SUNDAY READING.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 348, 26 March 1910, Page 10

SUNDAY READING.

ELIJAH'S LAST COMMISSION. SERMON PREACHED BY REV. H. J. LEWIS. "Go return on thy way to the wilderness of and wllen thou comest, anoint Ila.-ael tc be king over Syria, and Jeiui, the ot Ninislii* shall thou anoint to be king over Israel; and Elisha, the sou. oi Shaphal, shall thou anoint to be prophet in thy room. . . . Yet have i left me seven thousand in Israel aii the knees which have not bowed unto Baal and every mouth which hath not kissed him."—l. King's, XIX., 15-18. This was Elijah's last commission. It was God's answer to the request that he might die. The great prophet had had one of those terrible fits of depression which at times sweep over even the most earnest men. While that fit was upon him, the only prayer he could offer was one of pessimism. "It is enough 0 Lord, let me die for I am not better than my fathers." The vision of Horeb was sent "to show him that pessimism is always wrong. More than that, that pessimism is always the result'of partial views of life. He who takes wnole views of Hie must be au optimist. Elijah had been looking only at Jesebel till she seemed to fill the sky, and to be • standing with her pet trampling the ruins of a prostrate religion and an extinct church. God's cure for that morbid dream is simply to give him a larger outlook. He bid* him stand on the mount before. the Lord: He shows him the world from God's standpoint. He sees a world of which God is the sky on which Jesebel .is only a retreating shadow and a vanishing speck. He wakes up from his lurid dream to see that God is in His heaven; all's right with his world. God gives him a commission to execute tile glory of which 'banishes the existence of Jesebel from his mind. In this commission God draws aside the curtain and shows him a iew of the waves of influence emanating from a work thai seemed a, failure and'a life that appeared to be wasted The successive clauses of this commission illustrate (1)

GOD'S OVERLORDSHIP OF THE , HEATHEN WORLD. "Anoint Hasael to be king over Syria." Syria was a heathen land. And yet j God held it in the hollow of his hand, i The command to anoint Hasael king; over Syria meant Syria is mine. Tt i was a proclamation of the same as-: tounding claim as that set up in the j sublime psalm, "Gilead is mine, Manas-, seh is mine, Ephraim is the strength of; mine head, Judah is my lawgiver." But> that is not all. The east of Jordan r oe- j longs to me as well as the west. "Moab ■ is my washpot, over Edom will I cast ■■ my shoe." God's sovereignty is not re- \ stricted to the races of mankind that j recognise bini. "His kingdom ruleth < over all." The heathen world is an outpost of His empire. He has armies to conquer it and garrisons to hold it oi which we know nothing. Russia and , Turkey, China and Japan are as truly under His authority, as Great Britain. America and Australasia. The revolutions by which the nominal empires '■ over them rise and fall are the steps [ hv which He is silentlv setting up His throne. The motto which war and peace, commerce and civilisation, colonisation and emigration are silently j writing on every page of history is "The [ earth is the Lord's and tii3 fulness thereof." The crushing of a puppet prince like Napoleon, the downfall of American slavery, the decline of pres- ; tige of godless Powers like and Turkey are all echoes of the challenge , e'l the world's king to the pretenders \ who play at empire for a little while. Hitherto shall ye come, but n j further. ; and here shall your proud waves be slayed. (2) ' .

GOD'S SUPREMACY OVER THE SECULAR WORLD. "Jehu the son of Xinishi shall thou anoint to be king over Israel." Ahab was worse than a heathen who worshipped false gods, because he leeognised no god at all. His reign was .the incarnation of secularism pure and simple. All religions considerations were bowled clean out of that national life. Ahab had wiped out the name of Jehovah and painted his own in its stead. But it is one thing to discard God; it is another and a very different thing to dethrone Him. The command to anoint Jehu king of Israel was Gods'sentence of* dethronement on the madcap who had discarded Him. And that doom is an illustration of the truth that we can no more abolish God's rule over our secular life by refusing to recognise Him than >we can abolish passive resistance by refusing to read the newspapers. Our secular life is surrounded t»y unseen armies and shot through with irresistible forces which will execute God's will in it and over it whether we recognise that will or not. The business which is not conducted on Christian principles will grow or later come to grief. The marriage which makes more of social nosition than personal character will bring misery. The politics which are puffed out by ambition and greed can onlr make a bubble which will burst the louder the bigger it grows. The.world bear upon all branches of our secular institution which ignores God and taboos moral principle digs its own grave. Our efforts to bring ethical principles to bear up on all branches oi our secular life, to draw the teeth and cut fhe claws of the liquor traffic, to abolish the totalizator, to demand the recognition of God's authority in our State schools. and to Christianise the legislation of our

land are our ways of showing that we believe this world is God's world. (3) HOD'S GUARANTEE OF THE PROPHETIC SUCCESSION. "And Elisha, the son of Shaphal of Abel-Meholah, shalt thou anoint to be prophet in thy room." Probably the last man Elijah would ever ha>-(v dreamed of seeing turn prophet \vi> the son of the well-to-do sheep rarmer on the rich pastures of Abel-Meholah, and yet that was the man who was to supersede the grim greatness and stern strcnjrth of Elijah by a sweet gentleness of which he TTTinself had been incapable. The command to anoint Elisha meant thnl, Cod knows where to find his pronhpts better than we can tel] Him. God loves the world too well to let the race of ■prophets die out. From the ohseiiritv ; of a Shapnal's farm ho can sermon on the succession of Elijah, and irom' the obscurity of a Boston shoe store He ' can summon the Moodv whose voice is i to shake the world with a power whi<-'i; will eclipse that of a Spurgeon or a I rJceeher. We cannot call a nrophet. i We can only anoint the man whom God calls. We can no more make a prophet than we can make a morning star. When Jupiter comes blazing into the sky we can only look and wonder. When the new Elijah comes forth with the

dew of the morning on his Vrow. \\„- light of God iu his ejus, and the thunder of God iu his voice, we can oni\ bow our heads before him and s av u'e spirit of Elijah doth rest upon EHshu w GOD'S guardianship of the INVISIBLE CHURCH. "Yet have 1 left me seven tnousanU in Israel.'" That wa s the grandest revelation ol all, to leam that in ever? town and village, m every valley and glen, there were knees that had not been dishonored by the adoration oi Baal and lips that had never been polluted by his unholy kiss. The greatest mistake any of us can make is to imagine that lie has a monopoly of religion. There are millions of loyal hearts "and true whose names are not written on our church rolls. There is a faithful remnant known only to God. The moral of Elijahs last commission i 3 that despair is the worst sin of the church; hope is the highest duty. We have only to keep God's Hag flying and be true to our marching orders, and we shall discover that the chariots of God contain twenty thousand even thousands of saints.