Shall we pray? And we Father, as we have been singing, may we be able to be guided and comforted by our freedom in Christ. May we also be guided by the discernment that your word affords by the wisdom of the Lamb, as we sang earlier this morning. We thank you that there is wisdom and discernment in your word to guide us in our lives.
And we thank you for this group here this morning. We pray that we would be blessed each according to his or her own need. But Lord, you would open our hearts in love toward our brothers and sisters and to everyone who is present in Jesus' name, amen. In late November, I was talking about prophet and priest and king in kind of a general sense.
And in late December, I was sharing with you about the lives of Elijah and of Elisha and of something about the transition to Elisha. And I would like to continue this morning in talking about Elisha and the transition and the mantle that he received. It's interesting that when we look at it, we see that in that man's life, which is kind of a very important watershed in the history of the earthly people of God, we may think that there was sort of the one main time that he got the mantle. But in fact, you might say God snuck up on him the first time.
You might say that he began by the prophet Elijah, a man of passion and of renown, passing and putting it on him as he was plowing a field as we read in 1 Kings 19. Perhaps we might think of that as the beginning of his apprenticeship. In European history and to some extent in Canadian history, the idea of an apprentice as a very old idea, my father, my late father, was an apprentice in Denmark. He actually lived with his master.
And from that master, he learned to make furniture with no nails out of rosewood and teak. And for his masterwork, it was a spiral staircase. That is not something you sort of knock together in half an hour. The apprenticeship of Elijah was something that took place over a period of time.
In the Bible, he's with us for something like 50 years. And there's quite a bit of overlap between the ministries of the two men. Everyone can relate quite well to the second, the actual passing on of the responsibility, the full responsibility from Elijah to Elijah. I note that when that happened, when God decided that this man would not die, but would be taken up to heaven, would be translated up to heaven without dying like Enoch, that this man, Elijah, must have loved his teacher because he rent his clothes.
He was emotionally distraught at the loss of that, I would say, powerful personality in his life. And yet, he picks up the mantle. That speaks to me because I think sometimes we can become quite attached to someone. And when that perhaps guide in our human lives may disappear, sometimes we can lose perspective.
But God says, no, lose perspective. The Lord is still with you. And he sort of, I would say, grabbed hold of himself. And he consciously picked up that mantle.
It went down from the sky as Elijah was ascending. He saw it maybe like a piece of cloth might do, like a coat or a cloak might do coming down. He saw where it landed. And he was distraught at seeing his teacher go away.
But he composed himself and he went and picked it up. And he picked it up, I think, in faith because one does not pick up that mantle. And I think an important word in that context is mandate without having the spiritual power. And what we know is that when Elijah said, what do you want?
I want more of your spirit. I want a double portion of your spirit. Here was a man who had things in the right order. He doesn't first say, let me have the honor.
And the mandate and the job and everything. And then worry about whether I have spiritual power to execute it. So the other way around, is it not? This man received and would receive more.
But he received, he received, he received, that spiritual power that is absolutely necessary if we are going to serve God. And then he picked it up. He picked it up knowing where he was, I believe, in history. He picked it up knowing the present condition of the people around him, the condition of Israel.
That is perhaps a daunting thing. If anybody's guilty of this, it's me. We can become down. We can become a bit depressed.
We can become a bit overwhelmed. It's easy. It's easy. So easy is it not to think of the negative.
To think of the negative. How many negative things can you say about the people around you and your job and your life and your boss and your boss? Everything seems to be defective. And people are not what they ought to be.
And I'm not what I ought to be. Well, just keep thinking along those lines. And I think you're going to sink pretty low. But he picks up that mantle anyway.
He picks it up in spiritual power. And he had been with his master for long enough to know that this is not going to be easy. No. Nobody said it would be easy.
But he picks it up anyway. And then interestingly, in 214, he puts it to immediate use. He takes that mantle and uses it to cross the Jordan River, the river by which he grew up when he was a young boy and a man, a young man. And he crossed it to go into ministry, used it right away.
There's something he said for that. If God has given you the power and the instructions, what are you waiting for? We can get on with it. And he gets on with it.
