2 Chronicles 13

2 Chronicles THE SECRET OF VICTORY2 Chronicles 13:18 . These words are the summing-up of the story of a strange old-world battle between Jeroboam, the adventurer who rent the kingdom, and Abijah, the son of the foolish Rehoboam, whose unseasonable blustering had played into the usurper’s hands. The son was a wiser and better man than his father. It is characteristic of the ancient world, that before battle was joined Abijah made a long speech to the enemy, recounting the ritual deficiencies of the Northern kingdom, and proudly contrasting the punctilious correctness of the Temple service with the irregular cult set up by Jeroboam. He confidently pointed to the priests ‘with their trumpets’ in his army as the visible sign that ‘God is with us at our head,’ and while charging Israel with having ‘forsaken the Lord our God,’ to whom he and his people had kept true, besought them not to carry their rebellion to the extreme of fighting against their fathers’ God, and assured them that no success could attend their weapons in such a strife. The passionate appeal had no effect, but while Abijah was orating, Jeroboam was carrying out a ruse, and planting part of his troops behind Judah, so as to put them between two fires and draw a net round the outnumbered and outmanoeuvred enemy. Abijah and his men suddenly detected their desperate position, and did the only wise thing. When, with a shock of surprise, they saw that ‘behold!

the battle was before and behind them,’ they ‘cried unto the Lord, and the priests sounded with the trumpets.’ The sharp, short cry from thousands of agitated men ringed round by foes, and the blare of the trumpets were both prayers, and heartened the suppliants for their whirlwind charge, before which the men of Israel, double in number as they were, broke and fled. The defeat was thorough, and, for a while, Rehoboam and his kingdom were ‘brought under,’ and a comparatively long peace followed. Our text gathers up the lesson taught, not to Judah or Israel alone, by victory and defeat, when it declares that to rely upon the Lord is to prevail. It opens for us the secret of victory, in that old far-off struggle and in to-day’s conflicts. I. We note the faith of the fighters. ‘They relied,’ says the chronicler, ‘upon the Lord.’ Now the word rendered ‘relied’ is one of several picturesque words by which the Old Testament, which we are sometimes told, with a great flourish of learning, has no mention of ‘faith,’ expresses ‘trust,’ by metaphors drawn from bodily actions which symbolise the spiritual act. The word here literally signifies to lean on, as a feeble hand might on a staff, or a tremulous arm on a strong one. And does not that picture carry with it much insight into what the essence of Old Testament ‘trust’ or New Testament ‘faith’ is?