2 Kings 8:13

BEWARE!

‘Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this great thing?’

2 Kings 8:13

It is a common saying that we can never tell to what we may come. He who is now the greatest criminal was once an innocent child, and the greatest saint may one day become the worst of sinners. There is no reason to suppose that Hazael spoke insincerely when, on Elisha’s foretelling the cruelties he would one day inflict on the children of Israel, he exclaimed with horror, ‘But what! is thy servant a dog, that he should do this great thing?’ As much as to say, ‘What do you take me for; shall I, who am gentle and kind and who hate cruelty, ever sink so low? No! thy servant is not a dog.’ And yet he did commit these cruelties when the acquisition of the kingdom of Syria had developed germs of wickedness which before temptation revealed them he did not know that he possessed. The lesson we are to learn from this history is that it is very easy to fall—that, indeed, it is impossible not to fall if we live away from the Fountain of all goodness, the Source of all strength.

Let any one consider the character of the first and last temptation in a series of temptations. The first time the temptation occurs to us to commit some pleasant but sinful act, there is a shudder and a horror and a feeling of impossibility. ‘I cannot, cannot do it,’ we say. ‘Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this great thing?’ The next time the tempting thought comes to our mind it is treated with greater civility, it is a more welcome guest. We begin now to reason with it, instead of dashing it from us, which would have been the wisest course. Then we ask ourselves, is it really so bad after all? How can this be such a very great sin when every day thousands whom the world calls respectable commit it? At last the evil thought passes into the evil act.

I. This is every day illustrated by the liar.—We know what horror the child who has been trained to love truth feels when first the temptation arises in his mind to shelter himself from punishment by telling a lie. ‘How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?’ If he yields to the temptation, he is ashamed and full of remorse because the brightness of his truthful soul has been tarnished by a first lie. And then when years of untruthfulness have passed over his head he begins to consider a truthful man almost a fool, believing as he does that deceit and untruthfulness are the ordinary unavoidable means of gaining our ends in the world. At last he arrives at the liar’s last stage, which is to believe his own lies.

II. Or take an illustration from the easy descent into the hell of drunkenness.—Some of the most gifted of our race have been drunkards, and there are at present about 600,000 confirmed drunkards in Great Britain. Do you think they became drunkards the moment they tasted alcohol? No, the time was when many of them looked upon drunkenness with the same abhorrence that Hazael felt for cruelty. ‘Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this great thing?’ The first time they tasted intoxicating liquor, as children, they probably disliked it very much; but boys fancied that it was a manly thing to drink, and when they ceased to be boys they did not like to resist the apparent good fellowship of friendly glasses. Or some sorrow drove them to drown their senses in the drunkard’s cup of forgetfulness. There is only one way by which any man ever became a drunkard, and that is by growing fond of alcohol, at first in moderate drinking—day by day a little increased, year by year a little multiplied by the solitary becoming the frequent, and the frequent the habitual, and the habitual the all-but-inevitable transgression.

‘We are not worst at once: the course of evil

Begins so slowly and from such slight source,

An infant’s hand might stem the breach with clay:

But let the stream grow wider, and philosophy,

Aye, and religion too, may strive in vain

To stem the headlong current.’

But indeed all sin approaches in the same gradual way.

Rev. E. J. Hardy.

Illustrations

(1) ‘How easily do self-indulgent habits come upon us, and how surely do they lead to great crimes. George Eliot gives in Romola the picture of a man—good, generous, handsome, with all the appliances and means of doing good—who “because he tried to slip away from everything that was unpleasant, and cared for nothing so much as his own safety, came at last to commit some of the basest deeds such as make men infamous.” So true is it that

Small habits well pursued betimes

May reach the dignity of crimes.’

(2) ‘The holy man who exclaimed as he saw a criminal led to execution: “There goes me but for the grace of God,” was not exaggerating, but only speaking from observation and experience.’

(3) ‘As our Lord wept over the fate of Jerusalem, so the prophet wept as he foresaw the evils which Hazael would inflict on his people. But how little we know ourselves. Hazael could not stand the steadfast eye of the prophet, and asked in amazement what he took him to be, that he could prognosticate such a future. We may well appropriate the Apostle’s words, “Lord, is it I?” for there is no limit to the lengths of sin to which we may be led, apart from the grace of God.’