'And Jehoshaphat said, Is there not here a prophet of the Lord besides,
that we might enquire of him? 8. And the king of Israel said unto
Jehoshaphat, There is yet one man, Micaiah the son of Imlah, by whom we
may enquire of the Lord: but I hate him; for he doth not prophesy good
concerning me, but evil.'--1 KINGS xxii. 7,8.
An ill-omened alliance had been struck up between Ahab of Israel and
Jehoshaphat of Judah. The latter, who would have been much better in
Jerusalem, had come down to Samaria to join in an assault on the
kingdom of Damascus; but, like a great many other people, Jehoshaphat
first made up his mind without asking God, and then thought that it
might be well to get some kind of varnish of a religious sanction for
his decision. So he proposes to Ahab to inquire of the Lord about this
matter. One would have thought that that should have been done before,
and not after, the determination was made. Ahab does not at all see the
necessity for such a thing, but, to please his scrupulous ally, he
sends for his priests. They came, four hundred of them, and of course
they all played the tune that Ahab called for. It is not difficult to
get prophets to pat a king on the back, and tell him, 'Do what you
like.'
But Jehoshaphat was not satisfied yet. Perhaps he thought that Ahab's
clergy were not exactly God's prophets, but at all events he wanted an
independent opinion; and so he asks if there is not in all Samaria a
man that can be trusted to speak out. He gets for answer the name of
this 'Micaiah the son of Imlah.' Ahab had had experience of him, and
knew his man; and the very name leads him to an explosion of passion,
which, like other explosions, lays bare some very ugly depths. 'I hate
him; for he doth not prophesy good concerning me, but evil.'
That is a curious mood, is it not? that a man should know another to be
a messenger of God, and therefore know that his words are true, and
that if he asked his counsel he would be forbidden to do the thing that
he is dead set on doing, and would be warned that to do it was
destruction; and that still he should not ask the counsel, nor ever
dream of dropping the purpose, but should burst out in a passion of
puerile rage against the counsellor, and will have none of his
reproofs. Very curious! But there are a great many of us that have
something of the same mood in us, though we do not speak it out as
plainly as Ahab did. It lurks more or less in us all, and it largely
determines the attitude that some of us take to Christianity and to
Christ. So I wish to say a word or two about it.
I. My text suggests the inevitable opposition between a message from
God, and man's evil.
No doubt, God is love; and just because He is, it is absolutely
necessary that what comes from Him, and is the reflex and cast, so to
speak, of His character, should be in stern and continual antagonism to
that evil which is the worst foe of men, and is sure to lead to their
death. It is because God is love, that 'to the froward He shows Himself
froward.' and opposes that which, unopposed and yielded to, will ruin
the man that does it. So this is one of the characteristic marks of all
true messages from God, that men who will not part with their evil call
them 'stern,' 'rigid,' 'gloomy,' 'narrow' Yes, of course; because God
must look upon godless lives with disapprobation, and must desire by
all means to draw men away from that which is drawing them away _from_
Him and to their death.
Now, I suppose I need not spend time in enumerating or describing the
points in the attitude of Christianity towards the solemn fact of human
sin, which correspond to Ahab's complaint that the prophet spake always
'not good concerning him, but evil.' The 'gospel' of Jesus Christ
proves its name to be true, and that it _is_ 'good news,' not only by
its graciousness, its promises, its offers, and the rich blessings of
eternal life with which its hands are full, but by its severity, as men
call it. One characteristic of the gospel is the altogether unique
place which the fact of sin fills in it. There is no other religion on
the face of the earth that has so grasped and made prominent this
thought: 'All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.' There is
none that has painted human nature as it is in such dark colours,
because there is none that knows itself to be able to change human
nature into such radiance of glory and purity. The gospel has, if I
might so say, on its palette a far greater range of pigments than any
other system. Its blacks are blacker; its whites are whiter; its golds
are more lustrous than those of other painters of human nature as it is
and as it may become. It is a mark of its divine origin that it
unfalteringly looks facts in the face, and will not say smooth things
about men as they are.
Side by side with that characteristic of the dark picture which it
draws of us, as we are in ourselves, is its unhesitating restraint or
condemnation of deep-seated desires and tendencies. It does not come to
men with the smooth words on its lips, 'Do as thou wilt.' It does not
seek for favour by relaxing bonds, but it rigidly builds up a wall on
either side of a narrow path, and says, 'Walk within these limits and
thou art safe. Go beyond them a hair's-breadth, and thou perishest.' It
may suit Ahab's prophets to fling the reins on the neck of human
nature; God's prophet says, 'Thou shalt not,' That is another of the
tests of divine origin, that there shall be no base compliance with
inclinations, but rigid condemnation of many of our deep desires.
Side by side with these two, there is a third characteristic that the
Word, which is the outcome and expression of the divine love, is
distinguished by its plain and stern declarations of the bitter
consequences of evil-doing. I need not dwell upon these, brethren. They
seem to me to be far too solemn to be spoken of by a man to men in
other words than Scripture's. But I beseech you to remember that this,
too, is the characteristic of Christ's message. So a man should feel,
when he thinks of the dark and solemn things that the Old Testament
partially, and the New Testament more clearly, utter as to the death
which is the outcome of sin, that these are indeed the very voice of
infinite love pleading with us all. Brother I do not so misapprehend
facts as to think that the restraints and threatenings and dark
pictures which Christ and His servants have drawn are anything but the
utterance of the purest affection.
