Meanwhile that Baal-worship which Jehu has extirpated in the north, has found refuge in the southern realm, under the fostering patronage of a daughter of the house of Ahab. Jehoram, son of Jehoshaphat, had married a second Jezebel, in the person of her daughter Athaliah. Jehoram reigned eight years, and was succeeded by his son Ahaziah, who perished, as we read last Sunday, with his uncle Jehoram, son of Ahab, king of Israel, under the hand of the avenging Jehu, the scourge of God.
Then Athaliah, seeing that her son was dead, determined to reign for herself. She was one of those masculine spirits, one of those heroines of pride and crime, who can brook no puny, infant sovereigns; she could not live to be ruled by a grandchild; and so she took the decisive step of destroying all the seed royal, after which, it is said, Athaliah, late the queen-mother, did reign over the land.
But it is seldom, on this earth—which is still God’s, however much, at certain times, the devil may claim it for his own—it is seldom, I say, that crime is quite prosperous, quite thorough: something is forgotten in every murder, which rises at last into a testimony; and some one, some little babe perhaps, is overlooked in every massacre; there is a sister, it may be, or an aunt—as it was here—whose heart yearns over that little cradle, and who contrives to rescue its unconscious occupant to be the heir of the throne and the avenger of the family.
Such was King Joash; rescued by his aunt Jehosheba from her own mother’s fury, and by her hidden, during six years of earliest childhood, in one of the chambers of the Temple—for she was the wife of Jehoiada, the High Priest.
In his seventh year, there was a conspiracy, a revolution, and a coronation. The little King was shown to the people in the temple-court, the crown was put upon him, the testimony (or book of the law) was given him, he was made and he was anointed, and all the people clapped their hands, and said, God save the king. And when the usurping grandmother, attracted by the tumult, came upon the scene, with the cry, Treason, treason! the High Priest had her forth without the ranges; she was allowed to pass unmolested through the crowd and through the guard, till she was outside the consecrated ground; and there she was slain.
This was the curious, memorable entrance of the little King Joash upon a reign of forty years in Jerusalem. You can imagine how that scene must have printed itself on his memory. It must have given a strange, a solemn importance to the house of God, and all its belongings. The recollection of that sudden command, given by the High Priest, his uncle, preserver, and king-maker, Have her forth without the ranges, must have written upon his heart an indelible impression of the sacredness of that spot which could thus arrest revolution and make the most righteous doom impious. You will not wonder, therefore, if his young thoughts were first turned, as a Sovereign, to the wretched, the dilapidated state of the Temple itself. It appears that, on the one hand, there were long, careless arrears of temple income: people had grown indifferent to the payment of their most unquestionable dues to the Altar and the Priesthood: on the other hand, there was a positive as well as a negative defalcation; for on that sacred height of Mount Zion there had arisen, side by side with God’s Temple, a rival shrine of Baal; and the idolatress Athaliah, with her creatures, seems to have taken from the one to build the other: in short, the very foundation and wall-stones of the Holy House had been gradually pillaged and carted away, and the House itself stood a monument at once of modern shame and ancestral glory, needing the builder’s hand to restore it to decency and even to safety.
As for the vessels of the House—all those costly priceless treasures with which the wealth and piety of king Solomon had filled it—they had gone, bit by bit, to buy off the annoyances of powerful neighbours: King Rehoboam, at the very outset of the schism, had given Shishak Solomon’s shields of gold, and replaced them with pitiful shameful shields of brass: it was too late, or too soon, to think of ornament—the present question was one entirely of use and substantial repair.
It seems that even the efforts and injunctions of the young King were for many years ineffectual. In the twenty-third year of his reign the old breaches were still unrepaired. It is astonishing—men would not believe till they had tried it—how long it takes to re-awaken one slumbering conscience, or indeed to make one desired work of reparation, be it never so small—we see it ourselves at this moment in a side-chapel of this Church—a fact accomplished. And so King Joash, stung to the soul by the disappointment of his own good intentions, summons before him Jehoiada the Priest, his own uncle and benefactor, and expostulates with him and his brother-priests in the words of the text, Why repair ye not the breaches of the House?
And the result of it is, that, instead of leaving the money received for this purpose in the unaccountable hands of the Priests, they have a chest made, with a hole bored in the lid of it, and set beside the altar; and the Priests are to put all the money which they receive into this chest; and then they have a civil auditor, the King’s scribe, a sort of Secretary of State, to act with the High Priest in counting and applying the sums thus accumulated, and so it passes direct into the hands of the carpenters and builders, and the work is done.
My brethren, you will all perceive why I chose this text this evening, when we are making our first collection, under altered circumstances, for the more substantial part of our annual expenditure upon this Church. It is true, this House of Prayer is not in all respects like Solomon’s Temple: I mean that, in Christian times, it is not the fabric, it is the Congregation, which is the Temple or House of God. Nevertheless, without a fabric a congregation is a rope of sand: there must be a place if there is to be a worship: and therefore the distinction, though true, may be overstrained; and I am not afraid to apply to this Church, the building I mean, the expostulation of King Joash with Jehoiada and the Priests, Why repair ye not the breaches of the House?