Bible Commentaries

THE SECRET OF SPIRITUAL STRENGTH

‘So Jotham became mighty, because he prepared his ways before the Lord his God.’

2 Chronicles 27:6

The principle of Jotham’s reign is a grand one; and there is immense truth condensed into this short record of his whole life. It takes us behind the scenes, and admits us into those privacies of the king’s mind and habit where the real clues of every one’s character are to be found. We arrive at the secret of all strength, ‘preparation,’ and that preparation made ‘before the Lord his God.’ ‘Preparing times’ are never lost times. We all have had to regret precipitancy; but very few of us, in the retrospect of life, will say that we ever acted too deliberately. What is preparation ‘before God’?

I. I should say it lies in that general recognition of God—which gives to what we are going to do a religious character, and invests it with religious influences.

II. But we must carry our line of thought a little further, and copy Jotham, who did it ‘before the Lord his God.’—Observe the expression. ‘Before the Lord.’ Sovereignty. ‘His God.’ There is the loving appropriation.

III. The next thing is to ‘spread it before God,’ like Hezekiah’s letter, in prayer.—That man must be either an infidel, or a madman, who could dare to enter upon any enterprise without prayer!

IV. You must put God in His right place—‘the First, and with the Last.’ By such means a man ‘prepares his ways before the Lord his God.’

—Rev. James Vaughan.

Illustration

‘All our ways must be ordered under the Lord’s eye, for His glory, and by the direction of His Spirit. Then God will be able to do His best in and for us—we, too, shall become “mighty.” “I am not more sure,” says Erskine of Linlathen, “of my own existence than I am of being under the eye and guidance of a Being Who desires to train and educate me to be a good man; and yet I know that beyond the pale of the Bible’s influence, this conviction has rarely been felt. But the agreement between the Bible and my spiritual organisation strengthens my faith in the Divine origin of the Bible, more than any other argument could.”’