'And Ahab said to Elijah, Hast thou found me, O mine enemy!'--1 KINGS
xxi. 20.
The keynote of Elijah's character is force-the force of righteousness.
The New Testament, you remember, speaks of the 'power of Elias.' The
outward appearance of the man corresponds to his function and his
character. Gaunt and sinewy, dwelling in the desert, feeding on locusts
and wild honey, with a girdle of camel's skin about his loins, he
bursts into the history, amongst all that corrupt state of society,
with the force of a hammer that God's hand wields. The whole of his
career is marked by this one thing,--the strength of a righteous man.
And then, on the other hand, this Ahab;--the keynote of _his_ character
is the weakness of wickedness, and the wickedness of weakness. Think of
him. Weakly longing--as idle and weak minds in lofty places always
do--after something that belongs to somebody else; with all his
gardens, coveting the one little herb-plot of the poor Naboth; weak and
worse than womanly, turning his face to the wall and weeping when he
cannot get it; weakly desiring to have it, and yet not knowing how to
set about accomplishing his wish; and then--as is always the case, for
there are always tempters everywhere for weak people--that beautiful
fiend by his side, like the other queen in our great drama, ready to
screw the feeble man that she is wedded to, to the sticking-place, and
to dare anything to grasp that on which the heart was set. And so the
deed is done: Naboth safe stoned out of the way; and Ahab goes down to
take possession! The lesson of that is, my friend,--Weak dallying with
forbidden desires is sure to end in wicked clutching at them. Young
men, take care! You stand upon the beetling edge of a great precipice,
when you look over, from your fancied security, at a wrong thing; and
to strain too far, and to look too fixedly, leads to a perilous danger
of toppling over and being lost! If you know that a thing cannot be won
without transgression, do not tamper with hankerings for it. Keep away
from the edge, and '_shut_ your eyes from beholding vanity.'
But my business now is rather with the consequences of this apparently
successful sin, than with what went before it. The king gets the crime
done, shuffles it off himself on to the shoulders of his ready tools in
the little village, goes down to get his toy, and gets it--but he gets
Elijah along with it, which was more than he reckoned on. When, all
full of impatience and hot haste to solace himself with his new
possession, he rushes down to seize the vineyard, he finds there,
standing at the gate, waiting for him--black-browed, motionless, grim,
an incarnate conscience--the prophet whom he had not seen for years,
the prophet that he had last seen on Carmel, bearding alone the
servants of Baal, and executing on them the solemn judgment of death;
and there leaps at once to his lip, 'Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?'
I. I find here, in the first place, this broad principle: Pleasure won
by sin is peace lost.
It does not need that there should be a rebuking prophet standing by to
work out that law. God commits the execution of it to the natural
operations of our own consciences and our own spirits. Here is the fact
in men's natures on which it partly depends: when sin is yet tempting
us, it is loved; when sin in done, it is loathed. Action and reaction,
as the mechanicians tell us, are equal and contrary. The more violent
the blow with which we strike upon the forbidden pleasure, the further
back the rebound after the stroke. When sin tempts--when there hangs
glittering before a man the golden fruit which he knows that he ought
not to touch--then, amidst the noise of passion or the sophistry of
desire, conscience is silenced for a little while. No man sins without
knowing that it is wrong, without knowing that in the long run it is a
mistake; but at the instant, in the delirium of yielding, as in moments
of high physical excitement, he is blind and deaf, deaf to the voice of
reason, blind to the sight of consequences. Conscience and consequence
are alike lost sight of. Like a mad bull, the man that is tempted
lowers his head and shuts his eyes, and rushes right on. The moment
that the sin is done, that moment the passion or desire which tempted
to it is satiated, and ceases to exist for the time. It is gone as a
motive. Like some savage beast, being fed full, it lies down to sleep.
There is a vacuum left in the heart, the noise is stilled, and
then--and then--conscience begins to speak. Or, to take another image,
the passion, the desires, the impulses that lead us to do wrong
things--they are like a crew that mutiny, and take for a moment the
wheel from the steersman and the command from the captain, but then,
having driven the ship on the rocks, the mutineers get intoxicated, and
lie down and sleep. Passion fulfils itself, and expires. The desire is
satisfied, and it turns into a loathing. The tempter draws us to him,
and then unveils the horrid face that lies beneath the mask. When the
deed is done and cannot be undone, then comes satiety; then comes the
reaction of the fierce excitement, the hot blood begins to flow more
slowly; then rises up in the heart conscience; then rises up in majesty
in the soul reason; then flashes and flares before the eye the vivid
picture of the consequences. His 'enemy' has found the sinner. He has
got the vineyard--ay, but Elijah is there, and his dark and stern
presence sucks all the brightness and the sunniness out of the
landscape; and Naboth's blood stains the leaves of Naboth's garden!
