A Story from the Bible on Elijah

Hello to everyone. Welcome. Good to see so many people here. Especially good to see that people didn't head towards the exits when my name was announced for the sermon. It's not too late to leave if you need to. Hope you've all had a good week. It's been, I know for a lot of people, the first week back to a full schedule in a little while with all of the time off most of us have had from our jobs over the past few weeks. Actually, the words of the song probably mean a lot to plenty of people. I know I've heard plenty of comments from folks at services over the last few weeks about how they're feeling a bit worn. Especially around the time of the holidays, it tends to be a time when we realize some of the differences in terms of what we believe from those around us in a more acute way, maybe, than we do in other times of the year. I think there's other ways nowadays, too, that many of us are feeling worn. We're living in a particularly godless period of time, and we see this pointed out more and more often as we see different things going on in the news. I know this week, one of the stories that really hit me hard was seeing the news from Germany and some of the attacks and sexually motivated attacks on some of the women over there. You just start to see the fact that things that we've taken for granted as norms and mores in our society are slowly continuing to slip away. I think it's easy to feel often that we're among a very few and among a minority that really believe not only in God and His truth, but in some generally decent and stable way of life. Fortunately, God gives us examples, He gives us encouragement, and He gives us ways to continue to move forward through these types of times and through these feelings and thoughts. That's something I'd like to concentrate on today. Some of you might be familiar with the old TV show Gilligan's Island and how they would sing, "'Now sit right back and you'll hear a tale.'" Okay, so today, sit right back and let's hear a tale out of the Bible. Mark's grinning because some have compared one or two of the songs he's written to the theme from Gilligan's Island, I know, but we won't go there. I know that's a bit of a sore spot. You can ask him about that after services. But what I'd like to do is just ask everyone to sit back today and let's read a story from the Bible. We'll cover two or three chapters of the Bible. We really won't deviate far from there. For those of you who like to take notes, I'll ask you to just jot down three things, three points that I'd like to draw out of this story as we read through it, and hopefully things that will provide us encouragement and some more guidance for our lives as we go forward. The first one being God's absolute power. God's absolute power. His power and strength over everything else is there in the world around us. Secondly, God's use of his power to deliver us when and how he wills. God's use of his power to deliver us when and how he wills. And thirdly, God's mercy towards human weakness. God's mercy towards human weakness.

So please keep those three points in mind. Keep them in front of you if you'd like, and let's sit right back and listen to a tale out of the pages of the Bible. And this one happens to start very abruptly in chapter 17 of 1 Kings. So please turn with me to 1 Kings 17. This is one of the more abrupt starts to a story and to an account of a person that we'll find in the Bible. Elijah 17, sorry, 1 Kings 17, will read about Elijah. 1 Kings 17 and verse 1. Very simple verse. It just simply says, Elijah the Tishbite of the inhabitants of Gilead said to Ahab, As the Lord God of Israel lived before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years except at my word.

So first we've seen of this guy. Elijah just shows up on the scene and says these words to the king.

So what in the world is going on here? If you want to turn one page further or just look a little earlier, let's read a few verses out of 1 Kings 16, which will give us a little bit of context about what was going on at this time in the old kingdom of Israel. 1 Kings 16 will read verses 29 through 34.

Here we see that in the 38th year of Asa, the king of Judah, Ahab, his son, or the son of Amri, became the king. And he rained over Israel and Samaria for 22 years, and he did evil in the sight of the Lord more than all that were before him. And it came to pass as though it had been a trivial thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam. He did something even worse. He took Jezebel, the daughter of Ethbal, the king of the Sidonians as his wife, and he went and served Baal and worshipped him. And he set up an altar for that false god in a temple which he built in Samaria.

He made a wooden image, and he did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger than all of the kings of Israel that went before him. And if you've read any of the accounts of the kings of Israel, that's a pretty strong statement because there were some pretty bad and crazy things that some of them did. It says, also in his days, in verse 34, Heel of Bethel built Jericho and laid its foundation with a birem as firstborn, and with his youngest son, Sagub, he set up its gates, according to the word of the Lord, which he had spoken through Joshua, the son of Nun. And this refers to actually a curse that was pronounced on the city of Jericho after God destroyed it for the Israelites when they entered the Promised Land, and saying that it should not be rebuilt. And if it would be rebuilt, the person who rebuilt it would live these curses. And so in the time of Ahab, the king of Israel had departed so far from God, not only that, but then he married the wife, or as his wife, the daughter of a pagan king who was a heavy worshipper of a false god. I looked up a book called All the Women of the Bible, and it was interesting there because when you read the write-up about Jezebel, the first caption that comes is, the woman who was a she-devil. Not really the way most of us want to go down in history, I don't think. So it goes in here, and it talks about her family connections, talks about the fact that the culture that she came from, worship Baal and Ashtaroth, or Astarte, and set up 450 priests that Ahab installed in the temple to the sun god that he built in Samaria. Another 400 priests were housed in the sanctuary that Jezebel erected for them, and which she fed at her own table. Cruel and licentious rites were associated with the worship of Baal. Jezebel sprang from an idolatrous stock, the same source which afterwards produced the greatest soldier of antiquity, Hannibal, whose temper was not more daring and unforgiving than hers. So quite a lineage. It was this heathen woman who married Ahab, the king of northern Israel, and who in doing so was guilty of a rash and impious act that resulted in evil consequences.

