We must now leave our prophet, for a season, and turn our attention to the sad condition of things in Israel during the time that he was hidden with God. Terrible indeed must be the condition of things on earth when “the heaven is shut up.” Sterile and dreary must be the aspect of this lower world when heaven withholds its refreshing showers, and specially of that land which was to “drink water of the rain of heaven.” Egypt might not have regarded much the shutting up of heaven, seeing she had never been wont to look thither for her supplies. She had her resources in herself. “My river is mine own,” was her independent language. But such was not the case with the Lord’s land “the land of hills and valleys.” If heaven yielded not its supplies, all was parched and sterile. Israel could not say, “My river is mine own.” No; they were ever taught to look up; their eyes were always to be upon the Lord, as the Lord’s eyes were ever upon them. Hence, when anything arose to hinder the intercourse between heaven and earth, the land of Canaan was made to feel it with painful intensity.
Thus it was “in the days of Elias, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when great famine was throughout all the land.” Israel was made to feel the dreadful consequences of departure from their only source of real blessing.
“There was sore famine in Samaria, and Ahab said unto Obadiah, Go into the land, unto all fountains of water, and unto all brooks; peradventure we may find grass to save the horses and mules alive, that we lose not all the beasts. So they divided the land between them, to pass throughout it; Ahab went one way by himself, and Obadiah went another way by himself.” Israel had sinned, and Israel must feel the rod of Jehovah’s righteous anger. What a humbling picture of God’s ancient people, to see their king going forth to look for grass! What a contrast between all this and the rich abundance and glory of Solomon’s day! But God had been grossly dishonored, and His truth rejected. Jezebel had sent forth the pestilential influence of her principles by the instrumentality of her wicked prophets—Baal’s altar had superseded the altar of God; hence the heaven above was iron, and the earth beneath brass; the physical aspect of things was but the expression of Israel’s hardness of heart and low moral condition.
Now there is not so much as a word about God in Ahab’s directions to his servants—not a syllable about the sin that had called down the heavy displeasure and judgment of God upon the land. No; the word is, “Go unto all fountains and brooks.” Such was Ahab’s thought, his poor groveling thought; his heart turned not, in true humility, to Jehovah; he cried not to Him in the hour of his need; hence his word is, “peradventure we may find grass.” God is shut out, and self is the all-engrossing object. Provided he could find grass, he cared not about finding God. He could have enjoyed himself in the midst of Jezebel’s idolatrous prophets, had not the horrors of famine driven him forth: and then, instead of searching out the cause of the famine, in true self-judgment and humility, and seeking for pardon and restoration at the hand of God, he goes forth, in impenitent selfishness, to look for grass. Alas! he had sold himself to work wickedness; he had become the slave of Jezebel; his palace had become a cage of every unclean bird; Baal’s prophets, like so many vultures, hovered around his throne, and from thence spread the leaven of idolatry over the whole land. Oh, it is a truly awful thing to allow the heart to depart from the Lord. One cannot tell where it may end. Ahab was an Israelite, but he had allowed himself to be ensnared by a false religious system, at the head of which was Jezebel his wife; he had made shipwreck of faith and a good conscience, and was driven headlong into the most abandoned wickedness. There is no one so bad as the man who turns aside from the ways of God. Such an one is sure to plunge into more profound depths of wickedness than even the ordinary victims of sin and Satan. The devil seems to take special delight in making such an one an instrument in carrying out his malignant designs against the truth of God.
Reader, if you have ever been taught to value the ways of truth and holiness, if you have ever taken delight in God and His ways, be watchful; “keep thy heart with all diligence;” beware of false religious influence; you are moving through a scene in which the very atmosphere you breathe is noxious, and destructive of spiritual life. The enemy has with hellish sagacity—a sagacity sharpened by well-nigh six thousand years’ acquaintance with the constitution of the human mind—laid his snares on all sides of you, and nothing but permanent communion with your heavenly Father will avail to preserve your soul. Remember Ahab, and pray continually to be kept from temptation.
