• Paul Harrison

1 Kings 17:1 - 18:1

Elijah’s tremendous task, as we have seen, was to recall a whole nation to its lost God, to turn it away from idols to serve the living God.

The first act in his dramatic campaign was to crash into King Ahab’s court like a thunderbolt, and declare in the Name of Yahweh, Moses’ God, that by His command there should be neither dew nor rain for three years. Yahweh’s, not Baal’s, was the power over all the resources of nature on which agriculture depends; such was the challenge. Indeed, the prophet’s message was summed up in his very name. The ‘El’ in ‘Elijah’ is the Hebrew word for God, and the ‘yah’ is the shortened form of God’s name, Yahweh: El-i-yah means, ‘Yahweh is God.’

By his announcement to Ahab he flung down the gauntlet.

He was outlawed at once, and must go into hiding while the withering drought persisted through three relentless years. In the nature of things, the challenge Elijah had issued was one that had to hang in the air for a long time - long enough for it to be seen that the Baals were powerless to bring rain. Long enough therefore for Elijah to brood over the daring of the thing he had done; long enough for doubts to grow; long enough for loneliness to turn the memory of that day in Ahab’s court into a nightmare.

What if the thing did not work out? What if the inspiration that had carried him through that day had been a mistake, a mad seizure not prompted by the Spirit of God at all? If so, then the action by which he had thought to reinstate God in the people’s hearts would finally dethrone Him; and he, Elijah, would have to carry the burden of guilt for it, alone.

So, during this period of enforced inactivity, God took care to confirm in His servant’s private experience all the truth he was to stand for in public. This one chapter supplies on a personal level all the truth that was to be championed on a national level. Elijah learned in secret what he must shout - not in his case from a housetop - but from a mountaintop: that God is Lord of nature.

LORD OF NATURE

First God sent him to hide in one of the desolate ravines on the east side of the Jordan. The brook Cherith is a wee, narrow stream flowing mostly between jagged cliffs of rock. There he lived for an indefinite period, alone with God. The brook supplied his water, the ravens his food.

Some ingenious explanations of those ravens have been offered. One is that Elijah stole what the parent birds brought to their young who were nested there. It does not cast the prophet in a very flattering light! And in any case, the fledgling birds would soon be full-grown and leave to find their own food. Again it has been suggested that with a very slight change to the lettering of the Hebrew manuscript, (such a mistake as copyists might easily make) the word ‘ravens’ can be made to read ‘Arabs’, and even that there is in fact a tribe of Arabs called ‘the ravens’!

All this simply misses the point. The point is that God was demonstrating to His servant the truth he must proclaim to the nation: that Yahweh is in control of all the natural resources of the land. The seasons, the weather, the crops and herds, and even the birds are all under the hand of God, not under the control of the Baals. Elijah here experienced the truth of it for himself. His very life depended on God’s power to make nature serve him.

Cherith was training for Carmel.

The long days and nights of solitude, shut in with God - the daily supply of his food by the birds - these things rooted his faith in God the way the gift of manna had for his fathers in bygone days in the desert.

Why should it seem an incredible thing in our eyes that God should oblige nature to obey His will? We do it every day with the bit of nature we call our body. I snap my fingers: skin, bone and tissue - all bits of nature - move at the sheer exertion of my will. Shall we deny to God - on a larger scale - a power we ourselves already exert on a narrower scale?

And then the brook dried up!

In all likelihood the prophet was puzzled and disturbed. Why should God take away the thing on which his life depended and which had been God’s gift? Was it because God’s provision had become so regular that he had begun to take it for granted? It is surprising how quickly the marvellous becomes mundane! When America’s space shuttle ‘Columbia’ lifted off for the fifth time, it rated only a couple of paragraphs on a back page in national daily newspapers.

The very regularity of God’s gifts can obscure rather than reveal His hand in them. Some of us may have to wake up one day to find there is no breakfast on the table and no job to go to, to learn in the frenzy of prayer to which we are driven then that we only ever enjoy these things as the gift of God. John Donne it was who wrote, "From needing danger to be good, O Lord, deliver us."

Whether the prophet found it humbling to have to depend on ravens to bring him his daily bread, I do not know. But if he did, I can understand he may have felt even more humbled to be directed next to depend on a poor widow woman. That for his manly spirit of rugged independence!

