Rehoboam the Foolish Man

Breakers a-head ! — the fearful sound, which is no sooner raised by the outlook, and passed along the deck, than the wheel flies round, and the ship’s head, if haply not too late, is put on the other tack — this was the cry Rehoboam might have heard when his father’s death called him to the helm. Like the flash of the snowy foam descried through the pitchy night, and the hoarse roar that rises above rattling cordage, creaking timbers, and howling wind, as the waves thunder on the reef, there were many things in the condition of Israel at the time of Rehoboam’s succession to warn and to alarm him. A crisis had arrived, requiring prompt but prudent action, consummate skill, a cool head, and a firm hand in him who would extricate the state, and save the throne.

Turning giddy on the height to which they had been too suddenly raised, or intoxicated with power, kings have sacrificed the interests of morality and Yeligion, the public welfare, the loyalty and respect of their subjects, to the gratification of their passions. Acting without the fear of God, as if the people were made for them, and not they for the people, they have astonished the world by their madness. What an example of that the first Napoleon ! — him whom bleeding nations, roused to resistance, dragged from a throne he might have left to his descendants, and cast into the lone prison of a sea-girt isle, to pine away the last few miserable years of life, like an eagle chained to a rock. Our own history supplies similar, almost equally remarkable, examples in the last representatives of the Stuart dynasty. Love of despotism cost the unfortunate Charles I. his head; by brutal lusts his eldest son undermined the foundations of the throne; and, by his bigotry, the youngest overturned the tottering fabric. The latter — James the Seventh of Scotland, and the Second of England — though a bad man, was a bigoted Papist; one who, like many of the communion he adhered to, seemed to think that his crimes against morality might be atoned for by those he committed in the interests of the Church. - He aimed at reimposing on the neck of our free country the hateful yoke of Rome. Our fathers resisted, and God defeated his scheme; yet it cost him and his family the throne of these three kingdoms, and gave occasion to the wit of one who said of James, he was fool enough to give three crowns for a Mass.

There is a striking story told of a professional fool — one of those men, half rogues and half fools, to use a common expression, who once formed an appendage of every royal house. His sovereign and master, on investing him with staff and cap and bells — the insignia of his office — told him to wear them till he found a fool greater that himself. In course of time the king fell ill, and was at the point of death. On telling the witling that he was to leave him, the other asked where he was going. On a long journey, and to a far country, from which

I shall never return, replied the dying man. And what provision, asked the fool, have you made for it? Provision! said his master, who had been a bad and irreligious man, with a heavy sigh, Alas, I have made none! Whereupon, with a gleam of sense shot like a sunbeam through the clouds, the fool quickly doffed staff and cap and bells, and laid them down before the king, saying, They are yours; I was only to keep them till I found — -and I have found him — a fool greater than myself. Now, whether committed by prince or peasant, the greatest folly, no doubt, is to live forgetful of the ‘long journey,” and the need of seeking an interest in Jesus Christ; but in the conduct of his government and management of temporal affairs, none that ever wore a crown had a better claim to the cap and bells than he who stands in = chapter as the type of folly.

Rehoboam’s, perhaps, is the most remarkable instance the world ever saw of this, that, whatever may be hereditary — titles, estates, health, or disease — wisdom, like saving grace, is not. Some of the best men have had the worst sons; and in Solomon, we have the wisest man father of the greatest fool that ever verified the words, “they heap up riches, and know not who shall gather them,” wasted a fortune, or lost a throne. We have only to read his history, to see how fully he realized those gloomy forebodings which have marred the pleasure many expected from their accumulated gains, and amid which the sun of Solomon set in clouds and darkness. “I hated,” he says, “all the labor which I had taken under the sun, because I should leave it unto the man that shall be afte: me, and whe knoweth whether he shall be a wise man or a fool?” The folly of Rehoboam, which appeared in many things, culminates in —.

His conduct in the revolt.

