This tribute is also to the credit of the sons of the prophets, for their judgment was vital, and was not accidental. There are men who will only regard providence as operating in one way, or as operating in one form. These sons of the prophets did not belong to such an inferior class of judges.
It is remarkable, too, that the organic unity of the prophetic office is hereby recognized. The sons of the prophets do not treat Elisha as a novelty, a new sensation, or as representing a new point of departure. They unite the old with the new; though the man has changed, the spirit remains the same.
This is what must be always regarded in reading Christian history and in watching the course of the Christian ministry. Old ministers depart, but when new men come they come with the old spirit and with the old truth, or if they come with any other spirit or any other doctrine, they should, in the degree of the change, be suspected of being other than genuine successors of the prophets.
Elisha begins his ministry by doing good--that is to say, by healing the water that was diseased. This appeal to the prophet to do something for the city of Jericho was itself a tribute to the genuineness of the prophetic office as exercised by him. It is always beautiful to notice how great power is associated with the doing of good. What is it to be a prophet of any age, if the age is not practically benefited by the exercise of the office? The age does not want ornamental prophets, nominal prophets, official prophets. The age is crying out for men who can give it bread, who can heal its water, who can mitigate its sorrows, who can destroy its oppressions.
By this sign must all prophets live or die. It would have been a poor thing on the part of Elisha to have shown the mantle of his predecessor if he could not also show his power. We are only in the apostolic succession as we are in the apostolic spirit.
We may have all the relics which the apostles left behind--the cloak that was left at Troas, the parchment, the staff and the vessels out of which they ate and drank--we may even have the scrolls which they used in reading the Holy Scriptures; but all these things will constitute only a burden if we have not, along with all other possessions, the mighty and eternal Spirit of the living God, without whose energy even the apostles themselves were but common men.
Elisha, having cured the water, went up from the depressed plain of Jericho to the top of the highland of Jordan, to the height of three thousand feet, that he might come unto Beth-el--which, alas, became the chief stronghold of the calf worship. The popular sentiment was debased to the lowest possible point; even the little children were tainted with the awful disease of contempt for the greatest names and the greatest thoughts in all Israel.
“And he went up from thence to Beth-el; and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him: ‘Go up, thou bald head! Go up, thou bald head!’ And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them. And he went from thence to Mount Carmel, and from thence he returned to Samaria.”
This miracle has occasioned no little difficulty to those who read it only in the letter. It is not a narrow incident which can be regarded as a mere anecdote and treated, as it were, within the limits of its own four corners. We must understand the spirit of the age in which the incident occurred. We must realize that the whole air was full of idolatry and blasphemy. We must also remember that the very Church of Israel itself was deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, with hardly one spot of health on all the altar from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot. We must keep steadily before our minds the fact that the places which are mentioned in this incident had become as Sodom and Gomorrah--not, perhaps, in the physical and carnal sense, but in the still worse sense of spiritual alienation and spiritual contempt for every thing associated with the name of the living God.
When Elisha, therefore, wrought this deed of violence--this miracle of destruction--his action must be regarded typically and as strictly in keeping with the necessities of the occasion. Only this kind of miracle could have been understood by the people among whom it was worked and who had an opportunity of feeling its effects, either directly or incidentally. How often it happens that the first miracle is one which is marked peculiarly by a destructive energy!