Ah! There was no voice heard on Calvary to save the Son of Man. God showed mercy to the son of Abraham. You fathers and mothers, just picture to yourselves how you would suffer if you had to sacrifice your only son. And think what it must have caused God to give up His only Son. We are told that Abraham was glad. This manifestation of Abraham’s faith so pleased God that He showed him the grace of Heaven and lifted the curtain of time to let him look down into the future to see the Son of God offered, bearing the sins of the world.
AHAB.
There is a familiar saying: “Every man has his own price.”
Ahab had his, and he sold himself for a garden; Judas sold himself for thirty pieces of silver, and Esau for a mess of pottage.
Ahab sold himself just to please a fallen woman. And so we might go on—citing the men who have sold themselves. It is easy for us to condemn these men, but let us see if there are not men and women doing the same thing today. How many are selling themselves tonight for naught! It is easy enough to condemn Judas, Herod and Ahab, but in doing this do we not condemn ourselves?
We thought that slavery was hard. We thought it hard that those poor black people should be put upon the block, in the market, and sold to the highest bidder; but what do you think of those men who sell themselves today to evil?
Ahab sold himself to evil, and what did he get?
Elijah was the best friend that Ahab had, but he did not think so; he thought that Elijah was his enemy. Ahab was a religious man—that is, he thought he was. He had 850 prophets. “And what king has more? What king does more for religion than I?” So he would have said. There is a difference between religion and having Christ. There are a great many people that have religion but have no Christ in it—that have not a spark of Christianity.
This man was very religious, but he began wrong. His marriage was his first wrong step. He did not care about the law of God. He wanted to strengthen his kingdom. I can imagine they said: “We have outgrown the laws of Moses. We do not want your God; we have got something better. Here are the nations all around us worshiping Baal, and we will worship Baal.”