2 Chronicles 14:1-15 - Homiletics

The quiet often years.

The former half of this chapter may be said to turn upon the welcome subject of the "quiet" (spoken of twice), the "no war" (spoken of once), and the "rest" (spoken of three times), which were now for ten years the portion of Judah. The tender youth and the pious promise of King Asa combined, no doubt, in the providence of God, with external circumstances, to secure that interval of quiet and repose from war from which many blessings were able to flow. We may notice generally, from such induction of illustrations as are yielded by the far less complex instances of those wars that belong to early history and to the histories of Scripture, some of the essential and intrinsic advantages and blessings of being, in this most impressive sense, "quiet."

I. THE FREE , LEGITIMATE OPERATION OF THE AFFECTIONS OF HUMAN NATURE . What more dreadful subversion could be known to human nature than that love should be called and should become hate, and to labour to destroy human life should take the place of labour and zeal to save and to serve it! A nation that is at peace, and undisturbed by apprehension of war, is, by the very fact, delivered from being the victim of passions and of the sure operation of principles which must be only one degree less destructive to the unconscious subjects than to their designed and deliberately marked objects. War shakes not merely to its foundations this or that fabric of human society, but to its centre the fabric called human nature itself , which is compacted of affections, and, invisible though they may be, bound of no other bonds so real. Nothing, therefore, can justify it but that kind of necessity which declares, and can demonstrate what it declares, that that disaster of " shaking " confronts, and is within measurable distance of, the one alternative of shattering, and may therefore be counted the lesser evil or risk. The mutual hate and ill will of nations is a monster form of the sin of individual hate, and it is the violating on a gigantic scale of the second great commandment. It is true that there are some reliefs to this indictment, in respect of those composing the actual armies that confront one another, and of throe who may be called the mere machinery of war; but there is little relief, indeed, to it, in regard to all who may be called principals. But in the "quiet" of a nation, its proper human affections find their opportunity and feel their way with some uniformity and some regularity of growth; not swept across, on the one hand, by the destructive tornado of animosity, prejudice, hate, and by all the hurricane of evil-doing; nor, on the other hand, goaded into partial, frenzied action by the anguished imagination, or the sickening sight of the unspeakable horrors of the actual battle-field—its mangled limbs, its cries and groans, and, for months afterwards, its bleeding hearts and wasted homes, and that whole crew of consequential vices and indirect calamities which overspread equally the land of conquered and conqueror!

II. THE THOUGHT OF A PEOPLE NOT SUBJECT TO THE UNHEALTHY STRAIN OF ONE USURPING INTEREST , ONE IMPERIOUS , TYRANNOUS , CONSTANT , EXCITING THEME , BUT FREE TO ASCERTAIN , TO FOLLOW , TO DEVELOP , THE LEADING AND THE INSTINCTS OF ITS PROPER GENIUS , WHATEVER THAT MAY BE . The loss is, of course, simply incalculable which has resulted from this one source of perversion, so varied in its operation. No eye, even with all the aid of historic retrospect, can track its disturbing, distracting, desolating tyranny. The interaction of the exceedingly diverse genius of different peoples must be equally significant with the same phenomenon as between different individuals (as e.g. even within the range of one family), and is amazingly tributary to the general and, let us say, universal well-being, when permitted, as it never yet has been, free play. For what areas of lands, bounded and unbounded in dimension, and through what stretches of the ages, has it substituted the ravaging headlong course of the turbid mountain-torrent for the flow of some beneficent river, with the generous, fertilizing streams, and the everywhere meandering rills, and the unnumbered perennial springs!

III. OUTER WORKS OF WIDE AND ENDURING INFLUENCE , AND MONUMENTS OF REAL AND ENDURING HONOR , AMONG THE PEOPLE . With what a mourning heart we look back upon many, nay, the most part, of the greatest monuments of antiquity, and are often tempted to do so with cynical look and cynical speech! How many of them perpetuate the names and memory of those who were the scourges of their kind, the pestilences of human society, barriers to the health, wealth, and real well-being of the world, from whom they wrung unwilling and undeserved honour, which time has reversed and revenged! By unfortunate irony of events, the useful works of our text even were largely those of the surer preparation for war; but we may perhaps lay more grateful stress on the thought that they are described rather as preparations against war, and defensive in character. Modern history and, in especial, the history, in God's mercy, through some few longer stretches of time, of Great Britain—that antitype in so many most real senses of Judaea of old—have clone enough just to exemplify sufficiently the fact that, in "quiet," the useful works of art, the pursuit of the most beneficent sciences, the material well-being of a people, find the occasion to rise and to spread more equably. Material well-being may not at first seem to be of the highest moment, but (the expression being rightly understood) it certainly is of very high moment. The world was not meant to be a scene of beggary, nor the mere triumph of moral and spiritual force, with constant strain and effort over material exigence. So far as at any time and any where it is such a scene, it yields no honour to religion, no testimony to its power, no furtherance of its imperial claims.

IV. FAVOURABLE OPPORTUNITY FOR THE FAIREST OF GROWTHS — THAT OF RELIGION , AND OF A HEALTHY STATE OF RELIGIOUS FEELING AND LIFE . The "quiet" and "rest" so repeatedly spoken of are instanced partly, indeed, as the reward of practical religion, but partly also (hero as very emphatically elsewhere) as the opportunity of setting the house of God, its worship, and its priests and officers in order, and of breaking down and breaking away from the evil practices and habits of idolatry. It can scarcely be doubted that the scourge of war was used, has often been used,