LORD OF THE WORLD

But the new move was to convey an even deeper truth that would strengthen Elijah’s faith yet more. If he was baffled by it all, God’s purpose in it was that he should be baffled so as to fight better! Now he learns that God is God in all the world. For at this point the narrative conveys something easily missed. Where was Zarephath?

It was not anywhere in Israel at all. It was in Phoenicia, not two hour’s walk from Tyre ... and Tyre was Jezebel’s home town. God sent Elijah into enemy territory, on to the home ground of Jezebel’s false god, to learn there what many an Israelite never did learn: that Yahweh is still God in an alien land.

The Canaanites believed that the Baals had power only within a limited area. Move outside the area, and you moved beyond the limits of that god’s power. And in yielding to the belief that Yahweh was just another Baal, the Israelites had yielded to that belief too. (Once a vital faith in God is lost, superstitions take its place.) When Naaman was healed in Israel, he arranged to take back with him to Syria two sacks full of Israelite dirt so that Israel’s ‘god’ should have a foothold in territory that belonged to Syria’s gods! A silly superstition. But when, centuries later, the Hebrews were deported to Babylon, they mourned because they thought that there, in a foreign land, Yahweh had no power.

Are we any wiser, who hardly believe that God has any say in a Trades Union Congress? Do we believe that Christ’s power and rule do not extend beyond the boundaries of the Church? Said Jesus, "All authority on earth has been given to me." (Matthew 28:18) In the Kremlin, then? Or does God not rule in the affairs of men and nations? Whether the Russian Premier or the President of North Korea will be instruments of judgement in God’s hand or instruments of mercy remains to be seen. "It is God the Lord Who changes times and seasons; He it is Who removes kings and sets up rulers." (Daniel 2:21) That is the faith of the Bible. Is it ours? When we are tempted to look down on the children of Israel for their half-baked faith we should beware. Whenever we point an accusing finger at someone else, we point three back at ourselves!

It was a great step of faith for Elijah, staring at the bone dry pebbles at Cherith, to obey God when He told him to travel clear across Israel into Jezebel’s homeland - into the lion’s mouth! Everything in common sense was against it. But faith and obedience met with their reward, and Elijah learned that God can accomplish His purpose as well through foreign widows as through ravens. Do not imagine, when Elijah found that widow gathering sticks for her last despairing meal, hoping for nothing but death by starvation after it, that it did not test Elijah’s faith to respond to the prompting of the Spirit within and to promise her that if she shared it with him, Yahweh, the God of Israel would continue to provide for them both. Elijah had to believe that Israel’s God was the God of corn and oil there in Phoenicia - corn in the form of meal in a jar, and oil in a cruse.

Only a sense of courtesy, surely, forbade her to answer the prophet outright, "I cannot give you what you ask, even if you ask it in the name of God. It is all I have. This gone, I die. You can’t ask it of me." Have we not said it, or something like it, when God called on us to yield up something precious? ... "No, Lord. That you may not ask of me! Take that from me and you take away my life." That is what a young A.B.M.S. missionary known to me, Mark Holt, had to wrestle through in Tiom, in Irian Jaya, after he and his wife Val lost their baby (having no other way to dispose of the body in the primitive conditions, they had to incinerate it in a shoe box), and he was facing the possible loss of his wife too. Could he yield her up if God asked it? But if we will not obey, we shall miss the promise and the power of God. Had the widow refused Elijah that last meal, it would have been her last. But she gave it - and it became the first of many.

If we have ears to hear and a heart to obey, even though the command of God threatens to strip our life of everything that makes it seem worth living, we shall discover the blessedness of God’s endless giving.

When we reach the end of our hoarded resources, Our Father’s full giving is only begun.

His love has no limit, His grace has no measure, His power has no boundary known unto men. For out of His infinite riches in Jesus, He giveth ... and giveth ... and giveth again.

"One man gives freely," the Scriptures observe, "yet grows the richer: another withholds what he should give and only suffers want." (Proverbs 11:24) "He that would save his life shall lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake shall find it," said Jesus (Matthew 16:25). What we clutch we crush: open, empty hands are the only hands God can fill.

So the widow and the prophet received their bountiful supply, because like that other widow whom Jesus observed in the temple, she out of her poverty gave all she had to live on. (Luke 21:4)

And then the widow’s son died ... and faith received another setback. But as before, it led to a yet richer experience of God’s power.

LORD OF LIFE

What these two, the prophet and the widow, were given then was not just life, but life from the dead. So Elijah learned in his private experience what Israel must know, that with God, even in a foreign land, lay the power over life and death.

