Aholah and Aholibah.
"Her tent" and "My tent is in her." These names stand respectively for Israel and Judah. Israel, the northern kingdom, had her own tent, i.e. she was independent after secession from Judah, like a woman who has left her mother's tent and has one of her own. Judah retained the temple, the representative of the tabernacle of the wilderness; therefore God's tent was in her. These prosaic facts were suggestive of deeper traits of national character, which the symbolical names suggested.
I. INDEPENDENCE. Israel is named Aholah. She has her own tent; she is independent. This national independence has its counterpart in individual independence. Jacob leaves his home and fights his own battle with the world. Joseph is sent away from his family, and cast in his youth among the grand opportunities of a great nation and the direful temptations of a dissolute society. The young man going out into the world enters on the exhilarating but trying career of independent life. There are special opportunities, duties, and dangers in having one's own tent.
1. Opportunities. The independent position is not hampered with restrictions. Freedom means a wide range for individual activity. Now is the time to realize the long-cherished dreams of earlier days.
2. Duties. Duty dogs the footsteps of opportunity. As our scope for choice and individual activity is enlarged, the obligations of service are correspondingly increased. The slave has few duties; the free man great obligations. The liberty of manhood brings the burden of a man's duty. Christian liberty increases the obligations of Christian service.
3. Dangers. Israel gained in freedom by her rebellion against the petty tyranny of Rehoboam; but the liberty which was got by separation brought its own great dangers. Cut off from the temple-worship, excluded from the national festivals, deprived of the highest religious ministrations, the freed people were tempted to fall into the idolatry of their ancestors and their neighbors. This temptation was too great for them, and they apostatized earlier than Judah. It is dangerous to be separated from religious ordinances. The young man who leaves the Christian home of his childhood for new scenes of worldly life is entering on a path of peril. A self-contained life is open to temptation. To seek to be independent of God is to court ruin.
II. DIVINE FELLOWSHIP. Judah is named Aholibah. God's tent is in her. She has the outward means and symbols, at least, of the Divine presence. This fact represents high privileges, with corresponding guilt when God is forsaken.
1. High privileges.
2. Heavy guilt. Aholibah apostatized. Her guilt was all the greater that she bore such a name, and could claim the symbol of God's presence as peculiarly her own. The greatest guilt is that of men who know God and have enjoyed his presence and grace in the past, and who, sinning openly against light, have spurned those privileges and willfully rebelled against their chosen God. No sinners are so guilty as apostatized Christians. Mark: it is possible to be Aholibah and to enjoy God's presence, and yet to turn against him, fall, and be ruined.