In dealing with the various subjects of this book, we have reserved for
separate treatment their relation to the Messianic hopes of the Jews and
to the realisation of these hopes in Christ. The Messianic teaching of
Chronicles is only complete when we collect and combine the noblest traits
in its pictures of David and Solomon, of prophets, priests, and kings. We
cannot ascribe to Chronicles any great influence on the subsequent
development of the Jewish idea of the Messiah. In the first place, the
chronicler does not point out the bearing which his treatment of history
has upon the expectation of a future deliverer. He has no formal intention
of describing the character and office of the Messiah; he merely wishes to
write a history so as to emphasise the facts which most forcibly
illustrated the sacred mission of Israel. And, in the second place,
Chronicles never exercised any great influence over Jewish thought, and
never attained to anything like the popularity of the books of Samuel and
Kings. Many circumstances conspired to prevent the Temple ministry from
obtaining an undivided authority over later Judaism. The growth of their
power was broken in upon by the persecutions of Antiochus and the wars of
the Maccabees. The ministry of the Temple under the Maccabæan high-priests
must have been very different from that to which the chronicler belonged.
Even if the priests and Levites still exercised any influence upon
theology, they were overshadowed by the growing importance of the
rabbinical schools of Babylon and Palestine. Moreover, the rise of
Hellenistic Judaism and the translation of the Scriptures into Greek
introduced another new and potent factor into the development of the
Jewish religion. Of all the varied forces that were at work few or none
tended to assign any special authority to Chronicles, nor has it left any
very marked traces on later literature. Josephus indeed uses it for his
history, but the New Testament is under very slight obligation to our
author.
But Chronicles reveals to us the position and tendencies of Jewish thought
in the interval between Ezra and the Maccabees. The Messiah was expected
to renew the ancient glories of the chosen people, “to restore the kingdom
to Israel”; we learn from Chronicles what sort of a kingdom He was to
restore. We see the features of the ancient monarchy that were dear to the
memories of the Jews, the characters of the prophets, priests, and kings
whom they delighted to honour. As their ideas of the past shaped and
coloured their hopes for the future, their conception of what was noblest
and best in the history of the monarchy was at the same time the measure
of what they expected in the Messiah. However little influence Chronicles
may have exerted as a piece of literature, the tendencies of which it is a
monument continued to leaven the thought of Israel, and are everywhere
manifest in the New Testament.
We have to bear in mind that Messiah, “Anointed,” was the familiar title
of the Israelite kings; its use for the priests was late and secondary.
The use of a royal title to denote the future Saviour of the nation shows
us that He was primarily conceived of as an ideal king; and apart from any
formal enunciation of this conception, the title itself would exercise a
controlling influence upon the development of the Messianic idea.
Accordingly in the New Testament we find that the Jews were looking for a
king; and Jesus calls His new society the Kingdom of Heaven.
But for the chronicler the Messiah, the Anointed of Jehovah, is no mere
secular prince. We have seen how the chronicler tends to include religious
duties and prerogatives among the functions of the king. David and Solomon
and their pious successors are supreme alike in Church and state as the
earthly representatives of Jehovah. The actual titles of priest and
prophet are not bestowed upon the kings, but they are virtually priests in
their care for and control over the buildings and ritual of the Temple,
and they are prophets when, like David and Solomon, they hold direct
fellowship with Jehovah and announce His will to the people. Moreover,
David, as “the Psalmist of Israel,” had become the inspired interpreter of
the religious experience of the Jews. The ancient idea of the king as the
victorious conqueror was gradually giving place to a more spiritual
conception of his office; the Messiah was becoming more and more a
definitely religious personage. Thus Chronicles prepared the way for the
acceptance of Christ as a spiritual Deliverer, who was not only King, but
also Priest and Prophet. In fact, we may claim the chronicler’s own
implied authority for including in the picture of the coming King the
characteristics he ascribes to the priest and the prophet. Thus the
Messiah of Chronicles is distinctly more spiritual and less secular than
the Messiah of popular Jewish enthusiasm in our Lord’s own time. Whereas
in the chronicler’s time the tendency was to spiritualise the idea of the
king, the tenure of the office of high-priest by the Maccabæan princes
tended rather to secularise the priesthood and to restore older and cruder
conceptions of the Messianic King.
Let us see how the chronicler’s history of the house of David illustrates
the person and work of the Son of David, who came to restore the ancient
monarchy in the spiritual kingdom of which it was the symbol. The Gospels
introduce our Lord very much as the chronicler introduces David: they give
us His genealogy, and pass almost immediately to His public ministry. Of
His training and preparation for that ministry, of the chain of earthly
circumstances that determined the time and method of His entry upon the
career of a public Teacher, they tell us next to nothing. We are only
allowed one brief glimpse of the life of the holy Child; our attention is
mainly directed to the royal Saviour when He has entered upon His kingdom;
and His Divine nature finds expression in mature manhood, when none of the
limitations of childhood detract from the fulness of His redeeming service
and sacrifice.
The authority of Christ rests on the same basis as that of the ancient
kings: it is at once human and Divine. In Christ indeed this twofold
authority is in one sense peculiar to Himself; but in the practical
application of His authority to the hearts and consciences of men He
treads in the footsteps of His ancestors. His kingdom rests on His own
Divine commission and on the consent of His subjects. God has given Him
the right to rule, but He will not reign in any heart till He receives its
free submission. And still, as of old, Christ, thus chosen and well
beloved of God and man, is King over the whole life of His people, and
claims to rule over them in their homes, their business, their recreation,
their social and political life, as well as in their public and private
worship. If David and his pious successors were devoted to Jehovah and His
temple, if they protected their people from foreign foes and wisely
administered the affairs of Israel, Christ sets us the example of perfect
obedience to the Father; He gives us deliverance and victory in our
warfare against principalities and powers, against the world rulers of
this darkness, and against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly
places; He administers in peace and holiness the inner kingdom of the
believing heart. All that was foreshadowed both by David and Solomon is
realised in Christ. The warlike David is a symbol of the holy warfare of
Christ and the Church militant, of Him who came not to send peace on
earth, but a sword; Solomon is the symbol of Christ, the Prince of peace
in the Church triumphant. The tranquillity and splendour of the reign of
the first son of David are types of the serene glory of Christ’s kingdom
as it is partly realised in the hearts of His children and as it will be
fully realised in heaven; the God-given wisdom of Solomon prefigures the
perfect knowledge and understanding of Him who is Himself the Word and
Wisdom of God.
The shadows that darken the history of the kings of Judah and even the
life of David himself remind us that the Messiah moved upon a far higher
moral and spiritual level than the monarchs whose royal dignity was a type
of His own. Like David, He was exposed to the machinations of Satan; but,
unlike David, He successfully resisted the tempter. He was in “all points
tempted like as we are, yet without sin.”
The great priestly work of David and Solomon was the building of the
Temple and the organisation of its ritual and ministry. By this work the
kings made splendid provision for fellowship between Jehovah and His
people, and for the system of sacrifices, whereby a sinful nation
expressed their penitence and received the assurance of forgiveness. This
has been the supreme work of Christ: through Him we have access to God; we
enter into the holy place, into the Divine presence, by a new and living
way, that is to say His flesh; He has brought us into the perpetual
fellowship of the Spirit. And whereas Solomon could only build one temple,
to which the believer paid occasional visits and obtained the sense of
Divine fellowship through the ministry of the priests, Christ makes every
faithful heart the temple of sacred service, and He has offered for us the
one sacrifice, and provides a universal atonement.
In His priesthood, as in His sacrifice, He represents us before God, and
this representation is not merely technical and symbolic: in Him we find
ourselves brought near to God, and our desires and aspirations are
presented as petitions at the throne of the heavenly grace. But, on the
other hand, in His love and righteousness He represents God to us, and
brings the assurance of our acceptance.
Other minor features of the office and rights of the priests and Levites
find a parallel in Christ. He also is our Teacher and our Judge; to Him
and to His service all worldly wealth may be consecrated. Christ is in all
things the spiritual Heir of the house of Aaron as well as of the house of
David; because He is a Priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek, He,
like Melchizedek, is also King of Salem; of His kingdom and of His
priesthood there shall be no end. But while Christ is to the Kingdom of
Heaven what David was to the Israelite monarchy, while in the different
aspects of His work He is at once Temple, Priest, and Sacrifice, yet in
the ministry of His earthly life He is above all a Prophet, the supreme
successor of Elijah and Isaiah. It was only in a figure that He sat upon
David’s throne; it formed no part of His plan to exercise earthly
dominion: His kingdom was not of this world. He did not belong to the
priestly tribe, and performed none of the external acts of priestly
ritual; He did not base His authority upon any genealogy with regard to
priesthood, as the Epistle to the Hebrews says, “It is evident that our
Lord hath sprung out of Judah, as to which tribe Moses spake nothing
concerning priests.”(325) His royal birth had its symbolic value, but He
never asked men to believe in Him because of His human descent from David.
He relied as little on the authority of office as on that of birth.
Officially He was neither scribe nor rabbi. Like the prophets, His only
authority was His Divine commission and the witness of the Spirit in the
hearts of His hearers. The people recognised Him as a prophet; they took
Him for Elijah or one of the prophets; He spoke of Himself as a prophet:
“Not without honour, save in his own country.” We have seen that, while
the priests ministered to the regular and recurring needs of the people,
the Divine guidance in special emergencies and the Divine authority for
new departures were given by the prophets. By a prophet Jehovah brought
Israel out of Egypt,(326) and Christ as a Prophet led His people out of
the bondage of the Law into the liberty of the Gospel. By Him the Divine
authority was given for the greatest religious revolution that the world
has ever seen. And still He is the Prophet of the Church. He does not
merely provide for the religious wants that are common to every race and
to every generation: as the circumstances of His Church altar, and the
believer is confronted with fresh difficulties and called upon to
undertake new tasks, Christ reveals to His people the purpose and counsel
of God. Even the record of His earthly teaching is constantly found to
have anticipated the needs of our own time; His Spirit enables us to
discover fresh applications of the truths He taught: and through Him
special light is sought and granted for the guidance of individuals and of
the Church in their need.
But in Chronicles special stress is laid on the darker aspects of the work
of the prophets. They constantly appear to administer rebukes and announce
coming punishment. Both Christ and His apostles were compelled to assume
the same attitude towards Israel. Like Jeremiah, their hearts sank under
the burden of so stern a duty. Christ denounced the Pharisees, and wept
over the city that knew not the things belonging to its peace; He declared
the impending ruin of the Temple and the Holy City. Even so His Spirit
still rebukes sin, and warns the impenitent of inevitable punishment.
We have seen also in Chronicles that no stress was laid on any material
rewards for the prophets, and that their fidelity was sometimes
recompensed with persecution and death. Like Christ Himself, they had
nothing to do with priestly wealth and splendour. The silence of the
chronicler to the income of these prophets makes them fitting types of Him
who had not where to lay His head. A discussion of the income of Christ
would almost savour of blasphemy; we should shrink from inquiring how far
“those who derived spiritual profit from His teaching gave Him substantial
proofs of their appreciation of His ministry.” Christ’s recompense at the
hands of the world and of the Jewish Church was that which former prophets
had received. Like Zechariah the son of Jehoiada, He was persecuted and
slain; He delivered a prophet’s message, and died a prophet’s death.