Goes on to say that Baal had no more dedicated devotee than Jezebel. None could match her zeal for the worship of Ashtaroth, the famous goddess of the Sidonians, as zealous and liberal maintenance of hundreds of idolatrous priests clearly proves. Not content with establishing the idol worship of her own country in her husband's court, she sought to convert all of Israel to Baal worship.

Two heathen sanctuaries were built, one at Samaria and the other at Jezreel, with 850 priests between the two of them. And in a most relentless fashion, Jezebel tried to drive out the true prophets of God from the land, and thus became the first religious female persecutor in history. From her idolatrous father, a high priest of Ashtaroth, she inherited her fanatical religious enthusiasm that inspired her to exterminate the worship of the true and living God, and she almost succeeded in the attempt. So that's the backdrop of the time that Elijah came into. And we stepped in this first very abrupt paragraph or verse of chapter 17 of 1 Kings. That's the backdrop that he was stepping into. And certainly, our world is going in many of the same directions. It has differences, certainly, from what we read about here, but I think you can see how we can identify with those times in many ways. So why is it that Elijah is so important, and why is it that he came on the scene at this time? It's interesting that he leaves in the end as abruptly as when he came in.

For those of us who remember the story, at the end of his time as a prophet of God, Elijah is taken up by a whirlwind and carried away. So he comes in rather abruptly, shows up at the King's doorstep, and says, hey, it's not going to rain until I say so. And then when he's all done with his job, he's gone, whisked away in a whirlwind. He's actually the most mentioned Old Testament prophet in the New Testament. I hadn't really thought before looking into his background for this sermon about how prominent he is in the New Testament. In Malachi, Elijah has talked about, as the one preparing the way for the Lord. In the New Testament, first of all, in John, people ask John the Baptist. They ask if he's the coming Elijah. Many thought in Luke 9 that Jesus was Elijah. And in Matthew 17, at the time of the Transfiguration, when Jesus is there with a few of his disciples, Elijah is among the few people that show up there in the Transfiguration. So he's a very important character. But why is that? Have we thought about that? He's also one of only five people in the Bible who raised people from the dead. So trivia question, who were the other four?

If you can remember. One of them was Elijah. One was Jesus Christ. One was Peter, who raised actually two people. And the last one was Paul. I might have mentioned this before, but Paul's story to me is the most interesting and humorous, if it can be humorous, because there was a guy who was sitting in a window in a building while Paul was preaching, and he went on and on and on until Eudecus fell asleep, fell out of the window and died, and was then resurrected. So for those who fall asleep in services, there's hope, and God even has mercy on you.

At the same time, James talks about Elijah being a man of weakness. You don't have to turn there, since I said you can stay in 1 Kings. But in James 5 verses 17 and 18, there's a fairly well-known scripture that says Elijah was a man with a nature like ours. And he prayed earnestly that would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three years and six months. And then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth produced its fruit. So the point that it's making here is that God was working with Elijah as a normal person. He was a person who had weaknesses, he had strengths, he had doubts, just like we do as people.

And the inference here of this passage is the fact that we can have the same type of relationship with God that Elijah had. He wasn't anything special. He was a human being that God used for specific work, just as we are human beings who God has given his spirit to, so we can go out and we can do his work as well. So let's delve into the story a bit and see what it has to tell us.

First of all, we saw in verse 1 of chapter 17 that Elijah came and proclaimed a drought. Now, why a drought? Why would it be significant to proclaim a drought? Well, Baal, the god that Jezebel was installing, was the god of rain and a god that was reputed as a god of fertility.

And so one of the things that the true god was showing here right at the outset was it is the true god that determines when the rain falls and determines the fertility of the land. It's not this false god that you're worshiping. And so Israel was given a period of time during this drought to sort out who were they going to follow. Were they going to follow this false god or were they going to follow the true god?

