Sermons on Biblical Characters

by Clovis Gillham Chappell

One day you were reading in the New Testament and you came to that surprising word from James: "Elijah was a man subject to like passions as we are." And if you were reading thoughtfully you stared at that sentence in wide-eyed amazement. And then in your heart you said, "It isn't true. Elijah's story doesn't read a bit like mine."

Then you thought of how he came and put his finger in Ahab's face and made that face go white. You thought of how he carried Heaven's key in his pocket for three years and six months. You thought of his lifting the dead boy into life; of his victory on Carmel; of his quiet walk to the little station beyond the Jordan where the Heavenly Limited met him and took him home. And again you felt like saying that James was altogether mistaken.

To fortify yourself more fully you reread his story. Then you came to this passage and you read it with a gasp: "And he came and sat down under a juniper tree," etc. And down by the print of your foot you saw the big footprint of the old prophet and you said, "After all, we are very much alike. After all, he got in the dumps, fretted and broke his heart with the blues, even as I."

Now, what was the matter with Elijah? He was not a natural and deliberate pessimist. There are some folks that are, you know. There are some people who study to be pessimistic. They are the "self-appointed inspectors of warts and carbuncles, the self-elected supervisors of sewers and street gutters." They pride themselves on being guides to the Slough of Despond and on holding a pass key to the cave of Giant Despair.

One such woman, being asked how she felt, said, "I feel good to-day. But I always feel the worst when I feel the best because I know how bad I am going to feel when I get to feeling bad again." Two buckets went to a well one day. One sobbed and said, "Oh, me! it breaks my heart to think that however full we go away from the well, we always come back empty." And its companion laughed outright and said, "Why, I was congratulating myself on the fact that however empty we come to the well, we always go away full."

One morning when the world was brimming with spring, two little girls ran out into a garden where the dewdrops and the sunlight and God had wrought the miracle of a hundred full-blown roses. They looked at the lovely scene and one went back and said tearfully, "Oh, mother, the roses are blooming, but there is a thorn for every rose." The other looked and went back singing and said, "Mother, the roses are blooming and there is a rose for every thorn."

No, this man was not a deliberate pessimist. Had he been his name and memory would have rotted long ago, for the men that bless us are the hopeful men, the forward-looking men. I read of a man who was put in jail during the Boer War simply because he was always prophesying disaster. He was a discourager. He refused to see anything hopeful. And a man of that kind ought to be in jail because he is as harmful as a man with the small-pox. "He who steals my purse steals trash, but he who filcheth from me" my sunny outlook, my expectation of the dawn of a to-morrow, "takes that which not enriches him, but makes me poor indeed."

What was the matter with Elijah? Well, in the first place, he was tired. He was utterly spent. He had just passed through a very trying and exacting ordeal. We can well imagine that the days just preceding the test upon Carmel were toilsome days and the nights were sleepless nights. Then came the great day of contest and victory. There was, of course, no rest that day. And, in the exhilaration of victory, you know how he ran before the chariot of Ahab from Carmel to Jezreel, a distance of seventeen miles.

Arrived there, he got a message from Jezebel threatening his life. He had expected, of course, that the men who had shouted "The Lord He is God" would stand by him. But they did not. He had expected that even Jezebel would be afraid to lift her voice in defense of the old defeated heathenism of the past. But here again he was much mistaken. In fact, instead of tamely acknowledging defeat she sends him this word: "So let the gods do to me, and more also, if I make not thy life as the life of one of them by to-morrow about this time."

Jezebel's threat totally upset the prophet's sense of victory. He came to feel that he had not won after all. For the first time he gave way to fear. Cowardice rushed upon him and drove him, without rest, down the road that led into the wilderness. The terminus of this road was, quite naturally, the juniper tree.