But, besides the chronicler’s treatment of the offices of prophet, priest,
and king, there was another feature of his teaching which would prepare
the way for a clear comprehension of the person and work of Christ. We
have noticed how the growing sense of the power and majesty of Jehovah
seemed to set Him at a distance from man, and how the Jews welcomed the
idea of the mediation of an angelic ministry. And yet the angels were too
vague and unfamiliar, too little known, and too imperfectly understood to
satisfy men’s longing for some means of fellowship between themselves and
the remote majesty of an almighty God; while still their ministry served
to maintain faith in the possibility of mediation, and to quicken the
yearning after some better way of access to Jehovah. When Christ came He
found this faith and yearning waiting to be satisfied; they opened a door
through which Christ found His way into hearts prepared to receive Him. In
Him the familiar human figures of priest and prophet were exalted into the
supernatural dignity of the Angel of Jehovah. Men had long strained their
eyes in vain to a far-off heaven; and, behold, a human voice recalled
their gaze to the earth; and they turned and found God beside them, kindly
and accessible, a Man with men. They realised the promise that a modern
poet puts into David’s mouth:—
“... O Saul, it shall be
A face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me
Thou shalt love and be loved by for ever; a Hand like this hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ
stand!”
We have thus seen how the figures of the chronicler’s history—prophet,
priest, king, and angel—were types and foreshadowings of Christ. We may
sum up this aspect of his teaching by a quotation from a modern exponent
of Old Testament theology:—
“Moses the prophet is the first type of the Mediator. By his side stands
Aaron the priest, who connects the people with God, and consecrates it....
But from the time of David both these figures pale in the imagination of
the people before the picture of the Davidic king. His is the figure which
appears the most indispensable condition of all true happiness for Israel.
David is the third and by far the most perfect type of the
Consummator.”(327)
This recurrence to the king as the most perfect type of the Redeemer
suggests a last application of the Messianic teaching of the chronicler.
In discussing his pictures of the kings, we have ventured to give them a
meaning adapted to modern political life. In Israel the king stood for the
state. When a community combined for common action to erect a temple or
repel an invader, the united force was controlled and directed by the
king; he was the symbol of national union and co-operation. To-day, when a
community acts as a whole, its agent and instrument is the civil
government; the state is the people organised for the common good,
subordinating individual ends to the welfare of the whole nation. Where
the Old Testament has “king,” its modern equivalent may read the state or
the civil government,—nay, even for special purposes the municipality, the
county council, or the school board. Shall we obtain any helpful or even
intelligible result if we apply this method of translation to the doctrine
of the Messiah? Externally at any rate the translation bears a startling
likeness to what has been regarded as a specially modern development.
“Israel looked for salvation from the king,” would read, “Modern society
should seek salvation from the state.” Assuredly there are many prophets
who have taken up this burden without any idea that their new heresy was
only a reproduction of old and forgotten orthodoxy. But the history of the
growth of the Messianic idea supplies a correction to the primitive
baldness of this principle of salvation by the state. In time the picture
of the Messianic king came to include the attributes of the prophet and
the priest. If we care to complete our modern application, we must affirm
that the state can never be a saviour till it becomes sensitive to Divine
influences and conscious of a Divine presence.
When we see how the Messianic hope of Israel was purified and ennobled to
receive a fulfilment glorious beyond its wildest dreams, we are encouraged
to believe that the fantastic visions of the Socialist may be divinely
guided to some reasonable ideal and may prepare the way for some further
manifestation of the grace of God. But the Messianic state, like the
Messiah, may be called upon to suffer and die for the salvation of the
world, that it may receive a better resurrection.
BOOK IV. THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY.
Chapter I. The Last Prayer Of David. 1 Chron. xxix. 10-19.
In order to do justice to the chronicler’s method of presenting us with a
number of very similar illustrations of the same principle, we have in the
previous book grouped much of his material under a few leading subjects.
There remains the general thread of the history, which is, of course, very
much the same in Chronicles as in the book of Kings, and need not be dwelt
on at any length. At the same time some brief survey is necessary for the
sake of completeness and in order to bring out the different complexion
given to the history by the chronicler’s alterations and omissions.
Moreover, there are a number of minor points that are most conveniently
dealt with in the course of a running exposition.
The special importance attached by the chronicler to David and Solomon has
enabled us to treat their reigns at length in discussing his picture of
the ideal king; and similarly the reign of Ahaz has served as an
illustration of the character and fortunes of the wicked kings. We
therefore take up the history at the accession of Rehoboam, and shall
simply indicate very briefly the connection of the reign of Ahaz with what
precedes and follows. But before passing on to Rehoboam we must consider
“The Last Prayer of David,” a devotional paragraph peculiar to Chronicles.
The detailed exposition of this passage would have been out of proportion
in a brief sketch of the chronicler’s account of the character and reign
of David, and would have had no special bearing on the subject of the
ideal king. On the other hand, the “Prayer” states some of the leading
principles which govern the chronicler in his interpretation of the
history of Israel; and its exposition forms a suitable introduction to the
present division of our subject.
The occasion of this prayer was the great closing scene of David’s life,
which we have already described. The prayer is a thanksgiving for the
assurance David had received that the accomplishment of the great purpose
of his life, the erection of a temple to Jehovah, was virtually secured.
He had been permitted to collect the materials for the building, he had
received the plans of the Temple from Jehovah, and had placed them in the
willing hands of his successor. The princes and the people had caught his
own enthusiasm and lavishly supplemented the bountiful provision already
made for the future work. Solomon had been accepted as king by popular
acclamation. Every possible preparation had been made that could be made,
and the aged king poured out his heart in praise to God for His grace and
favour.
The prayer falls naturally into four subdivisions: vv. 10-13 are a kind of
doxology in honour of Jehovah; in vv. 14-16 David acknowledges that Israel
is entirely dependent upon Jehovah for the means of rendering Him
acceptable service; in ver. 17 he claims that he and his people have
offered willingly unto Jehovah; and in vv. 18 and 19 he prays that Solomon
and the people may build the Temple and abide in the Law.
In the doxology God is addressed as “Jehovah, the God of Israel, our
Father,” and similarly in ver. 18 as “Jehovah, the God of Abraham, of
Isaac, and of Israel.” For the chronicler the accession of David is the
starting-point of Israelite history and religion, but here, as in the
genealogies, he links his narrative to that of the Pentateuch, and reminds
his readers that the crowning dispensation of the worship of Jehovah in
the Temple rested on the earlier revelations to Abraham, Isaac, and
Israel.
We are at once struck by the divergence from the usual formula: “Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob.” Moreover, when God is referred to as the God of the
Patriarch personally, the usual phrase is “the God of Jacob.” The formula,
“God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel,” occurs again in Chronicles in the
account of Hezekiah’s reformation; it only occurs elsewhere in the history
of Elijah in the book of Kings.(328) The chronicler avoids the use of the
name “Jacob,” and for the most part calls the Patriarch “Israel.” “Jacob”
only occurs in two poetic quotations, where its omission was almost
impossible, because in each case “Israel” is used in the parallel
clause.(329) This choice of names is an application of the same principle
that led to the omission of the discreditable incidents in the history of
David and Solomon. Jacob was the supplanter. The name suggested the
unbrotherly craft of the Patriarch. It was not desirable that the Jews
should be encouraged to think of Jehovah as the God of a grasping and
deceitful man. Jehovah was the God of the Patriarch’s nobler nature and
higher life, the God of Israel, who strove with God and prevailed.
In the doxology that follows the resources of language are almost
exhausted in the attempt to set forth adequately “the greatness, and the
power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty, ... the riches and
honour, ... the power and might,” of Jehovah. These verses read like an
expansion of the simple Christian doxology, “Thine is the kingdom, the
power, and the glory,” but in all probability the latter is an
abbreviation from our text. In both there is the same recognition of the
ruling omnipotence of God; but the chronicler, having in mind the glory
and power of David and his magnificent offerings for the building of the
Temple, is specially careful to intimate that Jehovah is the source of all
worldly greatness: “Both riches and honour come of Thee, ... and in Thy
hand it is to make great and to give strength unto all.”
The complementary truth, the entire dependence of Israel on Jehovah, is
dealt with in the next verses. David has learnt humility from the tragic
consequences of his fatal census; his heart is no longer uplifted with
pride at the wealth and glory of his kingdom; he claims no credit for the
spontaneous impulse of generosity that prompted his munificence.
Everything is traced back to Jehovah: “All things come of Thee, and of
Thine own have we given Thee.” Before, when David contemplated the vast
population of Israel and the great array of his warriors, the sense of
God’s displeasure fell upon him; now, when the riches and honour of his
kingdom were displayed before him, he may have felt the chastening
influence of his former experience. A touch of melancholy darkened his
spirit for a moment; standing upon the brink of the dim, mysterious Sheol,
he found small comfort in barbaric abundance of timber and stone, jewels,
talents, and darics; he saw the emptiness of all earthly splendour. Like
Abraham before the children of Heth, he stood before Jehovah a stranger
and a sojourner.(330) Bildad the Shuhite had urged Job to submit himself
to the teaching of a venerable orthodoxy, because “we are of yesterday and
know nothing, because our days upon earth are a shadow.”(331) The same
thought made David feel his insignificance, in spite of his wealth and
royal dominion: “Our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there no
abiding.”
He turns from these sombre thoughts to the consoling reflection that in
all his preparations he has been the instrument of a Divine purpose, and
has served Jehovah willingly. To-day he can approach God with a clear
conscience: “I know also, my God, that Thou triest the heart and hast
pleasure in uprightness. As for me, in the uprightness of my heart I have
willingly offered all these things.” He rejoiced, moreover, that the
people had offered willingly. The chronicler anticipates the teaching of
St. Paul that “the Lord loveth a cheerful giver.” David gives of his
abundance in the same spirit in which the widow gave her mite. The two
narratives are mutually supplementary. It is possible to apply the story
of the widow’s mite so as to suggest that God values our offerings in
inverse proportion to their amount. We are reminded by the willing
munificence of David that the rich may give of his abundance as simply and
humbly and as acceptably as the poor man gives of his poverty.
But however grateful David might be for the pious and generous spirit by
which his people were now possessed, he did not forget that they could
only abide in that spirit by the continued enjoyment of Divine help and
grace. His thanksgiving concludes with prayer. Spiritual depression is apt
to follow very speedily in the train of spiritual exaltation; days of joy
and light are granted to us that we may make provision for future
necessity.
David does not merely ask that Israel may be kept in external obedience
and devotion: his prayer goes deeper. He knows that out of the heart are
the issues of life, and he prays that the heart of Solomon and the
thoughts of the heart of the people may be kept right with God. Unless the
fountain of life were pure, it would be useless to cleanse the stream.
David’s special desire is that the Temple may be built, but this desire is
only the expression of his loyalty to the Law. Without the Temple the
commandments, and testimonies, and statutes of the Law could not be
rightly observed. But he does not ask that the people may be constrained
to build the Temple and keeping the Law in order that their hearts may be
made perfect; their hearts are to be made perfect that they may keep the
Law.
