CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES.—
2 Kings 13:20. Moabites invaded the land at the coming in of the year—בָּא שָׁנָה—lit., a year came; but it may be interpreted as the Spring season, in ancient times the usual period for opening campaigns or commencing invasions.
2 Kings 13:21. As they were burying a man, &c.—i.e., a corpse of some unknown person about to be interred in the same burial place in which Elisha’s sepulchre was situate. The sudden appearance of one of these Moabite hordes urged them to cast the body hastily into the grave of Elisha, which, if not open, was quickly accessible by removing the stone from its mouth.
HOMILETICS OF 2 Kings 13:20-21
THE INFLUENCE OF THE GREAT AND GOOD
I. Does not terminate with their life. “And Elisha died, and they buried him;” but they could not bury his influence for good; that is one thing over which death has no power. “There is nothing,” writes Dickens, “no, nothing innocent or good, that dies and is forgotten; let us hold to that faith or none. An infant, a prattling child, dying in its cradle, will live again in the better thoughts of those who loved it, and play its part through them in the redeeming actions of the world, though its body be burnt to ashes, or drowned in the deepest sea. There is not an angel added to the host of heaven but does its blessed work on earth in those that loved it here. Forgotten! Oh, if the good deeds of human creatures could be traced to their source, how beautiful would even death appear, for how much charity, mercy, and purified affection would be seen to have their growth in dusty graves.” The life of Elisha was a precious treasure to the nation; his name could not be forgotten; his deeds shone as the stars of heaven; his power penetrated all ranks, from king to peasant.
II. Keeps alive the hope of deliverance in the breasts of an oppressed people (2 Kings 13:20). The Moabites had partially rccovered from the reverses they suffered at the beginning of Elisha’s career (ch. 3), and became strong enough to make an annual predatory incursion. Harassed by Syrian and Moabite, the Israelites might have yielded to despair; but the spirit of the dead prophet sustained them. They loved his memory; they revered his stainless character; they believed his prophecies, and in the darkest hour of oppression and suffering they cherished the hope of deliverance. The influence of a good man lives through many generations, and inspires many to nobler thoughts and more heroic action.
O! who shall lightly say that fame
Is nothing but an empty name!
Whilst in that sound there is a charm
The nerves to brace, the heart to warm;
As, thinking of the mighty dead,
The young from slothful couch will start,
And vow, with lifted hands outspread,
Like them to act a noble part!—Baillie.
III. Is sometimes vindicated by miraculous occurrences (2 Kings 13:21). This miracle of Elisha’s, after his death, is more surprising than any of those which he performed during his lifetime. No exact parallel offers itself in the rest of Scripture. Still it may be said to belong to a class where the miracle was not wrought through the agency of a living miracle-worker, but by a material object in which, by God’s will, virtue for the time being resided. The most familiar example of this class is the staunching of the issue of blood, by the touch of the hem of Christ’s garment; but the cures wrought by handkerchiefs and aprons brought to the sick from the body of St. Paul (Acts 19:12) are still more nearly parallel. In the present instance, no doubt the primary effect was greatly to increase the reverence of the Israelites for the memory of Elisha, to lend force to his teaching, and especially to add weight to his unfulfilled prophecies, as to that concerning the coming triumphs of Israel over Syria. In the extreme state of depression to which the Israelites were now reduced, a very signal miracle may have been needed to encourage and re-assure them (Speaker’s Comm.) It was not the dead body of Elisha, but the living God, that gave life again to the dead; and Omnipotence worked by contact with the dead Elisha to show that the Divine efficiency that was in the prophet had not disappeared from Israel with his death. The future fame and influence of the good may be safely left in the hands of God.
LESSONS:—A good man.—
1. Is the fruit of divine grace.
2. Is a great boon to a nation.
3. Is imperishable in his influence.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES
2 Kings 13:20. The death of the good. I. A calamity to a distracted country. II. Suggests that the most conspicuous piety cannot evade the penalty of sin. III. The cause of wide-spread and genuine sorrow. IV. Leads men to reflect upon the influence and power of the life just terminated.
—Such was Elisha, greater yet less, less yet greater, than Elijah. He is less. For character is the real prophetic gift. The man, the will, the personal grandeur of the prophet are greater than any amount of prophetic acts, or any extent of prophetic success. We cannot dispense with the mighty past, even when we have shot far beyond it. Nations, churches, individuals must all be content to fare as dwarfs in comparison with the giants of old time—with the Reformers, the Martyrs—the heroes of their early youthful reverence. A prophet like Elijah comes once, and does not return. Elisha, both to his countrymen and to us, is but the successor—the faint reflection of his predecessor. When he appeared before the three suppliant kings, his chief honour was that he was Elisha, the son of Shaphat, who “poured water on the hands of Elijah.”
Less, yet greater. For the work of the great ones of this earth is carried on by far inferior instruments, but on a far wider scale—and, it may be, in a far higher spirit. The life of an Elijah is never spent in vain. Even his death has not taken him from us. He struggles, single handed as it would seem, and without effect; and in the very crisis of the nation’s history, is suddenly and mysteriously removed. But his work continues; his mantle falls; his teaching spreads; his enemies perish. The prophet preaches and teaches; the martyr dies and passes away; but other men enter into his labours. By that one impulse of Elijah, Elisha and Elisha’s successors, prophets, and sons of prophets, are raised up by fifties and by hundreds. They must work in their own way. They must not try to retain the spirit of Elijah by repeating his words, or by clothing themselves in his rough mantle, or by living his strange life.
