The mistakes of the mourner.
Two persons are presented here as furnishing occasions for lamentation. One is Josiah, King of Judah, lately dead; the other is Shallum, his son, just succeeding him, and taken into captivity by Pharaoh-Nechoh, King of Egypt. The prophet, therefore, looks upon his countrymen as sorrowing both for the dead and the living. Moreover, he sees that, in accordance with all the natural tendencies of the human heart, a deeper sorrow is professed for the dead than for him who has been taken away into a foreign land. And yet this was not according to the necessities of the position. The captivity of Shallum, rightly considered, was a more distressing event than the death of his father. It may be truly said that we always exaggerate death as a calamity. In the instance of Josiah, his comparatively early death—for he seems to have been no more than forty when he perished in battled produced peculiar feelings of pity. He seemed to be one whose "sun had gone down while it was yet day." But we must remember that this very death had been prophetically spoken of as a blessing (2 Kings 22:20): "Thine eyes shall not see all the evil that I will bring upon this place." For one who is faithfully trying to serve God, it can matter very little when he dies. His service goes on. A man may benefit the cause of God more by the faithful testimony of a Christian death than by fifty years of continued work. If a man has come to death by his own folly and recklessness, we do well to grieve over him; but death in itself is an event which we may only too easily come to look at in a distorted, exaggerated way. There are things far Worse than death. Again and again it happens that people fall into severe illnesses, recover, and then return into the world, only to find that the years seemingly added in mercy to life have become a period of disaster and shame. In the midst of a world of misery, we cannot be too pitiful, too sympathetic, but we must be careful not to make erroneous estimates as to what most deserves our pity and sympathy. We can do nothing for the dead. When the last breath is breathed, there is straightway a great gulf fixed between us and them. But we may do much for the living, if only in a self-denying spirit we keep them in our recollection and strive to help them; seizing every opportunity, and economizing our energies so as to make the most of it.—Y.