We forget Abijah’s character in his eloquence. He carries a spell with him. Judging from his speech, one would suppose him faultless--entirely noble in every aspiration and impulse and sublimely religious and unselfish.
The whole Abijah is not here. This is but the ideal Abijah. Who ever shows himself wholly upon any one occasion? Who does not sometimes go forth in his best clothing?
We must read the account of Abijah which is given in the Book of Kings before we can correctly estimate the Abijah who talks in the Book of Chronicles.
It is, perhaps, encouraging that while men are upon the Earth they should not be so dazzlingly good as to blind their fellow men. Yet it is pitiful to observe how men can be religious for the occasion. Nearly all men are religious at a funeral; but few men are religious at a wedding.
Abijah has a great cause to serve, and he addresses himself to it not only with the skill of a rhetorician but with the piety of a mind that never tenanted a worldly thought. God knows the whole character--how bright we are in points, how dark in many places; how lofty, how low. Knowing all, He judges correctly, and His mercy is His delight. Neither God nor man is to be judged by one aspect, or one attribute, or one quality. We must comprehend, so far as we may be able, the whole circuit of character and purpose before we can come to a large and true conclusion.
But as we have to do with the ideal Abijah, let us hear what he has to say in his ideal capacity. We will forget his faults while we listen to the music of his religious eloquence.
Abijah comes before us like a man who has a good cause to plead. He fixes his feet upon a mountain as upon a natural throne, and from its summit he addresses a king and a nation, and he addresses his auditors in the sacred name of “the Lord God of Israel.” He will not begin the argument at a superficial point, or take it as starting from yesterday’s new raw history--history hardly settled into form. He will go back, and with great sweep of historical reference he will establish his claim to be heard. In II. Chronicles, thirteenth chapter and fifth verse, Abijah asks:
“Ought ye not to know that the Lord God of Israel gave the kingdom over Israel to David for ever, even to him and to his sons by a covenant of salt?”
The binding covenant--the covenant that even pagans would not break. If you have eaten salt with a man you can never speak evil of him with an honest heart. You must forget your criticism in the remembrance of the salt. You are at liberty to decline intercourse and fellowship and confidence; you are perfectly at liberty to say: “I will have nothing to do with thee in any association whatsoever.” But you can not be both friend and enemy. You can not eat salt with a man and smite him in the face, or wound him in the heel, or hurt him in any way, at any time, in any line or point.
That was pagan morality.
We are fallen a long way behind it in many cases, for what Christian is there who could not eat all the salt a man has, and then go out and speak about him with bitterness, plunder him, frustrate his plans, anticipate him in some business venture, and laugh at him over his misplaced confidence?
Abijah recognized the perpetuity of the covenant. The kingdom was given to David for ever--if not in words, yet in spirit; if chapter and verse can not be quoted, yet the whole spirit of the divine communion with David meant eternity of election and honor. It is right to hold up the ideal covenant; it is right that even men who themselves have broken covenants should insist that covenants are right. We must never forget the ideal. Our prayers must express our better selves. A dying thief may pray. Again and again we have to fall back upon the holy doctrine that a man is not to be judged in his character by the prayers which he offers, inasmuch as his prayers represent what he would be if he could.
Abijah, having to deal with a perpetual covenant, charges Jeroboam with breaking it:
“Yet Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, the servant of Solomon, the son of David, is risen up, and hath rebelled against his Lord.”
All rebellion is wrong, unless it arises from a sense of injustice, untruthfulness or dishonesty. No man has a right to dissent from the national Church unless his dissent be founded upon conscience, a right conception of the nature of the Kingdom of Christ upon the Earth, which leads him to say to certain men: “Stand off.”
No part of the empire has a right to arise against the central authority, of which itself constitutes a part, merely for the sake of expressing political prejudice or selfish design. Every rebellion must be put down that can not justify itself by the very spirit and genius of justice. Separation becomes schism when it but expresses a whim, an aversion, of a superficial or technical kind; and every rebellion is wickedness, is born of the spirit of the pit, that can not justify itself by appeals to justice, nobleness, liberty and God.