CHAPTER XVI
Bands of Love. Elijah and
Elisha
I. II. Kings
Agnes M. Lawson
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to Bible Study
The Colorado College of Divine
Science
Denver, 1920.
The short
history of the northern kingdom, Israel,
lasting about two hundred years, is
interesting and helpful, because it so
clearly reveals the never-ceasing action
of Divine Love in its endeavor to reclaim
its children, no matter how sunken in
degradation they be, to return them to
uprightness, to lead them to peace with
God and man, and to prepare them to
receive their inheritance, spiritual
peace and blessedness.
To this
corrupt kingdom, four great prophets were
sent. According to Hosea, all that Love
could do for Israel it had done. “I
taught Ephraim to go; I took them in my
arms; but they know not that I healed
them. I drew them with cords of a man,
with bands of love; and I was to them as
they that take off the yoke on their
jaws, and I laid meat before them.”
Three of these prophets were from
“the remnant” of the ten
tribes; the other was the missionary
Amos, who came to Israel, from the
southern kingdom of Judah. The three
native prophets were Elijah, Elisha and
Hosea. But Israel heeded none of
them.
At the time
Elijah, in the reign of the wicked Ahab
and his still more wicked wife, Jezebel,
Jehovah said to Elijah: “I have
left me seven thousand in Israel, all the
knees which have not bowed down unto
Baal, and every mouth which hath not
kissed him.” But one like Elijah is
a mighty host in himself to testify to
the truth: “I have been very
jealous for the Lord God of hosts; for
the children of Israel have forsaken thy
covenant, thrown down thine altars, and
slain thy prophets with the sword; and I,
even I only, am left; and they seek my
life to take it away.”
There had
been under Ahab a great persecution of
the prophets; and many of them had been
slain. An overseer of Ahab, Obadiah,
secretly sympathized with the prophets
and hid many of them in caves, where he
fed them. Elijah predicted a drought and
was forced to flee from the kingdom. He
came to Zidon, where he lived with a
widow who had on his arrival but “a
handful of meal in a barrel and a little
oil in a cruse.” She shared her
scanty store with the prophet, and during
the years of famine “the meal
lasted and the oil failed not”; for
the infallible law of the spiritual world
is: To use and to share gives the
increase; to spare and hoard will
diminish. [Emphasis added.]
The drought,
to Ahab, is not the result of his own
sin, but it is Elijah “that
troubleth Israel.” The saving rain
came after three years of famine in
answer to the prayer of Elijah; but it
did not bring with it redemption for the
king. “Ahab, the son of Omri, did
evil in the sight of the Lord above all
that went before him.” Elijah must
needs flee from Israel again, and he came
south to Judah, taking shelter under a
juniper tree; and here the great heart
absolutely yielded itself up, “It
is enough; now, Lord, take away my
life.”
Perfect
relaxation results as we yield our lives;
mortal thought is always tension; and the
refreshing sleep of absolute
self-abandonment came to Elijah. He was
awakened by the angel, who had prepared
his food, and told to “arise and
eat.” In the strength of this
heaven-sent food he traveled to his
destination, “forty days and forty
nights, until he came to Horeb, the Mount
of God.” Here he received the
command, “Go forth and stand upon
the mount of the Lord. And behold, the
Lord passed by, and a great and strong
wind rent the mountains, and brake in
pieces the rocks before the Lord! but the
Lord was not in the wind; and after the
wind the earthquake; and after the
earthquake the fire; but the Lord was not
in the fire; and after the fire a still
small voice.”
Behind the
screen of nature and what we call natural
law, yet everywhere present eternally, is
the inner realm which Jesus called the
Kingdom of God. To every so-called
“natural law” Spiritual Law
may be applied, a counteracting power. Is
it a “law” that fire burns?
Spiritualized man may stand in it and be
immune. Is it a “law” that
the human body will sink and drown in
water? Jesus walked upon its surface in
safety. Is gravitation a
“law”? The resurrection of
the Christ contradicts it; levitation
alone is law. The whole visible universe,
with its elements of air, water, fire and
earth, are all subject to spiritual Law,
which, if a man knows and applies it,
will render what human mind calls
“natural law” absolutely null
and void. Then it follows logically that
there is no such thing as natural law;
that they are mere human beliefs which
are overruled as man comprehends
Spiritual Law. Not in the wind, nor the
earthquake, nor the fire shall we find
the Lord, but in the “still small
voice.” Seers of all ages testify
to the “miracles” that result
when man transcends his belief in natural
law and comes under Spiritual Law.
