“They fell to him out of Israel in abundance when they saw that the Lord, his God, was with him.”
Such is the influence of a great leadership. If Asa had been halting, the people would have halted, too. Asa was positive; and positiveness, sustained by such beneficence, begets courage in other people. “They fell to him out of Israel in abundance”--that is, they came over to him and were on his side. They ranked themselves with Asa; they looked for his banner and called it theirs, “when they saw that the Lord, his God, was with him.”
Nations perish for want of great leaders. Social reforms are dependent to a large extent upon the spirit of the leadership which has adopted them. The Church is always looking around for some bolder man, some more heroic and dauntless spirit, who will utter the new truth, if any truth can be new--say, rather, the next truth; for truth has always a next self, a larger and immediately impending self, and the hero, who is also martyr, must reveal that next phase of truth and die on Golgotha for his pains.
Can we not, in some small sense, be leaders in our little circles--in our business relations, in our family life, in our institutional existence? Many people can follow a tune who can not begin one. That is the philosophy we would unfold and enforce.
Regard all leaders with prayerful hopefulness in so far as they want to do good and to be good. Sympathize with them; say to Asa, even the king: “What thou hast done thou hast well done; in God’s name we bless thee for the purification of the land and for the encouragement of all noble things.”
Asa showed the limits of human forbearance and human philosophy. He broke down in the very act of doing that which was right because he went too far. He made a covenant, and the people made it along with him.
Solemn renewals of the original covenant which God made with their fathers in the wilderness occur from time to time in the history of the Jews, following upon intervals of apostacy. This renewal in the reign of Asa is the first on record. The next falls three hundred years later, in the reign of Josiah. There is a third in the time of Nehemiah. On such occasions the people bound themselves by a solemn oath to observe all the directions of the Law, and called down God’s curse upon them if they forsook it.
“And they entered into a covenant to seek the Lord God of their fathers with all their heart and all their soul; that whosoever would not seek the Lord God of Israel should be put to death, whether small or great, whether man or woman.”
That is the danger. You can not make men religious by killing them, by threatening them, by inflicting upon them any degree of penalty. Do not force a child to church. Lead it; lure it; make the church so bright and homelike and beautiful that the child will eagerly long for the time to come when the door will be opened.
Asa was impartial. There was a touch of real grandeur about the man. He would not even allow his mother to keep an idol. The queen had an idol of her own “in a grove.”
“And also concerning Maachah, the mother of Asa, the king, he removed her from being queen, because she had made an idol in a grove; and Asa cut down her idol, and stamped it and burnt it at the brook Kidron.”
Thus ruthlessly Asa disestablished that little royal church. See how burningly in earnest the man was, and what a man will do when his earnestness is fervent! He knows nothing about fathers, mothers, partialities or concessions. He says: “Light is the foe of darkness, and you can not have any little dark corner of your own. This light must find you out, chase away every shadow and purify every secret place in human life and thought.”
Some have supposed that Maachah, the mother of Abijah, and Maachah, the “mother” of Asa, were different persons, the former being the daughter of Absalom, the latter the daughter of Uriel of Gibeah. There are really no grounds for this. Maachah, the mother of Abijah, enjoyed the rank of queen mother not only during his short reign of three years, but also during that of her grandson, Asa, until deposed by him on account of her idolatry.
The original word for “idol” appears to signify a “horrible abomination” of some monstrous kind; and instead of “in a grove” we should read “for an asherah,” the wooden emblem of the Canaanitish deity.
There seems little doubt that some obscene emblem is meant, of the kind so often connected with worship of the productive powers of nature in ancient religions--substituted, as a still greater abomination, for the ordinary asherah. Clearly, the act of Maachah was one of so flagrant a kind that Asa took the unusual step, on which the historian here lays great stress, of degrading her in her old age from her high dignity, besides hewing down her idol and burning it publicly under the walls of Jerusalem.
“Now,” said Asa, in effect, “what is good for the public is good for the individual; what is good for the subject is good for the queen.”