Page:The rock of wisdom.djvu/91

 them that fear him, and he will show them his covenan, for this church will exist while time lasts and he will show his officers how they should conduct the administration of all the affairs that they may be able to close all their charges in peace and make a safe arrival to the church of the first born. It appears that there was none that followed the house of David but the tribe of Juda. 1st Kings, 12: 20. Benjamin was a small tribe, and so intermixed with the tribe of Juda (the very city of Jerusalem being partly in Juda, partly in Benjamin) that they are here counted but as one tribe. "And he said unto him I am a prophet, also, as thou art an angel, speaketh unto me by the word of the Lord. 1st Kings 13: 18. The man was a prophet but he sinned in thus deceiving the man of God, the more because he pretended a revelation for what he did. When he had gone a lion met him by the way and slew him according to the word of the Lord in which he spake unto him, for his disobedience. Thus the Lord often punishes his servants here, that he may spare them hereafter, that will repent, for the generality of divines are of opinion, that the sin of this prophet, considered with all its circumstances, was not mortal, but yet if is unknown to man, for the Judge of all the earth will do right. Although Elijah requested to die, not out of impatience, but out of a zeal against sin, and that he might no longer be witness of the miseries of his people, and the war they were waging against God and his servant; but he went a day's journey into the wilderness and came and sat under a juniper-tree, and he requested for himself that he might die, and said "it is enough, now O Lord take away my life, for I am not better than my father." 1st Kings. 19: 4. This bread with which Elijah was fed in the wilderness, was a figure of the bread of life which we receive in the blessed sacrament, by the strength of which we are to be supported in our journey through the wilderness of the world till we come to the mountain of God and our end in a happy eterntity, for the thought raiseth the great courage of every true minister of God, to stand fast in the liberty where Christ has set them, for Elijah said "I have been very zealous for the Lord of Hosts, for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars and slayed thy prophets with the sword, and I, even I, only am