He puts that mantle to immediate use. It's a lovely picture. This monarchial period that I have before you is something like 400 years in duration. During that period, you have literal kings, literal priests, and literal prophets.
And if all of those three offices are working as they should in concert, the testimony of the country where the earthly children of God live should be the testimony that God wanted it to be. But if you read your Bible at all, you know that that rarely happened. That rarely happened. Very often, it was the king.
In fact, the northern kingdom didn't have a single good king after the split that took place around a 930 BC. If we date the beginning of Saul at 1,000 BC, some have dated the political split between North and South at 930 BC. And the northern 10 tribes, after that, never had one single good man leading them in terms of their king. And that wasn't his a tragedy.
When you have a system, which is not a system, which you have something which is not of God, it is pretending. It's pretending. The word pretend is the basis for the word pretentious. And so I think it's fair to say that the system of the northern kingdom was a pretentious kingdom.
It had no heart. It had no core. It had no godly mandate. And it had, in concert with that, unfortunately, no good king, no good leadership.
The kings, who were they? In this period of, you might say, overlap. Ahab, Ahab in Jezebel. Ahab, Ahasiah.
He was on a sick bed, and Elijah told him that he wasn't getting out of that bed, that that would be where he would die. Jehoram. Elijah comes on the scene also known as Joram. Easier to say Joram than Jehoram, like Bill or William.
Jehu Jeho has in Jeho ash. Something like 50 years spanning that center line that I have on the screen. Conveniently for you, you can just about divide these two men's ministries at the division between first kings and second kings. As you move into second kings, you are moving into Elisha, and the mantle is transferred in chapter two.
It's interesting to me that in chapter three, verse three, and when we're reading a description of Jehoram, the king when Elisha took on his responsibility, we read this. He cleaved unto the sins of Jeroboam, son of Nebat, which made Israel to sin. He departed not there from second kings, three, three. I just read to you a whole bunch of names that you never hear in your day-to-day lives, right?
Maybe I have because of the Moby Dick, but although those names, Jeroboam, did you catch that? That wasn't even in the list. It goes back to, I'm not sure if this has a laser. It goes back to 930.
It goes back to 9. That is when they said, let us do it our own way. Reoboam decided to run things his own way. There was enough dissatisfaction and political dissent in a powerful general that said, I think I can make this fly on my own.
And he hived off to the north with the 10 tribes and formed what would be called Samaria. And it had no temple. And it had no legitimate priesthood. It therefore had no legitimate core of worship.
And it not only floundered. It was a terrible testimony for its entire existence until the Assyrians destroyed it and took it away in 597 BC. There's something instructive there for us. At the core of things, there needs to be real worship.
There really does need to be a core, a core of true, God-mandated worship. In looking back at how things were, the writer of Second Kings, as I say, says in 1st 3, of chapter 3, essentially, this situation goes back to that beginning when there was that kind of a division. I have sometimes heard brothers, and I don't criticize them for saying it, that saying things like, isn't it sad that we have so much disunity in Christianity? I understand where you're coming from, I do.
But sometimes there is a reason, and the reason is good enough, that you will not participate in something that is not of God, and which God has not mandated, and which has no true core of worship. If these things are the case, the departure, and the absence of a core, and actually represent a rebellion, in essence, there is no reason for the child of God to say, it doesn't matter, it does matter. Sometimes it does matter. We have to have the discernment to know when it matters, and act accordingly.
What we read, too, worry some, very worry some. What do you think of this? It's sort of like a message here today of the sign of the times. I want to get as fast as I can to the idea of your ministry, but in terms of sort of the signs of the times, Jehorum, in the 1st 3 verses of chapter 3, sort of having a little bit of a plus point here, public worship of Baal, who injected Baal into the Jezebel because her father was king of Tyel, of Tyre, ech, Baal, ech, Baal.
It's actually his name. It's actually the roots of this. And he's said to have followed in the sins of his mother. He's the only king that that is said of.
And it's said there in chapter 3 that although some of these public evil things pertaining to Baal were done away with, he permitted the private. He permitted the private. Does that sound much like progress to you? Let us not have a public departure from God.