II. Now, secondly, let me ask you to look for a moment at the strange
dislike which this attitude of Christianity kindles.
I have said that Ahab's mental condition was a very odd one. Strange as
it is, it is, as I have already remarked, in some degree a very
frequent one. There are in us all, as we see in many regions of life,
the beginnings of the same kind of feeling. Here, for example, is a
course that I am quite sure, if I pursue it, will land me in evil. Does
the drunkard take a glass the less, because he knows that if he goes on
he will have a drunkard's liver and die a miserable death? Does the
gambler ever take away his hand from the pack of cards or the dice-box,
because he knows that play means, in the long run, poverty and
disgrace? When a man sets his will upon a certain course, he is like a
bull that has started in its rage. Down goes the head, and, with eyes
shut, he will charge a stone wall or an iron door, though he knows it
will smash his skull. Men are very foolish animals; and there is no
greater mark of their folly than the conspicuous and oft-repeated fact
that the clearest vision of the consequences of a course of conduct is
powerless to turn a man from it, when once his passions, or his will,
or, worse still, his weakness, or, worst of all, his habits, have bound
him to it.
Take another illustration. Do we not all know that honest friends have
sometimes fallen out of favour, perhaps with ourselves, because they
have persistently kept telling us what our consciences and common-sense
knew to be true, that if we go on by that road we shall be suffocated
in a bog? A man makes up his mind to a course of conduct. He has a
shrewd suspicion that an honest friend will condemn him, and that the
condemnation will be right. What does he do, therefore? He never
consults his friend, but if by chance that friend should say what was
expected of him, he gets angry with his adviser and doggedly goes his
own road. I suppose we all know what it is to treat our consciences in
the style in which Ahab treated Micaiah. We do not listen to them
because we know what they will say before they have said it; and we
call ourselves sensible people! Martin Luther once said, 'It is neither
safe nor _wise_ to do anything against conscience.' But Ahab put
Micaiah in prison; and we shut up our consciences in a dungeon, and put
a gag in their mouths, and a muffler over the gag, that we may hear
them say no word, because we know that what we are doing, and we are
doggedly determined to do, is wrong.
But the saddest illustration of this infatuation is to be found in the
attitude that many men take in regard to Christianity. There is a great
craving to-day, more perhaps than there has been in some other periods
of the world's history, for a religion which shall adorn, but shall not
restrain; for a religion which shall be toothless, and have no bite in
it; for a religion that shall sanction anything that it pleases our
sovereign mightiness to want to do. We should all like to have God's
sanction for our actions. But there are a great many of us who will not
take the only way to secure that--viz. to do the actions which He
commands, and to abstain from those which He forbids. Popular
Christianity is a very easy-fitting garment; it is like an old shoe
that you can slip off and on without any difficulty. But a religion
which does not put up a strong barrier between you and many of your
inclinations in not worth anything. The mark of a message from God is
that it restrains and coerces and forbids and commands. And some of you
do not like it because it does.
There is a great tendency in this day to cut out of the Old and New
Testaments all the pages that say things like this, 'The soul that
sinneth it shall die'; or things like this, 'This is the condemnation,
that light is come into the world, and men love darkness rather than
light'; or things like this, 'Then shall the wicked go away into outer
darkness.' Brethren, men being what they are, and God being what He is,
there can be no divine message without a side of what the world calls
threatening, or what Ahab called' prophesying evil.' I beseech you, do
not be carried away by the modern talk about Christianity being gloomy
and dark, or fancy that we put a blot and an excrescence upon the pure
religion of the Man of Nazareth, when we speak of the death that
follows sin, and of the darkness into which unbelief carries a man.
III. Once more, let me say a word about the intense folly of such an
attitude.
Ahab hated Micaiah. Why? Because Micaiah told him what would come to
him as the fruit of his own actions. That was foolish. It is no less
foolish for people to take up a position of dislike, and to turn away
from the gospel of Jesus Christ because it speaks in like manner. I
said that men are very foolish animals; there is surely nothing in all
the annals of human stupidity more stupid than to be angry with the
word that tells you the truth about what you are bringing down upon
your heads. It is absurd, because Micaiah did not make the evil, but
Ahab made it; and Micaiah's business was only to tell him what he was
doing. It is absurd, because the only question to be asked is. Are the
warnings true? are the threatenings representations of what really will
come? are the prohibitions reasonable? And it is absurd, because, if
these things are so--if it is true that the soul that sinneth dies, and
will die; if it is true that you, who have heard of the name and the
salvation of Jesus Christ over and over again, and have turned away
from it, will, if you continue in that negligence and unbelief, reap
bitter fruits here and hereafter therefrom--if these things are true,
surely the man that tells you so, and the gospel that tells you so,
deserve better treatment than Ahab's petulant hatred or your stolid
indifference and neglect.
Would you think it wise for a sea-captain to try to take the clapper
out of the bell that floats and tolls above a shoal on which his ship
will be wrecked if it strikes? Would it be wise to put out the
lighthouse lamps, and then think that you had abolished the reef? Does
the signalman with his red flag make the danger of which he warns, and
is it not like a baby to hate and to neglect the message that comes to
you and says, 'Turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die'?