And yet it is a most comforting chapter, for it shews
us how God is long-suffering and merciful, even to the most hardened
sinner; how to the last He puts before him good and evil, to choose
between them, and warns him to the last of his path, and the ruin to
which it leads.
We read of Ahab in the first lesson this morning as a thoroughly
wicked man,--mean and weak, cruel and ungodly, governed by his wife
Jezebel, a heathen woman, in marrying whom he had broken God's law,--
a woman so famous for cruelty and fierceness, vanity and
wickedness, that her name is a by-word even here in England now--"as
bad as Jezebel," we say to this day. We heard of Ahab in this
morning's lesson letting Jezebel murder the righteous Naboth, by
perjury and slander, to get possession of his vineyard; and then,
instead of shrinking with abhorrence from his wife's iniquity, going
down and taking possession of the land which he had gained by her
sin. We read of God's curse on him, and yet of God's long-suffering
and pardon to him on his repentance. Yet, neither God's curse nor
God's mercy seem to have moved him. But he had been always the
same. "He did evil," the Bible tells us, "in the sight of the Lord
above all that were before him." He deserted the true God for his
wife's idols and false gods; and in spite of Elijah's miracle at
Carmel--of which you heard last Sunday--by which he proved by fire
which was the true God, and in spite of the wonderful victory which
God had given him, by means of one of God's prophets, over the
Syrians, he still remained an idolater.
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