Henceforward throughout his history the chronicler’s criterion of a
perfect heart, a righteous life, in king and people, is their attitude
towards the Law and the Temple. Because their ordinances and worship
formed the accepted standard of religion and morality, through which men’s
goodness would naturally express themselves. Similarly only under a
supreme sense of duty to God and man may the Christian willingly violate
the established canons of religious and social life.
We may conclude by noticing a curious feature in the wording of David’s
prayer. In the nineteenth, as in the first, verse of this chapter the
Temple, according to our English versions, is referred to as “the palace.”
The original word _bîrâ_ is probably Persian, though a parallel form is
quoted from the Assyrian. As a Hebrew word it belongs to the latest and
most corrupt stage of the language as found in the Old Testament; and only
occurs in Chronicles, Nehemiah, Esther, and Daniel. In putting this word
into the mouth of David, the chronicler is guilty of an anachronism,
parallel to his use of the word “darics.” The word _bîrâ_ appears to have
first become familiar to the Jews as the name of a Persian palace or
fortress in Susa; it is used in Nehemiah of the castle attached to the
Temple, and in later times the derivative Greek name _Baris_ had the same
meaning. It is curious to find the chronicler, in his effort to find a
sufficiently dignified title for the temple of Jehovah, driven to borrow a
word which belonged originally to the royal magnificence of a heathen
empire, and which was used later on to denote the fortress whence a Roman
garrison controlled the fanaticism of Jewish worship.(332) The
chronicler’s intention, no doubt, was to intimate that the dignity of the
Temple surpassed that of any royal palace. He could not suppose that it
was greater in extent or constructed of more costly materials; the living
presence of Jehovah was its one supreme and unique distinction. The King
gave honour to His dwelling-place.
Chapter II. Rehoboam And Abijah: The Importance Of Ritual. 2 Chron.
x.-xiii.
The transition from Solomon to Rehoboam brings to light a serious drawback
of the chronicler’s principle of selection. In the history of Solomon we
read of nothing but wealth, splendour, unchallenged dominion, and
superhuman wisdom; and yet the breath is hardly out of the body of the
wisest and greatest king of Israel before his empire falls to pieces. We
are told, as in the book of Kings, that the people met Rehoboam with a
demand for release from “the grievous service of thy father,” and yet we
were expressly told only two chapters before that “of the children of
Israel did Solomon make no servants for his work; but they were men of
war, and chief of his captains, and rulers of his chariots and of his
horsemen.”(333) Rehoboam apparently had been left by the wisdom of his
father to the companionship of head-strong and featherbrained youths; he
followed their advice rather than that of Solomon’s grey-headed
counsellors, with the result that the ten tribes successfully revolted and
chose Jeroboam for their king. Rehoboam assembled an army to reconquer his
lost territory, but Jehovah through the prophet Shemaiah forbade him to
make war against Jeroboam.
The chronicler here and elsewhere shows his anxiety not to perplex simple
minds with unnecessary difficulties. They might be harassed and disturbed
by the discovery that the king, who built the Temple and was specially
endowed with Divine wisdom, had fallen into grievous sin and been visited
with condign punishment. Accordingly everything that discredits Solomon
and detracts from his glory is omitted. The general principle is sound; an
earnest teacher, alive to his responsibility, will not wantonly obtrude
difficulties upon his hearers; when silence does not involve disloyalty to
truth, he will be willing that they should remain in ignorance of some of
the more mysterious dealings of God in nature and history. But silence was
more possible and less dangerous in the chronicler’s time than in the
nineteenth century. He could count upon a docile and submissive spirit in
his readers; they would not inquire beyond what they were told: they would
not discover the difficulties for themselves. Jewish youths were not
exposed to the attacks of eager and militant sceptics, who would force
these difficulties upon their notice in an exaggerated form, and at once
demand that they should cease to believe in anything human or Divine.
And yet, though the chronicler had great advantages in this matter, his
own narrative illustrates the narrow limits within which the principle of
the suppression of difficulties can be safely applied. His silence as to
Solomon’s sins and misfortunes makes the revolt of the ten tribes utterly
inexplicable. After the account of the perfect wisdom, peace, and
prosperity of Solomon’s reign, the revolt comes upon an intelligent reader
with a shock of surprise and almost of incredulity. If he could not test
the chronicler’s narrative by that of the book of Kings—and it was no part
of the chronicler’s purpose that his history should be thus tested—the
violent transition from Solomon’s unbroken prosperity to the catastrophe
of the disruption would leave the reader quite uncertain as to the general
credibility of Chronicles. In avoiding Scylla, our author has fallen into
Charybdis; he has suppressed one set of difficulties only to create
others. If we wish to help intelligent inquirers and to aid them to form
an independent judgment, our safest plan will often be to tell them all we
know ourselves and to believe that difficulties, which in no way mar our
spiritual life, will not destroy their faith.
In the next section(334) the chronicler tells how for three years Rehoboam
administered his diminished kingdom with wisdom and success; he and his
people walked in the way of David and Solomon, and his kingdom was
established, and he was strong. He fortified fifteen cities in Judah and
Benjamin, and put captains in them, and store of victuals, and oil and
wine, and shields and spears, and made them exceeding strong. Rehoboam was
further strengthened by deserters from the northern kingdom. Though the
Pentateuch and the book of Joshua assigned to the priests and Levites
cities in the territory held by Jeroboam, yet their intimate association
with the Temple rendered it impossible for them to remain citizens of a
state hostile to Jerusalem. The chronicler indeed tells us that “Jeroboam
and his sons cast them off, that they should not execute the priest’s
office unto Jehovah, and appointed others to be priests for the high
places and the he-goats and for the calves which he had.” It is difficult
to understand what the chronicler means by this statement. On the face of
it, we should suppose that Jeroboam refused to employ the house of Aaron
and the tribe of Levi for the worship of his he-goats and calves, but the
chronicler could not describe such action as casting “them off that they
should not execute the priest’s office unto Jehovah.” The passage has been
explained to mean that Jeroboam sought to hinder them from exercising
their functions at the Temple by preventing them from visiting Judah; but
to confine the priests and Levites to his own kingdom would have been a
strange way of casting them off. However, whether driven out by Jeroboam
or escaping from him, they came to Jerusalem and brought with them from
among the ten tribes other pious Israelites, who were attached to the
worship of the Temple. Judah and Jerusalem became the home of all true
worshippers of Jehovah; and those who remained in the northern kingdom
were given up to idolatry or the degenerate and corrupt worship of the
high places. The chronicler then gives us some account of Rehoboam’s harem
and children, and tells that he dealt wisely, and dispersed his
twenty-eight sons “throughout all the lands of Judah and Benjamin, unto
every fenced city.” He gave them the means of maintaining a luxurious
table, and provided them with numerous wives, and trusted that, being thus
happily circumstanced, they would lack leisure, energy, and ambition to
imitate Absalom and Adonijah.
Prosperity and security turned the head of Rehoboam as they had done that
of David: “He forsook the law of Jehovah, and all Israel with him.” “All
Israel” means all the subjects of Rehoboam; the chronicler treats the ten
tribes as cut off from Israel. The faithful worshippers of Jehovah in
Judah had been reinforced by the priests, Levites, and all other pious
Israelites from the northern kingdom; and yet in three years they forsook
the cause for which they had left their country and their fathers house.
Punishment was not long delayed, for Shishak, king of Egypt, invaded Judah
with an immense host and took away the treasures of the house of Jehovah
and of the king’s house.
The chronicler explains why Rehoboam was not more severely punished.(335)
Shishak appeared before Jerusalem with his immense host: Ethiopians, Lubim
or Lybians, and Sukiim, a mysterious people only mentioned here. The LXX.
and Vulgate translate Sukiim “Troglodytes,” apparently identifying them
with the cave-dwellers on the western or Ethiopian coast of the Red Sea.
In order to find safety from these strange and barbarous enemies, Rehoboam
and his princes were gathered together in Jerusalem. Shemaiah the prophet
appeared before them, and declared that the invasion was Jehovah’s
punishment for their sin, whereupon they humbled themselves, and Jehovah
accepted their penitent submission. He would not destroy Jerusalem, but
the Jews should serve Shishak, “that they may know My service and the
service of the kingdoms of the countries.” When they threw off the yoke of
Jehovah, they sold themselves into a worse bondage. There is no freedom to
be gained by repudiating the restraints of morality and religion. If we do
not choose to be the servants of obedience unto righteousness, our only
alternative is to become the slaves “of sin unto death.” The repentant
sinner may return to his true allegiance, and yet he may still be allowed
to taste something of the bitterness and humiliation of the bondage of
sin. His Shishak may be some evil habit or propensity or special liability
to temptation, that is permitted to harass him without destroying his
spiritual life. In time the chastening of the Lord works out the peaceable
fruits of righteousness, and the Christian is weaned for ever from the
unprofitable service of sin.
Unhappily the repentance inspired by trouble and distress is not always
real and permanent. Many will humble themselves before the Lord in order
to avert imminent ruin, and will forsake Him when the danger has passed
away. Apparently Rehoboam soon fell away again into sin, for the final
judgment upon him is, “He did that which was evil, because he set not his
heart to seek Jehovah.”(336) David in his last prayer had asked for a
“perfect heart” for Solomon, but he had not been able to secure this
blessing for his grandson, and Rehoboam was “the foolishness of the
people, one that had no understanding, who turned away the people through
his counsel.”(337)
Rehoboam was succeeded by his son Abijah, concerning whom we are told in
the book of Kings that “he walked in all the sins of his father, which he
had done before him; and his heart was not perfect with Jehovah his God,
as the heart of David his father.” The chronicler omits this unfavourable
verdict; he does not indeed classify Abijah among the good kings by the
usual formal statement that “he did that which was good and right in the
eyes of Jehovah,” but Abijah delivers a hortatory speech and by Divine
assistance obtains a great victory over Jeroboam. There is not a
suggestion of any evil-doing on the part of Abijah; and yet we gather from
the history of Asa that in Abijah’s reign the cities of Judah were given
up to idolatry, with all its paraphernalia of “strange altars, high
places, Asherim, and sun-images.” As in the case of Solomon, so here, the
chronicler has sacrificed even the consistency of his own narrative to his
care for the reputation of the house of David. How the verdict of ancient
history upon Abijah came to be set aside we do not know. The charitable
work of whitewashing the bad characters of history has always had an
attraction for enterprising annalists; and Abijah was a more promising
subject than Nero, Tiberius, or Henry VIII. The chronicler would rejoice
to discover one more good king of Judah; but yet why should the record of
Abijah’s sins be expunged, while Ahaziah and Amon were still held up to
the execration of posterity? Probably the chronicler was anxious that
nothing should mar the effect of his narrative of Abijah’s victory. If his
later sources had recorded anything equally creditable of Ahaziah and
Amon, he might have ignored the judgment of the book of Kings in their
case also.
The section(338) to which the chronicler attaches so much importance
describes a striking episode in the chronic warfare between Judah and
Israel. Here Israel is used, as in the older history, to mean the northern
kingdom, and does not denote the spiritual Israel—_i.e._, Judah—as in the
previous chapter. This perplexing variation in the use of the term
“Israel” shows how far Chronicles has departed from the religious ideas of
the book of Kings, and reminds us that the chronicler has only partially
and imperfectly assimilated his older material.
