The first beginning was, the breaking up of the nation into two;—­ the kingdom of Judah to the south, the kingdom of Israel to the north.  And with that division came envy, spite, quarrels; wars between Israel and Judah, which were but madness.  For what could come of those two brother-nations fighting against each other, but that both should grow weaker and weaker, and so fall a prey to some third nation stronger than them both?  The ruin of the kingdom of Israel, of which the text tells us, arose out of some unnatural quarrel of this kind.  Pekah, the king of Israel, had made friends with the heathen king of Syria, and got him to join in making war on Judah:  and a fearful war it was; for the Israelites, according to one account, killed in that war a hundred and twenty thousand of the Jews, men of their own blood and language, all Abraham’s descendants as well as they.  On which, Ahaz, king of Judah, not to be behind-hand in folly, sent to the heathen king of Assyria to help him, just as the king of Israel had sent to the king of Damascus.  He had better have been dead than to have done that.  For those terrible Assyrians, who had set their hearts on conquering the whole east, were standing by, watching all the little kingdoms round tearing themselves to pieces by foolish wars, till they were utterly weak, and the time was ripe for the Assyrians to pounce upon them.  The king of Assyria came.  He swept away all the heathen people of Damascus, and killed their king.  But he did not stop there.  In a very few years, he came on into the land of Israel, besieged Samaria for three years, and took it, and carried off the whole of the inhabitants of the country; and there was an end of that miserable kingdom of Israel, which had been sinking lower and lower ever since the days of Jeroboam.  This was the natural outcome of all their sin and folly, of which we have been reading for the last few Sundays.

Elijah’s warnings had been in vain, and Elisha’s warnings also.  They liked, at heart, Ahab’s and Jezebel’s idolatries better than they did the worship of the true God.  And why?  Because, if they worshipped God, and kept his laws, they must needs have been more or less good men, upright, just, merciful, cleanly and chaste livers:  while, on the other hand, they might worship their idols, and nevertheless be as bad as they chose.  Indeed, the very idol-feasts and sacrifices were mixed up with all sorts of filthy sin, drunkenness and profligacy; so that it is a shame even to speak of the things which went on, especially at those sacrifices to Ashtaroth, the queen of heaven, of which they were so fond.  They choose the worse part, and refused the better; and they were filled with the fruit of their own devices, as every unrepenting sinner surely will be.