Let us have a private departure from God. That is no progress at all. I think that is what people can easily fall into. The Lord Jesus said, you cannot serve two masters.
That is the meaning of the word Baal. It means Lord or masters. The bales, the lords, the small L lords. There's only one Lord.
Elijah's purpose and mandate was to get rid of Lord's plural, a Dollar Tree, and point people back to the Lord with a capital L. That was his job and he was a fiery prophet. He literally brought fire down from heaven. And he also spoke fiery words.
We come to Elijah and we find a different picture. We find a man who is receiving the mantle and ministering. It's a lovely account as you move through. Second Kings, not without judgments, not without some harshness, but it is an account of a man who ministers to a nation and a people who are in desperate need of ministry.
Do we not need ministry? Scholars have often and writers of books like this. I didn't get through it all. But in my very studies of various books, people have pointed out that you can look at Elijah to Elisha and you can think of Moses to Joshua.
Moses giving to the people who is God. What is his law? What is God's righteousness all about? Moses.
If you got this, Joshua, let us move on to victory with God as our ally shall we say. Deliveror, Yeshua, it means Messiah, Joshua. Looking forward, the typology can be, of course, look forward and Elijah in fact is explicitly described at the beginning of Matthew as the kind of person John the Baptist would be. And when we of course know that John the Baptist handed things off in a sense to the Lord Jesus Christ.
He was the forerunner. He pointed people to the Lord Jesus Christ. We have that the Lord Jesus is one who ministers. He heals.
He blesses. He teaches. And this is seemingly the character of Elisha, one who blesses. He does more miracles than any other prophet in the Old Testament save Moses.
And he ministers. People have said Elijah woke people up to God and Elisha warmed them up to God's salvation. I don't know what you think about the age in which we live. Maybe 50 years ago when people used to go quite often in Canada to Sunday school, people would send their kids to Sunday school almost as a matter of course, many decades ago.
That you didn't have to say there's God. You didn't have to say that he's holy. Of course there's a God. Of course God is holy.
How can you be saved? That was the order of the day, decades ago. Now, it's almost like we need an Elijah approach and something of an Elijah approach at the same time due to the endemic atheism, the fact that in society today, if you want to say enjoy the grace of God, people go what God? I have no idea what you're talking about.
And I actually am very resistant to the idea, if I'm honest. What a different day we live in. So I point that out to you because not because you're not aware of it. But in the context of discussion of Elijah and Elijah, it seems to me we're getting into an age where people need to be shocked again as well as to be exposed to the blessings and the realities of the grace of God.
We can remember that the Lord Jesus said, greater works than these will you do. You me? We think of his miracles and we shake our heads and say, Lord, I don't know quite what you mean there. But isn't it true that seeing people come to Christ and souls saved is an enormous miracle of God, an enormous miracle, a great privilege to have any connection to that kind of ministry.
John 1412, Verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on me. The works that I do shall he do also and greater works than these shall he do because I go unto my Father. Paul was not shy about his commission and passing on the responsibilities associated with his commission to believers in various churches. First Corinthians 11, 1, be imitators of me.
So I am of Christ. 1st, that's 1, 6, as you become imitators of us and of the Lord for you received the word in much affliction and with the joy of the Holy Spirit. Imitators of us and of the Lord. I trust that we are able to live the kinds of lives that are attractive so that we in fact have a ministry.
Sometimes the words that we kick around in Christianity, like baptism, which means to dip or immerse. It was used in an entirely secular meeting. Words like ordain, which means to choose. Words like minister means to serve.
If or even the son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister and to give his life a ransom for many, to serve, to serve. We all remember well, John 13 and the Lord washing the disciples' feet, to serve, to minister. It's not a, it's kind of a, what I'm saying to you, is you wanna get out of a religious frame of mind. You almost want to put aside all these pregnant religious meanings of words and accept their obvious upfront meaning.
In the case of ministry, it's service to serve. There are parallels between Elijah and Elijah. Both men raised a dead child back to life. Both men made it possible for a woman to continue to survive in a situation of severe deprivation.
