2 Kings 4:40-41 So they poured out for the men to eat. And it came to pass, as they were eating of the pottage, that they cried out, and said… There are now in the world a great many cauldrons of death. The coloquintida of mighty temptations fills them. Some taste and quit, and are saved; others taste and eat on, and die. Is not that minister of Christ doing the right thing when he points out these cauldrons of iniquity and cries the alarm, saying, "Beware! There is death in the pot"? Iniquity is a coarse, jagged thing, that needs to be roughly handled. I want to go back of all public iniquity and find out its hiding-place. I want to know what are the sources of its power. I. UNHAPPY AND UNDISCIPLINED HOMES ARE THE SOURCE OF MUCH INIQUITY. A good home is deathless in its influences. Parents may be gone. The old homestead may be sold and have passed out of the possession of the family. Yet that place will never lose its charm over your soul. That first earthly home will thrill through your everlasting career. Rascally and vagabond people for the most part come forth from unhappy homes. Parents harsh and cruel on the one hand, or on the other lenient to perfect looseness, are raising up a generation of vipers. A home in which scolding and fault-finding predominate is blood relation to the gallows and penitentiary. Petulance is a reptile that may crawl up into the family nest and crush it. There are parents who disgust their children even with religion. They scold their little ones for not loving God. They go about even their religious duties in an exasperating way. Their house is full of the war-whoop of contention, and from such scenes husbands and children dash out into places of dissipation to find their lost peace, or the peace they never had. I verily believe that three-fourths of the wickedness of the great city runs out rank and putrid from undisciplined homes. Sometimes I know there is an exception. II. The second cauldron of iniquity to which I point you is AN INDOLENT LIFE. You will get out of this world just so much as, under God, you earn by your own hand and brain. Horatius was told he might have so much land as he could plough around in one day with a yoke of oxen, and I have noticed that men get nothing in this world, that is worth possessing, of a financial, moral, or spiritual nature, save they get it by their own hard work. It is lust so much as, from the morning to the evening of your life, you can plough around by your own continuous and hard-sweating industries. "Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways, and be wise." III. Another cauldron of iniquity is THE DRAM-SHOP. Surely there is death in the pot. Anacharsis said that the vine had three grapes: pleasure, drunkenness, misery. Then I remember what Gladstone, the Prime Minister of England, said to a committee of men engaged in that traffic when they came to him to deplore that they were not treated with more consideration: "Gentlemen, don't be uneasy about the revenue. Give me thirty million sober people, and I will pay all the revenue, and have a large surplus." But the ruin to property is a very small part of the evil. It takes everything that is sacred in the family, everything that is holy in religion, everything that is infinite in the soul, and tramples it into the mire. (T. De Witt Talmage, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: So they poured out for the men to eat. And it came to pass, as they were eating of the pottage, that they cried out, and said, O thou man of God, there is death in the pot. And they could not eat thereof. |
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