Abijah and Jeroboam had each gathered an immense army, but the army of
Israel was twice as large as that of Judah: Jeroboam had eight hundred
thousand to Abijah’s four hundred thousand. Jeroboam advanced, confident
in his overwhelming superiority and happy in the belief that Providence
sides with the strongest battalions. Abijah, however, was nothing dismayed
by the odds against him; his confidence was in Jehovah. The two armies met
in the neighbourhood of Mount Zemaraim, upon which Abijah fixed his camp.
Mount Zemaraim was in the hill-country of Ephraim, but its position cannot
be determined with certainty; it was probably near the border of the two
kingdoms. Possibly it was the site of the Benjamite city of the same name
mentioned in the book of Joshua in close connection with Bethel.(339) If
so, we should look for it in the neighbourhood of Bethel, a position which
would suit the few indications of place given by the narrative.
Before the battle, Abijah made an effort to induce his enemies to depart
in peace. From the vantage-ground of his mountain camp he addressed
Jeroboam and his army as Jotham had addressed the men of Shechem from
Mount Gerizim.(340) Abijah reminded the rebels—for as such he regarded
them—that Jehovah, the God of Israel, had given the kingdom over Israel to
David for ever, even to him and to his sons, by a covenant of salt, by a
charter as solemn and unalterable as that by which the heave-offerings had
been given to the sons of Aaron.(341) The obligation of an Arab host to
the guest who had sat at meat with him and eaten of his salt was not more
binding than the Divine decree which had given the throne of Israel to the
house of David. And yet Jeroboam the son of Nebat had dared to infringe
the sacred rights of the elect dynasty. He, the slave of Solomon, had
risen up and rebelled against his master.
The indignant prince of the house of David not unnaturally forgets that
the disruption was Jehovah’s own work, and that Jeroboam rose up against
his master, not at the instigation of Satan, but by the command of the
prophet Ahijah.(342) The advocates of sacred causes even in inspired
moments are apt to be one-sided in their statements of fact.
While Abijah is severe upon Jeroboam and his accomplices and calls them
“vain men, sons of Belial,” he shows a filial tenderness for the memory of
Rehoboam. That unfortunate king had been taken at a disadvantage, when he
was young and tender-hearted and unable to deal sternly with rebels. The
tenderness which could threaten to chastise his people with scorpions must
have been of the kind—
“That dared to look on torture and could not look on war”;
it only appears in the history in Rehoboam’s headlong flight to Jerusalem.
No one, however, will censure Abijah for taking an unduly favourable view
of his father’s character.
But whatever advantage Jeroboam may have found in his first revolt, Abijah
warns him that now he need not think to withstand the kingdom of Jehovah
in the hands of the sons of David. He is no longer opposed to an
unseasoned youth, but to men who know their overwhelming advantage.
Jeroboam need not think to supplement and complete his former achievements
by adding Judah and Benjamin to his kingdom. Against his superiority of
four hundred thousand soldiers Abijah can set a Divine alliance, attested
by the presence of priests and Levites and the regular performance of the
pentateuchal ritual, whilst the alienation of Israel from Jehovah is
clearly shown by the irregular orders of their priests. But let Abijah
speak for himself: “Ye be a great multitude, and there are with you the
golden calves which Jeroboam made you for gods.” Possibly Abijah was able
to point to Bethel, where the royal sanctuary of the golden calf was
visible to both armies: “Have ye not driven out the priests of Jehovah,
the sons of Aaron and the Levites, and made for yourselves priests in
heathen fashion? When any one comes to consecrate himself with a young
bullock and seven rams, ye make him a priest of them that are no gods. But
as for us, Jehovah is our God, and we have not forsaken Him; and we have
priests, the sons of Aaron, ministering unto Jehovah, and the Levites,
doing their appointed work: and they burn unto Jehovah morning and evening
burnt offerings and sweet incense: the shewbread also they set in order
upon the table that is kept free from all uncleanness; and we have the
candlestick of gold, with its lamps, to burn every evening; for we observe
the ordinances of Jehovah our God; but ye have forsaken Him. And, behold,
God is with us at our head, and His priests, with the trumpets of alarm,
to sound an alarm against you. O children of Israel, fight ye not against
Jehovah, the God of your fathers; for ye shall not prosper.”
This speech, we are told, “has been much admired. It was well suited to
its object, and exhibits correct notions of the theocratical
institutions.” But, like much other admirable eloquence, in the House of
Commons and elsewhere, Abijah’s speech had no effect upon those to whom it
was addressed. Jeroboam apparently utilised the interval to plant an
ambush in the rear of the Jewish army.
Abijah’s speech is unique. There have been other instances in which
commanders have tried to make oratory take the place of arms, and, like
Abijah, they have mostly been unsuccessful; but they have usually appealed
to lower motives. Sennacherib’s envoys tried ineffectually to seduce the
garrison of Jerusalem from their allegiance to Hezekiah, but they relied
on threats of destruction and promises of “a land of corn and wine, a land
of bread and vineyards, a land of oil olive and honey.” There is, however,
a parallel instance of more successful persuasion. When Octavian was at
war with his fellow-triumvir Lepidus, he made a daring attempt to win over
his enemy’s army. He did not address them from the safe elevation of a
neighbouring mountain, but rode openly into the hostile camp. He appealed
to the soldiers by motives as lofty as those urged by Abijah, and called
upon them to save their country from civil war by deserting Lepidus. At
the moment his appeal failed, and he only escaped with a wound in his
breast; but after a while his enemy’s soldiers came over to him in
detachments, and eventually Lepidus was compelled to surrender to his
rival. But the deserters were not altogether influenced by pure
patriotism. Octavian had carefully prepared the way for his dramatic
appearance in the camp of Lepidus, and had used grosser means of
persuasion than arguments addressed to patriotic feeling.
Another instance of a successful appeal to a hostile force is found in the
history of the first Napoleon, when he was marching on Paris after his
return from Elba. Near Grenoble he was met by a body of royal troops. He
at once advanced to the front, and exposing his breast, exclaimed to the
opposing ranks, “Here is your emperor; if any one would kill me, let him
fire.” The detachment, which had been sent to arrest his progress, at once
deserted to their old commander. Abijah’s task was less hopeful: the
soldiers whom Octavian and Napoleon won over had known these generals as
lawful commanders of Roman and French armies respectively, but Abijah
could not appeal to any old associations in the minds of Jeroboam’s army;
the Israelites were animated by ancient tribal jealousies, and Jeroboam
was made of sterner stuff than Lepidus or Louis XVIII. Abijah’s appeal is
a monument of his humanity, faith, and devotion; and if it failed to
influence the enemy, doubtless served to inspirit his own army.
At first, however, things went hardly with Judah. They were outgeneralled
as well as outnumbered; Jeroboam’s main body attacked them in front, and
the ambush assailed their rear. Like the men of Ai, “when Judah looked
back, behold, the battle was before and behind them.” But Jehovah, who
fought against Ai, was fighting for Judah, and they cried unto Jehovah;
and then, as at Jericho, “the men of Judah gave a shout, and when they
shouted, God smote Jeroboam and all Israel before Abijah and Judah.” The
rout was complete, and was accompanied by terrible slaughter. No fewer
than five hundred thousand Israelites were slain by the men of Judah. The
latter pressed their advantage, and took the neighbouring city of Bethel
and other Israelite towns. For the time Israel was “brought under,” and
did not recover from its tremendous losses during the three years of
Abijah’s reign. As for Jeroboam, Jehovah smote him, and he died; but
“Abijah waxed mighty, and took unto himself fourteen wives, and begat
twenty-and-two sons and sixteen daughters.”(343) His history closes with
the record of these proofs of Divine favour, and he “slept with his
fathers, and they buried him in the city of David, and Asa his son reigned
in his stead.”
The lesson which the chronicler intends to teach by his narrative is
obviously the importance of ritual, not the importance of ritual apart
from the worship of the true God; he emphasises the presence of Jehovah
with Judah, in contrast to the Israelite worship of calves and those that
are no gods. The chronicler dwells upon the maintenance of the legitimate
priesthood and the prescribed ritual as the natural expression and clear
proof of the devotion of the men of Judah to their God.
It may help us to realise the significance of Abijah’s speech, if we try
to construct an appeal in the same spirit for a Catholic general in the
Thirty Years’ War addressing a hostile Protestant army. Imagine
Wallenstein or Tilly, moved by some unwonted spirit of pious oratory,
addressing the soldiers of Gustavus Adolphus:—
“We have a pope who sits in Peter’s chair, bishops and priests ministering
unto the Lord, in the true apostolical succession. The sacrifice of the
Mass is daily offered; matins, laud, vespers, and compline are all duly
celebrated; our churches are fragrant with incense and glorious with
stained glass and images; we have crucifixes, and lamps, and candles; and
our priests are fitly clothed in ecclesiastical vestments; for we observe
the traditions of the Church, but ye have forsaken the Divine order.
Behold, God is with us at our head; and we have banners blessed by the
Pope. O ye Swedes, ye fight against God; ye shall not prosper.”
As Protestants we may find it difficult to sympathise with the feelings of
a devout Romanist or even with those of a faithful observer of the
complicated Mosaic ritual. We could not construct so close a parallel to
Abijah’s speech in terms of any Protestant order of service, and yet the
objections which any modern denomination feels to departures from its own
forms of worship rest on the same principles as those of Abijah. In the
abstract the speech teaches two main lessons: the importance of an
official and duly accredited ministry and of a suitable and authoritative
ritual. These principles are perfectly general, and are not confined to
what is usually known as sacerdotalism and ritualism. Every Church has in
practice some official ministry, even those Churches that profess to owe
their separate existence to the necessity for protesting against an
official ministry. Men whose chief occupation is to denounce priestcraft
may themselves be saturated with the sacerdotal spirit. Every Church, too,
has its ritual. The silence of a Friends’ meeting is as much a rite as the
most elaborate genuflexion before a highly ornamented altar. To regard
either the absence or presence of rites as essential is equally
ritualistic. The man who leaves his wonted place of worship because “Amen”
is sung at the end of a hymn is as bigoted a ritualist as his brother who
dare not pass an altar without crossing himself. Let us then consider the
chronicler’s two principles in this broad sense. The official ministry of
Israel consisted of the priests and Levites, and the chronicler counted it
a proof of the piety of the Jews that they adhered to this ministry and
did not admit to the priesthood any one who could bring a young bullock
and seven rams. The alternative was not between a hereditary priesthood
and one open to any aspirant with special spiritual qualifications, but
between a duly trained and qualified ministry on the one hand and a motley
crew of the forerunners of Simon Magus on the other. It is impossible not
to sympathise with the chronicler. To begin with, the property
qualification was too low. If livings are to be purchased at all, they
should bear a price commensurate with the dignity and responsibility of
the sacred office. A mere entrance fee, so to speak, of a young bullock
and seven rams must have flooded Jeroboam’s priesthood with a host of
adventurers, to whom the assumption of the office was a matter of social
or commercial speculation. The private adventure system of providing for
the ministry of the word scarcely tends to either the dignity or the
efficiency of the Church. But, in any case, it is not desirable that mere
worldly gifts, money, social position, or even intellect should be made
the sole passports to Christian service; even the traditions and education
of a hereditary priesthood would be more probable channels of spiritual
qualifications.
