Living Like God is Real. 1 Kings 16:25-17:1

 

Elijah is operating in a pagan environment, in a culture that is dominated by a pagan worldview that is completely at odds with a biblical, theocentric view of life and of God’s creation. The introduction to this rings out some important facets on Elijah at the end of chapter 16. He is, as James points out, a man just like we are. He is subject to the same flaws and failures that we are. James 5:17 NASB “Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the earth for three years and six months.” It is important to understand the context of James chapter five. That chapter is talking about believers who are struggling with being able to hang in there in the midst of trials and testings and difficulties. How do you hang tough in times of suffering? How do you continue to apply doctrine when it doesn’t appear to work? The paths of Christian lives scattered with people who have fallen aside in their spiritual life because can’t hang in there, they can’t persevere, in the midst of suffering to see that doctrine works. As a result they try this, then that, and then something else. One of the reasons God allows us to go through times like that when it doesn’t appear that anything is happening, that God is not answering our prayers, there are not any changes, is because God is testing us to see if we can remain faithful and consistent in our walk. So James uses a couple of examples to point out and illustrate the importance of persevering and enduring in the midst of extremely difficult external circumstances. He uses Elijah as one of his examples. The phrase that James puts in there— NASB “Elijah was a man with a nature like ours”—is one that is very important, because we have a tendency to idolise or to make super heroes out of these Old Testament prophets like Moses and Elijah and forget that not only did they not have the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit as we do in relation to the spiritual life but they were still just as human as we are. Elijah still had a sin nature, as we do; and as we will see, he crashes.

 

As we study Elijah we see that he is a believer who knows how to pray. When he prays that there will be no rain he does it on the basis of promises in the Word of God, so it is a great picture of how to claim a promise from the Word and apply it to a particular situation and circumstance. He is a picture of a believer who prays consistently and has dramatic results. He is also a picture of a believer who stands against a false system of thinking, and he will give us a pattern for how to stand against such a false system of thinking and how to do so in such a way that it doesn’t compromise our own Christian position. But he is also a picture of a believer who gets his eyes on circumstances and becomes depressed despondent, thinking that God has forgotten about him, and that he is just a failure. He faced overwhelming odds against him and yet for much of his life and ministry he refused to put his focus on that and he stood his ground and remained faithful to God. So he is an example for us of endurance in the midst of testing; and not only enduring but doing it the right way.

 

To summarize:

 

1.       As long as we are trusting God there are no hopeless situations, no matter what the situation may be. God is the God who provides everything through grace. We are not to give up, to despair; we are to trust in God and to keep strong in His Word. We are to utilize every test like that as an opportunity to drive us further into His Word, e.g. the Psalms.

2.       Never think that you are isolated, that you are standing alone. We can’t let our eyes get on ourselves and become self-absorbed and think that we are the only ones who have the truth. That is arrogance.

3.       When God operates in history and in our lives with tests God is the original multi-tasker. So tests operate at different levels, different circumstances, and the whole idea is to get us to focus on His grace solutions. This may involve using the faith-rest drill, it may involve being grace oriented, with dealing with somebody out of impersonal love, or any number of different problem-solving strategies such as the 10 stress-busters or problem-solving devices in Scripture. Each one of these tests gives us different ways in which we can apply the Word to that particular circumstance.

4.       When we do the right thing the right way the results are not always what we expect them to be. It doesn’t mean that we won’t go through suffering and difficult times. When Elijah did everything he was supposed to do he still had to go through the tests of the judgment that came—the tests of adversity. He had to experience the drought and the famine just as much as everybody else did. Each day was another opportunity for him to trust the Lord.

5.       When a nation is under divine discipline even the positive mature believers are going to suffer by association. Just because we are positive doesn’t mean we are immune from the judgments that God will bring against a nation. Believers who are living in a nation under divine discipline are going to experience all of the consequences of that discipline in their own lives. The way to handle that is through the use of God’s Word. One of the things that is a principle in history is that nations get the leaders they deserve, and the leaders that they get are the products of the culture that they have. The solution is not political or economic; the solution is a spiritual solution.

1 Kings 17:1 NASB “Now Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the settlers of Gilead…” He just shows up here. His name means “My God is Yahweh.” “Elijah” is a form of parts of the two different words for God. El is the generic term in the Hebrew for God; the Yah is the first syllable in Yahweh. So his name was Eliyahu. It indicates his devotion to God as the one and only God. He stands as a man of conviction, a man of courage, a man who gets his courage from the Word of God as he stands before Ahab, and for Elijah God is real, His Word is real, and he lives as if God is real. He stands in contrast to Ahab and the culture who has created this fantasy world based on the false religious systems of the day of the Baal and the fertility cult. The people are living as if that is real, and when we live on the basis of fantasy then sooner or later our world is going to come back down around us. There is a contrast here between Elijah and his conviction of reality based on God and His Word in contrast to the culture around him.   