Again, the people believed that this was the business of the Baals. The Baals were responsible for the annual death of the vegetation in winter and its resurrection in the spring; that is why human sacrifice had become another feature of their idolatrous Baal worship. The Baal’s lordship over death must be acknowledged or he would withhold the gift of life to the new-born earth in the spring.

But here in Zarephath, Elijah knew the truth. Yahweh’s power raised the widow’s son ... and in answer to his prayer. Think how sustaining that memory was to be, when later on at Carmel he prayed for the fire. The widow’s testimony was surely to be a strength to him later, too, when he spoke for God on Mt. Carmel: "Now I know that you are a man of God, and that Yahweh’s word in your mouth is the truth."

So the period of private training ended; God’s servant had been made ready for his task. His faith had been firmly grounded in experience. And so after many days the word of the Lord came to Elijah in the third year, "Go, show yourself to Ahab, and I will again send rain upon the earth." (v. 18)

We may gather up the lessons from this part of Elijah’s story under the headings Dare, Share and Bear.

1. Dare

We must somewhere take a real first step of obedience, or we shall make no progress in our spiritual journey at all. Elijah had to go first to Ahab and announce a drought. Had he funked that first daring step, nothing would have followed ... nothing at all. He had to take the one brave step that committed him.

That is why the Lord puts baptism at the beginning of our Christian discipleship. It is the first brave step of obedience that commits us. We do the one thing we see to be done. What follows is in the hands of God, as it was for Elijah. But unless we take that first step nothing starts.

This is a principle vital to all spiritual progress: We have to commit ourselves on the strength of what we do see, not hold back on the strength of what we don’t. Take one step forward toward the light we see, and the light will grow; one step backward, and it will dim. In the realm of things spiritual, obedience sharpens our vision; disobedience blurs it. As our eye is the organ of seeing in things physical, so obedience is the organ of knowledge in things spiritual. "If any man wills to do God’s will" said Jesus, "he shall know." (John 7:17)

2. Share

What God teaches us in our personal experience is not for ourselves alone: it is for the whole people of God. That is what Elijah learned. What he discovered at Cherith and Zarephath he had to proclaim on Carmel.

"What I tell you in the dark" said Jesus to His disciples in Matthew 10:27, "utter in the light; and what you hear whispered proclaim upon the housetops."

"If a revelation is made to one," said Paul to the Corinthians, "let the others sitting by be silent, for you can all speak one by one, so that all may learn and all may be encouraged." (I Corinthians 14:30)

If that sort of sharing is to be realised among us, how shall we achieve it? If we are to experience the kind of shared life and mutual encouragement that is proper to members in the Body of Christ, we must make it one of our positive, conscious, serious goals to establish frequent and regular small informal groups, whether study oriented or task oriented, where trust and communication can grow.

3. Bear

The final lesson Elijah learned - when the brook dried up at Cherith and he was told to go to Zarephath in an alien land, and again when the widow’s son died - is that the life of faith is not dismayed either by setbacks or by more daring challenges.

All too often we are dismayed. Every fresh crisis throws us into confusion, so we question on the one hand whether we were ever really in the will of God at all or things would be going smoother - wouldn’t they? - or we question on the other hand whether God is being fair or faithful to us.

But faith should not have all the stuffing knocked out of it by one blow. Faith is persevering or it simply is not faith. And without challenges there will be no room for the exercise of greater faith. If faith is to grow strong, it must surely be given something to flex its muscles on. Even the most superficial reading of life surely suggests that God has built recurring crises into it as a normal feature in its pattern: from the crisis of birth, we move to the crisis of puberty, on to the crisis of marriage and with it of family, then to the crisis of the family’s dispersal, and on to the final crisis of death. It is the way we grow.

Crises should be expected and welcomed, not feared and resisted. It is absurd to pray, "Lord, increase our faith," and then expect life to be easier. If we ask a gym instructor to give us stronger muscles we must expect him to set us tougher exercises. Faith is supposed to make us, not flabby but fit, not stiff but supple, not defeatist but determined, not stuck in a rut but breaking new ground.

If God is to be trusted, then that is reason, not to sit down, but to go forward; not to want out, but to get stuck in; not to close our eyes and hope everything will go away, but to open them and look up, knowing that our redemption is drawing near.

God suffers us, like Elijah, to be baffled so that we may fight better.

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Rev Paul T Harrison BD