To trace that event to its origin, we must go further back than the misgovernment or crimes of his father Solomon, and ascend the stream of history to an early period of the Jewish commonwealth. Like many of the evils which separate brethren in Christ and afflict His Church, it had its source in jealousy — the jealous feeling with which Ephraim regarded the other tribes, and especially Judah. Covering the largest extent of country, and mustering most men for battle, they were the most powerful tribe. Proud of that, they would brook no inferiority. We find the Ephraimites, for example, quarrelling with Gideon because he had presumed to fight with Midian without summoning them to his aid; nor could he pacify these haughty and high-handed warriors but by humbling himself and addressing them in such flattering terms as these — “What have I now done in comparison of you? Is not the gleaning of the grapes of Ephraim better than the vintage of Abiezer?” The same vile, cruel, and hateful passion broke out more fiercely still against Jephthah, another saviour of the land. Animated with that sectarian spirit which denies or depreciates the good done by others, this same tribe of Ephraim said, ‘‘ Wherefore passest thou over to fight against the children of Ammon, and didst not call us to go with thee ? — we will burn thine house upon thee with fire.” So haughtily did they bear themselves, and so hotly resent what affronted their pride, that, blinded by passion to the monstrous sin of fratricide, they turned their swords against Jephthah and his gallant band — sacrificing to their jealousy the forty-two thousand men of their own tribe whom they left dead, as they fled defeated from the field of battle. To this passion may be attributed also their stanch adherence to the house ef Saul during the seven years that David reigned over the tribe of Judah. At length, no doubt, along with the other tribes, they acquiesced in what appeared to be the arrangements of Providence: crowning David at Hebron king over all the land. Then, as the history relates, came all the tribes of Israel to David unto Hebron, and spake, saying, “Behold, we are thy bone and thy flesh: also in time past when Saul was king over us, thou wast he that leddest out and broughtest in Israel; and the Lord said to thee, Thou shalt feed my people Israel, and thou shalt be captain over all Israel.” Yet, though David, alive to the danger, so conducted his government as to suspend the jealousy of Ephraim; and though it smouldered during the whole reign of Solomon, the old passion, like the sins of an unsanctified professor of religion, was there; ready to break out; needing but causes sufficiently active to revive and burst into flame — and these, as events proved, were silently at work during a considerable part of the reign of Solomon.

It is a remarkable fact that Solomon violated every one of the injunctions which Moses laid down to guide the kings of Israel when the time arrived that the tribes, to be neighbor-like, should choose aking. As if he had resolved of express intention to set God’s instructions at defiance, every one thing the king was forbidden to do he did, For example, speaking in the name of God and in view of the future, Moses said of their king to be, “He shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt to the end that he should multiply horses; neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away: neither shall he multiply to himself silver and gold.” This, in ‘the form of inhibition or interdict, looks less like a simple warning than a direct prophecy of Solomon’s crimes and career. He did all these forbidden things; and thereby, as well as by the idolatries he introduced — all gross, many of them obscene — he forfeited the respect, and, toa large extent, alienated the affections of the best of his people; those prophets and pious men by whose prayers to God and influence with the community the state might have been saved in its hour of greatest danger. Besides this, he made his reign so burdensome to the country through monopolies and taxation as to revive the jealousy of Ephraim, and strengthen the enemies of his house; and at length force a patient people on the first favorable occasion to remonstrate, and, when their remonstrances were not only treated with neglect but answered with insolence and insults, to rebel. That occasion came when the tribes assembled to crown his son and successor at Shechem. And when Jeroboam, the enemy both of father and son, called from Egypt to be the mouthpiece, and head, and hand of an oppressed and angry people, appeared on the scene, ‘‘the hour and the man had come.” This man, Jeroboam, belonged to the tribe of Ephraim. He had been a distinguished soldier, and at one time a great favorite of Solomon’s.

