SERMON III.

THE LORD AND BAAL.

(Preached at St Mary's on the 9th Sunday after Trinity, August 16, 18401).

1 KINGS XVIII. 21.

And Elijah came unto all the people and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? If the Lord be God, follow him; but if Baal be God, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word.

THE acts and the fortunes of God's ancient people Israel are exhibited to us, even in the last and most perfect record of the Divine will, as sources of abundant and perpetual instruction. They are exhibited as the great model of the Almighty's proceeding both with nations and with individuals—with those most emphatically and specially whom he has favoured with the means of peculiar knowledge, and admitted to a covenanted relation with Himself. Their Exodus from Egypt, the commencement of their national existence, their march across the desert, as the very remarkable Epistle of this day' has reminded us,— with all the leading events of their subsequent history,-all, it is said, happened to them as en

1 First preached in India, Aug. 8, 1830.

1 Cor. x. 1-13.

samples or patterns of general application; and they are written for our admonition most eminently, upon whom the ends of the world are

come.

If this then be the case with every part of the Hebrew history, the life of that great prophet and reformer of Israel, who speaks in the words I have just read, cannot be among the least interesting or important. Few names are more often repeated in the sacred writings of the New Testament than that of Elias. If an example is to be given of trust in God in times of difficulty and adversity, of constant fidelity, of immovable resolution, of instant earnestness with God in prayer and intercession for his apostate people, it is the venerable Tishbite who is thus held out to the early Christians throughout the apostolical epistles. It is he who in the gospel is the prototype and exact resemblance of the great forerunner of our Lord: thus was that precursor foretold by the last of the Old Testament prophets, and thus was he announced by the angel at the beginning of the New: the greatest praise of him who was "a prophet and more than a prophet," was that he should go before his Lord in the spirit and power of Elias. This Elias was moreover the type and figure of our Lord Himself in the great event of his ascension into heaven. And further, on that holy mount where the Lord was transfigured, and displayed in anticipation the glory to which He should re-ascend before the eyes of the chief of

the apostles, it is Elias who is associated with Moses as an attendant and active participator in that scene. The great witness and assertor of forsaken truth, the reformer of Israel, is alone thought worthy to stand by its first teacher and legislator, where both are to wait on the Lord of all before He is offered up,-to confer with Him in glory on these coming events in which the law and the prophets were alike completed.

"The spirit and the power of Elias," to which alone such splendid distinction is attached,—a spirit certainly imparted to him from above, since himself was, as the apostle St James observes, a man of like passions with ourselves, this spirit and power was nowhere more remarkably exemplified than in the events recorded in that chapter of the book of Kings from which my text is taken, and which was the first lesson of this morning. I propose to consider with some particularity the leading points of this narration, connecting it with the preparatory and attendant circumstances; in order that we may, by God's blessing, fully enter into the meaning of that appeal in which the chief moral of the history lies, and be enabled to trace the intended application to ourselves.

It was to the kingdom of Israel, that is, of the ten tribes, Ephraim and the rest, as distinguished from the kingdom of Judah, comprising but the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, that the labours and testimony of this great prophet were directed. How this, the largest portion of God's inheritance,

whose whole name therefore of Israel it took, was led into a general apostasy from the true worship of God in his sacred hill of Sion, we learn from the earlier chapters of this book. The apostasy was a consequence, but by no means a necessary or inevitable consequence, of the previous defection from David's house under Jeroboam; for it was committed in despite of an express assurance of God to that prince, that by continuing to regard His worship at Jerusalem, notwithstanding the separation of the kingdoms, and by observing His will in all things, his throne would be prospered and secured like that of David. The opposite course, to which an obvious policy led Jeroboam, that of setting up a rival centre of religion in his own kingdom, lest the sympathy of a common worship might lead his people back to their old lords, well represents the deductions of human wisdom when set against the wisdom of God, and the mistake which civil rulers necessarily commit whenever they imagine themselves institutors, instead of what they really are, divinely appointed protectors, of the Church of God: a Church first planted in the earth, not only without the aid of the temporal powers, but against their strongest efforts for its suppression. The natural course of evil is strongly marked in the subsequent history of that ill-fated kingdom, down to its last hopeless and unredeemed captivity under the Assyrian conquerors, Tiglath-pileser and Salmaneser: it is visible alike in the progress of the sin itself and in its punishment. The man of Ephraim who, in

the hope of perpetuating his newly-acquired royalty by an irreligious policy, both sinned himself and caused Israel to sin, has, in the very next generation, his dynasty and house cut off: and a stranger of the tribe of Issachar usurps the place of the sovereign he had murdered. He again, when he treads in the steps of Jeroboam's grand apostasy, is punished similarly in the person of his son and immediate successor, who is miserably assassinated, and the whole house of Baasha extirpated. And then, after a turbulent struggle of several parties for the monarchy, a military chief of Samaria becomes the head of a third dynasty in this kingdom, after its separation from the house of David. But far from ceasing from the original sin of idolatry which brought down these successive plagues on his predecessors and their kingdom, Omri and his family fearfully aggravate it. At first, it had been the design and policy of Jeroboam and his successors to keep the new ship at Dan and Bethel to some kind of mimic resemblance of that which was performed at Jerusalem, and had been divinely revealed to Moses from Mount Sinai. Even when the calves are set up, the object attempted to be symbolically connected with them, is the sacred obligation of the people's redemption from Egypt by Jehovah the Lord God of Israel; even as it was in part when the first error of this kind was committed by Aaron himself, at the people's suggestion, in the wilderness'. But the command of God and

1 Exod. xxxii. 4, 5; 1 Kings xii. 28.