1 Kings 16:29 NASB “Now Ahab the son of Omri became king over Israel in the thirty-eighth year of Asa king of Judah, and Ahab the son of Omri reigned over Israel in Samaria twenty-two years.” This is a summary of his reign. His father was Omri who had come to the throne as a result of winning out in a civil war that took place after Zimri had assassinated the son of Baasha. Omri was one of the most respected military leaders and political powers in the ancient world at that time. He had established the military power of the northern kingdom but he was just as guilty as the other kings in the north and he continues to promote the idolatry that was initiated by Jeroboam the son of Nebat. The spiritual evaluation of Omri is in 1 Kings 16:25 NASB “Omri did evil in the sight of the LORD, and acted more wickedly than all who {were} before him.” So there is a further degradation of the spiritual life of the northern kingdom under Omri and a further promotion of paganism as they have drifted further and further away from being the nation that God had called them to be. [26] “For he walked in all the way of Jeroboam the son of Nebat and in his sins which he made Israel sin, provoking the LORD God of Israel with their idols.

Then Ahab comes along. 1 Kings 16:29 NASB “Now Ahab the son of Omri became king over Israel in the thirty-eighth year of Asa king of Judah, and Ahab the son of Omri reigned over Israel in Samaria twenty-two years.” His evaluation: [30] “Ahab the son of Omri did evil in the sight of the LORD more than all who were before him.” So Ahab becomes one of the most evil kings the history of the northern kingdom, and he did that because he listened to his wife. [31] “It came about, as though it had been a trivial [light, inconsequential] thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, that he married Jezebel the daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, and went to serve Baal and worshiped him.” His view of God and of spiritual things is that it really doesn’t matter. How modern is that!

This is going to bring into play the whole spectrum the fertility religion: the worship of Baal and also the Asherah, the female counterparts to Baal. 1 Kings 16:32 NASB “So he erected an altar for Baal in the house of Baal which he built in Samaria.” So in the drama of the 9th century BC Ahab is the evil villain. He introduces the depths of depravity and perversion into the northern kingdom. The sexual perversion in the fertility religions goes beyond anything that any of us could possibly imagine. It was a religious system that just degraded humanity, it had no value for human life, for marriage or family and it was all about prosperity—surviving, making money, having the things that could be gained from prosperity. It led to the most tragic chapters in the history of Israel.

Ahab ruled the northern kingdom from 871-852 BC, and he grows up in what is arguably the most powerful court in the history of the northern kingdom of Israel. He would have received the military training from his father, and he was also a brilliant strategist and general in his own right. He is the eighth king in the northern kingdom but it has been a time of tremendous instability—one king after another, one revolt after another. The legacy that they have is a spiritual legacy that leaves the northern kingdom in its worst shape. That is the tone for their eventual destruction under the fifth cycle of discipline in 722 BC.

The principle that we learn from looking at this much of Ahab is that people and churches and nations get the leaders that they deserve; and they deserve the leaders that they get. As we look out on the ecclesiastical scene in America today we wonder where in the world did this crop of biblically-ignorant, psychologically enthralled (with psychology, not the Bible) pastors come from? These are not the kind of men that pastured and led churches of generations before. We saw a big shift begin in the sixties as there became more and more of an emphasis on size and numbers and growing churches; and churches became more market driven and more commercial. It characterizes seminaries. What do people want? not What do people need? And so churches are getting pastors who are no longer capable of teaching the Word. This all comes down to a spiritual crisis, and that is what we see illustrated with Ahab. The real problem with Ahab is a spiritual problem and that comes as a result of his marriage. Jezebel was the one who was the real spiritual manipulator in the family. When she married she brought with her 450 priests of Baal whose job it was to go out throughout the land and to spread their teaching, to build altars to Baal, totally supported by funds from the state treasury. This had a tremendous impact on the nation.

We see that is one example: 1 Kings 16:34 NASB “In his days Hiel the Bethelite built Jericho; he laid its foundations with the {loss of} Abiram his firstborn, and set up its gates with the {loss of} his youngest son Segub, according to the word of the LORD, which He spoke by Joshua the son of Nun.” This was seen in Joshua 6:26 NASB “Then Joshua made them take an oath at that time, saying, ‘Cursed before the LORD is the man who rises up and builds this city Jericho; with {the loss of} his firstborn he shall lay its foundation, and with {the loss of} his youngest son he shall set up its gates’”—he would lose both his eldest and his youngest son. This gives us a picture of complete disregard for God—God is not real! It shows total devotion to business and making money and materialism, and it shows a complete disregard for human life—the human life of his own sons. This gives a picture of the great degradation in Israel at that time, not unlike our own culture, and it is into this situation that Elijah comes. 

Illustrations