“He was,” says the author of the Book of Kings, “‘a mighty man of valor; and Solomon, seeing that the young man was industrious, made him ruler over all the charge of the house of Joseph,” — in other words, over the tribes of Manasseh and Ephraim. Little dreaming, like ourselves often on the eve of important events, what of good or evil a day or hour might bring forth, he one day left Jerusalem to find himself in a‘lonely part, and at a turn of the road, face to face with a prophet, Ahijah the Shilonite. The man of war makes obeisance to the man of God, who proceeds straightway to lay rough hands on him, and pluck the cloak from his shoulders. Taken by surprise, or overawed by the other’s presence and sacred character, Jeroboam neither resists nor remonstrates; but stands by to see the prophet rend his garment into twelve pieces. But how much greater his astonishment when he who had ventured on this bold rude liberty counts off ten of them, and presents them to him, saying, “Take thee ten pieces; for thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel, Behold, I will rend the kingdom out of the hand of Solomon” (or rather, as is afterwards stated, out of his son’s hand), ‘“‘and will give ten tribestothee.” A secret thisilltokeep. Jeroboam may have said it in confidence to his wife, and she, probably, in turn to her gossips; but however it happened, whether from incautiousness or intention on his part, or whether by some dark hint which Ahijah dropped, enough oozed out to alarm Solomon, and render it necessary for Jeroboam, if he would save his life, to fly for refuge to the land of Egypt. There, verifying the words, “He that believeth shall not make haste,” and teaching statesmen, churchmen, and better men than he, in all circumstances to wait on, rather than anticipate, Providence, he bides his time. It comes in a call from the people of Israel; prepared to revolt if reform and redress are refused. Solomon is dead; the time is favorable for the attempt; and so they send to Egypt for Jeroboam, eithes because they had some, though it might be an imperfect, knowledge of the story of the torn garment and the ten pieces, or because, attracted by his reputation for statesmanship and military talents, they regarded him as the most likely man to obtain them redress, or if that was refused, to head the revolt, and conduct it to a successful issue. They judged rightly that a man of superior rank or talents at the head of the masses is as necessary to the success of a revolution as the glittering steel-head fixed on its wooden shaft to the worth of a battle-spear.

All things thus arranged, the mine dug beneath the throne, and the train laid ready for firing, they repair to Shechem to the coronation of Rehoboam. Its ceremonies are brought toaclose. Surrounded by a splendid retinue, the king, probably flattering himself that he has won the favor of Ephraim by selecting its chief city for the place of his coronation, sits on his throne, high and lifted up. The sacred oil has been poured, and the crown, flashing back the sunbeams from the gems on its golden arches, has been placed on his head; and now, when the white-robed priests from the temple have chanted the last psalm, is the time for ten times ten thousand knees to bend, and ten times ten thousand voices to rend the air with jubilant shouts of “God save the King!” But no cheers rise from the multitude, echoing back, and drowning in a full ocean-like swell the plaudits of obsequious courtiers. An ominous gloom hangs on all faces. An ominous silence weighs on the assembly. Observing how, though his young councillors assume airs of insolent contempt, the gray-haired men who stood by his father Solomon regard the scene with grave and anxious looks, Rehoboam himself turns pale, blenching at these ominous signs. And not without reason; for, the crowd dividing to let him pass, Jeroboam comes to the front. Now, as the people catch sight of their champion, the air is rent with cheers; and when these cease, with the bearing of a man who has looked on more formidable sights than a king, and hears the tramp of millions at his back, he addresses Rehoboam, saying, ‘‘ Thy father made our yoke heavy; now, therefore, make thou the grievous service of thy father, and his heavy yoke which he put upon us, lighter, and we will serve thee.” To any ears but those of a fool, these words, so plain, so brief, and unlike the flattering adulatory terms familiar to Rehoboam, had a ring which showed that the speaker was a man not to be trifled with.

It is idle for us to inquire whether the people were justified in assuming the attitude they did assume, whether the statement of their spokesmar, Jeroboam, was, or was not, borne out by facts. A great political crisis had arrived. The peril was imminent. The nation was on the verge of rebellion; nor could a rebellion be averted but by the most skilful and, indeed, delicate management. The king stood above a magazine of combustibles.

An angry word or look, and the spark falls which fires them, and shakes his kingdom to its found a — tions — shatters it in pieces; the ship hangs on a mountain wave, close by the thundering reef — a wréng turn of the helm, and she goes crashing on the rocks, to be scattered in fragments on the deep. A difficult post Rehoboam’s; and to no man was the saying ever less appropriate than to him, the right man in the right place.

