The first thought which I hand you from this subject is that the extermination of righteousness is an impossibility.
When a woman is good she is apt to be very good, and when she is bad she is apt to be very bad; and this Athaliah was one of the latter sort. She would exterminate the last scion of the house of David, through whom Jesus was to come. There was plenty of work for embalmers and undertakers. She would clear the land of all God-fearing and God-loving people. She would put an end to every thing that could in any wise interfere with her imperial criminality.
Athaliah folds her hands and says: “The work is done; it is completely done.”
Is it?
In the swaddling clothes of that church apartment are wrapped the cause of God and the cause of good government.
That is the scion of the house of David; it is Joash, the Christian reformer; it is Joash, the friend of God; it is Joash, the demolisher of Baalitish idolatry. Rock him tenderly; nurse him gently.
Athaliah, you may kill all the other children, but you can not kill him. Eternal defenses are thrown all around him, and this clergyman’s wife, Jehosheba, will snatch him up from the palace nursery, and will run up and down with him into the house of the Lord, and there she will hide him for six years, and at the end of that time he will come forth for your dethronement and utter obliteration.
DAVID.
David, the shepherd boy, is watching his father’s sheep.
They are pasturing on the very hills where afterward a Lamb was born of which you have heard much—“the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”