What was begun in fire and storm, in solitude and awful visions, must be carried on through winning arts, and healing acts, and gentle words of peaceful and social intercourse. Not in the desert of Horeb, or on the top of Carmel, but in the crowded thoroughfares of Samaria, in the gardens of Damascus, and by the rushing waters of Jordan. Elisha himself may be as nothing compared with Elijah. His wonders may be forgotten. He dies by the long decay of years; no chariots of fire are there to lighten his last moments, or bear his soul to heaven. Yet he knows that, though unseen, they are always around him. Once in the city of Dothan, in the ancient pass, where the caravans of the Midianites and the troops of the Syrians stream through into Central Palestine—when he is compassed about with chariots and horses of the hostile armies, and his servant cries out for fear, Elisha said, “Fear not: for they that be with us are more than they that be with them. And, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.” It is a vision of which the meaning acquires double force from its connection with the actual history; as if to show, by the very same figure, that the hope which bore Elijah to his triumphal end, was equally present with Elisha. Elijah, and those who are like Elijah, are needed in critical and momentous occasions to “prepare the way for the Lord.” His likeness is John the Baptist: and of those that were born of women before the times of Christendom, none were greater than they. But Elisha, and those who are like Elisha, have a humbler, and yet a wider, and therefore a holier sphere; for their works are not the works of the Baptist, but are the deeds, if not of Christ Himself, at any rate of “the least in His kingdom”—the gentle, beneficent, “holy man of God, who passeth by us continually.”—Stanley.
Before closing this account of Elisha, we must not omit to notice the parallel which Elisha presents to our Lord—the more necessary because, unlike the resemblance between Elijah and John the Baptist, no attention is called to it in the New Testament. Some features of this likeness have already been spoken of. But it is not merely because he healed a leper, raised a dead man, or increased the loaves, that Elisha resembled Christ, but rather because of that loving, gentle temper, and kindness of disposition—characteristic of him above all the saints of the Old Testament—ever ready to soothe, to heal and to conciliate—which attracted to him women and simple people, and made him the universal friend and “father,” not only consulted by kings and generals, but resorted to by widows and poor prophets in their little troubles and perplexities. We have spoken above of the fragmentary nature of the records of Elisha, and of the partial conception of his work as a prophet which they evince. Be it so. For that very reason we should the more gladly welcome those engaging traits of personal goodness which are so often to be found even in those fragments, and which give us a reflection—feeble, it is true, but still a reflection—in the midst of the sternness of the Old Dispensation, of the love and mercy of the New.—Smith’s Bible Dictionary.
2 Kings 13:21. The virtue of a corpse. The chief lesson this story teaches is the mighty influence a good man may exert after his decease.
1. We should be ambitious of this influence. Our lives at the longest are brief. That portion of our lives devoted to holy aims is briefer still. How consolatory and inspiring is the fact that, when our brief life is finished, we can still be a power for good! Think that, from your seat in glory, you may see men inspired by the memory of your generosity, zeal, courage, purity, and prayerfulness. Their deeds in turn are remembered, and inspire others. Thus you will have a share in blessing men to the end of time.
2. Let me remind you how much we owe to this influence. Would you be what you are were it not for the memory of the dead?
3. The best methods for securing this posthumous influence for good.
1. By publishing through the press our thoughts and opinions. How many a book is like the body of Elisha—lifeless itself. yet giving life!
2. By a definite and public profession of religion.
3. By active engagement in Christian work. We must all exert some influence after death, either for weal or woe. Let us, then, be jealous over ourselves with a godly jealousy.—R. A. Griffin.
—Were not the men of Israel more dead than the carcase thus buried, how could they choose but see in this revived corpse an emblem of their own condition? How could they choose but think, if we adhere to the God of Elisha, He shall raise our decayed estates, and restore our nation to its former glory.—Bp. Hall.
—The miracle of Elisha’s bones has been the subject both of criticism and of allegory. The rationalist, of course, admits no miracle. In his view, the deceased was only apparently dead, fallen into a trance, perhaps, but suddenly brought to his senses again by the shock of being roughly cast into Elisha’s tomb; others admit a real miracle, but seem to look upon it with suspicion. “This,” says Clarke, “is the first, and, I believe, the last, account of a true miracle performed by the bones of a dead man, and yet on it, and such like, the whole system of miracle-working relics has been founded by the Popish Church.” “Elisha’s works,” says Stanley, “stand alone in the Bible in their likeness to the acts of mediæval saints. There alone, in the sacred history, the gulf between Biblical and ecclesiastical miracles almost disappears. In this, as in so much besides, his life and miracles are not Jewish, but Christian.” By others the miracle is made a type of Jesus’ power to raise to life by his own death and burial those who are dead in trespasses and sins. “So, too,” says Wordsworth, “the apostles and evangelists, being dead, yet speak to all the world in the Gospels and Epistles, and, by the word of God in them, they raise souls to life eternal.”—Whedon.
—Which miracle God wrought, partly to do honour to that great prophet, and that by this seal he might confirm his doctrine, and thereby confute the false doctrine and worship of the Israelites; partly to strengthen the faith of Joash and the Israelites in his promise of their success against the Syrians; and partly, in the midst of all their calamities, to comfort such Israelites as were Elisha’s followers with the hopes of that eternal life whereof this was a manifest pledge, and to awaken the rest of that people to a due care and preparation for it.—Pool.