The material
realm so apparent to the senses of man is
absolutely unknown to God--God who is
everywhere equally and evenly present.
Where, then, is the material world?
Nowhere but in the conception of mortal
man. It is human mind’s concept of
the eternal Real. Jesus consciously lived
in the spiritual world, and told his
disciples over and over again that they
had only to change their concept from a
material to a spiritual basis to be able
to work the miracles that he did.
Cosmic
glimpses of this Real are borne in upon
us in our highest moments. These rare
moments of revelation are becoming more
general in the consciousness of the race.
When the spiritual principle of life is
firmly established in the race-mind,
creation will cease to be
“material” to man, for all
will be spiritualized. Whenever a truth
appears, the false is automatically
destroyed.
When man
believes in the Real he dwells in the
supersensuous realm. The stories of
Elijah and Elisha are sustained contact
with the Spiritual Reality. The iron
hammer does not sink; the dead are
raised; the hosts of the Lord visibly
fill the mountains. This is the truth
always to “beholding and jubilant
souls.” Like the infant hands
unable to hold the article, it drops to
the ground; the mortal consciousness is
unable to hold its concepts, and so they
appear to drop because [they are] not
sufficiently sustained.
In times of
greatest revelation the opposite evil is
most pronounced. Moses had his Pharaoh;
Elijah had his Ahab; Jesus had his
Caesar. The appearance of Truth brings
evil to a climax, and it is destroyed. Or
is it that in times of real wickedness
the Divine Love seeks us even more
yearningly than it does at any other
time? Is not man’s extremity always
God’s opportunity?
Naboth had a
vineyard which the king coveted, but he
refused to sell it to him. Jezebel, with
fiendish cunning, had him put to death,
and Ahab took possession of the vineyard.
Elijah, stern and menacing, presented
himself again before Ahab. Conscience is
to the spiritual man what pain is to the
physical man. Pain is a friendly warning
that physical conditions are not right,
and that they must be adjusted.
Conscience warns the spiritual man that
he is off the track, and danger lurks
everywhere to the man who has gone
astray. The ignorant condemn pain and
ignore its warning; the wicked condemn
conscience and defy it. Ahab greets
Elijah: “Hast thou found me, O mine
enemy?” But conscience, the friend,
follows us all, and says as the prophet
said to the king, “I have found
thee.” Regard it as David did
Nathan, and we are saved; defy it as Ahab
did Elijah, and we are destroyed.
The most
fixed belief of human conception is
death. Is this a law? Laws are never
destructive; they are all beneficent.
Would or could Jesus have overcome it had
it been Law; he who said that he came not
to destroy but to fulfill? Would the
great apostle, Paul, have called it an
enemy had it been Law? We speak of death
as inevitable; yet this to the Christian
is as ignorant as it would be to a
scientist to persist in calling the earth
a flat surface after we have proved it to
be round. Jesus, in the resurrection,
proved man to be not material but
spiritual; and the beautiful story of
Elijah gives us the one inevitable thing
to every child begotten by the Infinite
Love--the “chariot of fire”
that awaits each of us at the end of his
mortal belief.
Elijah chose
as his successor, Elisha; and touching
indeed is the story of Elisha as he
walked with Elijah to his transition.