And thirdly, both men had a connection to the lack of rain, as you know. Elijah predicted seven years of drought in Second Kings 8. And in Second Kings 4, water, the appearance of water overnight, is used as a vehicle of victory over the Moabites. So the resurrection and the oil and the water are parallel between these two men, and they may put us in mind of certain figurative comparisons.
Let's think for a moment though, about some of the ministry of Elijah. I'm going to think about it kind of figuratively, kind of typologically. I feel that that is a legitimate thing to do with the scripture. The scripture so frequently takes ideas through physical images.
And clearly, I think, is portraying for us teaching. After this man has this mantle and he crosses the Jordan, what does he immediately come across in Second Kings 2, 16? What does he find? He goes to Jericho and finds a prophet school, prophet school.
50 guys there. They don't seem to know what to do with themselves. They say to Elijah, please tell us, let us. Go searching for Elijah.
No. Please let us go search for Elijah. No. Please.
OK. Go. Pointless. Waste of time.
Looking for a missing person. In fact, he's so missing. He's not standing anywhere on the earth. It's not a valley of mountain or valley.
He's not here, period. These 50 prophets were looking for the wrong person. They're looking for the wrong thing altogether. We need to be careful.
Elijah was a very powerful personality. And here you have men who are intent on running with that and sticking with that. That is a very human tendency. In political circles, I know my brother Gabriel has a master's degree in political science.
He could probably get up here and talk about these things for an hour. But in political studies, you can read about the use of what is called the cult of personality. A famous example would be Mao Zedong, who in fact needs to not only rule over his people with a ubiquitous hand and his picture was everywhere. Believe me, I was in China in 1983 for the first time.
Very stark, cold, sterile country with a lot of pictures of Mao Zedong. Don't you dare say anything about him negative. He had created around himself. It was like a cult.
It was like a 750 million member cult in order to get political sway. There's two sides to that. There is the evil side that says, let me control you. And then unfortunately, brothers and sisters, there's the human side that says, OK, I guess I can go with that, that there is a tendency to attach oneself to a human personality.
Don't do it. It is not of God. It is a bad idea. This man had left, and they're still stuck on the idea.
He's a good man, but he's gone to come to a point of facing it. It's interesting that Elijah himself, as you may remember, was a man who could fall into depression. He could go through a great victory and then feel, then he would run for his life and he would hide. And he was a man who had a bit of a roller coaster in his life emotionally.
And I love it that the Lord Jesus brought him to the Mount of Transfiguration and showed him the redemption that was about to be a man. That was the plan. Right now, what's the plan? What does that mean?
It means you know, Elijah, it's not about your personal failures. You saw a great victory over Baal. You saw seeming failure in the face of the threat of death from Jezebel and you're so upset with yourself about that personal failure. It's as though the Lord Jesus was saying to him, it's not about your personal failures.
We will have our personal failures because we are human. That is why it is such a bad idea to hitch your wagon to this one. Don't do it. There is only one that you must hitch your wagon to.
The Lord Jesus Christ himself, himself. Let him be your king. We are said in 1 Peter to be a kingdom of priests. Be it.
Have the core of worship. Prophet. We have the word. We have the spirit.
The Lord Jesus promised us that paraclete, that one who would come beside the comforter. We have his word. We can be our prophets. It's true that we need teaching.
It's good that we need to be a king. We have the word. We have the word. We have the word.
We have the word. We have the word. We have the word. It's good that we benefit perhaps from teaching and reading and studying.
It's all good. But none of that would matter very much. If you didn't have the spirit, if you didn't have that grace of God, you didn't have redemption to start with. If you enjoy redemption to start with and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in your heart, in your life, ministry is kind of largely up to you.
It's up to you. You can minister to yourself. If you don't know how to minister to yourself, don't say, I need to hitch my wagon on that guy. And all those, oh, that guy is sort of like number three on my pecking order, but don't even think like that.
That is not of God. It's not of God at all. So that is the first thing that Elisha finds. And I think it's quite telling.
