Images de page
PDF
ePub

and tyrannically taxed to support dalliance, debauchery, and idolatry, from curtailed resources. Discontents broke out, and the signal of the waning glory of the house of David was given by the prophet Ahijah, who, in obedience to God's command, anointed Jeroboam as king over the ten tribes which were to revolt from his son.

The last recorded act of Solomon is his attempt to kill Jeroboam. Thus he ended with a wilful opposition to God's appointment. So little did he reck of God's last warning to him. So utterly had he sunk to the reprobate mind of voluptuousness. So destructive is lust; it ruins both heart and head; it hardens one and perverts the other; it extinguishes shame, it sears the feeling of affection, and love, and gratitude, it destroys all sensibility to holiness, it darkens the understanding with utter infatuation upon all things of good report in earth and in heaven, and enlightens it only with the infernal lightening of cold, selfish calculation in the matters of sensual gratification. There is no hint in Scripture that Solomon ever repented of his sins. Indeed, the narrative implies rather the reverse. Seldom, or rather never, has a hoary profligate awakened to repentance. It is a moral impossibility, it is a spiritual improbability. The man who has once entertained the word of life, and then abandoned it, is in a more hopeless situation than he who never recked of it at all. The inert seed may at some time or other shoot up; but the eradicated plant can never thrive again. After a reign of forty years of glory, such as the best of his successors could never reach to, and of shame, such as the worst scarcely sank to, Solomon was gathered to his fa

thers.

God's unappeased displeasure against him is declared by the age at which he died. He promised him length of days on condition of obedience, and he died at the comparatively early age of 59. The kingdom which he had received from his father, improving and united, he left to his son, declining and distracted. God was sufficiently merciful in delaying to the day of his successor the ruin which his iniquities had brought upon his country. Alas! that successor found too clearly that the sins of their fathers are visited upon their children. Melancholy, indeed, is the review of the life of Solomon. We are grieved and miserably disappointed as in one of those days of spring, when we have awakened to a warm bright sun, with life and light in joyous sound and motion all around us; but by noon the sun is hidden in clouds of darkness, and rain and wind are howling. With intellectual vigour superior to that of his father David, he had passions equally strong, with less moral firmness to control them. He had not been bred up in the hardy school of adversity, nor had peril and the sword taught him either command over himself, or confidence in God. He sank therefore to the lowest depth of his father's sins, but never soared up to the height of his holiness. David's worst sins were momentary surprises compared with his. His were sins of wilful systematic indulgence; and, like a true voluptuary he forgot his best friend, he forgot all his benefits, he forgot his plighted covenant. Here is a dreadful apostasy; here is a man once prodigally decked out in the most precious gifts of God's Holy Spirit, and then utterly stripped of them by his own act: one

M

who had tasted (yea, and given to taste) the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, who fell away, and was not renewed again unto repentance1.

The works of Solomon, some of which compose a portion of the word of God in his Church, must have been composed before he fell into this lamentable state, the effect of which is to enervate the mind, to indispose it to any thing serious, and to break down all its vigorous thought and masculine sense. Alas, for wisdom! of how little avail is its earthly dross, when the heavenly spirit is fled. When Solomon had once lost the fear of God, which he himself lays down as the rudiment of wisdom, what was all that remained but folly, the folly of those men, who professing themselves to be wise, become fools 2. Like those bodies which lose all their transparency, when some pervading quality is gone, and intercept light instead of transmitting it; such is wisdom deprived of the Spirit; it darkens instead of enlightening the mind. It introduces man to the powers of darkness, and excludes him from the powers of light. It is potent only for mischief, only to misguide and destroy it is a lie, as the father of it is a liar. Real wisdom can never be maintained without continual communication with the blessed fountain of all wisdom, and truth cannot abide with him who has forsaken the God of truth.

[blocks in formation]

ELIJAH.

B. c. 896.

But

Of all the prophets under the old dispensation, Elijah, of Thisbe, in Galilee, is most remarkable. Samuel, indeed, stands first in order of time1, Isaiah has gained the title of the Evangelical Prophet, and Daniel could fix the very period of the beginning and end of the kingdom of heaven upon earth. Elijah was not only a prophet, but also a prophecy. He is personally concerned with both covenants. He typified the forerunner of that King, and the last strain of the last prophet promised to send Elijah the Prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. He even personally made his reappearance in the latter days. In the awfully magnificent scene of the transfiguration of our Lord on the Mount, he is seen attending upon him in his glory, the representative of the prophetical, as Moses was of the legal part of the old covenant. On this account his history is among the most important portions of the narrative of the Old Testament. The circumstances which first bring him before us, tell a sad tale of the degeneracy of Israel. The family of the schismatical Jeroboam, which had been cut off by God's express declaration, was succeeded by one which, undeterred by the awful warning, gave

1 See Acts iii. 24.; the Books of Samuel are first in the prophetic series of the Jewish canon.

itself up to the aggravated sin of idolatry. This was introduced, as usual, by intermarriage with the heathen. Ahab, the most weak and wicked of the Israelitish kings, and second of this dynasty, married Jezebel, daughter of Ethbaal, king of the Sidonians. Her husband immediately gave himself up to all the abominable superstitions of her nation. But the artful and ambitious woman was not content with this token of her influence. She saw her advantage in the general dissemination of these impieties. It gave her a party in the kingdom, which, supported as it was by this reason from without, bade defiance to the opposition of the faithful servants of God. Nor was it difficult to substitute her religion in place of the corrupt worship of Jehovah. When images are once introduced as objects of adoration, it little matters whom they represent; and it was easy for men, if scruples arose, to be persuaded that Baal and his fellows were no other than their own Jehovah, under peculiar attributes. When they had once degraded his glory to the likeness of a calf that eateth hay, it was but a short step to give him another name and form. The apostasy was soon general. Baal had a temple and altar at Samaria, the worship of Astarte was established, and both deities were furnished each with a long train of about 400 priests. It was amid such impieties that God interfered, and commanded Elijah to go before Ahab, and denounce a drought upon the land. The manner in which this communication was received is a striking example of degeneracy. Saul had submissively listened to Samuel, and David to Nathan, notwithstanding the unwelcomeness of their message. But Ahab immediately

« PrécédentContinuer »