Asa was a good king of Judah. He “did that which was good and right in
the eyes of the Lord, his God.” Not only “good and right,” because these
might be variable terms. There are persons who set themselves to the
presumptuous and impious task of settling for themselves what is “right”
and what is “good.”
In the case of Asa, he did not invent a righteousness, nor did he invent
a goodness which he could adapt to his own tempers, ambitions and
conveniences. He was right and good and “did that which was good and
right in the eyes of the Lord, his God.”
While the land had peace, Asa set to work and built walls, towers and
fences, and did all that he could for the good of his country.
Zerah, an Ethiopian warrior, did not understand silence. He mistook
quietness for languor. He made the vulgar mistake of supposing that
quietness was indifference. He did not know that repose is the very
highest expression of power.
Zerah brought against Asa, king of Judah, no fewer than a million
soldiers--to us a large number, but to the Orientals quite a common
array. Zerah’s host was the largest collected army of which we read in
Scripture, but it does not exceed the known numbers of other Oriental
armies in ancient times. Darius Codomannus brought into the field at
Arbela a force of 1,040,000. Xerxes crossed into Greece with certainly
above a million combatants. Artaxerxes Mnemon collected 1,260,000 men to
meet the attack of the younger Cyrus.
What was to be done? Asa did not shrink from war, though he never courted
it. He must meet the foe in battle. Before doing so he must pray.
“Lord, it is nothing with Thee to help, whether with many or with them
that have no power. Help us, O Lord, our God, for we rest on Thee; and in
Thy name we go against this multitude. O Lord, thou art our God; let not
man prevail against Thee.”
Having risen from their knees, they launched themselves against the
Ethiopians, and were mighty as men who answer straw with steel. They
fought in God’s name and for God’s cause, and the thousand thousand of
the Ethiopians were as nothing before the precise and terrific stroke of
men who had studied war in the school of God.
The defeat of Zerah is one of the most remarkable events in the history
of the Jews. On no other occasion did they meet in the field and overcome
the forces of either of the two great monarchies between which they were
placed. It was seldom that they ventured to resist, unless behind walls.
Shishak, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander and Ptolemy
I. were either unopposed or only opposed in this way. On the other
occasion on which they took the field--which was under Josiah against
Necho--their boldness issued in a most disastrous defeat.
Asa, then, began upon a good foundation; he established himself upon a
great principle. That is what all, young people especially, should take
to heart right seriously. Do not make an accident of your lives--a thing
without center, purpose, certitude or holiness. Be right in your great
foundation lines, and you will build up a superstructure strong, after
the nature and quality of the foundation upon which you build. Do not
snatch at life. Do not take out an odd motto here and there and say:
“This will do for the occasion.” Life should be deeply laid in its bases,
strongly cemented together in its principles, noble in its convictions;
then it can be charitable in its concessions and recognitions.
“And Asa took courage, and put away the abominable idols out of all the
land of Judah and Benjamin, and out of the cities which he had taken
from Mount Ephraim, and renewed the altar of the Lord.”
Let us not trifle with the occasion by suggesting that we have no
idolatries to uproot, no heathen groves to examine, to purify or to
destroy. That would indeed be making light of history and ignoring the
broadest and saddest facts of our present circumstances. The world is
full of little gods, man-made idols, groves planted by human hands,
oppositions and antagonisms to the tried Theism of the universe.
We are apt to think that the idols are a long way off--far beyond seas;
or that they existed long centuries ago and spoke languages now obsolete
or forgotten.
Nothing of the kind. They live here; they build today. Our gods
are a million strong. We do not call them gods, but we worship
them none the less. Luck, Accident, Fortune, Fashion, Popularity,
Self-Indulgence--these are the base progeny of idols that did once
represent some ideal thought and even some transcendental religion.
Idolatry has retrograded; polytheism has gone quickly backward.
Asa said, in effect: “We must be right about our gods before we can be
right with one another.” That is true teaching. With a wrong theology we
never can have a thoroughly sound and healthy economic system.
This was the corner-stone upon which Asa built his great and gracious
policy. What was the effect of it upon other people? We find that the
effect then was what it must always be:
“They fell to him out of Israel in abundance when they saw that the Lord,
his God, was with him.”