At the suggestion, probably, of some sage and aged councillor who, prompt to see and anxious to avert the danger, whispers it in his ear, his first step is marked by wisdom. He will reply in three days — a proposal which the people regard as reasonable, and, averse to precipitate matters or to rush into rebellion, at once agree to. A council is summoned. It meets. The old men advise concession — that the king should speak the people fair; yield to their present humor; bend to the wave which would in that case, foaming and formidable as it looked, pass harmless over him. They assure him that a little sacrifice of his pride and dignity now would bind the nation hereafter, and forever, to his service. There was sound sense in this. How inconstant the popular humor, and how easily a skilful hand may manage, calm, and turn even a fierce and furious multitude, is well known, and was signally illu, trated by an incident in the life of the first Napo-Jeon. When but a distinguished officer of the French army, he was ordered to meet a mob in the streets of Paris, and disperse them. At that time the slimness of his form corresponded to the smallness of his stature. As he advanced with troops and two or three cannon on the scene, the roar of the suffering and ferocious multitude announced their approach; and at a turn of the narrow street they came pouring down like an avalanche, that, uprooting trees and sweeping houses from their foundations, descends thundering into the valley. Ordering his guns to the front, he halted; and, struck by his formidable front and determined attitude, so did they. Averse to shed the blood of citizens, he began to parley with them. Whereupon a woman of-fierce visage and enormous size stepped out — upbraiding him and his fellow soldiers as, living on the fat of the land, while she and her industrious compatriots were at the point of starving. With the promptitude that seizes the moment, and won him afterwards many a hard-fought field, he stepped out too; and’ placing his spare, tiny form beside that mountain of flesh, he addressed her companions, saying, ‘“‘I appeal to you, my friends, whether this good lady or I look most like starving?” The effect was electric. The humor 7n4 ta7>7 pf the reply carried the mob as by a coup 4 mu,, peals of laughter succeeded to rage; and, both powder and blood cleverly saved by a stroke of humor, the people dispersed to their homes in peace. There Napoleon was the right man in the right place: not here the son of Solomon. The first poured oil on the stormy waters; the second, oil on a burning fire. Ilustrating the adage, ‘‘Whom God wishes to destroy he first makes mad,” Rehoboam rejected the counsel of the wise old men who had stood by the throne, and sharpened their own wits on the wisdom of his father Solomon A man at this time of forty years, he might have known that, to use a common proverb, a gray head is not found on young shoulders; yet, in this crisis of his affairs, he turns his back on aged councillors to follow the advice of rash and inexperienced youths — of his own gay companions, the ministers of his guilty pleasures, and flatterers of his person. It was very foolish to seek their advice, but. it was the height of folly, sheer madness, to take it, and at their suggestior lash the people into rebellion with words like these, ‘““My father made your yoke heavy, and I will add to your yoke; my father chastened you with whips, but I will chasten you with scorpions.” Adding insult to injury, to injustice haughty and intolerable insolence, this was not to drop a spark, but cast a blazing torch into a magazine of combustibles. With the suddenness and violence of an explosion, the pent-up indignation of years bursts forth into open revolt. Struck with terror at his own work,

Rehoboam leaps from his throne; and as he flies the tumult, hears the knell of his kingdom ringing in the cry, “To your tents, O Israel! what portion have we in David? neither have we inheritance in the son of Jesse.” It seems hardly possible for Rehoboam to do anything more unwise than this. Yet his next act is one where he surpasses himself — like the capital ona pillar, it crowns his folly. Though it might be shutting the door when the steed is stolen, or the desperate action of one who grasps, as he drowns, at a passing straw, he will make an effort to recall the people to their obedience; he will send a man to reason with rebellion, and talk them out of their mutinous spirit Nor was he without

REHOBOAM THE FOOLISH MAN. 4it

such as might have ruled the fierce democracy — men adhering to his cause, as brave sailors to a wreck, distinguished for their piety, or the advocates of popular rights, or warriors of renown, whom the people regarded with reverence and would have heard with respect. But like a man demented, without a glimmering of common sense, he pitches on one, of all his court, the most unsuitable for his purpose. A messenger from the king! — this cry lays a momentary arrest on the revolt; and when the expectation of the people is excited, who steps out to address them but Adoram — the officer that had exacted the taxes which drove them on rebellion. At the sight of this obnoxious tool of despotism, the object of their bitterest hatred, their rage knew no bounds. They rose; they fell on the unhappy man; they stoned the life out of him. Rehoboam has but made bad worse. Panic-struck at the news, he throws him: self into his chariot to fly to Jerusalem, a sadder but not a wiser man; to prove by his future career that it is not the fear of man, but of God, which is the beginning of wisdom, and that, as his own father said, ‘‘though thou shouldest bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him.”

