2 Kings 6:25

THE LESSONS OF A FAMINE

‘There was a great famine.’

2 Kings 6:25

We say the words, but I doubt very much whether we realise their meaning. We, in England, do not really know what a great famine is. Bad crops we have had, and short ones, but they have never for many, many years failed us altogether. The nearest sight a few who are living now have ever had of famine was when the potato crops failed all over Ireland in 1846, and great sufferings were undergone by the Irish poor. Some saw the grim features of famine at our very doors then, but, by God’s goodness, he did not enter in; and year by year the increase of the corn has come in its season to ‘fill our hearts with food and gladness.’

But in the East it is quite different. These famines are not strange or at all unknown. In prosperous years, when there is abundant rain, the intense heat of the sun stimulates vegetation to the utmost, and produces enormous crops. But when rain fails, as it does once in every few years, this intense heat burns up and destroys everything. The corn plants die in the furrows; the very leaves wither on the trees; the grass shrivels and dries up; the whole country becomes as dry and as hard as the high-road. Then, if the drought goes on, first the cattle die of want of water and of pasture; and then the people die too; die of literal starvation. Weakened by want of food, they fall an easy prey to cholera and dysentry and typhoid, and the many other diseases that lie in wait for those whose vitality is deficient. Now, that is what goes on in eastern countries year by year; great fertility, sometimes balanced and contrasted by pinching famine. So we are told in the text of the famine in Samaria, or of the seven years of plenty, followed by seven years of famine, that were experienced in Egypt when Joseph lived there; or of the famine in Israel in the days of Elijah, caused, just as it often is in India, by want of rain. It is the common course of human life in those lands. But it is none the less hard to bear for that. The griping hunger, the terrible diseases seize upon new victims every time. It is from childish lips and freshly desolated homes that the cry of pain and hunger goes up.

What are the lessons of famine?

I. Surely the chief lesson to us, at all events, is one of sympathy.—‘If one member suffer, all the members suffer with it.’ That ought to be the effect which suffering produces upon Christian hearts. Our Master, Christ, could never see suffering without wishing to relieve it—without doing what was possible (and what was not possible to Him?)—to remove the cause of it. Let us follow His noble example, as far as we may. We do not indeed wield the power that could multiply the wine at Cana, or feed five thousand men with five loaves and two fishes. Man is only the viceroy of the Divine Creator, and not himself the sovereign. He administers laws—the laws of nature—which he did not make; which he may use, but cannot alter. Within the limit which they set he may act freely; outside them his power does not stretch. Where a calamity passes, as this which is before us passes, beyond human powers of effectual relief, all that he can do is to remit it to the Higher Power by prayer for the removal of the cause; he can but apply his feeble efforts to remove some of the terrible effects.

II. Could not this terrible famine be prevented.—Experience has shown that it is perfectly possible to store up in tanks the rain which falls in vast quantities when it falls at all, and which now runs away to waste, so as to provide for the deficiency of the years when there is no rain. Experience has shown also that the planting of trees has the effect of increasing the fall of rain. Where those works have been carried out there has been no famine. That is the way that God recompenses intelligent and industrious following of the directions which His laws of nature give as plainly as possible, to all who have eyes to see or minds to understand. Surely, then, in the face of wasted fields, and hundreds of thousands of emaciated and starved corpses, the country will ask, with a voice which will make itself heard, and must not be passed over with neglect,—Why have not irrigation works been constructed and plantations made, when they would have arrested the deadly drought and brought down from heaven the life-giving rain? God is not deaf to the prayer, although it be without words, which is really put up to Him in the thoughtful and obedient following out of His laws of nature. If you plant a sapling in the soil that suits it, it will grow; if you plant it upon the rock, or where it can get no sun or no moisture, it will wither and die. Why is this? Because in the first case you obeyed the laws of nature, which are God’s laws, and which trees must conform to, if they would live, and which men must conform to likewise, if they would rear up trees; in the other case, the laws of nature were neglected, and therefore the tree died.

III. How we may best save some of the victims who have not been yet quite starved to death.— Starved to death! That is easily said; but as I declared at the beginning, I doubt if we understand what it really means. It is a series of deaths, day after day, as long as it lasts.

I dare say most of us here present have never gone a whole day without food ever since we were born. I may go farther, and say that we have hardly ever known what it is to go without even a single meal. We do not know, probably, what hunger is, except as a coveted spur to the appetite, which we eagerly seek by work and exercise. We play with hunger, that is to say; but it has quite another aspect when the strong stagger because of it, and the weak faint; when the cheek grows thin, and the eye hollow; when the husband sees his wife, and the mother her little children, starving around her; crying for food, and she has none to give them. Think of it; this scene is often going on in tens of thousands of homes in India; reckon, if you can reckon for horror, how many silent hearths, how many families blotted out, how many children starved to death that ghastly total includes. Every One of us can do something, though it may be but a little, to alleviate it, and is responsible if he do not that little. Let it be yours to give that help. Whatever we may do, it is certain that the pittance, which is all that can at the best be given to these sufferers, will leave them only just not dead, only just not starved; whilst without that pittance they must die—and die speedily.

If we have taken the lessons of a time of famine rightly to heart, our souls will be filled with gratitude to God, and heart and hand will alike be open to offer a thankoffering. The lessons which a famine may teach are many; let this lesson in particular, of sympathy and help to the victims of the famine, come home to our hearts to-day.