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| Further Examples from the Old Testament in Favour of Fasting.
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Chapter VII.—Further
Examples from the Old Testament in Favour of Fasting.
And thus we have already proceeded to examples, in order
that, by its profitable efficacy, we may unfold the powers of this duty
which reconciles God, even when angered, to man.
Israel, before their gathering together by Samuel
on occasion of the drawing of water at Mizpeh, had sinned; but so
immediately do they wash away the sin by a fast, that the peril of
battle is dispersed by them simultaneously (with the water on the
ground). At the very moment when Samuel was offering the
holocaust (in no way do we learn that the clemency of God was more
procured than by the abstinence of the people), and the aliens
were advancing to battle, then and there “the Lord thundered with
a mighty voice upon the aliens, and they were thrown into confusion,
and fell in a mass in the sight of Israel; and the men of Israel went
forth out of Mizpeh, and pursued the aliens, and smote them unto
Bethor,”—the unfed (chasing) the fed, the unarmed the
armed. Such will be the strength of them who “fast to
God.”1050
For such,
Heaven fights. You have (before you) a condition upon which
(divine) defence will be granted, necessary even to spiritual
wars.
Similarly, when the king of the Assyrians,
Sennacherib, after already taking several cities, was volleying
blasphemies and menaces against Israel through Rabshakeh, nothing else
(but fasting) diverted him from his purpose, and sent him into the
Ethiopias. After that, what else swept away by the hand of the
angel an hundred eighty and four thousand from his army than Hezekiah
the king’s humiliation? if it is true, (as it is), that on
hearing the announcement of the harshness of the foe, he rent his
garment, put on sackcloth, and bade the elders of the priests,
similarly habited, approach God through Isaiah—fasting being, of
course, the escorting attendant of their prayers.1051
| 1051 See Bible:Isa.37">2 Kings xviii.; xix.; 2 Chron. xxxii.;
Isa. xxxvi.; xxxvii. | For peril has no time for food, nor
sackcloth any care for satiety’s refinements. Hunger is
ever the attendant of mourning, just as gladness is an accessory of
fulness.
Through this attendant of mourning, and (this)
hunger, even that sinful state, Nineveh, is freed from the predicted
ruin. For repentance for sins had sufficiently commended the
fast, keeping it up in a space of three days, starving out even the
cattle with which God was not angry.1052
Sodom
also, and Gomorrah, would have escaped if they had fasted.1053
| 1053 See Ezek. xvi. 49; Matt. xi. 23, 24; Luke x.
12–14. | This remedy even Ahab
acknowledges. When, after his transgression and idolatry, and the
slaughter of Naboth, slain by Jezebel on account of his vineyard,
Elijah had upbraided him, “How hast thou killed, and possessed
the inheritance? In the place where dogs had licked up the blood
of Naboth, thine also shall they lick up,”—he
“abandoned himself, and put sackcloth upon his flesh, and fasted,
and slept in sackcloth. And then (came) the word of the Lord unto
Elijah, Thou hast seen how Ahab hath shrunk in awe from my face:
for that he hath shrunk in awe I will not bring the hurt upon (him) in
his own days; but in the days of his son I will bring it upon
(him)”—(his son), who was not to fast.1054
Thus a God-ward fast is a work of
reverential awe: and by its means also Hannah the wife of Elkanah
making suit, barren as she had been beforetime, easily obtained from
God the filling of her belly, empty of food, with a son, ay, and a
prophet.1055
| 1055 See 1 Sam. i. 1, 2, 7–20; iii.
20 (in LXX. 1 Kings). |
Nor is it merely change of nature, or aversion of
perils, or obliteration of sins, but likewise the recognition of
mysteries, which fasts will merit from God. Look at
Daniel’s example. About the dream of the King of Babylon
all the sophists are troubled: they affirm that, without external
aid, it cannot be discovered by human skill. Daniel alone,
trusting to God, and knowing what would tend to the deserving of
God’s favour, requires a space of three days, fasts with his
fraternity, and—his prayers thus commended—is instructed
throughout as to the order and signification of the dream; quarter is
granted to the tyrant’s sophists; God is glorified; Daniel is
honoured; destined as he was to receive, even subsequently also, no
less a favour of God in the first year, of King Darius, when, after
careful and repeated
meditation upon the times predicted by Jeremiah, he set his face to God
in fasts, and sackcloth, and ashes. For the angel, withal, sent
to him, immediately professed this to be the cause of the Divine
approbation: “I am come,” he said, “to
demonstrate to thee, since thou art pitiable”1056
—by fasting, to wit. If to God he
was “pitiable,” to the lions in the den he was formidable,
where, six days fasting, he had breakfast provided him by an
angel.1057
| 1057 See Bel and the
Dragon (in LXX.) vers. 31–39. “Pitiable” appears to
be Tertullian’s rendering of what in the E.V. is rendered
“greatly beloved.” Rig. (in Oehler) renders:
“of how great compassion thou hast attained the favour;”
but surely that overlooks the fact that the Latin is
“miserabilis es,” not “sis.” | E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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