Wesley Corpus

xxiv. 31.) And yet even at that time they did not serve Him alone; they were not free from gross idolatry; otherwise, there had been no need of his giving them that exhortation a little before his death: “Now, therefore, put away the strange gods which are among you,” the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the river Jordan. (Verse 23.) What gods these were, we learn by the words of Amos, cited by St. Stephen: “O ye house of Israel, have ye offered sacrifices to me by the space of forty years? Yea, ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch, and the star of your god Remphan, figures which ye made to worship them.” (Acts vii. 42, 43.) 10. The sacred history of what occurred within a short space after the death of Joshua, for some hundred years, even until the time that Samuel judged Israel, gives us a large account of their astonishing wickedness during almost that whole period. It is true, just “when God smote them, then they sought him; they returned, and inquired after God.” Yet “their heart was not right with him, neither were they steadfast in his covenant.” (Psalm lxxviii. 34, 37.) And we find little alteration among them for the better in the succeeding ages; insomuch that, in the reign of Ahab, about nine hundred years before Christ, there were only “seven thousand left in Israel who had not bowed the knee to Baal.” (1 Kings xix. 18.) What manner of men they were for the next three hundred years, we may learn from the books of the Kings, and from the Prophets; whence it fully appears that, except a few short intervals, they were given up to all manner of abominations; by reason of which the name of the Most High was the more abundantly blasphemed among the Heathens. And this continued, until their open rebellion against God brought upon the whole nation of the Jews (a hundred and thirty-four years after the captivity of the ten tribes, and about six hundred before Christ) those terrible and long-deserved calamities which made them a spectacle to all that were round about them. The writings of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Jeremiah, leave us noroom to think that they were reformed by those calamities.