Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 January 1911 — When the Altar Was Not a Refuge [ARTICLE]

When the Altar Was Not a Refuge

WHEN Joab the warrior entered the Tabernacle court and laid hold of two of: the two horns or comer projections of the altar of burnt offerings, he had found the place of all places that was: safest for him. And yet it was not safe. .. Joab was David’s nephew, and for many years he had been true to the: great king; only, he was true to the: worst side of David, and not to thaj best side, and so he was not true toi David at all. To be sure, he had fought on David's! side against Saul, and David had made, him commander-in-chief; but Joab chose to follow his own judgment! rather than his king’s, and that is treason. In the first place, Joab slew Abner, the mighty warrior, whom David was moved by the wisest motives to preserve, and whorp the king mourned as "a prince and a great man.” In the second place, Joab slew Absar lom, and by that murder almost broke the father’s heartIn the third place Joab slew Amasa, as he was in the act of kissing him, and thus became the Judas of the Old 1 Testament. Joab’s Final Treachery. In the fourth place, worst of all, he pandered to David’s lust by placing Uriah where he must be killed in the battle, that David might marry his wife, Bathsheba. As a final treachery to David, defying his royal master’s will that Solomon should succeed him, Joab joined David’s oldest son-Adonijah, the secand Absalom In his plots for the succession; and when those were foiled, Joab, the mighty general had nothing left but to flee for his life to the house of God. The four “horns of the altar’’ received the blood of the sacrifices, and in a special way summed up the sanctity of the altar itself. From of old, 1, panting fugitives had laid hold upon them, and gained that protection from merited punishment which the altar and its sacrifices gloriously symbolized. Joab seized upon his last hope when he grasped in his despair the horns of the altar. The Unpardonable Sin. But wilful murderers, by an express provision of the sacred law, were forbidden even this final sanctuary; and Joab was a wilful murderer, trebly dyed. Solomon was acting legally, as well as wisely for his kingdom, when he sent Benaiah, who . slew him. There is an unpardonable sin! —that Is the lesson taught by the Joabs. There is a filthiness that must remain “filthy still,” that even the blood of the Lamb cannot wash away. There is a laying hold even of the horns of God’s altar that does not avail, because the hands alone lay hold and not the heart. No one has committed the unparadonable sin if he dreads sin and longs after holiness; those that brood over this teaching are least of all those that need it. The sin against which the altar of God’s mercy is closed is the sin that, through years of acquiescence in it, has closed the heart against God’s mercy, and made holiness no longer desired. The Joabs fall by inches, till at last they fall even from the horns of the altar.