Another point that the chronicler objects to in Jeroboam’s priests is the
want of any other than a property qualification. Any one who chose could
be a priest. Such a system combined what might seem opposite vices. It
preserved an official ministry; these self-appointed priests formed a
clerical order; and yet it gave no guarantee whatever of either fitness or
devotion. The chronicler, on the other hand, by the importance he attaches
to the Levitical priesthood, recognises the necessity of an official
ministry, but is anxious that it should be guarded with jealous care
against the intrusion of unsuitable persons. A conclusive argument for an
official ministry is to be found in its formal adoption by most Churches
and its uninvited appearance in the rest. We should not now be contented
with the safeguards against unsuitable ministers to be found in hereditary
succession; the system of the Pentateuch would be neither acceptable nor
possible in the nineteenth century: and yet, if it had been perfectly
administered, the Jewish priesthood would have been worthy of its high
office, nor were the times ripe for the substitution of any better system.
Many of the considerations which justify hereditary succession in a
constitutional monarchy might be adduced in defence of a hereditary
priesthood. Even now, without any pressure of law or custom, there is a
certain tendency towards hereditary succession in the ministerial office.
It would be easy to name distinguished ministers who were inspired for the
high calling by their fathers’ devoted service, and who received an
invaluable preparation for their life-work from the Christian enthusiasm
of a clerical household. The clerical ancestry of the Wesleys is only one
among many illustrations of an inherited genius for the ministry.
But though the best method of obtaining a suitable ministry varies with
changing circumstances, the chronicler’s main principle is of permanent
and universal application. The Church has always felt a just concern that
the official representatives of its faith and order should commend
themselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God. The prophet
needs neither testimonials nor official status: the word of the Lord can
have free course without either; but the appointment or election to
ecclesiastical office entrusts the official with the honour of the Church
and in a measure of its Master.
The chronicler’s other principle is the importance of a suitable and
authoritative ritual. We have already noticed that any order of service
that is fixed by the constitution or custom of a Church involves the
principle of ritual. Abijah’s speech does not insist that only the
established ritual should be tolerated; such questions had not come within
the chronicler’s horizon. The merit of Judah lay in possessing and
practising a legitimate ritual, that is to say in observing the Pauline
injunction to do all things decently and in order. The present generation
is not inclined to enforce any very stringent obedience to Paul’s
teaching, and finds it difficult to sympathise with Abijah’s enthusiasm
for the symbolism of worship. But men to-day are not radically different
from the chronicler’s contemporaries, and it is as legitimate to appeal to
spiritual sensibility through the eye as through the ear; architecture and
decoration are neither more nor less spiritual than an attractive voice
and impressive elocution. Novelty and variety have, or should have, their
legitimate place in public worship; but the Church has its obligations to
those who have more regular spiritual wants. Most of us find much of the
helpfulness of public worship in the influence of old and familiar
spiritual associations, which can only be maintained by a measure of
permanence and fixity in Divine service. The symbolism of the Lord’s
Supper never loses its freshness, and yet it is restful because familiar
and impressive because ancient. On the other hand, the maintenance of this
ritual is a constant testimony to the continuity of Christian life and
faith. Moreover, in this rite the great bulk of Christendom finds the
outward and visible sign of its unity.
Ritual, too, has its negative value. By observing the Levitical ordinances
the Jews were protected from the vagaries of any ambitious owner of a
young bullock and seven rams. While we grant liberty to all to use the
form of worship in which they find most spiritual profit, we need to have
Churches whose ritual will be comparatively fixed. Christians who find
themselves most helped by the more quiet and regular methods of devotion
naturally look to a settled order of service to protect them from undue
and distracting excitement.
In spite of the wide interval that separates the modern Church from
Judaism, we can still discern a unity of principle, and are glad to
confirm the judgment of Christian experience from the lessons of an older
and different dispensation. But we should do injustice to the chronicler’s
teaching if we forgot that for his own times his teaching was capable of
much more definite and forcible application. Christianity and Islam have
purified religious worship throughout Europe, America, and a large portion
of Asia. We are no longer tempted by the cruel and loathsome rites of
heathenism. The Jews knew the wild extravagance, gross immorality, and
ruthless cruelty of Phœnician and Syrian worship. If we had lived in the
chronicler’s age and had shared his experience of idolatrous rites, we
should have also shared his enthusiasm for the pure and lofty ritual of
the Pentateuch. We should have regarded it as a Divine barrier between
Israel and the abominations of heathenism, and should have been jealous
for its strict observance.
Chapter III. Asa: Divine Retribution. 2 Chron. xiv.-xvi.
Abijah, dying, as far as we can gather from Chronicles, in the odour of
sanctity, was succeeded by his son Asa. The chronicler’s history of Asa is
much fuller than that which is given in the book of Kings. The older
narrative is used as a framework into which material from later sources is
freely inserted. The beginning of the new reign was singularly promising.
Abijah had been a very David, he had fought the battles of Jehovah, and
had assured the security and independence of Judah. Asa, like Solomon,
entered into the peaceful enjoyment of his predecessor’s exertions in the
field. “In his days the land was quiet ten years,” as in the days when the
judges had delivered Israel, and he was able to exhort his people to
prudent effort by reminding them that Jehovah had given them rest on every
side.(344) This interval of quiet was used for both religious reform and
military precautions.(345) The high places and heathen idols and symbols
which had somehow survived Abijah’s zeal for the Mosaic ritual were swept
away, and Judah was commanded to seek Jehovah and observe the Law; and he
built fortresses with towers, and gates, and bars, and raised a great army
“that bare bucklers and spears,”—no mere hasty levy of half-armed peasants
with scythes and axes. The mighty array surpassed even Abijah’s great
muster of four hundred thousand from Judah and Benjamin: there were five
hundred and eighty thousand men, three hundred thousand out of Judah that
bare bucklers and spears and two hundred and eighty thousand out of
Benjamin that bare shields and drew bows. The great muster of Benjamites
under Asa is in striking contrast to the meagre tale of six hundred
warriors that formed the whole strength of Benjamin after its disastrous
defeat in the days of the judges; and the splendid equipment of this
mighty host shows the rapid progress of the nation from the desperate days
of Shamgar and Jael or even of Saul’s early reign, when “there was neither
shield nor spear seen among forty thousand in Israel.”
These references to buildings, especially fortresses, to military stores
and the vast numbers of Jewish and Israelite armies, form a distinct class
amongst the additions made by the chronicler to the material taken from
the book of Kings. They are found in the narratives of the reigns of
David, Rehoboam, Jehoshaphat, Uzziah, Jotham, Manasseh, in fact in the
reigns of nearly all the good kings; Manasseh’s building was done after he
had turned from his evil ways.(346) Hezekiah and Josiah were too much
occupied with sacred festivals on the one hand and hostile invaders on the
other to have much leisure for building, and it would not have been in
keeping with Solomon’s character as the prince of peace to have laid
stress on his arsenals and armies. Otherwise the chronicler, living at a
time when the warlike resources of Judah were of the slightest, was
naturally interested in these reminiscences of departed glory; and the
Jewish provincials would take a pride in relating these pieces of
antiquarian information about their native towns, much as the servants of
old manor-houses delight to point out the wing which was added by some
famous Cavalier or by some Jacobite squire.
Asa’s warlike preparations were possibly intended, like those of the
Triple Alliance, to enable him to maintain peace; but if so, their sequel
did not illustrate the maxim, “Si vis pacem, para bellum.” The rumour of
his vast armaments reached a powerful monarch: “Zerah the Ethiopian.”(347)
The vagueness of this description is doubtless due to the remoteness of
the chronicler from the times he is describing. Zerah has sometimes been
identified with Shishak’s successor, Osorkon I., the second king of the
twenty-second Egyptian dynasty. Zerah felt that Asa’s great army was a
standing menace to the surrounding princes, and undertook the task of
destroying this new military power: “He came out against them.” Numerous
as Asa’s forces were, they still left him dependent upon Jehovah, for the
enemy were even more numerous and better equipped. Zerah led to a battle
an army of a million men, supported by three hundred war chariots. With
this enormous host he came to Mareshah, at the foot of the Judæan
highlands, in a direction south-west of Jerusalem. In spite of the
inferiority of his army, Asa came out to meet him; “and they set the
battle in array in the valley of Zephathah at Mareshah.” Like Abijah, Asa
felt that, with his Divine Ally, he need not be afraid of the odds against
him even when they could be counted by hundreds of thousands. Trusting in
Jehovah, he had taken the field against the enemy; and now at the decisive
moment he made a confident appeal for help: “Jehovah, there is none beside
Thee to help between the mighty and him that hath no strength.” Five
hundred and eighty thousand men seemed nothing compared to the host
arrayed against them, and outnumbering them in the proportion of nearly
two to one. “Help us, Jehovah our God; for we rely on Thee, and in Thy
name are we come against this multitude. Jehovah, Thou art our God; let
not man prevail against Thee.”
Jehovah justified the trust reposed in Him. He smote the Ethiopians, and
they fled towards the south-west in the direction of Egypt; and Asa and
his army pursued them as far as Gerar, with fearful slaughter, so that of
Zerah’s million followers not one remained alive.(348) Of course this
statement is hyperbolical. The carnage was enormous, and no living enemies
remained in sight. Apparently Gerar and the neighbouring cities had aided
Zerah in his advance and attempted to shelter the fugitives from Mareshah.
Paralysed with fear of Jehovah, whose avenging wrath had been so terribly
manifested, these cities fell an easy prey to the victorious Jews. They
smote and spoiled all the cities about Gerar, and reaped a rich harvest,
“for there was much spoil in them.” It seems that the nomad tribes of the
southern wilderness had also in some way identified themselves with the
invaders; Asa attacked them in their turn. “They smote also the tents of
cattle”; and as the wealth of these tribes lay in their flocks and herds;
“they carried away sheep in abundance and camels, and returned to
Jerusalem.”
This victory is closely parallel to that of Abijah over Jeroboam. In both
the numbers of the armies are reckoned by hundreds of thousands; and the
hostile host outnumbers the army of Judah in the one case by exactly two
to one, in the other by nearly that proportion: in both the king of Judah
trusts with calm assurance to the assistance of Jehovah, and Jehovah
smites the enemy; the Jews then massacre the defeated army and spoil or
capture the neighbouring cities.
These victories over superior numbers may easily be paralleled or
surpassed by numerous striking examples from secular history. The odds
were greater at Agincourt, where at least sixty thousand French were
defeated by not more than twenty thousand Englishmen; at Marathon the
Greeks routed a Persian army ten times as numerous as their own; in India
English generals have defeated innumerable hordes of native warriors, as
when Wellesley—
“Against the myriads of Assaye
Clashed with his fiery few and won.”
For the most part victorious generals have been ready to acknowledge the
succouring arm of the God of battles. Shakespeare’s Henry V. after
Agincourt speaks altogether in the spirit of Asa’s prayer:—
“... O God, Thy arm was here;
And not to us, but to Thy arm alone,
Ascribe we all....
... Take it, God,
For it is only Thine.”
When the small craft that made up Elizabeth’s fleet defeated the huge
Spanish galleons and galleasses, and the storms of the northern seas
finished the work of destruction, the grateful piety of Protestant England
felt that its foes had been destroyed by the breath of the Lord; “Afflavit
Deus et dissipantur.”
The principle that underlies such feelings is quite independent of the
exact proportions of opposing armies. The victories of inferior numbers in
a righteous cause are the most striking, but not the most significant,
illustrations of the superiority of moral to material force. In the wider
movements of international politics we may find even more characteristic
instances. It is true of nations as well as of individuals that—
“The Lord killeth and maketh alive;
He bringeth down to the grave and bringeth up:
The Lord maketh poor and maketh rich;
He bringeth low, He also lifteth up:
He raiseth up the poor out of the dust,
He lifteth up the needy from the dunghill,
To make them sit with princes
And inherit the throne of glory.”
Italy in the eighteenth century seemed as hopelessly divided as Israel
under the judges, and Greece as completely enslaved to the “unspeakable
Turk” as the Jews to Nebuchadnezzar; and yet, destitute as they were of
any material resources, these nations had at their disposal great moral
forces: the memory of ancient greatness and the sentiment of nationality;
and to-day Italy can count hundreds of thousands like the chronicler’s
Jewish kings, and Greece builds her fortresses by land and her ironclads
to command the sea. The Lord has fought for Israel.
But the principle has a wider application. A little examination of the
more obscure and complicated movements of social life will show moral
forces everywhere overcoming and controlling the apparently irresistible
material forces opposed to them. The English and American pioneers of the
movements for the abolition of slavery had to face what seemed an
impenetrable phalanx of powerful interests and influences; but probably
any impartial student of history would have foreseen the ultimate triumph
of a handful of earnest men over all the wealth and political power of the
slave-owners. The moral forces at the disposal of the abolitionists were
obviously irresistible. But the soldier in the midst of smoke and tumult
may still be anxious and despondent at the very moment when the spectator
sees clearly that the battle is won; and the most earnest Christian
workers sometimes falter when they realise the vast and terrible forces
that fight against them. At such times we are both rebuked and encouraged
by the simple faith of the chronicler in the overruling power of God.
It may be objected that if victory were to be secured by Divine
intervention, there was no need to muster five hundred and eighty thousand
men or indeed any army at all. If in any and every case God disposes, what
need is there for the devotion to His service of our best strength, and
energy, and culture, or of any human effort at all? A wholesome spiritual
instinct leads the chronicler to emphasise the great preparations of
Abijah and Asa. We have no right to look for Divine co-operation till we
have done our best; we are not to sit with folded hands and expect a
complete salvation to be wrought for us, and then to continue as idle
spectators of God’s redemption of mankind: we are to tax our resources to
the utmost to gather our hundreds of thousands of soldiers; we are to work
out our own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God that worketh
in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure.
This principle may be put in another way. Even to the hundreds of
thousands the Divine help is still necessary. The leaders of great hosts
are as dependent upon Divine help as Jonathan and his armour-bearer
fighting single-handed against a Philistine garrison, or David arming
himself with a sling and stone against Goliath of Gath. The most competent
Christian worker in the prime of his spiritual strength needs grace as
much as the untried youth making his first venture in the Lord’s service.
At this point we meet with another of the chronicler’s obvious
self-contradictions. At the beginning of the narrative of Asa’s reign we
are told that the king did away with the high places and the symbols of
idolatrous worship, and that, because Judah had thus sought Jehovah, He
gave them rest. The deliverance from Zerah is another mark of Divine
favour. And yet in the fifteenth chapter Asa, in obedience to prophetic
admonition, takes away the abominations from his dominions, as if there
had been no previous reformation, but we are told that the high places
were not taken out of Israel. The context would naturally suggest that
Israel here means Asa’s kingdom, as the true Israel of God; but as the
verse is borrowed from the book of Kings, and “out of Israel” is an
editorial addition made by the chronicler, it is probably intended to
harmonise the borrowed verse with the chronicler’s previous statement that
Asa did away with the high places. If so, we must understand that Israel
means the northern kingdom, from which the high places had not been
removed, though Judah had been purged from these abominations. But here,
as often elsewhere, Chronicles taken alone affords no explanation of its
inconsistencies.
Again, in Asa’s first reformation he commanded Judah to seek Jehovah and
to do the Law and the commandments; and accordingly Judah sought the Lord.
Moreover, Abijah, about seventeen years(349) before Asa’s second
reformation, made it his special boast that Judah had not forsaken
Jehovah, but had priests ministering unto Jehovah, “the sons of Aaron and
the Levites in their work.” During Rehoboam’s reign of seventeen years
Jehovah was duly honoured for the first three years, and again after
Shishak’s invasion in the fifth year of Rehoboam. So that for the previous
thirty or forty years the due worship of Jehovah had only been interrupted
by occasional lapses into disobedience. But now the prophet Oded holds
before this faithful people the warning example of the “long seasons” when
Israel was without the true God, and without a teaching priest, and
without law. And yet previously Chronicles supplies an unbroken list of
high-priests from Aaron downwards. In response to Oded’s appeal, the king
and people set about the work of reformation as if they had tolerated some
such neglect of God, the priests, and the Law as the prophet had
described.
Another minor discrepancy is found in the statement that “the heart of Asa
was perfect all his days”; this is reproduced verbatim from the book of
Kings. Immediately afterwards the chronicler relates the evil doings of
Asa in the closing years of his reign.
Such contradictions render it impossible to give a complete and continuous
exposition of Chronicles that shall be at the same time consistent.
Nevertheless they are not without their value for the Christian student.
They afford evidence of the good faith of the chronicler. His
contradictions are clearly due to his use of independent and discrepant
sources, and not to any tampering with the statements of his authorities.
They are also an indication that the chronicler attaches much more
importance to spiritual edification than to historical accuracy. When he
seeks to set before his contemporaries the higher nature and better life
of the great national heroes, and thus to provide them with an ideal of
kingship, he is scrupulously and painfully careful to remove everything
that would weaken the force of the lesson which he is trying to teach; but
he is comparatively indifferent to accuracy of historical detail. When his
authorities contradict each other as to the number or the date of Asa’s
reformations, or even the character of his later years, he does not
hesitate to place the two narratives side by side and practically to draw
lessons from both. The work of the chronicler and its presence with the
Pentateuch and the Synoptic Gospels in the sacred canon imply an emphatic
declaration of the judgment of the Spirit and the Church that detailed
historical accuracy is not a necessary consequence of inspiration. In
expounding this second narrative of a reformation by Asa, we shall make no
attempt at complete harmony with the rest of Chronicles; any inconsistency
between the exposition here and elsewhere will simply arise from a
faithful adherence to our text.
The occasion then of Asa’s second reformation(350) was as follows: Asa was
returning in triumph from his great defeat of Zerah, bringing with him
substantial fruits of victory in the shape of abundant spoil. Wealth and
power had proved a snare to David and Rehoboam, and had involved them in
grievous sin. Asa might also have succumbed to the temptations of
prosperity; but, by a special Divine grace not vouchsafed to his
predecessors, he was guarded against danger by a prophetic warning. At the
very moment when Asa might have expected to be greeted by the acclamations
of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, when the king would be elate with the
sense of Divine favour, military success, and popular applause, the
prophet’s admonition checked the undue exaltation which might have hurried
Asa into presumptuous sin. Asa and his people were not to presume upon
their privilege; its continuance was altogether dependent upon their
continued obedience: if they fell into sin, the rewards of their former
loyalty would vanish like fairy gold. “Hear ye me, Asa, and all Judah and
Benjamin: Jehovah is with you while ye be with Him; and if ye seek Him, He
will be found of you; but if ye forsake Him, He will forsake you.” This
lesson was enforced from the earlier history of Israel. The following
verses are virtually a summary of the history of the judges:—
“Now for long seasons Israel was without the true God, and without
teaching priest, and without law.”
Judges tells how again and again Israel fell away from Jehovah. “But when
in their distress they turned unto Jehovah, the God of Israel, and sought
Him, He was found of them.”
Oded’s address is very similar to another and somewhat fuller summary of
the history of the judges, contained in Samuel’s farewell to the people,
in which he reminded them how when they forgot Jehovah, their God, He sold
them into the hand of their enemies, and when they cried unto Jehovah, He
sent Zerubbabel, and Barak, and Jephthah, and Samuel, and delivered them
out of the hand of their enemies on every side, and they dwelt in
safety.(351) Oded proceeds to other characteristics of the period of the
judges: “There was no peace to him that went out, nor to him that came in;
but great vexations were upon all the inhabitants of the lands. And they
were broken in pieces, nation against nation and city against city, for
God did vex them with all adversity.”
Deborah’s song records great vexations: the highways were unoccupied, and
the travellers walked through by-ways; the rulers ceased in Israel; Gideon
“threshed wheat by the winepress to hide it from the Midianites.” The
breaking of nation against nation and city against city will refer to the
destruction of Succoth and Penuel by Gideon, the sieges of Shechem and
Thebez by Abimelech, the massacre of the Ephraimites by Jephthah, and the
civil war between Benjamin and the rest of Israel and the consequent
destruction of Jabesh-gilead.(352)
“But,” said Oded, “be ye strong, and let not your hands be slack, for your
work shall be rewarded.” Oded implies that abuses were prevalent in Judah
which might spread and corrupt the whole people, so as to draw down upon
them the wrath of God and plunge them into all the miseries of the times
of the judges. These abuses were wide-spread, supported by powerful
interests and numerous adherents. The queen-mother, one of the most
important personages in an Eastern state, was herself devoted to heathen
observances. Their suppression needed courage, energy, and pertinacity;
but if they were resolutely grappled with, Jehovah would reward the
efforts of His servants with success, and Judah would enjoy prosperity.
Accordingly Asa took courage and put away the abominations out of Judah
and Benjamin and the cities he held in Ephraim. The abominations were the
idols and all the cruel and obscene accompaniments of heathen
worship.(353) In the prophet’s exhortation to be strong, and not be slack,
and in the corresponding statement that Asa took courage, we have a hint
for all reformers. Neither Oded nor Asa underrated the serious nature of
the task before them. They counted the cost, and with open eyes and full
knowledge confronted the evil they meant to eradicate. The full
significance of the chronicler’s language is only seen when we remember
what preceded the prophet’s appeal to Asa. The captain of half a million
soldiers, the conqueror of a million Ethiopians with three hundred
chariots, has to take courage before he can bring himself to put away the
abominations out of his own dominions. Military machinery is more readily
created than national righteousness; it is easier to slaughter one’s
neighbours than to let light into the dark places that are full of the
habitations of cruelty; and vigorous foreign policy is a poor substitute
for good administration. The principle has its application to the
individual. The beam in our own eye seems more difficult to extract than
the mote in our brother’s, and a man often needs more moral courage to
reform himself than to denounce other people’s sins or urge them to accept
salvation. Most ministers could confirm from their own experience Portia’s
saying, “I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done than be one
of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.”
