of his own enthusiasm in the conflict with the
enemy. It does not sound like an edifying deathbed. People might have
said, 'Ah! secular and political affairs should be all out of a man's
mind when he comes to his last moments.' But Elisha thought that to
stick to his life's work till the last breath was out of him, and to
devote the last breath to stimulating successors who might catch up
the torch that dropped from his failing hands, was no unworthy end of
a prophet's life.
So there followed what perhaps is not very familiar to some of us,
that strange scene in which the dying man is far fuller of energy and
vigour than the young king, and takes the upper hand of him, giving
him a series of curt, authoritative commands, each of which he
punctiliously obeys. 'Take bow and arrow,' and he took them. Then the
prophet lays his wasted hand for a moment on the strong, young hand,
and having thus either in symbol or reality--never mind
which--communicated power, he says to him, 'Fling open the casement
towards the quarter where the enemy's territory lies,' and he flings
it open. 'Now, shoot,' and he shoots. Then the old man gathers himself
up on his bed, and with a triumphant shout exclaims, 'The Lord's arrow
of victory!... Thou shalt smite the Syrians till they be consumed.'
That is not all. There is a second stage. The promise is given; the
possibility is opened before the king, and now all depends on the
question whether he will rise to the height of the occasion. So the
prophet says to him, 'Take the sheaf of arrows in your hand'; and he
takes them. And then he says, 'Now smite upon the ground.' It is a
test. If he had been roused and stirred by what had gone before; if he
had any earnestness of belief in the power that was communicated, and
any eagerness of desire to realise the promises that had been given of
complete victory, what would he have done? What would Elisha have done
if he had had the quiver in his hand? This king smites three
perfunctory taps on the floor, and having done what will satisfy the
old man's whim, and what in decency he had to do, he stops, as if
weary of the whole performance. So the prophet bursts out in
indignation on his dying bed--'Thou shouldst have smitten five or six
times; then hadst thou conquered utterly. Now thou shalt conquer but
thrice.' A strange story; very far away from our atmosphere and
latitude! Yet are there not obviously in it great principles which may
be disentangled from their singular setting, and fully applied to us?
I think so. Let us try and draw them from it.