Though in not marrying heathen wives, as Solomon did, and in providing separate establishments for his sons, thereby averting domestic broils, Rehoboam, as the Bible says, ‘‘ did wisely,” yet were it needful still further to justify the opprobrious epithet we have attached to his name, we should find ample materials in his conduct on other occasions than the revolt. He might have seen, indeed he must have known, for instance, that the dismemberment of the kingdom was a judgment brought on his father’s house for his father’s sins. Yet, regardless of this, and reckless of consequences, moved neither by the injuries which Solomon produced nor by the repentance he expressed for his crimes, Rehoboam repeated them. ‘He desired,” it is said, ‘‘ many wives;” and had no fewer than eighteen, besides sixty concubines. In point of numbers, these, no doubt, fell far short of his father’s. Yet, like the negative virtues which Pharisees boast of, like the superiority some claim over such as have gone greater lengths than themselves in vice, this was probably due more to the want of way than the want of will, to the restraints of circumstances rather than the restraints of conscience. But however that may be, he set an example of immorality before the nation which, like the water that falling on mountain tops descends through fissures into the valleys, was sure to find its way through the different grades down to the lowest strata of society — carrying corruption of morals and manners along with it. And when we imagine the effect of such an example on Judah in the days of Rehoboam, or contemplate the corruption of morals that, issuing from the court of Charles II., poured its foul and fetid streams over our own land, we cannot be too thankful that we have a Sovereign who frowns on every form of vice, and presents to her nobles and to all classes in the country an illustrious example of every personal, domestic, and public virtue. I doubt if we are sufficiently thankful for this great mercy.

Again: Rehoboam followed his father’s example in committing a yet graver crime. When Jeroboam, his rival, set up the calves at Dan and Bethel, a party in Israel taught future ages, the ministers and members of churches in our own, what part they should act when earthly interests and religious principles conflict. Not the priests only, but the pious people of the land had to choose between abandoning their faith or their fortunes; between deserting their God or deserting their homes. Some, as will always happen in such circumstances, may have proved renegades, and broken down in the day of trial; but vast multitudes from her mountains, plains, and shores, poured out of Israel to settle, far from their sweet homes and paternal fields, in the land of Judah. This influx of piety, like that of the Huguenots on our own land, or of the suffering Protestants who fled from the Low Countries to escape the bloody cruelties of Philip and the Duke of Alva, brought a blessing with it to Judah; and under this holy influence and God’s chastening hand, the conduct of Rehoboam and the fortunes of his kingdom underwent, though but a temporary, a manifest improvement. After relating how ‘the priests and Levites that were in all Israel resorted to Rehoboam out of all their coasts;” and how “the Levites left their suburbs and their possessions, and came to Judah and Jerusalem;” and how, following them — the natural leaders of the people in matters belonging to religion — “out of all the tribes of Israel such as set their hearts to seek the Lord God of Israel came to Jerusalem;” the sacred historian tell us, “‘so they strengthened the kingdom of Judah, and made Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, strong.”

But, alas, with no permanent result. In his prosperity, Rehoboam, like many others, forgot the lessons of adversity. Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked. The dog returned to his vomit — the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire.

Rehoboam had been a witness of the calamities idolatry had brought on his father and his father’s house, and he had had experience also of the blessings which attend the steps and swell the train of piety. Properly affected by the circumstances, he promised for a time to be another and a better man; but as a strong and impetuous river, though diverted for a while into a new, returns to its old channel, so he relapsed into idolatry. Nor did he sin alone. As it happens with crew and boats and cargo and floating wreck, when some mighty ship sinks in the deep, this man, whom no adversity could improve, nor experience warn, nor lessons the most painful educate, dragged down the nation with himself. ‘‘ Judah,” it is said, “did evil in the sight of the Lord, and they provoked him to jealousy with their sins, which they committed above all that their fathers had done; building them high places and images and groves on every high hill and under every green tree,” and amid a shocking corruption of public and private morals, “doing according to all the abominations of the nations which the Lord cast out before the children of Israel.”