The following passage of Scripture may well be used, in connection with Ahab, as a solemn and seasonable warning: “Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord. For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited” (Jer. 17:5-65Thus saith the Lord; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord. 6For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited. (Jeremiah 17:5‑6)).
Such was the wretched Ahab—wretched though favored with a diadem and a scepter. He cared neither for God nor his people. In his sayings and doings, on the melancholy occasion to which we are referring, we find as little about Israel as about God. There is not one word about the people that had been committed to his care, and who ought, after God, to have been his great object. His earthly mind seems to have been unable to reach beyond “the horses and mules.” Such were the objects of Ahab’s anxious solicitude in the day of Israel’s direful calamity. Alas, what a contrast between all this low and groveling selfishness and the noble spirit of the man after God’s own heart, who, when the land was trembling beneath the heavy stroke of Jehovah’s chastening rod, could say, “Is it not I that have commanded the people to be numbered: even I it is that have sinned and done evil indeed; but as for these sheep, what have they done? let Thy hand, I pray Thee, O Lord my God, be on me, and on my father’s house; but not on Thy people, that they should be plagued” (1 Chron. 21:1717And David said unto God, Is it not I that commanded the people to be numbered? even I it is that have sinned and done evil indeed; but as for these sheep, what have they done? let thine hand, I pray thee, O Lord my God, be on me, and on my father's house; but not on thy people, that they should be plagued. (1 Chronicles 21:17)).
Here was the true spirit of a king. David, in the spirit of his blessed Master, would expose his own bosom to the stroke, in order that the sheep might escape; he would “stand between them and the foe;” he would turn the scepter into a shepherd’s crook; he thought not of his “horses and mules;” yea, he thought not of himself or his father’s house, but of the people of God’s pasture, and the sheep of His hand. Happy, ineffably happy, will it be for Israel’s scattered tribes to find themselves again under the tender care of the true David.
It might be profitable to follow out a little more fully the history of Ahab; to dwell upon his unprincipled treatment of the righteous Naboth; of the alluring influence exerted by him over the mind of the good king Jehoshaphat, and of many other circumstances in his unhappy reign; but all this would lead us too far from our subject. We shall therefore advert for a few moments to the character of an important member of Ahab’s household, and then return to Elijah.
Obadiah, the governor of Ahab’s house, was one who, in the secret of his own spirit, feared the Lord, but who was planted in a most unhallowed atmosphere. The house of the wicked Ahab, and his still more wicked consort, must have been a painful school for the righteous soul of Obadiah; and so he found it. He was hindered in service and testimony. What he did for the Lord was done by stealth. He was afraid to act openly and decidedly; yet he did quite enough to show what he would have done had he been planted in a more congenial soil and cherished by a more healthful atmosphere. “He took a hundred prophets, and hid them by fifty in a cave, and fed them with bread and water.” This was a most precious token of devotedness of heart to the Lord—a blessed triumph of divine principle over the most untoward circumstances.
Thus it was with Jonathan in the house of Saul. He, too, was sadly hindered in his service to God and to Israel. He should have stood forth in more entire separation from the evil in which his father lived, and moved; his place at Saul’s table should have been vacant as well as David’s; the cave of Adullam would have been his proper place, where, in holy companionship with the rejected David and his despised band of followers, he might have found a wider and more suited range in which to manifest his affectionate devotedness to God and His anointed.
Human expediency, however, might, and doubtless would, have recommended Jonathan to remain in Saul’s house, and Obadiah to remain in Ahab’s house, as being “the sphere in which Providence had placed them;” but expediency is not faith, nor will it aid a man in his path of service, whatever it may be. Faith will ever lead a man to break through the freezing rules of human expediency, in order that it may express itself in a way not to be mistaken. Jonathan felt constrained at times to leave the table of Saul in order that he might embrace David: but he should have abandoned it altogether; he should have cast in his lot entirely with David; he ought not to have rested satisfied with speaking for his brother, he should have identified himself with him. But he did not do so, and therefore he fell on Mount Gilboa, by the hand of the uncircumcised. Thus, in his life he was harassed and hindered by the unrighteous principle of rule which Saul had set up to entangle and bind the consciences of the faithful, and in his death he was ingloriously mingled with the uncircumcised.
