Studies of the Old Testament

hee. ? 2 Chkon. xiv. 11. prayers recorded in the Bible are almost -- all of 'them models in their place. Such is the prayer of the Jewish monarch in the text. King Asa is in a great strait. To all human appearance, his throne and his life are in peril. His Ethiopian enemy is in battle array before him, with numbers in the proportion to his own of about two to one. His defeat is morally certain. He and his staff must have felt, in that valley of Ephratah, as they looked over the roods of glittering spears, as our own Washington felt in Valley Forge, in the most dismal winter of the Revolution. He seems to himself to have come to the place of extreme catastrophe. He he can only lie down and die. Like the " Father of his Country," the Jewish king betakes himself to prayer. It is about all there is left for him to do, preliminary to the fatalmorrow. His petition is very brief. In great emergencies our wants are summed up in few words. We have no heart for more. This is the model of prayer in an emergency. It is made up of four fragments, each of which teaches us a fundamental element in the spirit of prayer in such an exigency. 1. Prayer in emergencies should be founded on a strong faith in God's independence of human resources and methods of judgment. Hear the stricken monarch, as he kneels beneath the weight of a kingdom: "Lord, it is nothing to thee to help, whether with many or with them that have no power." This goes to the heart of the case. Nothing els... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.