So let's see what happens to Elijah after the time that he comes in. He makes this bold statement to the king. We'll start in verse 2. We'll read verses 2 through 7 of chapter 17. Then the word of the Lord came to Elijah in verse 2, saying, Get away from here and turn eastward and hide by the brook charath which flows into the Jordan. And it will be that you shall drink from the brook and I've commanded the ravens to feed you there. So he went and did according to the word of the Lord, for he went and stayed by the brook charath which flows into the Jordan.

And the ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening, and he drank from the brook. And it happened after a while that the brook dried up because there had been no rain in the land. That's kind of a counterintuitive way to go after you've told this bold thing to the king. You just go hide by a brook and get fed by birds for a while until a brook dries up. But you know, this is the way that God works. And this idea of a bit of a wilderness experience for people that God has called out is actually a very common one in the Bible.

If we think back and reflect on it, we can think of Moses, who after he was part of the royal family, adopted really into the royal family in Egypt after he killed an Egyptian, he went out. He actually lived as a shepherd for 40 years before God brought him back and used him to deliver the children of Israel out of Egypt.

We think about David, who was anointed to be the next king of Israel as a teen, and then went back to his sheep. And it was more than a dozen years later. He was probably around 30 or so when he took the throne.

So quite a bit of time that he had as well, after something big happened, to continue to develop. Joseph, after he was taken to Egypt, served first in the house of Potiphar. After that, he was in prison for a time before he came in and God used him to deliver Egypt and eventually to work out his plan to bring his brothers and his family into that land. Even Paul, when we think about it, after the time that he was called, he spent three years in Arabia being taught directly by Jesus Christ. But even after that, he spent seven years in the city of Tarsus in relative obscurity. And you see almost nothing written in the Bible about the things that he did during that time.

So from the time that he was struck blind on the road to Damascus to the time that he really started moving forward and preaching strongly God's way, about 10 years. So wilderness experiences and things like that are normal in the way that God deals with people. How do we process that in terms of our own faith in God and how he's working with us? We go through different, very punctuated experiences in our lives, don't we?

Some of us have grown up in the church and we've come to a point in time when we've made a decision to commit our lives to God. And things don't necessarily change immediately on a dime from that time forward. Others have come completely new into the church as adults. There's a huge change in life. And after that, life settles back in in some ways, doesn't it? And you realize that even though you've made a commitment to God, you still have to deal with the every day with the strengths and weaknesses, the poles of the world that you deal with. Others might have known God for a while and stepped away and come back to church. And at the point that you do that and recommit to God, again, there's a normalcy that sets in. And there's this time period of just having to deal with day to day life. And what's shown here in the way that God was dealing with Elijah, I think, was the way that God cares for us during that time. And the fact that not everything that happens to us is this big bang that takes place. And there are periods of time that might be lulls in our lives. There are periods of times that might be normalcy, figuratively sitting by the brook and being fed by God day to day until the next thing is going to happen. And we have to be ready for that, and we have to trust in God that He'll take care of our needs in that way. Another place that this drew me towards was Proverbs 30 verses 7 through 9. Proverbs 30 verses 7 through 9. This is titled in the Bible. I was using the prayer of Agor that's recorded, and his prayer was in verse 7 of Proverbs 30. Two things I request of you, deprive me not before I die, he said in his prayer, remove falsehood and lies far from me, give me neither poverty nor riches, feed me with the food allotted to me, lest I be full and deny you and say who is the Lord, or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God. And that prayer, I think, applies to all of our lives as well, and also shown in the example of Elijah. God cared for him by that brook, and we'll see as he does that going on further in his ministry, and took care of him, and he gave him what he needed. He didn't give him more, but he gave him what he needed. He kept him alive, and he kept him moving forward in the job that he had for him to do. Let's look at the next section of the story. So the brook dried out because there had been no rain in the land, and Elijah had to move on. So let's go to verse 8. The word of the Lord came to Elijah in verse 8, saying, Arise, go to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and dwell there. See, I've commanded a widow there to provide for you. So he arose, and he went to Zarephath, and when he came to the gate of the city, indeed a widow was there gathering sticks, and he called her and said, Please, bring me a little water and a cup that I might drink.

And as she was going to get it, he called her and said, Please bring me a morsel of bread in your hand. And so she said, As the Lord your God lives, I don't have bread.