Such is the influence of a great leadership. If Asa had been halting,
the people would have halted, too. Asa was positive; and positiveness,
sustained by such beneficence, begets courage in other people. “They fell
to him out of Israel in abundance”--that is, they came over to him and
were on his side. They ranked themselves with Asa; they looked for his
banner and called it theirs, “when they saw that the Lord, his God, was
with him.”
Nations perish for want of great leaders. Social reforms are dependent to
a large extent upon the spirit of the leadership which has adopted them.
The Church is always looking around for some bolder man, some more heroic
and dauntless spirit, who will utter the new truth, if any truth can be
new--say, rather, the next truth; for truth has always a next self, a
larger and immediately impending self, and the hero, who is also martyr,
must reveal that next phase of truth and die on Golgotha for his pains.
Can we not, in some small sense, be leaders in our little circles--in our
business relations, in our family life, in our institutional existence?
Many people can follow a tune who can not begin one. That is the
philosophy we would unfold and enforce.
Regard all leaders with prayerful hopefulness in so far as they want to
do good and to be good. Sympathize with them; say to Asa, even the king:
“What thou hast done thou hast well done; in God’s name we bless thee
for the purification of the land and for the encouragement of all noble
things.”
Asa showed the limits of human forbearance and human philosophy. He
broke down in the very act of doing that which was right because he went
too far. He made a covenant, and the people made it along with him.
Solemn renewals of the original covenant which God made with their
fathers in the wilderness occur from time to time in the history of the
Jews, following upon intervals of apostacy. This renewal in the reign of
Asa is the first on record. The next falls three hundred years later, in
the reign of Josiah. There is a third in the time of Nehemiah. On such
occasions the people bound themselves by a solemn oath to observe all
the directions of the Law, and called down God’s curse upon them if they
forsook it.
“And they entered into a covenant to seek the Lord God of their fathers
with all their heart and all their soul; that whosoever would not seek
the Lord God of Israel should be put to death, whether small or great,
whether man or woman.”
That is the danger. You can not make men religious by killing them, by
threatening them, by inflicting upon them any degree of penalty. Do not
force a child to church. Lead it; lure it; make the church so bright and
homelike and beautiful that the child will eagerly long for the time to
come when the door will be opened.
Asa was impartial. There was a touch of real grandeur about the man. He
would not even allow his mother to keep an idol. The queen had an idol of
her own “in a grove.”
“And also concerning Maachah, the mother of Asa, the king, he removed her
from being queen, because she had made an idol in a grove; and Asa cut
down her idol, and stamped it and burnt it at the brook Kidron.”
Thus ruthlessly Asa disestablished that little royal church. See how
burningly in earnest the man was, and what a man will do when his
earnestness is fervent! He knows nothing about fathers, mothers,
partialities or concessions. He says: “Light is the foe of darkness, and
you can not have any little dark corner of your own. This light must find
you out, chase away every shadow and purify every secret place in human
life and thought.”
Some have supposed that Maachah, the mother of Abijah, and Maachah, the
“mother” of Asa, were different persons, the former being the daughter
of Absalom, the latter the daughter of Uriel of Gibeah. There are really
no grounds for this. Maachah, the mother of Abijah, enjoyed the rank of
queen mother not only during his short reign of three years, but also
during that of her grandson, Asa, until deposed by him on account of her
idolatry.
The original word for “idol” appears to signify a “horrible abomination”
of some monstrous kind; and instead of “in a grove” we should read “for
an asherah,” the wooden emblem of the Canaanitish deity.
There seems little doubt that some obscene emblem is meant, of the kind
so often connected with worship of the productive powers of nature in
ancient religions--substituted, as a still greater abomination, for the
ordinary asherah. Clearly, the act of Maachah was one of so flagrant a
kind that Asa took the unusual step, on which the historian here lays
great stress, of degrading her in her old age from her high dignity,
besides hewing down her idol and burning it publicly under the walls of
Jerusalem.
“Now,” said Asa, in effect, “what is good for the public is good for the
individual; what is good for the subject is good for the queen.”