My wife and I recently had an experience in interacting with a man who's going for a, I might say, a fancy diploma. And yet in interacting with him, we found that we were profoundly disappointed in how much faith you might say, how much weight he was putting on the need, the need to obtain that fancy diploma. What he shared with us was that in the seminaries where he was interacting, two of them, the kind of stuff that you're not allowed to talk about in class turns out to be the same kind of stuff that I'm not allowed to say at the university because of political correctness. It's infected everything.
It's infected the seminaries. Even what we thought was conservative seminaries. Maybe they're becoming cemeteries. It's terrible, disturbing, profit school of Jericho, beware.
Second Kings too, and I'm pretty much out of time. I've got a page of notes and a number of more slides, but he goes to Jericho and it reminds me so much of today because they say to him, they say to Elijah, the city is pleasant, the city is pleasant. Yes, but it has a problem. The water is contaminated.
The most fundamental sustenance that the human biological entity needs water is poison. That's just like today. One of my brothers here is Father visited from West Africa and his father commented, you know, I look around. You guys have everything.
You have everything. You have food. You have health care. You have everything you need.
All infrastructure, everything. Yeah, the city is pleasant. And what are people all drinking? Poison water.
It's rotten through with poison. That's where we are. A pleasant city with poison water. What did the Lord Jesus say in John chapter four?
I am the spring of eternal life. That's what the Lord Jesus said. And so it's true. It's so true.
What happens next? That's a long one, isn't it? Poison food. Poison food.
And the people of God are eating stuff that's not good to eat. It needed to be healed. He had poured a mixture of liquids in some form of salt. There are various salts, actually, into the waters of Jericho.
And he added a certain kind of meal to the noxious porridge. What do we do to the porridge? One of the guys just got a wild vine and he shaved it off and he put it in the food. Let's not have the people of God throwing wild stuff into the mix.
That they don't know what it is. There's this tendency for we like something new. We know like some new flavor. We don't know what it is.
We'll try the assembly. Really? Really? Where will that lead?
You might find out that you've got noxiousness as a result. Not only is the food healed, not only is the potty healed, it is then that there's a lot of people who now need food and the profit is able just like the Lord to take a small amount of food and enable it to feed many. It immediately reminds us of things like, I am the bread of life after the Lord fed a few thousand people, more than a few thousand people. I am the bread of life.
Yes, we need to be drinking from the right well. We need to be consuming the right food as the people of God. And Elisha reminded people of these things. I had two more points and the time is gone.
I want to just share one thing that I loved from Colossians 4, 17. I didn't remember the name Archipas. Hippos is a word for horse. I'm not sure what the guy's name actually gets down to, but here you have Paul writing, and he remembers a brother Archipas.
And he says to this man, take heed to the ministry, which now has received in the Lord. And the dauphulfillate. The dauphulfillate. Elisha received a mantle.
He received a mandate. He got down to business. He got busy amongst the people of God. I believe that is true of all of us.
Some of us may, for a few minutes a month, get up here and do something. I don't believe that is the most significant thing that happens in disassembly by any stretch of the imagination. I would be deluded if I thought such a thing. Every one of us has been given something, some ministry, some mantle, something to do.
Do you not know what it is? Sometimes we don't. Sometimes we're not sure. It's a bit like the sunken axe head, which is found in the account.
In chapter six, read it for yourself. The Lord can bring it up. The Lord can show you what it is. And if the Lord shows you that you can be a minister, who cares if it's a capital M or lowercase M?
It means to serve. If the Lord shows you that you are able to minister, because you are, you have his spirit, you have his clothing, you have everything you need, you have his spirit, you have his word, you have his people, then get on with it. And what you do when you get on with it is that you are honoring the Lord in the most magnificent way. You are following through on what you have been given to do.
Elijah was given something to do, and he followed through on it. I believe that the Lord has something for all of us to do. Hidden things, not hidden things. Does it matter?
I think, in fact, the most beautiful things of all are the hidden things. Somebody who serves the Lord and nobody knows about it, except the Lord. That is a wonderful ministry. And it is a ministry that you can have in your relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.
And I will close there this morning. I wonder if we might sing. I apologize for going a bit over time. Be unto your name.
If we could sing, be unto your name in closing. It's a short, relatively short chorus with a couple of verses. It's a favorite of mine. Shall we stand?