There is no sin which is not the purchase of pleasure at the price of
peace.
Now, you will say that all that is true in regard to the grosser forms
of transgression, but that it is not true in regard to the less vulgar
and sensual kinds of crime. Of course it is most markedly observable
with regard to the coarsest kind of sins; but it is as true, though
perhaps not in the same degree--not in the same prominent, manifest way
at any rate--in regard to every sin that a man does. There is never an
evil thing which--knowing it to be evil--we commit, which does not rise
up to testify against us. As surely as (in the words of our great
philosopher poet) 'lust dwells hard by hate,' and as surely as
to-night's debauch is followed by to-morrow's headache, so surely--each
after its kind, and each in its own region--every sin lodges in the
human heart the seed of a quick-springing punishment, yea, is its own
punishment. When we come to grasp the sweet thing that we have been
tempted to seize, there is a serpent that starts up amongst all the
flowers. When the evil act is done--opposite of the prophet's roll--it
is sweet in the lips, but oh! it is bitter afterwards. 'At the last it
biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder!'
Then, you may say again, 'All that is very much exaggerated. That is
not the sort of feeling which men that go on persistently doing wrong
things, cherish. They live quietly and contentedly enough. "There are
no bands in their death, and their strength is firm."' All that would
be true if men's consciences kept sensitive in the midst of men's sins,
but they do not; and so it cannot be that every transgression has thus
its quick result in loss of peace. I grant you at once that it is quite
possible for men to sin away the delicacy and susceptibility of their
consciences. I dare say there are people here now who, after they have
done a wrong thing, go on very quietly, with no knowledge of those
agonies that I have been speaking about, with scarcely ever a prick of
conscience for their sin. But what then? I did not say that all sin
purchased pleasure by inflictions of agony; but I do say, that all sin
purchases pleasure by loss of peace. The silence of a seared conscience
is not peace. For peace you want something more than that a conscience
shall be dumb. For peace you want something more than that you shall be
able to live without the daily sense and sting of sin. You want not
only the negative absence of pain, but the positive presence of a
tranquillising guest in your heart--that conscience of yours testifying
with you, blessing you in its witness, and shedding abroad rest and
comfort. It is easy to kill a conscience--after a fashion at least. It
is easy to stifle it. It is easy to come to that depth of wrongdoing
that one gets used to it, and does it without caring. But oh! that cold
vacuum, that dead absence in such a spirit of all healthy
self-communing, that painful suspicion, 'If I look into myself, and be
quiet for a little while, and take stock of my own character, and see
what I am, the balance will be on the wrong side,'--that is _not_
peace. As the old historian says about the Roman armies that marched
through a country, burning and destroying every living thing, 'They
make a solitude, and they call it peace.' And so men do with their
consciences. They stifle them, sear them, forcibly silence them,
somehow or other; and then, when there is a dead stillness in the
heart, broken by no voice of either approbation or blame, but doleful
like the unnatural quiet of a deserted city, then they call that peace,
and the man's uncontrolled passions and unbridled desires dwell
solitary in the fortress of his own spirit! You _may_ almost attain to
that. Do you think it is a goal to be set before you as an ideal of
human nature? The loss of peace is certain--the presence of agony is
most likely--from every act of sin.
And so, it is not only a _crime_ that men commit when they do wrong,
but it is a _blunder_. Sin is not only guilt, but it is a mistake. 'The
game is not worth the candle,' according to the French proverb. The
thing that you buy is not worth the price you pay for it. Sin is like a
great forest-tree that we may sometimes see standing up green in its
leafy beauty, and spreading a broad shadow over half a field; but when
we get round on the other side, there is a great dark hollow in the
very heart of it, and corruption is at work there. It is like the
poison-tree in travellers' stories, tempting weary men to rest beneath
its thick foliage, and insinuating death into the limbs that relax in
the fatal coolness of its shade. It is like the apples of Sodom, fair
to look upon, but turning to acrid ashes on the unwary lips. It is like
the magician's rod that we read about in old books. There it lies; and
if, tempted by its glitter, or fascinated by the power that it proffers
you, you take it in your hand, the thing starts into a serpent with
erected crest and sparkling eye, and plunges its quick barb into the
hand that holds it, and sends poison through all the veins. Do not
touch it, my brother! Every sin buys pleasure at the price of peace.
