Elijah the Tishbite 28:
By F.W. Krummacher
An awful shipwreck of a royal vessel is recalled to our notice by the portion of Scripture selected for our present meditation. Let the wreck here presented to us be a warning against heart idolatry, that great evil of the present day. Let the affectionate words of the last surviving and aged apostle be now more heeded than ever: "Little children, keep yourselves from idols." Amen.
2 CHRON. XXI. 12--15. "And there came a writing to him (Jehoram) from Elijah the prophet, saying, Thus saith the Lord God of David thy father, Because thou hast not walked in the ways of Jehoshaphat thy father, nor in the ways of Asa king of Judah, but hast walked in the way of the kings of Israel, and hast made Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to go a whoring, like to the whoredoms of the house of Ahab, and also hast slain thy brethren of thy father's house, which were better than thyself: behold, with a great plague will the Lord smite thy people, and thy children, and thy wives, and all thy goods: and thou shalt have great sickness by disease of thy bowels, until thy bowels fall out by reason of the sickness day by day."
I. Elijah rests from his labours. At the time of his departure to heaven, king Jehoram, the son of Ahab, sat on the throne of the kingdom of Israel. Jehoshaphat reigned in Judah, and continued to do so until the eighth year after the removal of our prophet. He also had been gathered to his fathers, and his first-born, Ahab's son-in-saw, the degenerate Jehoram, of the same name with his brother-in-law, the king of Israel, had ascended the throne. To this Jehoram a writing comes, the contents of which were far f rom agreeable. The writing came from "Elijah the Tishbite," who had departed in the chariot of fire to heaven at least six years before. It is said by St. Paul, that Abel, in a figurative sense, "being dead, yet speaketh." The quiet and godly character of this pious shepherd; his accepted sacrifice offered unto God in faith; his unnatural death, perfiguring to future ages what the children of God had to expect in this world; his blood, which cried to Heaven for recompence; all this is a kind of speaking without the use of words. And in this way many a pious departed person still speaks, though his tongue may have long been silent in the grave; and many a church and family is thus spoken to by the example of some departed member. What a cloud of such invisible witnesses encompasses us, my brethren; how many never-to-be-forgotten pilgrims of God, whose names still live in our hearts or memories, still preach to us, encourage and comfort us, by their still remembered words and examples! Thus their influence on earth has not ceased with their earthly life. But here, it should seem, that the prophet Elijah did not speak merely by example to those he left behind: he spoke by a writing.
We are not, however, to expect that many will believe this in the present age, which has for some time been endeavouring to cleanse every corner of the earth from the belief of whatever is miraculous and supernatural. But we cannot conceal our belief, that this is one scriptural instance which teaches us, that between the kingdom of the blessed and the dark vale of our pilgrimage, there is not such a vast distance as most persons are apt to imagine. And are there not several other instances in Scripture which support this belief? Did not Samuel personally appear after his decease, and speak to Saul in common human language? Did not Elijah and Moses, more than a thousand years after their departure, meet their Saviour and his disciples on the mount of transfiguration? Did not the apostles, when they beheld their Divine Master walking on the sea, and again when he appeared after his resurrection, imagine they saw an apparition from the invisible world; and did not our Lord, instead of reproving them for this, as mere superstition, only appeal to their senses to convince them that he was not such an apparition as they supposed him to be. Peter, too, after his deliverance from prison, was mistaken by the brethren for his spirit, as if they had thought he had died in prison; and is there a word said in Scripture to contradict any such supposed erroneous notion, namely, of the possibility of departed saints reappearing in this visible world?
