• 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  missionary known to me had to wrestle through after he and his wife 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.

—————

Rev Paul T Harrison BD

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• Michael Hardin, The Jesus-Driven Life: Reconnecting Humanity with Jesus
• LIVING A WHOLE LIFE (Richard Rohr)
• Faith and feelings
• Beautiful video with a comforting message…

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