I just have a handful of flour and a bin, a little bit of oil and a jar, and see I'm gathering a couple of sticks that I might go in and prepare it for myself and my son, that we might eat it and die. Things were very dire at that point in time. There was a famine through the whole land. And Elijah said to her, Don't fear, and go and do as you've said, but make me a small cake from it first, and bring it to me, and afterward make some for yourself and your son. For thus says the Lord God of Israel, The bin of flour shall not be used up, nor shall the jar of oil run dry till the day the Lord sends rain on the earth. So he's promising a miracle to her that she'll be miraculously sustained. So she went away and did according to the word of Elijah, and as she and her household ate for many days, the bin of flour was not used up, nor did the jar of oil run dry according to the word of the Lord, which he spoke by Elijah. Now there's a few things going on here that lie kind of beneath the text that I just want to dig into briefly. This section is from bible.org, a study that tells a little bit about the background of where it was that Elijah went to, because, you know, we're not familiar with these geographies and boundaries and all the rest, so I found this very helpful. Zarephath, it says, is located in Phoenicia, the very heart of Baalism. Here, Yahweh will defeat Baal in his own territory. So what Elijah's done, God sent him out of Israel, and he sent him actually to the land that Jezebel came from, and he was living in basically the headquarters area of Baal, where he came from. Here God's people, it says, will fare better than Baal's. The fact is the main purpose of this narrative is to demonstrate on Phoenician soil, where Baal is worshipped, that Yahweh has power over things in which Baal has failed. Zarephath is in Sidon, not that far from where Jezebel's father, the king of Sidon, lived, and not far from where she had grown up. Zarephath is where the Baal worship of Ahab and Jezebel originated. The Sidonian gods of Phoenicia have the home field advantage. Elijah is on their turf.

It was often believed that the gods were territorial. This seems even to be true of Abraham, who feared that God could not protect him outside of the Promised Land. And it gives a sight here to Genesis 20, verses 11 through 13. It was true of the Syrians, who thought that Yahweh was the god of the mountain while Baal was a god of the valleys in 1 Kings 20. If this were true, which it's not, then Elijah is taking a huge risk by moving to Zarephath. Who would live there as one who worshipped Yahweh? Who would hide him? You would think that everyone living there would want to turn him over to Ahab. And yet, as so far as we are told, no one laid a hand on him while he was there. Ironically, the safest place in the world was under Baal's nose. The safest place in the world was where God told him to be. So even though he was asked to go into a place that was not only forred, but hostile in terms of worship of the true God, God wanted him there and he protected him and he sustained him there. This story also harkens back a bit to, or forward, you might say, to Jesus Christ. He used this story and referred to it in Luke 4 when he was back in his hometown of Nazareth, and he said, no prophet is without honor except in the town that he came from.

And if you remember the story, the people of the town actually tried to throw him off a cliff after he got done saying that. He also said that greater faith would be found in Sodom and Gomorrah than it was in Israel. And what this lady did was actually an act of faith, wasn't it? It was similar in many ways to what Abraham did. When God asked the person to do something first and he gave a reward for that action after the fact, after seeing that in Abraham's case, he was willing to move his family out of the land of his forefathers and go to a new place because God had called him to do that.

And in this case, in what we've read, Elijah asked this lady, go and make me something to eat, and after that you will see this miracle take place. She had to exercise a level of faith, a belief that God was working through Elijah and that he was going to take care of her as a result of using up her last food to feed this stranger who'd come in.

Let's go to the next part of the story in verses 17 through 24.

Now it happened after all these things, and it appears that Elijah was living for a while here with this widow, that the son of the woman who owned the house became sick, and his sickness was so serious that there was no breath left in him. So she said to Elijah, what have I to do with you, O man of God? Have you come to me to bring my sin to remembrance and to kill my son? And he said to her, give me your son. So she took him out of her arms and carried him to the upper room where he was staying and laid him on his bed. And it talks then about how he cried out to God and stretched himself out three times, and God brought the son back from death. In verse 23, Elijah took the child, brought him down from the upper room into the house and gave him to his mother, and Elijah said, see your son lives. And then the woman said to Elijah, now by this I know that you're a man of God, and the word of the Lord in your mouth is true. There are a couple of things that I'd like to point out in this passage as well that I think are helpful also. The first resurrection from the dead that occurred in the Bible is not a resurrection of somebody of the people of Israel.

It's somebody who the Israelites would consider a Gentile. So this, what I would say, greatest act of mercy, greatest miracle that God has only performed a few times recorded in the Bible was actually done for a Gentile person in the first instance.

So it harkens back in some ways also to other people that God has worked with that came from backgrounds that were not of his chosen people. For example, think about the lineage of Jesus Christ.

Who lies back in the very earliest part of the lineage of Jesus Christ? We talked about the city of Jericho a short time ago. Actually, I've been doing a read through the Bible in a year program, and earlier this week was listening to the account of the taking of Jericho and the destruction of it.

Do you remember who it was that looked after the spies when they came to Jericho? It was a prostitute, a lady named Rahab. She hid the spies. She had faith that they were being sent by God, and she acted on that faith and hid the spies from Israel. And they said, take this red cord, hang it in your room, and God will ensure that you survive.

Not only did she survive, but if you look in the lineage of Jesus Christ, all the way back in the lineage of Jesus Christ is Rahab the prostitute.

God performing miracles like this, that we see here with Elijah, with Rahab, and he's doing it in a way that very early on is showing his grace, his willingness to forgive sin, his acknowledgement of human weakness, and the fact that he can and will work with us despite that. There's nothing that can separate us from God's love if he extends it to us and we accept it. And he's showing that powerful grace and that mercy that he has through these actions that he's taking. In this case, sustains not only the life of the lady, but raises her son from the dead. So let's do a checkpoint and look back at our three main themes again. God's absolute power that we're seeing played out here as Elijah goes to the home field of Baal, right, and shows that God is much stronger than their idol that they're worshiping. The use of God's power to deliver when and how he wills.

Which one of us would have sent Elijah to live by some brook and be fed by birds for a while after the time that he proclaims a drought? But God knew the people of Israel needed time, things needed to move on, and they needed to move in his time, and he used his power to care for Elijah during that middle section of time. And lastly, God's mercy towards human weakness.

You see the mercy that he had on this lady, on her son, on Elijah, and on the people that he was dealing with. So let's go on with the story in chapter 18. 1 Kings 18 verses 1 through 19.

And it came to pass after many days that the word of the Lord came to Elijah in the third year, saying, Go, present yourself to Ahab, and I will send rain on the earth. So this is in the third year. So we know that the things that we've read about, living by the brook, living with the widow of Zarephath, took up something between two and three years' time. It's not a short period of time.

We think back and reflect on what happened to us during 2015, during 2014, going back into 2013.

That's a long period of time that went by in just these couple of chapters, really one chapter in chapter 17 that we read about. That's a lot of life, and I think sometimes we read the Bible, I don't know if you remember when Frank Dunkel was here for the ABC weekend. He talked about this theory of velocity of narrative, right, and how the Bible at certain times, you'll read one chapter of the Bible, it might cover a hundred years, and you'll read another chapter of the Bible, it might cover half a day, depending on the story that it's telling. It's easy to forget that when we read through chapter 17, between two and three years' time. And I think often we don't reflect when we maybe take some of these people in the Bible and think that they're so much different and so much better and more spiritual than we were. We don't think about what was the human suffering, what were the doubts and the thoughts that went on between two and three years' time with Elijah from the time that he declared the drought, to all the things that he had to suffer and live through, and also see God's deliverance through. But it's a long period of time, and it says he was a man of like passions as us. He had to have had the same doubts that every one of us would have had in that period of time, as we're wondering, how long does this drought keep going on? So in 1 Kings 18, let's read on in verse 2. Elijah finally called on to go and present himself to Ahab, and there was a severe famine in Samaria. And Ahab called Obadiah, who was in charge of his house, and Obadiah happened to be someone who feared the Lord greatly. And even when Jezebel massacred the prophets of the Lord, Obadiah had taken a hundred of them and hidden them, fifty to a cave, and fed them with bread and water. So here's somebody that was doing his part and doing everything that he could to care for God's people in this difficult time. Go into the land, Ahab told him, to all the springs of water and all the brooks, and maybe we'll find grass to keep the horses and mules alive so we won't have to kill any livestock. So he divided the land between the two of them to explore it, and Ahab went one way by himself and Obadiah the other way. So you can see how dire a situation this is. They're going out and seeing if they can find basically any green thing to keep their flocks alive so they won't have to kill all of their animals. And as Obadiah was on his way, Elijah met him, he recognized him and fell on his face, and he said, is that you, Elijah? And he said, yes, it is. Tell your master Elijah is here. And so Obadiah says, how have I sinned that you're delivering your servant in the hand of Ahab to kill me? That's kind of a strange thing to say, but as we look in the intervening verses, what's happening here is there were lots of reports going on during this period of time that, hey, Elijah's over here, Elijah's over there, and Ahab wanted to find him and kill the guy because he was giving him a lot of trouble. And Obadiah is worried, I'm going to go run back to Ahab. I'm going to say, hey, I found Elijah and he's going to be gone.

And Ahab's going to be so mad he's going to kill Obadiah because he raised another false report.

But that wasn't going to happen because in verse 15, Elijah says, as the Lord of hosts lives, before whom I stand, I will surely present myself to him today. So he gives Obadiah assurances that he's not going to disappear again and get Obadiah in trouble as a result of it.

So he went to meet Ahab and told him, and Ahab went to meet Elijah. And in verse 17, it happened, when Ahab saw Elijah, that Ahab said to him, is that you, O troubler of Israel? And he answered, I haven't troubled Israel, but you and your father's house have, in that you forsaken the commandments of the Lord, and have followed Baal's. Now therefore send and gather all Israel to me on Mount Carmel, the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal, and the four hundred prophets of Asheroth, who eat at Jezebel's table. So how much is this like all of us? You see what Ahab's first reaction was against Elijah. He looked at Elijah and said, you're the one who's causing me all of these problems. So this is the guy who came into office, rejected the worship of the true God, which he knew that he was supposed to be doing, married a woman who came from an idolatrous place, allowed her to install idolatry, and have really a vengeful of vendetta against all the people who worship the true God. And after doing all of that, he looks at Elijah and says, you're the one who's caused me all of this trouble. A very human response, I'm sure if we're all honest, we have that same response about things that happen in our own lives, don't we?

We point to God and sometimes say, God, why are you letting all this trouble happen in my life? Why are you causing this? We often don't look at our own selves and think about the actions that we took that might have contributed or maybe more than contributed to us being in the situations we're in. But in this case, in this story now, God is going to bring his deliverance.

He was making it clear, and Elijah made it very clear quickly to Ahab, look, I'm not the one giving you trouble. You've made choices, you've made decisions, and now we're going to bring it to your head. So, let's go down to verse 20 and read about the showdown. This happens to be one of my favorite passages of the Bible. I find this story so colorful, and I love the way that it plays out and the way that God draws out his points in this showdown between Elijah and the prophets of Baal.

So, Ahab sent for all the children of Israel in verse 20, gathers them all together, and Elijah tells the people, look, I'm the only one. No other prophets of the Lord around. It's just me.

I'm here. And then he looks over and he's got the hundreds of others of the false prophets. He says, let's get two bulls in verse 23, and let them choose a bull, cut it in pieces, and lay it on the wood, but no fire under it. And I'll prepare the other one. I'll lay it on the wood, and I won't put any fire under it. You call on the name of your gods? I'll call on the name of the Lord, and the God who answered by fire? He's God. Sounds like a pretty good deal, right? Set up a situation where it has to be clear, and somebody is going to have to, as one of the gods, is going to have to come in and intervene and prove his power. And this is really the culmination of everything. Again, as God was trying to show the nation of Israel who was more powerful, who had the absolute power. And the people answered and said, it's well spoken. It's interesting. It doesn't say that the priests of Baal said it was well spoken. It was the people who said so. Because I could imagine what was going through the minds of those priests of Baal at this point in time.

Because I would imagine they probably hadn't called fire down from heaven before. Meanwhile, you've got Elijah over here who's had three, three and a half years of seeing God intervene supernaturally in his life. And then you've got the people out there who say, okay, let's do it.

So Elijah said to the prophets of Baal, you guys go ahead, choose a bowl for yourselves, and you prepare it first, because there's many of you, and call on the name of your God, but don't put any fire under it. So in verse 26, they took the bowl, they prepared it, and they called on Baal's name from morning till noon, crying out for him to hear them. But there was no voice, and no one answered, and they leaped about the altar which they had made. So you can just imagine these hundreds of people screaming and crying and jumping around and leaping and trying to call down fire from heaven for hours. You know, when they say morning, we don't know for sure if that dawn is at 8am, but for hours, if it's until noon, we're certainly spending multiple hours. And at noon time, Elijah began to mock them. He said, cry aloud, for he's a God. Maybe he's meditating, or he's busy, or he's on a journey, or maybe he's sleeping and he has to be awakened. If you look back at some of the translations, they'll say, he is busy. Actually refers to him being in the bathroom.

So Elijah's having a good time, right? He's saying, you know, call louder. You know, maybe he's asleep.

He's got a pillow over his head. You've got to drag him out of bed so he can come out and help you.

And so they cried aloud in verse 28, they cut themselves as was their custom with knives and lances until the blood gushed out on them. And when midday passed, they prophesied until the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice. But there was no voice, no one answered, and no one paid attention. Now, exactly when that evening sacrifice was not quite certain from the things I've read, the traditional evening sacrifice in the temple would have been around three o'clock in the afternoon. So for sake of argument, you could probably guess that six, seven hours of this had been going on. You could imagine how exhausted these people were at this point, probably frightened, probably worried about what in the world was going to happen next. And after making all this noise, you can imagine how emotionally spent they must have been. You kind of feel that if you've been in a big crowd situation, at a big game or something, when home team loses, those who are Browns fans know that experience very well. I'm sorry, I had to say that.

And so now things are quiet, and everyone's just kind of emotionally spent. And Elijah says to the people, come near to me. So the people came near to him, and he repaired the altar of the Lord that was broken down. In verse 31, Elijah took twelve stones according to the number of the tribes and the sons of Jacob, to whom the word of the Lord had come, saying, Israel shall be your name. And with those stones he built an altar in the name of the Lord, made a trench around the altar large enough to hold two seyas of seed. And he put the wooden order, cut the bowl in pieces, and laid it on the wood, and said, Fill four water pots with water. Pour it on the burnt sacrifice and on the wood. And then he said, Do it a second time. And then he said, Do it a third time. And he did it a third time. So the water ran all around the altar, and he filled the trench with water. So as if the odds weren't already stacked against this guy enough. He's here on Mount Carmel, where there have been offerings made to Baal for quite some time, an old broken-down altar to God that apparently hadn't been used in a really, really long time because he had to rebuild it. One single solitary person against 850 of them. He sets up his offering, and then he douses it with so much water that nobody humanly could light that thing on fire. And once that's been done, he hasn't done two more times until there's this trench overflowing with water all around this altar. Now it's time to pray to God. It came to pass at the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice. The Elijah the prophet came near and said, Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God and Israel. I am your servant, and I have done these things at your word.

Hear me, O Lord, hear me that this people may know that you are the Lord God, and you've turned their hearts back to you again. And then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and it licked up the water in the trench.

There's no doubt left here. How many times have we seen stones burned up by fire?

As a kid, I've tried to start some pretty good-sized bonfires before. We've thrown aluminum cans into the fire and even seen them melt once or twice. But I've never been able to build a fire that makes the stones burn, and I don't think any of you probably have unless you've got an industrial furnace of some sort. Maybe we should talk to Jim about that. Or David, I'm sorry.

So God making no doubt, as he consumes every bit of it. And Elijah said to them, seize the prophets of Baal, don't let them escape. And he seized them, and they were brought down to the brook, Keshan, and executed there. Then in verse 41, Elijah said to Ahab, go up, eat and drink, for there's the sound of the abundance of rain. And Ahab went up to eat and drink, and Elijah went back up to the top of Carmel, bowed down on the ground, and put his face between his knees, and he said to his servant, go up now and look towards the sea. And so he went up, and he looked, and he said, there's nothing. And seven times Elijah told him to go again.

So maybe we're seeing a bit of foreshadowing here, but things weren't going to work out quite exactly the way that Elijah thought they were going to. He prayed, and seven different times he had to go and look for the cloud. But finally, on the seventh time, there came the cloud, as small as a man's hand rising out of the sea. And so Ahab was told to prepare his chariot to get down before the rain stopped. And the hand of the Lord in verse 46 came on Elijah, and he girded up his loins, and he ran ahead of Ahab to the entrance of Jezreel. Now, if we were watching an old-time Disney movie, this would be a great end to the story. We'd roll the credits. The good guy won. Life would go on happily ever after. But unfortunately, that's not what happens in this story. Just like in our lives, that's not the way it always happens. It's not that simple. Life continues on. The challenges continue on. The difficulties continue on. And the answers are not always the ones that we thought we would get. And even when it's God's salvation, his grace, his deliverance, it doesn't always look the way that we think it should look. It looks the way he wants it to look. Chapter 19, verse 1.

Ahab told Jezebel everything that Elijah had done, how he'd executed the prophets, and Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, Let the gods do the same thing to me, and more also, if I don't make your life as the life of one of them by tomorrow at this time.

And when he saw that, Elijah arose and ran for his life, and went to Beersheba, which belongs to Judah, and he left his servant there. But he himself went another's day's journey into the wilderness, and he came and sat down under a broom tree, and he prayed that he might die, and he said, It's enough. Lord, take my life, because I'm no better than my father's.

Now, I've heard a lot of different explanations over the years for why Elijah felt that way, but the best example, or the best explanation I can think of is simply the fact that Elijah was expecting that in one fell swoop, God was going to come in, he'd killed all the prophets of Baal, he'd proven his power by bringing the fire down, and now he was going to simply restore worship of God in Israel. And God didn't do that, and so now Elijah is just incredibly confused. He's done all these things, fire came down from heaven, all these incredible things happen, and the outcome that Elijah was expecting didn't happen. What happened instead was a queen was still in power, and she says, You're going to be dead by this time tomorrow. How is that the full salvation and deliverance of God? And so he runs out into the wilderness, and he's going to hide out and try and pull himself together to figure out what's going on. And this is where God's mercy towards our own weakness, our doubts, our lack of understanding comes in. Because what is it that God does?

God doesn't come and grab him and scream at him and bring bolts of lightning. He doesn't call him a sinner and a weak human being. He sustains him. Let's look at what happened in verse 5.

As Elijah lay and slept under a broom tree, an angel touched him and said, Arise and eat.

And he looked, and there by his head was a cake baked on the coals and a jar of water.

And so he ate and he drank, and he laid down again. And the angel of the Lord came back the second time and touched him and said, Arise and eat. The journey is too great for you. So he rose and he ate and drank, and he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights as far as Horeb, the mountain of God. And there he went into a cave, and he spent the night there. And the Lord came to him and said, Elijah, what are you doing here? And he said, I've been zealous for the Lord of hosts, for the children of Israel forsaken your covenant, torn down your altars, and killed your prophets, and I alone are left, and they seek to take my life. So now it comes out. I find it interesting here that God first sustained him, simply cared for him, and he let him go another forty days. That's a long time, more than a month, before he came back to Elijah and said, Elijah, what are you doing here? Let's get this figured out. Giving him room to sort things out, giving him room to try to understand what was going on, and probably to grapple with everything that was happening. So then in verse 11, God said to Elijah, go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord.

And the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord. But the Lord wasn't in the wind. And after the wind came an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a still small voice. So again, God is showing symbolically here to Elijah. Look, not everything that happens in life is going to be this great earth-rocking event that's going on. Some things will be. There will be incredible change, incredible miracles that come, but sometimes it's just going to be a still small voice. And I think back in this section about Elijah on the top of Mount Carmel as he was rebuilding that altar. What does it talk about him doing? Kneeling down on the ground and stone by stone, building that altar up. You can almost imagine that, you know, this guy sitting there, kneeled on the ground, and just kind of picking up one stone at a time and building an altar. And I think about that in the context of this as well in our lives, because God isn't building us into a finished creation at one time. He doesn't call us, make us complete, and send us out to go do something, right? He's building us up over time, stone by stone, brick by brick, into his creation as his Holy Spirit works in us, as we develop, as we experience, as we have his care and his mercy along the way. He's building us up piece by piece.

Sometimes that's something dramatic that happens in our lives, but sometimes it's these still, small voices that come, realizations that come to us as we're reflecting on the scriptures, things that come to us as we're praying, as we're talking with other people at church, as we're experiencing things in our lives. All of these things are God, brick by brick, building us up.

It talks about us being a temple, right? A temple built of stone, and God slowly building that piece by piece. And so it was in verse 13 when Elijah heard this still small voice. He wrapped his face in his mantle, he went out and he stood in the entrance of the cave, and the voice came to him and said, Elijah, what are you doing here? And he said, I've been zealous for the Lord God of hosts because the children of Israel forsaken your covenant. They've torn down your altars, they've killed your prophets with a sword, and I alone am left, and they're seeking to take my life.

God, look how awful it is around here. Didn't you see that?

You did some of the stuff that you were supposed to do, but you didn't do all of it.

God, go finish the job. You kind of hear Elijah saying that, this quizzical sort of expression.

Why in the world did you leave Israel in a situation like this? You were supposed to fully deliver us. And the Lord said to him, go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus, and when you arrive, anoint Hazael as king over Syria. And anoint Jehu the son of Nim, she as king over Israel, and Elisha the son of Shaphat, you shall anoint as prophet in your place.

And it shall be that whoever escapes the sword of Hazael, Jehu will kill. Whoever escapes the sword of Jehu, Elisha will kill. And I've reserved seven thousand in Israel, all of whose knees have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him. So what he's saying here is he is going to finish his work, but he wants Elijah to go and do a few other things that are going to finish out this job for him. God had a plan that he was working out, and he was going to work it out in his way through Elijah, not necessarily in the way that Elijah wanted it to be done. And as it finishes up, it talks about the account about how he goes. Elijah finds his successor, Elisha, who then goes forward, and the other things that God prophesied here come to pass. And worship of God is restored in Israel. So hopefully you've enjoyed sitting back and listening a bit to this story. I find Elijah a fascinating person, but also I think that the lessons here that are shown to us in the way that God worked with Elijah and through him are very instructive for us. Like us, he lived in a time where people were very far from God, and where even more so than today, there was just pure animosity towards people who worshiped God to the extent that they were being hunted down and killed, something that's safe to say we've not experienced in our lifetimes. God, through the things that happened to Elijah, showed his absolute power. He showed that he was going to use that power to deliver how and when he thought it was necessary and in accordance with his will. And lastly, he showed a tremendous amount of mercy towards human weaknesses. James said that Elijah was a person just like us. So God looks at us in a very similar way that he looked at Elijah as he sees our weaknesses and our frailties. He's willing to deal with us in mercy and in kindness and in grace, and he will work out his plan in our lives in the way that he sees fit. So let's go on, let's have confidence in our God, who we know is the great and absolute power in this world.