Asa’s reformation was constructive as well as destructive; the toleration
of “abominations” had diminished the zeal of the people for Jehovah, and
even the altar of Jehovah before the porch of the Temple had suffered from
neglect: it was now renewed, and Asa assembled the people for a great
festival. Under Rehoboam many pious Israelites had left the northern
kingdom to dwell where they could freely worship at the Temple; under Asa
there was a new migration, “for they fell to him out of Israel in
abundance when they saw that Jehovah his God was with him.” And so it came
about that in the great assembly which Asa gathered together at Jerusalem
not only Judah and Benjamin, but also Ephraim, Manasseh, and Simeon, were
represented. The chronicler has already told us that after the return from
the Captivity some of the children of Ephraim and Manasseh dwelt at
Jerusalem with the children of Judah and Benjamin,(354) and he is always
careful to note any settlement of members of the ten tribes in Judah or
any acquisition of northern territory by the kings of Judah. Such facts
illustrated his doctrine that Judah was the true spiritual Israel, the
real δωδεκάφυλον, or twelve-tribed whole, of the chosen people.
Asa’s festival was held in the third month of his fifteenth year, the
month Sivan, corresponding roughly to our June. The Feast of Weeks, at
which first-fruits were offered, fell in this month; and his festival was
probably a special celebration of this feast. The sacrifice of seven
hundred oxen and seven thousand sheep out of the spoil taken from the
Ethiopians and their allies might be considered a kind of first-fruits.
The people pledged themselves most solemnly to permanent obedience to
Jehovah; this festival and its offerings were to be first-fruits or
earnest of future loyalty. “They entered into a covenant to seek Jehovah,
the God of their fathers, with all their heart and with all their soul;
... they sware unto Jehovah with a loud voice, and with shouting, and with
trumpets, and with cornets.” The observance of this covenant was not to be
left to the uncertainties of individual loyalty; the community were to be
on their guard against offenders, Achans who might trouble Israel.
According to the stern law of the Pentateuch,(355) “whosoever would not
seek Jehovah, the God of Israel, should be put to death, whether small or
great, whether man or woman.” The seeking of Jehovah, so far as it could
be enforced by penalties, must have consisted in external observances; and
the usual proof that a man did not seek Jehovah would be found in his
seeking other gods and taking part in heathen rites. Such apostacy was not
merely an ecclesiastical offence: it involved immorality and a falling
away from patriotism. The pious Jew could no more tolerate heathenism than
we could tolerate in England religions that sanctioned polygamy or suttee.
Having thus entered into covenant with Jehovah, “all Judah rejoiced at
their oath because they had sworn with all their heart, and sought Him
with their whole desire.” At the beginning, no doubt, they, like their
king, “took courage”; they addressed themselves with reluctance and
apprehension to an unwelcome and hazardous enterprise. They now rejoiced
over the Divine grace that had inspired their efforts and been manifested
in their courage and devotion, over the happy issue of their enterprise,
and over the universal enthusiasm for Jehovah; and He set the seal of His
approval upon their gladness, He was found of them, and Jehovah gave them
rest round about, so that there was no more war for twenty years: unto the
thirty-fifth year of Asa’s reign. It is an unsavoury task to put away
abominations: many foul nests of unclean birds are disturbed in the
process; men would not choose to have this particular cross laid upon
them, but only those who take up their cross and follow Christ can hope to
enter into the joy of the Lord.
The narrative of this second reformation is completed by the addition of
details borrowed from the book of Kings. The chronicler next recounts how
in the thirty-sixth year of Asa’s reign Baasha began to fortify Ramah as
an outpost against Judah, but was forced to abandon his undertaking by the
intervention of the Syrian king, Benhadad, whom Asa hired with his own
treasures and those of the Temple; whereupon Asa carried off Baasha’s
stones and timber and built Geba and Mizpah as Jewish outposts against
Israel. With the exception of the date and a few minor changes, the
narrative so far is taken verbatim from the book of Kings. The chronicler,
like the author of the priestly document of the Pentateuch, was anxious to
provide his readers with an exact and complete system of chronology; he
was the Ussher or Clinton of his generation. His date of the war against
Baasha is probably based upon an interpretation of the source used for
chap. xv.; the first reformation secured a rest of ten years, the second
and more thorough reformation a rest exactly twice as long as the first.
In the interest of these chronological references, the chronicler has
sacrificed a statement twice repeated in the book of Kings: that there was
war between Asa and Baasha all their days. As Baasha came to the throne in
Asa’s third year, the statement of the book of Kings would have seemed to
contradict the chronicler’s assertion that there was no war from the
fifteenth to the thirty-fifth year of Asa’s reign.(356)
After his victory over Zerah, Asa received a Divine message(357) which
somewhat checked the exuberance of his triumph; a similar message awaited
him after his successful expedition to Ramah. By Oded Jehovah had warned
Asa, but now He commissioned Hanani the seer to pronounce a sentence of
condemnation. The ground of the sentence was that Asa had not relied on
Jehovah, but on the king of Syria.
Here the chronicler echoes one of the key-notes of the great prophets.
Isaiah had protested against the alliance which Ahaz concluded with
Assyria in order to obtain assistance against the united onset of Rezin,
king of Syria, and Pekah, king of Israel, and had predicted that Jehovah
would bring upon Ahaz, his people, and his dynasty days that had not come
since the disruption, even the king of Assyria.(358) When this prediction
was fulfilled, and the thundercloud of Assyrian invasion darkened all the
land of Judah, the Jews, in their lack of faith, looked to Egypt for
deliverance; and again Isaiah denounced the foreign alliance: “Woe to them
that go down to Egypt for help, ... but they look not unto the Holy One of
Israel, neither seek Jehovah; ... the strength of Pharaoh shall be your
shame, and the trust in the shadow of Egypt your confusion.”(359) So
Jeremiah in his turn protested against a revival of the Egyptian alliance:
“Thou shall be ashamed of Egypt also, as thou wast ashamed of
Assyria.”(360)
In their successive calamities the Jews could derive no comfort from a
study of previous history; the pretext upon which each of their oppressors
had intervened in the affairs of Palestine had been an invitation from
Judah. In their trouble they had sought a remedy worse than the disease;
the consequences of this political quackery had always demanded still more
desperate and fatal medicines. Freedom from the border raids of the
Ephraimites was secured at the price of the ruthless devastations of
Hazael; deliverance from Rezin only led to the wholesale massacres and
spoliation of Sennacherib. Foreign alliance was an opiate that had to be
taken in continually increasing doses, till at last it caused the death of
the patient.
Nevertheless these are not the lessons which the seer seeks to impress
upon Asa. Hanani takes a loftier tone. He does not tell him that his
unholy alliance with Benhadad was the first of a chain of circumstances
that would end in the ruin of Judah. Few generations are greatly disturbed
by the prospect of the ruin of their country in the distant future: “After
us the Deluge.” Even the pious king Hezekiah, when told of the coming
captivity of Judah, found much comfort in the thought that there should be
peace and truth in his days. After the manner of the prophets, Hanani’s
message is concerned with his own times. To his large faith the alliance
with Syria presented itself chiefly as the loss of a great opportunity.
Asa had deprived himself of the privilege of fighting with Syria, whereby
Jehovah would have found fresh occasion to manifest His infinite power and
His gracious favour towards Judah. Had there been no alliance with Judah,
the restless and warlike king of Syria might have joined Baasha to attack
Asa; another million of the heathen and other hundreds of their chariots
would have been destroyed by the resistless might of the Lord of Hosts.
And yet, in spite of the great object-lesson he had received in the defeat
of Zerah, Asa had not thought of Jehovah as his Ally. He had forgotten the
all-observing, all-controlling providence of Jehovah, and had thought it
necessary to supplement the Divine protection by hiring a heathen king
with the treasures of the Temple; and yet “the eyes of Jehovah run to and
fro throughout the whole earth, to show Himself strong in behalf of them
whose heart is perfect toward Him.” With this thought, that the eyes of
Jehovah run to and fro throughout the earth, Zechariah(361) comforted the
Jews in the dark days between the Return and the rebuilding of the Temple.
Possibly during Asa’s twenty years of tranquillity his faith had become
enfeebled for want of any severe discipline. It is only with a certain
reserve that we can venture to pray that the Lord will “take from our
lives the strain and stress.” The discipline of helplessness and
dependence preserves the consciousness of God’s loving providence. The
resources of Divine grace are not altogether intended for our personal
comfort; we are to tax them to the utmost, in the assurance that God will
honour all our drafts upon His treasury. The great opportunities of twenty
years of peace and prosperity were not given to Asa to lay up funds with
which to bribe a heathen king, and then, with this reinforcement of his
accumulated resources to accomplish the mighty enterprise of stealing
Baasha’s stones and timber and building the walls of a couple of frontier
fortresses. With such a history and such opportunities behind him, Asa
should have felt himself competent, with Jehovah’s help, to deal with both
Baasha and Benhadad, and should have had courage to confront them both.
Sin like Asa’s has been the supreme apostacy of the Church in all her
branches and through all her generations: Christ has been denied, not by
lack of devotion, but by want of faith. Champions of the truth, reformers
and guardians of the Temple, like Asa, have been eager to attach to their
holy cause the cruel prejudices of ignorance and folly, the greed and
vindictiveness of selfish men. They have feared lest these potent forces
should be arrayed amongst the enemies of the Church and her Master. Sects
and parties have eagerly contested the privilege of counselling a
profligate prince how he should satisfy his thirst for blood and exercise
his wanton and brutal insolence; the Church has countenanced almost every
iniquity and striven to quench by persecution every new revelation of the
Spirit, in order to conciliate vested interests and established
authorities. It has even been suggested that national Churches and great
national vices were so intimately allied that their supporters were
content that they should stand or fall together. On the other hand, the
advocates of reform have not been slow to appeal to popular jealousy and
to aggravate the bitterness of social feuds. To Hanani the seer had come
the vision of a larger and purer faith, that would rejoice to see the
cause of Satan supported by all the evil passions and selfish interests
that are his natural allies. He was assured that the greater the host of
Satan, the more signal and complete would be Jehovah’s triumph. If we had
his faith, we should not be anxious to bribe Satan to cast out Satan, but
should come to understand that the full muster of hell assailing us in
front is less dangerous than a few companies of diabolic mercenaries in
our own array. In the former case the overthrow of the powers of darkness
is more certain and more complete.
The evil consequences of Asa’s policy were not confined to the loss of a
great opportunity, nor were his treasures the only price he was to pay for
fortifying Geba and Mizpah with Baasha’s building materials. Hanani
declared to him that from henceforth he should have wars. This purchased
alliance was only the beginning, and not the end, of troubles. Instead of
the complete and decisive victory which had disposed of the Ethiopians
once for all, Asa and his people were harassed and exhausted by continual
warfare. The Christian life would have more decisive victories, and would
be less of a perpetual and wearing struggle, if we had faith to refrain
from the use of doubtful means for high ends.
Oded’s message of warning had been accepted and obeyed, but Asa was now no
longer docile to Divine discipline. David and Hezekiah submitted
themselves to the censure of Gad and Isaiah; but Asa was wroth with Hanani
and put him in prison, because the prophet had ventured to rebuke him. His
sin against God corrupted even his civil administration; and the ally of a
heathen king, the persecutor of God’s prophet, also oppressed the people.