Elijah said to him, “Tarry here, I
pray thee; for the Lord hath sent me as
far as Bethel [house of God]. And Elisha
answered, As the Lord liveth, and as thy
soul liveth, I will not leave thee. So
they went down to Bethel. And the sons of
the prophets that were at Bethel came
forth to Elisha and said to him, Knowest
thou that the Lord will take away thy
master from thy head today? And he said,
Yea, I know it; hold ye your peace. And
Elijah said to him, Elisha, Tarry here, I
pray thee, for the Lord hath sent me to
Jericho [a fragrant place]. And he said,
As the Lord liveth and as thy soul
liveth, I will not leave thee. So they
came to Jericho. And the sons of the
prophets that were at Jericho came near
to Elisha, and said to him, Knowest thou
that the Lord will take away thy master
from thy head today? And he answered,
Yea, I know it; hold ye your peace. And
Elijah said to him, Tarry here, I pray
thee, for the Lord hath sent me to Jordan
[descender]. And he said, As the Lord
liveth and as thy soul liveth, I will not
leave thee. And they came and stood at
Jordan. And Elijah took his mantle, and
wrapped it together, and smote the
waters, and they were divided hither and
thither, so that they two went over on
dry ground. And it came to pass when they
were gone over that Elijah said to
Elisha, Ask what I shall do for thee,
before I be taken from thee, and Elisha
said, I pray thee, let a double portion
of thy spirit be upon me. And he said,
Thou hast asked a hard thing;
nevertheless, if thou see me when I am
taken from thee, it shall be so unto
thee; but if not, it shall not be so. And
it came to pass, as they still went on
and talked, that behold there appeared a
chariot of fire, and horses of fire,
which parted them both asunder; and
Elijah went up by a whirlwind into
heaven. And Elisha saw it, and he cried,
My father, my father, the chariots of
Israel and the horsement
thereof.”
Elisha
received his gift not because Elijah gave
it to him but because he could see
Elijah’s ascension. What we
perceive we understand and can reproduce.
Only this can be a real possession to
anyone. The story of Elijah and Elisha
may be regarded as mythological by the
merely intellectual student of the Bible;
but, the letter killeth, the spirit alone
giveth life; and to read this history
believingly is to walk free on the high
lands of spiritual Reality. It is these
glimpses into the Real that makes this
Book separate from all others; the
greatest possession of civilized man.
A blind man
may deny the brilliant colors of the
sunset which we painstakingly describe to
him; but that does not prove to the one
who sees that the colors are not there;
it proves but one thing, the blind man
cannot see them. The materialist may call
“this world” real, but that
does not prove it to be so; it only
proves that “this
world’s” horizon is the limit
of his vision. Elijah did not go into
another world, for there is no other
world. There is only one World, the one
in the Mind of the Creator. Elijah is
“here” in the only world
there is, the spiritual Kingdom; mortals
live nowhere but in sense beliefs and
limitation; in the pictures which their
own imagination makes. When Elijah lost
his mortal concept of body and received
his spiritual concept of body, those
still in mortal concept were not able to
see him.
The body of
man appears to him natural if his belief
of it be material, spiritual if his
belief of it be spiritual. “The
flesh profiteth nothing,” it is but
a picture in the thought of man; and if
man ever dies, that is, if he ever
“leaves the body,” he has not
yet received the truth in its entirety.
The perception of the truth of the body,
not passively but actively, must
necessarily mean its transition from
mortal sight. Man can never see beyond
his own concepts; his range of vision is
always confined within them. Faith is an
active power, which de-materializes the
material concept and transmutes it into
the spiritual. It is the leaven which
changes the composition of thought
entirely.
Elisha walks
the way of his master; neither is he a
citizen of this three dimensional world,
he lives in freedom above its confines.
He too can part the waters, make the iron
swim, raise the dead. The army of the
Syrian King sent to capture him he can
regard with fearlessness: “More are
they that be with us than they that be
against us.” And the shining hosts
invisible to mortal sense are clearly
visible to him and fill the mountains
about him.
He who
believes “this world” to be
real has not had Cosmic Vision, and is
not in a world at all; he is in his sense
beliefs of a world. He who will receive
the testimony of those who do see and
prays to Bartimeus, “Lord, that I
may receive my sight,” will receive
it. The believing heart will receive the
seeing eye, and the hearing ear that
receives into consciousness the world
eternally existent in divine Mind,
without variableness or shadow of
turning.
Cosmic
Vision sees the Real; it looks through
the material as with the X-rays we look
through seemingly solid walls. To
spiritual vision there is nothing solid
in the material world; but behind
everything visible is the substance of
Spirit, the Real, of which mortal sight
sees but its semblance, its concept of
it.
Out on the
mountain of Horeb with Elijah; or in the
forests of Dothan with Elisha, in my home
or your home, be it Calcutta, London,
Denver or Seattle, the shining ones are
encamped around us; and if we do not see
them we are accursed, and walk into the
pit of mortality; if we do see them we
walk free on the King’s Highway of
spiritual Reality, and material
conditions are entirely subject to
us.
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