The Lord causes the most wicked men to pay His religion the homage which is due to its excellence. A bad king employs a good governor. He who himself disobeys Jehovah yet engages a servant who fears the Lord greatly. The thief likes an honest man for steward. The blasphemer likes a godly teacher for his child. The great speculator prefers an unspeculative man for book-keeper. It is thus that virtue has many unconscious votaries. He who is the slave of idolatry becomes an easy prey to the power of cruel tempters. We do not know that Ahab was a cruel man, but we do know that Jezebel was a cruel woman, and Ahab was greatly influenced by his passionate and sanguinary wife. Ahab’s provocation of the Lord may have been in the direction of idolatry alone; but to be wrong in your conception of worship is to expose yourself to every possible attack of the enemy. To pray in the wrong direction is to be weak in every other. Ahab was a speculative idolater; Jezebel was a practical persecutor. Ahab showed that speculative error is consistent with social toleration. You must distinguish between Ahab and Elijah in this matter. It was Jezebel who slew the prophets of the Lord, and Ahab knew that his servant, Obadiah, had hidden fifty of these prophets in a cave; and yet Ahab kept Obadiah in his service. But redeeming points do not restore the whole character. “One swallow does not make a Summer.” In the same character may be met great faith and great doubt. Obadiah risked his life to save fifty of the prophets of the Lord, yet dare not risk it, without first receiving an oath, for the greatest prophet of all! This mixture we find in every human character. “How abject, how august, is man!” In Ahab, Obadiah, Elijah and Jezebel we see a fourfold type of human society. There is the speculator, the godly servant, the far-seeing prophet and the cruel persecutor. Society has got no farther than this today. The Ahabs of the age are leading us away into speculation that ends in idolatry and in infinite provocation of the Lord; the Obadiahs of the age are still praying, and serving God, and saving even the worst households from the wrath of Heaven; the Elijahs of the age are still hurling their divine thunders through the corrupt and stagnant air, and piercing with lightning shafts the gloomy and threatening future; and the Jezebels of the age are still narrow, bitter, indignant, vengeful and sanguinary. O wondrous combination! So checked, so controlled, by invisible but benignant power! Speculative error has its counterpart in actual cruelty, and patient worship has its counterpart in daring service. We sometimes hear that Ahab was a covetous man. Are we quite sure that the charge is just and that it can be substantiated? This charge is based on the affair of Naboth’s vineyard. How could Ahab be covetous? He proposed terms, saying: