Father, we're thankful that it is possible to say that it is well with my soul. We pray that if there's someone here who does not know what that means, that your spirit would show it to them. We pray that your word would go out this morning, your word speaks for itself. We pray that it would find place in our hearts and that our minds would be receptive and able to remember these things.
In the coming week, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. About a month ago, I was with you and talked about the ideas of prophet, priest and king. And the quintessential king in the Old Testament is King David.
The quintessential priest who set up the priesthood started with his brother Aaron in logistical practice was Moses. And the quintessential prophet was Elijah. And the only Old Testament figures who are mentioned more than Elijah are Moses and David. The third most mentioned person is Elijah.
When we think of these men and miracles and the Old Testament miracles, we might search our minds. What is a magnificent historical event, miracle? And one that comes, perhaps, immediately to mind is the crossing of the Red Sea under the direction of Moses, in the physical redemption of the earthly children of God. And anyway, the other one that comes to my mind is Elijah standing on Mount Carmel and calling down the fire and judgment of God to consume what was on the altar and the rocks and some of the people around, to make a definitive declaration that Jehovah is the Lord, that Jehovah God is God.
Elijah was one of the men of God, as prophets are often referred to. And as I was explaining to you about a month ago, the prophet and the character and the nature of a prophet is in strong, contrary distinction to a king. Kings often have to think about politics. To the extent that kings get overwhelmed and focused on politics and that they are human, they often fall into sin and into trouble.
And if you are unfortunate enough to have a bad king, you have a terrible country. The prophet is there not to care about what he looks like, unlike the king. He is not there to care about what other people are thinking or saying about him. He is there to speak the mind of God, to reveal to God's people what the mind of God is in general and on specific issues.
As a result of that, the prophet is often at loggerheads with the king in the day. And during the monarchical period, which ran from about 1,000 BC to 586 BC, 413 years or so, there is much to learn from the kings and the prophets and the interactions between the two. In terms of New Testament mention of prophets, the one that everyone can probably remember is mention of Elijah in the book of James, which is in itself quite a remarkable statement Elijah was a man like as we are. And you know what I'm saying is no, I do not have that kind of courage.
I do not have that kind of backbone. I do not have that kind of walk with God. I am beset with things in the Hebrews 12 cents. But of course James goes on.
He prayed and it didn't rain for over three years. Powerful, powerful. That is our direction toward Elijah in the Key verse of the New Testament. The other allusions to Elijah occur just before Hebrews 12 in that Hall of Faith chapter 11, women received the dead, their children back from the dead.
It's actually twice. Elijah and the widow of Zarathath as I'll be talking about. Elijah and the Shunamite women, both of these women received their child back from the dead. And in the first instance it was Elijah.
And I want to talk about that instance as well. I have researched over the past little while a little bit about prophets and Elijah of course. And I have found that many scholars and commentators will be able to divide up his life into many phases, many phases, seven phases, more than seven phases. If you happen to own a Thompson reference Bible, there's more than seven.
It turns out to be rather a neat arrangement. And this is what I'm going to do this morning. Three, the beginning, a great big middle and the end. Just three.
And my focus this morning, I think, is going to be what a philosopher would call existential. I would recommend to you reading a book on philosophy by a man named McGee who's a prophet in Texas, M-A-G-H-E-E, no M-A-C, McGee, M-H-G-H. And he traces for us the history of Western thought. And what you find in the late 1800s is basically the bank erupting of human thought.
So that after hundreds of years of struggling with the metaphysical versus the metaphysical, the material versus the immaterial, the situation remains unresolved. And the basis for morality is still completely up in the air because a completely materialistic approach to things leads to nothing more than pragmatism. And as Ravi Zacharissa said, the problem with pragmatism is it doesn't work. We're left with a material view of things.
Toward the 1800s, you have characters like Jean-Paul Sartre and Soren Kierkegaard. Soren Kierkegaard is my late father's country. His parents were devout Lutherans. And this existentialism basically says, look, forget it.
We can't figure it out. We can't resolve such questions. Therefore, live in the moment. That is all you can hope to do.
Live in the moment. From a Christian point of view, from a sort of heritage Kierkegaard point of view, there's a lot of validity to that. From a Jean-Paul Sartre, atheist point of view, it is another form, a more severe form, of bankruptcy. Bankruptcy.
I want to present to you today some thoughts about the life of Elijah and how it can relate to us. James says, you know, he's trying to encourage us to pray. And he says, here was a man. He was just like you.
That means that you are just like him. I find that to be a surprising suggestion given the stature of this individual. That is a lot of stature to say that ordinary people can connect to it in some way. But there it is.
What is the scripture trying to say to us? So I'm going to go through some passages and there is no PowerPoint presentation. This is the old school way. And in this December's bulletin, there is my wife's email.
She doesn't know that I was about to say this. If you would like to get these two pages, count them two of notes. You may email my wife. They are also in her hard drive and she can bounce these notes to you.
And all of these scripture references and the condensation of these thoughts. And that may be prove helpful to you. When we first meet Elijah, so my three parts are the calling, the crises plural and the confrontations and the clarity. The calling, a big part on crises and confrontations, and at the end, clarity.
So let's start with calling. How does this man come on to the scene? He comes on to the scene so suddenly that the sentence doesn't even finish that explains what he is doing. That is, he is standing in front of a king.
He is standing in front of an evil, evil throne. A very evil man. And it turns out, as you will read in the coming chapters, he is only half of the evil. He is backed up by even greater evil in the form of Jezebel.
Now, we see that he comes from the east side of the Jordan River in an area called Gilead. There is in fact a place there called Jabesh Gilead. It is in between the Yarmuk River and the Jabuk River. One, the top one, flows just where Galilee flows out and the bottom one flows just above where it flows into the Dead Sea.
In between those two rivers is this man's village of Tishby, which we don't know where it is. Elijah, the Tishbite. So if you look at 17-1 and Elijah, the Tishbite, who was of the inhabitants of Gilead said to Ahab, wait, you got me there. This prophet appears on the scene and he is standing in front of the king immediately.
And he says, as the Lord God of Israel, liveth before whom I stand, there shall not be due nor reign these years but according to my word. A pronouncement of judgment to an evil throne from the get-go. Immediately this man appears on the scene and he says to this king, I stand, I represent, and I am accountable to Jehovah. And you are so evil and what you have brought to this country, which is Baal worship, is so evil that it is not going to reign here for three years plus.
Interesting. How did this happen? I wonder what we think of this. You often hear, you know, sometimes the not to criticize missionaries or pastors and such, but you'll often hear people say, well, you know, I got the calling.
I got a calling to go into the ministry. I'm not kind of disputing that. But I want to put it to you today that if you are saved, your calling is automatic. You can be automatically called.
You can be essentially on the scene as long as you are willing. God will prepare you. God has prepared you. You are where you are supposed to be.
And if you will allow God to use you, you can be put to use immediately, immediately. This man came out of nowhere. He's unannounced, uninvited, unknown, and he's confronting this evil with the reality and the holiness of Jehovah. We live in an evil age.
Sometimes I think we are going to increasingly in these days be required and be expected to. We can expect ourselves to need to take a stand. Are you ready? Are you ready to take a stand?
Somehow, and we don't know the details, living on the far side of the Jordan River, this man living in an unknown village was prepared by God. I don't know your unknown village. I can tell you a lot about my unknown village and how God, you know, worked the circumstances in my life to bring me to a point of various kinds of, one might say, service. It was necessary for God to break me.
It was necessary for God to deal with me. I might say harshly. It seemed at the time, as chastisement sometimes is. But the preparation was there.
And I think that we should be mindful of that and take example here from this man who had courage. He had backbone. God had prepared him and there was nothing stopping him from confronting the evil that his country had become in the person of Ahab. You know, to extend that a little bit to my own life as I have just been doing.
I don't know how many of you know. Farrell Drive, sort of like two streets over, three streets over. A young man with his brother Peter, this young man, wandered into this church in the summer of 1977, the Lord just having grabbed my life. And it's a funny thing.
I didn't have a clue. I was so stupid. I didn't have a clue how to write a resume. I've been helping somebody with a resume.
I tell you, we're talking about an extremely, extremely impressive resume, really. And in order to get a work-term job with Memorial University, I was going to Mon. You had to write a letter and prepare a resume. Mine was so bad that I was the last person interviewed over, like out of 120 people.
Everybody else had a job or has gone home or something. It was me. Because my covering letter and my resume were so awful. Well, I didn't understand why.
But God then brought me to a job so I could live with my brother. And my brother was subsequently saved about a year later. That was why. Talking about dear ones, I'm emotional this morning as you know, because I haven't seen my son in three years.
And he walks in the door without warning this morning. It's kind of very eric. In the best kind of way. So when I start thinking about dear ones, my heart starts to maybe palpitate a little bit this morning.
And, you know, in the ups and downs that followed, I look back and I see God's hand. At the time, I couldn't really see it. I can see it now. The various things that happened.
The various directions that things took. The things that God overruled. Wrong. Doesn't matter.
You're doing this. Wrong. Doesn't matter. You're going that way.
And then I'm over here and thinking, I should probably be over there by right. This is a better place. Based on my mistake, I should be over there. Sure is good to be here.
So this has happened too many times. My point for you this morning on that note is that you are no different. Do you think that you are here? Do you think that you are in your life?
And that it is nothing but an accident that you are accidentally sitting here? That God had no hand in preparing you and in guiding you and in putting you where you are in your job, in your school, in your family, in your life, with your relatives and with your friends and all the people. Is this all just basically an accident? What an ungodly point of view?
To think that life is just sort of a series of accidents that are not in your life. It is of accidents that result in a happen to be in a chair or happen to be in a public or happen to be driving a truck or whatever it is. It doesn't matter that it's an accident. Faithless.
That's faithless. God is not like that. You are here for a reason. You are in your present position in life and in family and in always by design of God, by design of God.
It is therefore possible that we can emerge. Elijah emerges. He's been being prepared. There is something he needs to do of national significance.
And he's ready and he stands up there before that throne. That's the first item thing that I want to use to go through his life. His life is extremely memorable. The first thing that you can remember to use, that you can use to remember the sequence of his life is in fact the word throne.
Standing before a throne of evil and very evil man with a very evil wife and this man is sitting on the throne, not sure where her wife is, pulling the strings in the background quite often. These people have turned the country into an evil country and these are supposed to be the children of God. They're supposed to have a national testimony and they have exactly the opposite. It's horrific.
And he's standing before that throne and he says it's not going to rain. Of course if there's no rain, there's no crops, there's no food. People are going to be in a state of suffering instead of worshiping Baal. Right after that he disappears.
God, I'm sure that the Ahab wanted to pull out a dagger and throw it at him. He just, Elijah's gone. And the next thing to think of is bird. You have a man taken off in fact in between the rivers.
There is a little brook that we don't know about called Karas. He's there. And the birds feed him. The unclean birds provide for him.
And he drinks from the brook. So in his life he's going from a position of exhibiting great courage to a position of hiding away and being provided for by God in a situation of deprivation. I don't know how much a bird can bring you in a run of a day and I don't know about bending down and lapping from a brook very much but this obviously isn't a banquet. It's part of God's plan but here is a man who is undergoing deprivation.
Do we as Christians think that we will never undergo or experience deprivation? I think that it would be a childish thing to suggest is that no Christian should ever experience a period of deprivation. Wondering what's next. Especially when the brook dries up.
If God brought me here now that's his dry, now what? I don't even know if this doesn't make sense to me. Sometimes life is like that. But God tells him what to do next.
Interestingly enough he goes to the father-in-law of Ahab named F. Bell to his neck of the woods in Lebanon to a place called Zarafeth. The place still exists today. In fact I teach a student who has that place name in its modern sense, Zarafindi, in her name.
South of Tyre on the coast of Lebanon. Go there. Go there. It turns out that they are not spared the famine.
He goes there and the next thing thrown bird is child, a widow's child. And you'll remember that this woman was essentially also in a state of deprivation. But the provision would continue to come. The oil would not run out, the meal would not run out and they would have enough.
This woman really doesn't know what to make of Elijah. She's basically afraid of him. But he comes in, the food continues to flow miraculously. They are provided for.
It's not a banquet. They have enough. They're making it. And one day the child dies.
The child dies. I wonder what Elijah felt. The woman is saying in spite of the fact that the food came because of him. Elijah is saying, the woman is saying to Elijah rather, the widow of Zarafeth is saying to him, What have you done?
My son has died because of your presence, because of my past sins. It's an old idea. I wonder what he felt like. This man, you know, existentially feels many things.
He goes through a period of courage. He goes through a period of deprivation. He goes through the agonization. I love children.
The child died. His heart is probably half broken. He feels in some sense responsible, even though he's not. She thinks he is.
And he goes and you will remember that he lay down on the child three times and prayed for him. And then he came down and gave the boy back to her. Resurrection. Resurrection.
We then come to the period of arrangement there. Okay, the showdown. The big showdown. Ahab.
It's mediated through Man of Obadiah and his people. The big showdown. Mount Carmel. Mount Carmel.
Pretty high. And we all know the story. They pour water. They sacrifice.
The prophets of Baal cutting themselves. Blood going everywhere. Baal, the god of fertility and nature and crops and all of that. He can't bring one drop of rain down from the sky.
And all this gross stuff is going on. And Elijah prays a simple prayer and everything is consumed and the rocks melt and the altar is gone. And then the next symbol is a sword. It takes 450 of them with the help of God's people and slaughters them.
Does that, you find that horrible? That men who are in league with Satan? In this dispensation of the law should be executed, should be put to death. It doesn't surprise me in the least.
I am not in the least bit surprised that that is the outcome for these evil men who are serving Ahab and Jezebel. You would think that the entire nation would turn back to God. That doesn't really happen. So we have Thrones, birds, dead child, fire, sword.
And the next one is, I love this. He's praying that now that this showdown has been won in favor of Jehovah, that it would reign again. James, pray not, no rain. Pray, reign.
This man has power with God. You have power with God in your prayer life. And he's sending his assistance. Check for clouds.
Not yet. Pray, pray, pray, pray. Check for clouds. Not yet.
So many times. Finally, the guy comes back and says, I see a cloud the size of a man's hand. Isn't that cute? I love that.
How do you even, so far, what's that? It's anyway, small. That's it. It's coming.
The rain's coming. This man knows. He knows. He knows what's happening.
And the rain comes back. Wonderful. Now we find out something very, we see something very kind of inexplicable. In chapter 19, verse 3, what does he do?
He must have felt euphoric at the victory. And great. Vindication. God is God.
All the other stuff we've dealt with, we've dealt a mortal blow to them. But Jezebel raises her head and he runs from Jezebel. This man who stood up to this and did all of this runs from a woman. He's man.
He's running in fear from Jezebel. And he can't cope with this. And it's even worse. The strangeness of it is even more strange in that he finds a place, you know, he heads for Horrib.
And he says, take my life, God. It's done. I'm done. I just, I have nothing left.
And he's also kind of in pity, pity party mode, I guess. He says, I alone and left. It's factually untrue. And God will show him that it is factually untrue.
But this is his frame of mind. After these victories, he's now running from a very evil person. And he's seemingly controlled by fear. Is that possible for us?
Is it possible to kind of, for us to kind of lose our marbles and base our actions on fear? We are human. Sometimes fear grips us. Fear gripped this man and he kind of lost it.
He went away and hid in a cave and pitied himself and was ready to die as far as his relationship with God was concerned. And then what you'll read is that God showed him some miraculous natural phenomenon that ended with God speaking to him quietly in the breeze, in the little breeze. After the, the earthquake and the wind and the terrible things that were natural phenomena that God caused, there's this still small voice setting things right. So it's not the amazing natural phenomena that actually have anything to do with anything.
It's the still small voice of God that turns things around. And Elijah actually bucks it. He goes, yeah, but I'm alone and everything is bad. God just says, look, come up here, come up there, cave there, cave there.
Look, 7,000 people have not bowed the knee to bail. That God tells him this, I'm not alone. You're not alone. We're not alone.
For one thing, God is with us. And for another thing, there's plenty of people who are with us, who hopefully are also praying for us. God says, for all his sort of moaning, I see in 1913 in my notes, God says this, what are you doing here? What are you doing here?
You're way in a cave. I'm alone. There's only me. I might as well die.
What are you doing? This is ungodly behavior. In point of fact, there are 7,000. And this is what you will do next and tells him what to do next.
Sometimes you just need to get shaken, right? You need to be shaken up, smacked in the face and ask the question, what am I really doing? What's the point of this? And stop doing that.
And that's what happens. I think in that cave was an ancient example of clinical depression, combination of fear and adrenaline and let down from the big events and pity. And God brought him out of it and got him busy. And he got busy.
And you can read in the intervening chapters, it ends, it starts in 2nd Kings 17, goes to 2nd Kings 2. 2nd Kings 2 is the end of what we see of Elijah. And what we see then is this wonderful phrase, you know, we've said Jezebel in the cave, and now where are we? Chariots of fire.
Don't you love that? It's only two people that were translated in the Old Testament, Enoch before Elijah, and now Elijah. That's it. Didn't die.
Moses has no known grave. But Enoch and Elijah have no bones on this planet. And Elijah is taken up in this chariot of fire after he has designated Elijah. And what emotion would you guess at?
After all of these things, what emotion might you guess at? Well, that's a good question. Exhilaration and joy. I wonder what's going to happen in the rapture when you are being taken up if the Lord comes while we are alive.
What amazing exhilaration and joy will be ours. To be taken up to meet the Lord in the air if he comes. You know, it's 2,000 years since he left. And I believe that the time is running out.
The time is running out. We see changes in society that are absolutely frightening. And we better, I would say, get our act together. Admit that God has not just randomly dealt with our lives.
And stand up and be counted. The other attitude against saying that the faithless attitude, that saying that everything is accidental. I don't know if I can't make head or tail of my entire life. I don't know what I'm doing.
That's a very faithless attitude for someone who is a believer. The exact opposite of it is everything is set in stone. Can't do a thing about it. When the Americans were fighting in Vietnam, one of the things that they noted was that philosophically, the Buddhist hyphen communist is completely fatalistic in his approach to warfare.
And well, I'm probably meant to die and I'll just run into the machine guns and die. I mean, it's just fatalism. Buddhism, communism are both leading to combined fatalism. Fatalism.
Well, that's the kind of thing that leads from the idea that everything is set and stone. Can't do a thing about it. Everything is not accidental. It's all preset.
Can't do a thing about it. Don't think that way. That is a terrible way to think. God does not want you to think that way.
It's not the right way for the believer to think. I think both are incorrect and inconsistent with the very concept of faith. And I'm out of time and I'm at the top of page two and I just want to talk about what happens in Luke 9 and Matthew 17. It's described for us and it's under my heading, clarity.
We've seen crises and confrontations plural. And now he's gone. Elijah is gone. Where's he gone?
Well, as you know, on the Mount of Transfiguration, the Lord Jesus communed with his father and two people came to be on that Mount with the Lord Jesus. Moses and Elijah. Isn't that amazing that they would be brought out of wherever they are. We read in Hebrews 12 being encompassed by a great cloud of witnesses.
And they are brought to this mountain. And Moses, in his actions on this earth, was very concerned about where is the territory of God? Where is the promised land? Let's get in it.
Let's take it. Let's claim it and live there. What is the promised land? Let's have a proper promised land.
Now Moses is standing on a mountain and he's shown that it's not about the land. It's not really about the land. It's about redemption. Redemption.
Elijah, before he was taken up in the chariots, one man has said he did not finish well. A man who comes to that point in his life of that state of mind and heart has not finished well. I'm not sure there's more that happens there before the chariots of fire, but Elijah is brought down and he is shown redemption too. He is shown that the work of God is in men's hearts.
He is shown that redemption is being brought to all mankind. He never had that concept when he walked on the earth. By analogy, I would say that what we wish sometimes that we had is more clarity than God is going to give us while we are here. The walk of faith by definition means that we don't have the big picture.
We don't have complete clarity. Moses and Elijah got some additional clarity compared to their lives on earth. That was a wonderful privilege for them to have and to receive. What about us?
Sometimes I think we wish, you know, what I need is to be in heaven and to sort this out. I want to be able to look down and unravel the spaghetti and then I'll know and then I'll act properly. But since I'm not completely aware of all of God's purposes and plans, well, I don't know what to do then. I guess I can't do anything.
I think I'm useless. That's a very wrong attitude. God has prepared each of you, each of us, to serve him. He can and has through his spirit and through his word, even us the power to serve him.
We need to realize that we can be part of that and not worry so much about getting complete clarity. He will lead us. He will lead us. It's 12 after and I'm going to read one of the three verses that have been very precious to me over the years.
And it is Hebrews 12, wherefore, 12-1, wherefore seeing we also are encompassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses. Let us lay aside every weight and the sin that so easily besets us. And let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the capital A author and the capital F finisher of our faith. Ooh, for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the majesty on high.
Consider him who endured such contradiction of sinners against himself lest you be weiried and faint in your minds. May the Lord bless these few thoughts to your hearts this morning. That's how we pray. Father, we thank you that your word is able to minister to our hearts, help us to hold it precious and to take it in.
We pray that as we depart, you would enable us in the coming week to be your people, to show backbone and to show courage, and to recognize that we are where we are for a reason. In Jesus' name, Amen. I don't know whether we might have time for one verse of moment by moment. As I indicated to you over coffee, one verse of moment by moment.
Dyeing with Jesus by death, reckoned mind, living with Jesus a new life, divine, looking to Jesus till pouring forth shine. Moment by moment, oh Lord, I am thine. Moment by moment, I'm kept in his love. Moment by moment, I've life from above, lurking to Jesus till glory, death, shine.
Moment by moment, oh Lord, I am thine.