The strong man on whom Joash used to lean was away, and the poor, weak
king went just where the wicked princes led him. It was probably out
of sheer imbecility that he passed from the worship of God to the
acknowledgment and service of idols.
The first point that I would insist upon is a well-worn and familiar
one, as I am well aware, but I urge it upon you, and especially upon
the younger portion of my audience. It is this, that there is no
telling the amount of mischief that pure weakness of character may
lead into. The worst men we come across in the Bible are not those who
begin with a deliberate intention of doing evil. They are weak
creatures, 'reeds shaken by the wind,' who have no power of resisting
the force of circumstances. It is a truth which every one's experience
confirms, that the mother of all possible badness is weakness, and
that, not only as Milton's Satan puts it, 'To be weak is to be
miserable,' but that weakness is wickedness sooner or later. The man
who does not bar the doors and windows of his senses and his soul
against temptation, is sure to make shipwreck of his life and in the
end to become 'a fool.' There is so much wickedness lying round us in
this world that any man who lets himself be shaped and coloured by
that with which he comes in contact, is sure to go to the bad in the
long run. Where a man lays himself open to the accidents of time and
circumstances, the majority of these influences will be contrary to
what is right and good. Therefore, he must gather himself together and
learn to say 'No!' There is no foretelling the profound abysses into
which a 'good, easy' nature, with plenty of high and pure impulses,
perhaps, but which are written in water, may fall. 'Thou, therefore,
young man! be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.' Learn to
say No! or else you will be sure to say Yes! in the wrong place, and
then down you will go, like this Joash whose goodness depended on
Jehoiada, and when he died, all the virtue that had characterised this
life hitherto was laid with him in the dust.
Let us learn from this story in the next place, how little power of
continuance there is in a merely traditional religion. Many of you
call yourselves Christian people mainly because other people do the
same. It is customary to respect and regard Christianity. You have
been brought up in the midst of it. Our country is always considered a
Christian land, and so, naturally, you tacitly accept the truth of a
religion which is so influential. The lowest phase of this attitude is
that which seeks some advantage from a church connection, like the
foolish man in the Old Testament who thought he would do well because
he had a Levite for his priest. Religion is the most personal thing
about a man. To become a Christian is the most personal act one can
perform. It is a thing that a man has to do for himself, and however
friends and guides may help us in other matters, in trials and
perplexities and difficulties, by their sympathy and experience, they
are useless here. A man has here to act as if there were no other
beings in the universe but a solitary God and himself, and unless we
have ourselves done that act in the depths of our own personality, we
have not done it at all. If you young people are good, just because
you have pious parents who make you go to church or chapel on a
Sunday, and keep you out of mischief during the week, your goodness is
a sham. One great result of personal Christianity is to make a
minister, a teacher, a guide, superfluous, and when such an one
becomes so, his work has been successful and not till then. Unless you
put forth for yourself the hand of faith and for yourself yield up the
devotion and love of your own heart, your religion is nought.
However much active effort about the outside of religion there may be,
it is of itself useless. It is without bottom and without reality.
Here we have Joash busy with the externals of worship and actually
deceiving himself thereby. It was a great deal easier to make that
chest for contributions to a Temple Repairing Fund, and to get it well
filled, and to patch up the house of the Lord, than for him to get
down on his knees and pray, and he may have thought that to be busy
about the house of God was to be devout. So it may be with many
Sunday-school teachers and Church workers. Their religion may be as
merely superficial and as little personal as this man's was. It is not
for me to say so about A, B, or C. It is for you to ask of yourselves
if it is so as to you. But I do say that there is nothing that masks
his own soul from a man more than setting him to do something for
Christianity and God's Church, while in his inmost self he has not yet
yielded himself to God.
I look around and I see the devil slaying his thousands by setting
them to work in Christian associations and leaving them no time to
think about their own Christianity. My brother! if the cap fits, go
home and put it on.
We see in Joash's life for how long a time a man may go on in this
self-delusion of external and barren service and never know it. Joash
came to the throne at the age of seven. Up till that age he had lived
in the Temple in concealment. Until he was one and thirty he went on
in a steady, upright course, never knowing that there was anything
hollow in his life. Apparently, Jehoiada's long life of one hundred
and thirty years extended over the greater part of Joash's reign,
during most of which he had Jehoiada to direct him and keep him right,
and all this tragedy comes at the tag end of it.
So he went on apparently all right, like a tree that has become quite
hollow, till during some storm it is blown down and falls with a
crash, and it is seen that for years it has been only the skin of a
tree, bark outside, and inside--emptiness.
II. We come now to the second stage in the later life of Joash: His
resistance to the divine pleading.
'And they left the house of the Lord God of their fathers, and served
groves and idols, and wrath came upon Judah and Jerusalem for their
trespass, yet He sent prophets to them to bring them again unto the
Lord.' He sent with endless pity, with long-suffering patience. He
would not be put away, and as they increased the distance between Him
and them, He increased His energies to bring them back. But they
lifted themselves up, Joash and his princes, and with that strange,
awful power of resisting the attraction of the divine pleading, and
hardening their hearts against the divine patience--'they would not.'
And then comes the affecting episode of the death of the high priest
Zechariah, who had succeeded to his father's place and likewise to his
heroism, and who, with the Spirit of God upon him, stands up and
pointing out his wickedness, rebukes the fallen monarch for his
apostasy. Joash, doubtless stung to the quick by Zechariah's just
reproaches, allowed the truculent princes to slay him in the court of
the Temple, even between the very shrine and the altar.
What a picture we have here of the divine love which follows every
wanderer with its pleadings and beseechings! It came to this man
through the lips of a prophet. It comes to us all in daily blessings,
sometimes in messages, like these poor words of mine. God will not let
us ruin ourselves without pleading with us and wooing us to love Him
and cling to Him. 'He rises up early' and daily sends us His messages,
sometimes rebukes and voices in our conscience, sometimes sunset glows
and starry heavens lifting our thoughts above this low earth,
sometimes sorrows that are meant to 'drive us to His breast,' and
above all, the 'Gospel of our salvation' in Christ, ever, in such a
land as ours, sounding in our ears.
Still further, we see in Joash what a strange, awful strength of
obstinate resistance, a character weak as regards its resistance to
man, can put forth against God. He never attempted to say 'No!' to the
princes of Judah, but he could say it again and again to his Father in
heaven. He could not but yield to the temptations which were level
with his eyes, and this poor creature, easily swayed by human
allurements and influences, could gather himself together, standing,
as it were, on his little pin point, and say to God, 'Thou dost call
and I refuse.' What a paradox, and yet repetitions of it are sitting
in these pews, only half aware that it is about them that I am
speaking!
The ever-deepening evil which began with forsaking the house of the
Lord and serving Ashtaroth, ends with Joash steeping his hands in
blood. The murder of Zechariah was beyond the common count of crimes,
for it was a foul desecration of the Temple, an act of the blackest
ingratitude to the man who had saved his infant life, and put him on
the throne, an outrage on the claims of family connections, for Joash
and Zechariah were probably blood relations. My brother! once get your
foot upon that steep incline of evil, once forsake the path of what is
good and right and true, and you are very much like a climber who
misses his footing up among the mountain peaks, and down he slides
till he reaches the edge of the precipice and then in an instant is
dashed to pieces at the bottom. Once put your foot on that slippery
slope and you know not where you may fall to.