No reformation of manners can be relied on which does not spring from a change of heart. It was with Rehoboam and his country according to the parable, ‘When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he saith, I will return unto my house from whence I came out; and when he is come he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished: then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.” This case of Rehoboam is by no means singular; to be regarded as exceptional or abnormal. In many others who for a while seemed reformed, the last state has proved worse than the first. They have left the austerities of Lent to plunge into the excesses of a carnival. Such cases are not without their lessons; they teach us to make sure of a true interest in Jesus Christ — to seek a new heart. Without that no change of manriers contains the elements of permanence; and thus they who maintain the most decent exterior have as much need as the vilest sinner to remember these solemn words, “Verily, verily,” Saith our Lord, “except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God!”

As to the causes which will account for Reho- ° boam’s career of sin and folly, many may be adduced. It wag his misfortune, as it has been that of others, to be the son of one whose public engagements left him little time to bestow on the home-education of his family. It was also his fate, and I may add the same misfortune to him that it has been-to others, to be born to wealth and power, and never to know, in obscurity, in hardships, in early struggles, and in straitened circumstances, what it was to bear the yoke in his youth. A greater misfortune still, Rehoboam did not find in the court of his father a school, nor in his example a pattern of morals. Through his position and his prospects as heir apparent to the throne, he was exposed, in the society of parasites, flatterers, and gay companions, to a thousand dangerous and seductive influences. Let his fate warn us against his sins, and teach us to seek the grace which, a greater marvel than his safety in the lions’ den, preserved Daniel and his companions pure amid the impurities of the court of Babylon. But who that knows their own innate depravity, that folly is bound up in the heart even of a child, how prone the best are to fall, and how the best have fallen, will, in judging this unhappy man, mingle asperity with censure? In judging others it were well to imitate the candor, and lenity, and charity of Luther, who hearing an obscure person condemn some fault committed by the Elector in terms of the harshest severity, rebuked him, saying, Hold your tongue; and remember that for one devil you have to fight with, the Elector has to fight with ten. ‘There is one short sentence in Rehoboam’s history which supplies the key, more perhaps than anything else, to his sin and folly — ‘his mother’s name was Naamah, an Ammonitess.” She was by blood an alien, and by religion a heathen. Unhappy in many things, but unhappiest most in such a mother, he begins to be regarded more with pity than astonishment. The letters written on water are hardly formed when they are filled up: on the other hand, the finger that traces them on stone leaves no visible impression on its indurated surface; but plastic clay, midway between what is hard and soft, offers to the gentlest finger a substance which both receives and retains an impression. Such is the heart that youth and childhood offer to a mother’s influences. Hence her power to mould, for good or evil, the character of her children; and hence the gratitude they owe to God who have had a mother that taught their little feet to walk in the ways of his commandments, and encouraged their feeble efforts to rise to heaven on the wings of prayer — at the piety of whose bosom their own was kindled. ‘I had a bad mother,” explains many a wreck. “I had a good mother,” is the way many account, under God, for their success in this life, and their salvation in the next. Let mothers therefore feel and tremble, and pray under a sense of their power and responsibility How much depends on them — like the mothers of old — on their bringing their little ones to Jesus for his hands and blessing! Hear how Cowper -sings of the boy by a mother’s knee: —

His heart, now passive, yieldsto thy command. Secure it thine, its key is in thine hand. If thou desert thy charge, and throw it wide, Nor heed what guest there enter and abide, Complain not if attachments lewd and base Supplant thee in it, and usurp thy place. But if thou guard its secret chambers sure From vicious inmates, and delights impure, Hither his gratitude shall hold him fast, And keep him warm and filial to the last; Or, if he prove unkind (as who can say But, being man, and therefore frail, he may?) One comfort yet shall cheer thine aged heart, Howe’er he slight thee, thou hast done thy part.