Elijah is always waiting at the gate of the ill-gotten possession.
II. In the second place, Sin is blind to its true friends and its real
foes.
'Hast thou found me, _O mine enemy?'_ Elijah was the best friend that
Ahab had in his kingdom. And that Jezebel there, the wife of his bosom,
whom he loved and thanked for this new toy, she was the worst foe that
hell could have sent him. Ay, and so it is always. The faithful
rebuker, the merciful inflicter of pain, is the truest friend of the
wrongdoer. The worst enemy of the sinful heart is the voice that either
tempts it into sin, or lulls it into self-complacency. And this is one
of the most certain workings of evil desires in our spirits, that they
pervert for us all the relations of things, that they make us blind to
all the moral truths of God's universe. Sin is blind as to itself,
blind as to its own consequences, blind as to who are its friends and
who are its foes, blind as to earth, blind as to another world, blind
as to God. The man who walks in the 'vain show' of transgression, whose
heart is set upon evil,--he fancies that ashes are bread, and stones
gold (as in the old fairy story); and, on the other hand, he thinks
that the true sweet is the bitter, and turns away from God's angels and
God's prophets, with, 'Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?' That is the
reason, my friend, of not a little of the infidelity that haunts this
world--that sin, perverted and blinded, stumbles about in its darkness,
and mistakes the face of the friend for the face of the foe. God sends
you in mercy a conscience to prick and sting you that you may be kept
right; and you think that _it_ is your enemy. God sends in His mercy
the discipline of life, pains and sorrows, to draw us away from the
wrong, to make us believe that the right in this world and the next is
life, and that holiness is happiness for evermore. And then, when,
having done wrong, God's merciful messenger of a sharp sorrow finds us
out, we say, 'Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?' and begin to wonder
about the mysteries of Providence, and how it comes that there is evil
in the creation of a good God. Why, physical evil is the best friend of
the man that is subject to moral evil. Sorrow is the truest blessing to
a sinner. The best thing that can befall any of us is that God shall
not let us alone in any wrong course, without making us feel His rod,
without hedging up our way with thorns, and sending us by His grace
into a better one. There is no mystery in sorrow. There is a mystery in
sin; but sorrow following on the back of sin is the true friend, and
not the enemy, of the wrong-doing spirit.
And then, again, God sends us a gospel full of dark words about evil.
It deals with that fact of sin, as no other system ever did. There is
no book like the Bible for these two things,--for the lofty notion that
it has about what man may be and ought to be; and for the low notion
that it has of what man is. It does not degrade human nature, because
it tells us the truth about human nature as it is. Its darkest and
bitterest sayings about transgression, they are veiled promises, my
brother. It does not make the consequences of sin which it writes down.
You and I make them for ourselves, and it tells us of them. Did the
lighthouse make the rock that it stands on? Is it to be blamed for the
shipwreck? If a man _will_ go full tilt against the thing that he knows
will ruin him, what is the right name for him who hedges it up with a
prickly fence of thorns, and puts a great light above it, and writes
below, 'If thou comest here thou diest'? Is that the work of an enemy?
And yet that is why people talk about the gloomy views of the gospel,
about the narrow spirit of Christianity, about the harsh things that
are here! The Bible did not make hell. The Bible did not make sin the
parent of sorrow. The Bible did not make it certain that 'every
transgression and disobedience' should reap its 'just recompense of
reward.' We are the causes of their coming upon ourselves; and the
Bible but proclaims the end to which the paths of sin must lead, and
beseechingly calls to us all, 'Turn ye, turn ye! why will ye die?' And
yet when it comes to you, how many of you turn away from it, and say,
'It is mine enemy'! How many shrink from its merciful knife, that cuts
into all the wounds of the festering spirit! How many of you feel as if
'the truth that is in Jesus' was a hard and bitter truth; when all the
while its very heart's blood is love, and the very secret of its
message is the tenderest compassion, the most yearning sympathy, for
every soul amongst us!
