Athaliah—II Chronicles XXIII.
James Dodson
[from The Covenanter, Devoted to the Principles of the Reformed Presbyterian Church. 6.2 (September 1850) ed. James M. Willson. Philadelphia: William S. Young, 1850. p. 45.]
We read in this chapter the fate of Louis Napoleon and Pius IX. She murdered all the seed royal, except Joash. He was saved by a good woman, the daughter of a good father. Seven years Athaliah swayed her iron sceptre over the commonwealth. The people were prepared for a revolution, as our fathers were by the twenty-eight years’ persecution of Charles and James.
Jehoiada and the priests, as ministers of the gospel should do now, taught the people their duty as citizens. A few faithful and chosen men of God entered into a covenant. They collected the priests, Levites, and heads of the houses of Israel, or, as we should say now, the ministers, elders, and deacons, to the house of the Lord, The young king was brought out and shown to the people, who chose him for their king, put the crown on his head, and cried—“God save the king.” The officers of the church, the king, and the people, solemnly renewed their national covenant. Athaliah ran into the assembly, and raised the common cry of tyrants and all persecutors—“Treason, treason.” There was treason, but it was her own. She was summarily condemned and executed. The revolution was complete.
Mattan, the priest of Baal, who, like the Pope and his Jesuits now, with Louis Napoleon, had been the instigator of Athaliah’s murderous cruelty, was tried, condemned, and suffered the penalty of Jehovah’s law enacted against gross idolaters. These things “are written for our admonition and learning.” Far be it from us to maintain, as some would have us to believe, that because the judicial law is done away, under the new dispensation, the whole of Old Testament law, in church and state, ceases to bind. God forbid. God give us grace to adhere to all our Reformation attainments, and guard his saints against all open and all insidious attacks on them. “Whereunto ye have attained, walk by the same rule and mind the same thing.”