- 53-
It was this Jehu, who, on the return of Jehoshaphat from the expedition against
Ramoth-Gilead, announced to the king the Divine displeasure. Better than any other
would he be acquainted with the spiritual declension in the northern kingdom, since
it was he who had been sent to pronounce on Baasha, king of Israel, the judgment
that should overtake him and his people for their apostasy (1 Kings 16:1, etc.). And
who so fit to speak fearlessly to Jehoshaphat as the son of him who had formerly
suffered imprisonment at the hands of Asa, the father of Jehoshaphat, for faithfully
delivering his commission from God (2 Chronicles 16:7-10)? The message which he
now brought was intended to point out the incongruity of Jehoshaphat's alliance with
Ahab.
The punishment which the prophet announced as its sequence, came when the king
experienced the effects of that other unholy alliance, in which Ammon and Moab
combined against Judah (2 Chronicles 20). Again had Jehoshaphat to learn in the
destruction of his fleet at Ezion-Geber (2 Chronicles 20:37) that undertakings,
however well-planned and apparently unattended by outward danger, can only end in
disappointment and failure, when they who are the children of God combine with
those who walk in the ways of sin.
But in Jehoshaphat the warning of the prophet wrought that godly repentance which
has not to be repented of Jehu had declared how God, in His condescension,
acknowledged that "nevertheless there are good things found in thee" - and this, not
merely as regarded his public acts in the abolition of open idolatry in his country, but
also that personal piety which showed itself in preparing his own heart to seek after
God. And now the sense of his late inconsistency led him all the more earnestly to
show that he did not regard the religious condition of his late allies as a light matter.
Once again he took in hand the religious reformation begun at the commencement of
his reign. (2 Chronicles 17:7-10)^87
The account of the present movement is the more interesting that it furnishes proof of
the existence of the Book of Deuteronomy at that time, long before the memoirs were
written on which the Books of Chronicles are based. For, as we shall presently see,
there are here constant references to the legislation in the Book of Deuteronomy, and
that not pointedly and with a show of emphasis - such as we would have expected if
Deuteronomy had been only lately invented or introduced - but in a manner which
indicates a long admitted authority, so that its legislation had permeated the people,
and its principles required only to be alluded to as something universally
acknowledged, - not vindicated as something recently introduced. This line of
argument, bringing out the undesigned evidences of the antiquity of the Mosaic
legislation, seems to us to possess far more convincing force than much of the
specious reasoning on the other side, which has of late been so confidently advanced.
And while on this ground the reader should be warned against hastily adopting
(^)