"Thus regarded," says Professor Van Oort, "the picture of Elijah at Mount Horeb is full of consolation to all lovers of the truth. Sometimes they cry, All is lost! and are ready to despair. But God answers, Never lose heart. Storms in which God is not, in which the power of darkness seems to sweep unbridled and unconquered o'er the earth, come before the whispering of the cooling breeze, but the kingdom of peace and blessedness is ever drawing nigh. Let all who love God truly, work for its 'approach.'"
Let us then cling to the lesson that mercy is better than sacrifice, and is transcendently to be preferred to holocausts of human sacrifice, even when the victims are polluted and cruel idolaters. Scripture never hides from us the imperfections of its heroes, and St. James tells us that Elijah was but a man of like passions with ourselves. The progress of the generations, the slow shining of the light of God, has not been in vain, and we can see truths and read the meaning of theophanies by the experience of three subsequent millenniums, of which two have followed the incarnation of the Son of God.
[685] Deut. iv. 12, 15, (comp. v. 4, 22, 23). Of Moses, on the other hand, it is said, "the similitude of the Lord shall he behold" (Numb. xii. 8; Exod. xxxiii. 11; Deut. xxxiv. 10).
[686] מָקוֹם, τόπος, "place," was a sort of recognised euphemism for God in Rabbinic and Alexandrian exegesis. Thus, in Exod. xxiv. 10, for "they saw _the God of Israel_," the LXX. have εἷδον τὸν τόπον οὗ εἱστήκει ὁ θεός. Philo says, "God Himself is called Place" (_De Somn._, i. 525). Rabbi Isaac says, "God is not in Makom, but Makom is in God." See my Bampton Lectures on _Hist. of Interpretation_, p. 120; _Early Days of Christianity_, i. 261.
[687] Psalm civ. 4; Heb. i. 7. This intermediacy of angels is prominently alluded to in Acts vii. 53; Gal. iii. 19; Heb. ii. 2, 3; Deut. xxxiii. 2; Psalm lxviii. 17.
[688] The anthropomorphism which the Targumists disliked vanishes in the Chaldee: "And before Him was a host of angels of the wind rending the mountains, and breaking the rocks, before the Lord but the Shechinah was not in the hosts of the angels of the wind, and after the hosts of the angels of the wind was the host of the angel of the earthquake, etc."
[689] Job xxxviii. 1, xl. 6.
[690] Ezek. i. 4.
[691] Jer. xxiii. 19, 20, xxv. 32, xxx. 23.
[692] Psalms xviii. 10, civ. 3, 5.
[693] Nahum i. 3, 5.
[694] Psalm xviii. 7, lxxvii. 18, xcvii. 4; Judg. v. 4; 2 Sam. xxii. 8.
[695] Hab. iii. 3-16.
[696] 1 Kings xix. 12; LXX., φωνὴ αὔρας λεπτῆς; Vulg., _Sibilus auræ tenuis_; Chaldee, "a voice of angels singing in silence."
[697] Jehu was the grandson of Nimshi, and was the son of Jehoshaphat (2 Kings ix. 2).
[698] Isa. xi. 4, xlix. 2; comp. Jer. i. 10, xviii. 7.
[699] Comp. Rom. xii. 5. Kissing images was a sign of idolatry then as it is now. The foot of the statue of St. Peter in Rome is worn away with kisses. Hosea xiii. 2 tells us of the custom of kissing the calves. Comp. Psalm ii. 12. Cicero tells us that the lovely brazen statue of Hercules at Agrigentum had the mouth and chin partly worn away by the kisses of the devout (in _Verr._, iv. 43).
[700] Herder, who was a devout poet, and therefore a true imaginative interpreter of devout poetry, says: "The vision was to show the fiery zeal of the Prophet that would amend everything by the storm, the mild process of God, and proclaim His longsuffering tender nature as previously the voice did to Moses: hence the scene was so beautifully changed." Long before him the wise Theodoret had said: Διὰ δὲ τούτων ἔδειξεν ὅτι μακροθυμία καὶ φιλανθρωπία μόνη φίλη Θεῷ. Irenæus, still earlier (_c. Hær._, iv. 27), saw in the vision an emblem of the difference between the law and the gospel; and Grotius, following him, says, "Evangelii figuratio, quod non venit cum vento, terræ motu, et fulminibus ut lex," Exod. xix. 16 (see Keil, _ad loc._, whose illustrations are often valuable when his exegesis is false and obsolete).