Three years(362) after the repulse of Baasha a new punishment fell upon
Asa: his feet became grievously diseased. Still he did not humble himself,
but was guilty of further sin(363): he sought not Jehovah, but the
physicians. It is probable that to seek Jehovah concerning disease was not
merely a matter of worship. Reuss has suggested that the legitimate
practice of medicine belonged to the schools of the prophets; but it seems
quite as likely that in Judah, as in Egypt, any existing knowledge of the
art of healing was to be found among the priests. Conversely physicians
who were neither priests nor prophets of Jehovah were almost certain to be
ministers of idolatrous worship and magicians. They failed apparently to
relieve their patient: Asa lingered in pain and weakness for two years,
and then died. Possibly the sufferings of his latter days had protected
his people from further oppression, and had at once appealed to their
sympathy and removed any cause for resentment. When he died, they only
remembered his virtues and achievements; and buried him with royal
magnificence, with sweet odours and divers kinds of spices; and made a
very great burning for him, probably of aromatic woods.
In discussing the chronicler’s picture of the good kings, we have noticed
that, while Chronicles and the book of Kings agree in mentioning the
misfortunes which as a rule darkened their closing years, Chronicles in
each case records some lapse into sin as preceding these misfortunes. From
the theological standpoint of the chronicler’s school, these invidious
records of the sins of good kings were necessary in order to account for
their misfortunes. The devout student of the book of Kings read with
surprise that of the pious kings who had been devoted to Jehovah and His
temple, whose acceptance by Him had been shown by the victories vouchsafed
to them, one had died of a painful disease in his feet, another in a
lazar-house, two had been assassinated, and one slain in battle. Why had
faith and devotion been so ill rewarded? Was it not vain to serve God?
What profit was there in keeping His ordinances? The chronicler felt
himself fortunate in discovering amongst his later authorities additional
information which explained these mysteries and justified the ways of God
to man. Even the good kings had not been without reproach, and their
misfortunes had been the righteous judgment on their sins.
The principle which guided the chronicler in this selection of material
was that sin was always punished by complete, immediate, and manifest
retribution in this life, and that conversely all misfortune was the
punishment of sin. There is a simplicity and apparent justice about this
theory that has always made it the leading doctrine of a certain stage of
moral development. It was probably the popular religious teaching in
Israel from early days till the time when our Lord found it necessary to
protest against the idea that the Galilæans whose blood Pilate had mingled
with their sacrifices were sinners above all Galilæans because they had
suffered these things, or that the eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam
fell, and killed them, were offenders above all the inhabitants of
Jerusalem. This doctrine of retribution was current among the Greeks. When
terrible calamities fell upon men, their neighbours supposed these to be
the punishment of specially heinous crimes. When the Spartan king
Cleomenes committed suicide, the public mind in Greece at once inquired of
what particular sin he had thus paid the penalty. The horrible
circumstances of his death were attributed to the wrath of some offended
deity, and the cause of the offence was sought for in one of his many acts
of sacrilege. Possibly he was thus punished because he had bribed the
priestess of the Delphic oracle. The Athenians, however, believed that his
sacrilege had consisted in cutting down trees in their sacred grove at
Eleusis; but the Argives preferred to hold that he came to an untimely end
because he had set fire to a grove sacred to their eponymous hero Argos.
Similarly, when in the course of the Peloponnesian war the Æginetans were
expelled from their island, this calamity was regarded as a punishment
inflicted upon them because fifty years before they had dragged away and
put to death a suppliant who had caught hold of the handle of the door of
the temple of Demeter Theomophorus. On the other hand, the wonderful way
in which on four or five occasions the ravages of pestilence delivered
Dionysius of Syracuse from his Carthaginian enemies was attributed by his
admiring friends to the favour of the gods.
Like many other simple and logical doctrines, this Jewish theory of
retribution came into collision with obvious facts, and seemed to set the
law of God at variance with the enlightened conscience. “Beneath the
simplest forms of truth the subtlest error lurks.” The prosperity of the
wicked and the sufferings of the righteous were a standing religious
difficulty to the devout Israelite. The popular doctrine held its ground
tenaciously, supported not only by ancient prescription, but also by the
most influential classes in society. All who were young, robust, wealthy,
powerful, or successful were interested in maintaining a doctrine that
made health, riches, rank, and success the outward and visible signs of
righteousness. Accordingly the simplicity of the original doctrine was
hedged about with an ingenious and elaborate apologetic. The prosperity of
the wicked was held to be only for a season; before he died the judgment
of God would overtake him. It was a mistake to speak of the sufferings of
the righteous: these very sufferings showed that his righteousness was
only apparent, and that in secret he had been guilty of grievous sin.
Of all the cruelty inflicted in the name of orthodoxy there is little that
can surpass the refined torture due to this Jewish apologetic. Its cynical
teaching met the sufferer in the anguish of bereavement, in the pain and
depression of disease, when he was crushed by sudden and ruinous losses or
publicly disgraced by the unjust sentence of a venal law-court. Instead of
receiving sympathy and help, he found himself looked upon as a moral
outcast and pariah on account of his misfortunes; when he most needed
Divine grace, he was bidden to regard himself as a special object of the
wrath of Jehovah. If his orthodoxy survived his calamities, he would
review his past life with morbid retrospection, and persuade himself that
he had indeed been guilty above all other sinners.
The book of Job is an inspired protest against the current theory of
retribution, and the full discussion of the question belongs to the
exposition of that book. But the narrative of Chronicles, like much Church
history in all ages, is largely controlled by the controversial interests
of the school from which it emanated. In the hands of the chronicler the
story of the kings of Judah is told in such a way that it becomes a
polemic against the book of Job. The tragic and disgraceful death of good
kings presented a crucial difficulty to the chronicler’s theology. A good
man’s other misfortunes might be compensated for by prosperity in his
latter days; but in a theory of retribution which required a complete
satisfaction of justice in this life there could be no compensation for a
dishonourable death. Hence the chronicler’s anxiety to record any lapses
of good kings in their latter days.
The criticism and correction of this doctrine belongs, as we have said, to
the exposition of the book of Job. Here we are rather concerned to
discover the permanent truth of which the theory is at once an imperfect
and exaggerated expression. To begin with, there are sins which bring upon
the transgressor a swift, obvious, and dramatic punishment. Human law
deals thus with some sins; the laws of health visit others with a similar
severity; at times the Divine judgment strikes down men and nations before
an awe-stricken world. Amongst such judgments we might reckon the
punishments of royal sins so frequent in the pages of Chronicles. God’s
judgments are not usually so immediate and manifest, but these striking
instances illustrate and enforce the certain consequences of sin. We are
dealing now with cases in which God was set at nought; and, apart from
Divine grace, the votaries of sin are bound to become its slaves and
victims. Ruskin has said, “Medicine often fails of its effect, but poison
never; and while, in summing the observation of past life not unwatchfully
spent, I can truly say that I have a thousand times seen Patience
disappointed of her hope and Wisdom of her aim, I have never yet seen
folly fruitless of mischief, nor vice conclude but in calamity.”(364) Now
that we have been brought into a fuller light and delivered from the
practical dangers of the ancient Israelite doctrine, we can afford to
forget the less satisfactory aspects of the chronicler’s teaching, and we
must feel grateful to him for enforcing the salutary and necessary lesson
that sin brings inevitable punishment, and that therefore, whatever
present appearances may suggest, “the world was certainly not framed for
the lasting convenience of hypocrites, libertines, and oppressors.”(365)
Indeed, the consequences of sin are regular and exact; and the judgments
upon the kings of Judah in Chronicles accurately symbolise the operations
of Divine discipline. But pain, and ruin, and disgrace are only secondary
elements in God’s judgments; and most often they are not judgments at all.
They have their uses as chastisements; but if we dwell upon them with too
emphatic an insistence, men suppose that pain is a worse evil than sin,
and that sin is only to be avoided because it causes suffering to the
sinner. The really serious consequence of evil acts is the formation and
confirmation of evil character. Herbert Spencer says in his _First
Principles_(366) “that motion once set up along any line becomes itself a
cause of subsequent motion along that line.” This is absolutely true in
moral and spiritual dynamics: every wrong thought, feeling, word, or act,
every failure to think, feel, speak, or act rightly, at once alters a
man’s character for the worse. Henceforth he will find it easier to sin
and more difficult to do right; he has twisted another strand into the
cord of habit: and though each may be as fine as the threads of a spider’s
web, in time there will be cords strong enough to have bound Samson before
Delilah shaved off his seven locks. This is the true punishment of sin: to
lose the fine instincts, the generous impulses, and the nobler ambitions
of manhood, and become every day more of a beast and a devil.
Chapter IV. Jehoshaphat—The Doctrine Of Non-Resistance. 2 Chron. xvii.-xx.
Asa was succeeded by his son Jehoshaphat, and his reign began even more
auspiciously(367) than that of Asa. The new king had apparently taken
warning from the misfortunes of Asa’s closing years; and as he was
thirty-five years old when he came to the throne, he had been trained
before Asa fell under the Divine displeasure. He walked in the first ways
of his father David, before David was led away by Satan to number Israel.
Jehoshaphat’s heart was lifted up, not with foolish pride, like
Hezekiah’s, but “in the ways of Jehovah.” He sought the God of his father,
and walked in God’s commandments, and was not led astray by the evil
example and influence of the kings of Israel, neither did he seek the
Baals. While Asa had been enfeebled by illness and alienated from Jehovah,
the high places and the Asherim had sprung up again like a crop of evil
weeds; but Jehoshaphat once more removed them. According to the
chronicler, this removing of high places was a very labour of Sisyphus:
the stone was no sooner rolled up to the top of the hill than it rolled
down again. Jehoshaphat seems to have had an inkling of this; he felt that
the destruction of idolatrous sanctuaries and symbols was like mowing down
weeds and leaving the roots in the soil. Accordingly he made an attempt to
deal more radically with the evil: he would take away the inclination as
well as the opportunity for corrupt rites. A commission of princes,
priests, and Levites was sent throughout all the cities of Judah to
instruct the people in the law of Jehovah. Vice will always find
opportunities; it is little use to suppress evil institutions unless the
people are educated out of evil propensities. If, for instance, every
public-house in England were closed to-morrow, and there were still
millions of throats craving for drink, drunkenness would still prevail,
and a new administration would promptly reopen gin-shops.
Because the new king thus earnestly and consistently sought the God of his
fathers, Jehovah was with him, and established the kingdom in his hand.
Jehoshaphat received all the marks of Divine favour usually bestowed upon
good kings. He waxed great exceedingly; he had many fortresses, an immense
army, and much wealth; he built castles and cities of store; he had
arsenals for the supply of war material in the cities of Judah. And these
cities, together with other defensible positions and the border cities of
Ephraim occupied by Judah, were held by strong garrisons. While David had
contented himself with two hundred and eighty-eight thousand men from all
Israel, and Abijah had led forth four hundred thousand, and Asa five
hundred and eighty thousand, there waited on Jehoshaphat, in addition to
his numerous garrisons, _eleven hundred and sixty thousand men_. Of these
seven hundred and eighty thousand were men of Judah in three divisions,
and three hundred and eighty thousand were Benjamites in two divisions.
Probably the steady increase of the armies of Abijah, Asa, and Jehoshaphat
symbolises a proportionate increase of Divine favour.
The chronicler records the names of the captains of the five divisions.
Two of them are singled out for special commendation: Eliada the Benjamite
is styled “a mighty man of valour,” and of the Jewish captain Amaziah the
son of Zichri it is said that he offered either himself or his possessions
willingly to Jehovah, as David and his princes had offered, for the
building of the Temple. The devout king had devout officers.