Just so it was with Obadiah. It was his lot to stand in connection with the man who occupied the lowest step of that ladder of apostasy whereby the kings of Israel had descended from original principles. Hence he was obliged to act stealthily for God and His servants; he was afraid of Ahab and Jezebel; he lacked boldness and energy to stand out in decided testimony against all abominations; he had no room for the development of his renewed energies or affections; his soul was withered by the noxious vapors around him, and he could therefore exert but little influence on his day and generation. Hence, while Elijah was boldly confronting Ahab, and openly serving the Lord, Obadiah was openly serving Ahab, and stealthily serving the Lord. While Elijah was breathing the holy atmosphere of Jehovah’s presence, Obadiah was breathing the polluted atmosphere of Ahab’s wicked court. While Elijah was receiving his daily supplies from the hand of the God of Israel, Obadiah was ranging the country in search of grass for Ahab’s horses.
Truly a most striking contrast! And is there not at this moment many an Obadiah similarly occupied? Is there not many a God-fearing man sharing, in common with the children of this world, its death and misery, and laboring in co-operation with them to avert its impending ruin? Doubtless there is. And is this fit work for such? Should “the mules and horses” of an ungodly world engross the thoughts and energies of the Christian, instead of the interests of the Church of God? Ah no! it should not be so. The Christian should have a nobler end in view—a higher and more heavenly sphere in which to use his energies. God, and not Ahab, demands and deserves our devotion.
This is a very wide question, and there are few amongst us that may not learn a lesson from it. Let us ask ourselves honestly, as before the Searcher of hearts, what are we doing? What object are we carrying out? What end have we in view? Are we sowing to the flesh? Are we working for merely earthly objects? Have we no higher end in view than self or this present world?
Oh, these are searching questions, when rightly put! The tendency of the human heart and affections is ever downward—ever toward earth and the things of earth. The palace of Ahab holds out far more powerful attractions to our fallen nature than the lonely banks of Cherith or the house of the starving widow of Zarephath. But ah, let us think of the end! The end alone is the true criterion by which to judge in such matters. “Until I went into the sanctuary of God; then understood I their end” (Psa. 73:1717Until I went into the sanctuary of God; then understood I their end. (Psalm 73:17)).
Elijah knew, by being in the sanctuary, that Ahab stood in a slippery place; that his house would speedily crumble in the dust; that all his pomp and glory was about to end in the lonely tomb, and his immortal spirit to be summoned to render its final account. These things the holy man of God thoroughly understood, and he was therefore well content to stand apart from it all. His leathern girdle, his homely fare, his lonely path, were far better, he felt, than all the pleasures of Ahab’s court. Such was his judgment, and we shall see, ere we close this paper, that his judgment was sound. “The world passeth away, and the lust thereof, but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.” Would that all who love the name of Jesus were more uncompromising and energetic in their testimony for Him! The time is rapidly approaching when we would give worlds that we had been more true and real in our ways here below. We are too lukewarm, too much inclined to make terms with the world and the flesh, too ready to exchange the leathern girdle for the robe in which Ahab and Jezebel are most willing to array us.
May the Lord give all His people grace to testify against this world that the deeds thereof are evil, and to stand apart from its ways, its maxims and principles; in a word, from everything which properly belongs to it. “The night is far spent, and the day is at hand.” Let us then cast off the works of darkness and stand clothed in the armor of light; let us, as those that are risen with Christ, set our affection on things above, and not on things on the earth; having “our citizenship in heaven,” let us, with unceasing eagerness, “look for the Savior from thence, who shall change the body of our humiliation, that it may be fashioned like unto the body of His glory, according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things to Himself.”