The battle of the kings is recorded in Genesis 14. As long as it was merely a contest between them, Abraham has nothing to say to it. Let the potsherds strive with the potsherds. But as soon as he hears that his kinsman Lot is involved in that struggle, he stirs himself.
Everything, as we read, is beautiful in its season. There is a time to build, and a time to pull down. There was a time for Abraham to be still, and a time for Abraham to be active; a time to be silent, and a time to break silence. And he understood the time. Like the men of Issachar afterwards, he knew the time and what Israel ought to do. God’s principles were Abraham’s rules. Lot was taken prisoner, and the kinsman’s part was now Abraham’s duty. The battlefield in the vale of Siddim shall be his now, as the tent had been his till now in the plains of Mamre. The mind of God had another lesson for him than that which he learned while the potsherds of the earth were alone in the conflict, and a time to break silence calls him out at the head of his trained servants.
The Right Time
This intelligence of the mind of Christ in a saint is excellent and beautiful indeed, and everything is beautiful in its season. Out of season the very same action is defiled and disfigured. The material of an action is not enough to determine the character of an action. It must be seasonable likewise. Elijah, from his elevation, may call down fire from heaven on the captains and their fifties, and so the two witnesses in the day of Revelation 11. But it will not do for the companions of the lowly, rejected Jesus to act thus on the Samaritan villagers, in Luke 9. It is only in its season that anything is really right. How was the garden of Gethsemane which had been made sacred by the sorrows of the Lord Jesus soon disfigured by the blood which Peter’s sword drew there! What a stain on that soil, though the power of Christ was present to remove it! But another sword was doing right service when it hewed Agag in pieces, for when vengeance is demanded, when the trumpet of the sanctuary sounds an alarm for war, vengeance or war will be as perfect as grace and suffering.
But there is more than this in our patriarch at this time. Two victories distinguish him—one over the armies of the kings and the other over the offers of the king of Sodom.
The first of these Abraham gained because he struck the blow exactly in God’s time. He went out to the battle neither sooner nor later than God would have had him. He waited, as it were, till “he heard the sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry trees” (2 Sam. 5:24). Victory was therefore sure, for the battle was the Lord’s, not his. His arm was braced by the Lord, and this victory of Abraham’s was that of a sling and stone, or of the jawbone of an ass, or of a Jonathan and his armor-bearer against a Philistine host, for Abraham’s was but a band of trained servants against the armies of four confederated kings.
The second, still brighter than the first, was achieved in virtue of fellowship with the very springs of divine strength. The spirit of the patriarch was in victory here, as his arm had been before. He had so drunk in the communication of the King of Salem — had so fed on the bread and wine of that royal, priestly stranger — that the king of Sodom spread out his feast in vain. The soul of Abraham had been in heaven, and he could not return to the world.
J. G. Bellett, adapted