Ay, and more than that:--sin makes us fancy that God Himself is our
enemy; and sin makes that thought of God that ought to be most blessed
and most sweet to us, the terror of our souls. You have the power, my
friend, by your own wrongdoing, of perverting the whole universe, and,
worst of all, of distorting the image of the merciful Father, of the
loving God. God loves. God is the Father. God watches over us. God will
not let us alone when we transgress, God in His love has appointed that
sin shall breed sorrow. But _we_--we do wrong; and then, for God's
Providence, and God's Gospel, and God's Son, and God Himself, there
rises up in our hearts a hostile feeling, and we think that He is
turned to be our enemy, and fights against us! But oh! He only fights
against us that we may submit to, and love, Him. Will you, then, have
it that God's highest mercy should be your greatest sorrow, that your
truest friend should be your worst foe? You can make the choice. To you
God and His truth are like that ark of His covenant which to Dagon and
the Philistines was a curse, but to the house of Obededom was a
blessing. He and His gospel are to you like that pillar that was
darkness and trouble to the hosts of the Egyptians, but light by night
to His children. To you, my brother, the gospel may be either 'the
savour of life unto life, or the savour of death unto death!' If He
comes to you with rebuke, and meets you when you are at the very door
of your sin, and busy with your transgression,--usher Him in, and thank
Him, and bless Him for words of threatening, for merciful severity, for
conviction of sin;--because conviction of sin is the work of the
Comforter; and all the threatenings and all the pains that follow and
track, like swift hounds, the committer of evil, are sent by Him who
loves too wisely not to punish transgression, and loves too well to
punish without warning, and desires only when He punishes that we
should turn from our evil way, and escape the condemnation. An enemy,
or a friend,--which is God in His truth to you?
III. Lastly, the sin which mistakes the friendly appeal for an enemy,
lays up for itself a terrible retribution. Elijah comes to Jezreel and
prophesies the fall of Ahab. The next peal, the next flash, fulfil the
prediction. There, where he did the wrong, he suffered. In Jezreel,
Ahab died. In Jezreel, Jezebel died. That plain was the battlefield for
the subsequent discomfiture of Israel. Over and over again there
encamped upon it the hosts of the spoilers. Over and over again its
soil ran red with the blood of the children of Israel; and at last, in
the destruction of the kingdom, Naboth was avenged and God's word
fulfilled. The threatened evil was foretold that it might lead the king
to repentance, and that thus it might never need to be more than a
threat. But, though Ahab was partially penitent, and partially listened
to the prophet's voice, yet for all that, he went on in his evil way.
Therefore the merciful threatening becomes a stern prophecy, and is
fulfilled to the very letter.
So, when God's message comes to us, friends, if we listen not to it,
and turn not to its gentle rebuke, Oh! then we gather up for ourselves
an awful futurity of judgment, when threatening will darken into
punishment, and the voice that rebuked will swell into the voice of
final condemnation. When a man fancies that God's prophet is his enemy,
and dreams that his finding him out is a calamity and a loss, that man
may be certain that something worse will find him out some day. His
sins will find him out, and that is worse than the prophet's coming. My
friend, picture to yourself this--a human spirit shut up, with the
companionship of its forgotten and dead transgressions. There is a
resurrection of acts as well as of bodies. Think what it will be for a
man to sit surrounded by that ghastly company, the ghosts of his own
sins!--and as each forgotten fault and buried badness comes, silent and
sheeted, into that awful society, and sits itself down there, think of
him greeting each with the question, 'Thou too? What! are ye all here?
Hast _thou_ found me, O mine enemy?' and from each bloodless spectral
lip there tolls out the answer, the knell of his life, 'I _have_ found
thee, because thou hast sold thyself to work evil in the sight of the
Lord.' Ah, my friend! if that were all we had to say, it might well
stiffen us into stony despair. Thank God--thank God! such an issue is
not inevitable. Christ speaks to you. Christ is your _Friend_. He loves
you, and He speaks to you now--speaks to you of your danger, but in
order that you may never rush into it and be engulfed by it; speaks to
you of your sin, but in order that you may say to Him, 'Take Thou it
away, O merciful Lord'; speaks to you of justice, but in order that you
may never sink beneath the weight of His stroke; speaks to you of love,
in order that you may know, and fully know, the depth of His
graciousness. When He says to you, 'I love thee; love thou Me: I have
died for thee; trust Me, live _by_ Me, and live _for_ Me, 'will you not
say to Him, 'My Friend, my Brother, my Lord, and my God'?