“And he went up from thence to Beth-el; and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him: ‘Go up, thou bald head! Go up, thou bald head!’ And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them. And he went from thence to Mount Carmel, and from thence he returned to Samaria.”
This miracle has occasioned no little difficulty to those who read it only in the letter. It is not a narrow incident which can be regarded as a mere anecdote and treated, as it were, within the limits of its own four corners. We must understand the spirit of the age in which the incident occurred. We must realize that the whole air was full of idolatry and blasphemy. We must also remember that the very Church of Israel itself was deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, with hardly one spot of health on all the altar from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot. We must keep steadily before our minds the fact that the places which are mentioned in this incident had become as Sodom and Gomorrah—not, perhaps, in the physical and carnal sense, but in the still worse sense of spiritual alienation and spiritual contempt for every thing associated with the name of the living God.
When Elisha, therefore, wrought this deed of violence—this miracle of destruction—his action must be regarded typically and as strictly in keeping with the necessities of the occasion. Only this kind of miracle could have been understood by the people among whom it was worked and who had an opportunity of feeling its effects, either directly or incidentally. How often it happens that the first miracle is one which is marked peculiarly by a destructive energy!
This would seem to be the miracle which our own first zealous impulses would work, had they the power to express themselves in such a form. When the soul is alive with the purity of God, when the heart glows and burns with love, when the whole being is in vital sympathy with the purposes of the cross of Christ, the first and all but uncontrollable impulse is to destroy evil—not to reason with it, or make truce with it, or give it further treatment of any kind, but instantly and violently to crush it out of existence.
This impulse will be trained unto other uses in the School of Christ.
We see, in the opening of the sixth chapter of the second Book of Kings, some of the simple and happy relations which existed between the elder and the younger prophets.
Is it not possible to revive some of these relations? Look at the case:
“And the sons of the prophets said unto Elisha: ‘Behold, now, the place where we dwell with thee is too strait for us.’”
Put into modern language, the statement amounts to this: “Our college is getting too small, and we want more room. Let us, therefore, consider this practical question, and see what can be done.”
Elisha did not live with the young men. That, perhaps, was rather a happy than an unhappy circumstance—though a very beautiful picture could be drawn concerning domestic collegiate life. A college or a school with the teachers and the students all living together must, one would surely say, be a little Heaven on Earth. What can be, ideally, more perfect than the old prophet surrounded by all the younger prophets, eating and living together, having a common room, a common hostelry—a common home? What can be, imaginatively, more taking, pathetic and satisfactory?