Living in the Face of Adversity. 1 Kings
17:1-4
We are looking at the
crisis that occurred in the northern kingdom that is primarily a result of
God’s discipline on the nation, but the ultimate cause is the negative volition
of the people in the northern kingdom. They have rejected God, rejected His
plan and His provision, they have operated on the fantasy that every unbeliever
automatically operates on when he rejects truth and substitutes his own imaginations
for handling the situations, crises and the various things that happen in life.
That is the standard modus operandi of every single unbeliever and when you get
cultures like we have in this world, whether an eastern culture or whether it
is what is happening in the western civilization now that we have developed
these really global types of interactions between all of these nations, we
recognize that whatever is going on in the world affects everybody, and things
that happen in far-flung places that we know very little about have a
tremendous impact on what goes on in the day to day world. We live in a world
today that is characterized more and more by governments, powers, political
elites, business elites that are far removed from the absolutes of God’s Word,
and operating on levels of arrogance that most of us can’t even imagine. The
result of that is always going to bring tremendous crisis to people’s lives.
The crisis that occurs is
not a crisis of meteorology, not a crisis of economics, not a crisis of
politics; it is a crisis of spirituality. When you reject God as the ultimate
starting point something has to fill that vacuum, and so man will put something
there, something in the creation to fill that vacuum. Then once you begin to
think and operate out from that one of the first things to go are the divine
institutions--#1 is individual responsibility and accountability. Primarily
that is for God but it affects all the other decisions that we make in life; #2
is marriage, designed to be between one man and one woman. It is the framework
for raising a family, for education and for passing that on to the next
generation; #3 is the family; #4 is the nation. There is a progression in these
divine institutions so when we start seeing a breakdown in individual
responsibility and accountability, where something—either parents or
governments or international bodies—begins to come in and to try to negate the
impact of bad decisions, so that when people make foolish decisions that cause
economic crises, everything starts steamrolling in many different directions.
Once you break down individual responsibility then that begins to break down
various aspects of marriage, and when marriage begins to break down that breaks
down education within the home. When there is no education taking place
primarily within the home then important information is not passed on to the
next generation, and one generation after another becomes increasingly ignorant
of a heritage, becomes increasingly unable to think critically, and the result
then affects the nation and the health of the nation as a whole.
We live in a world today where people just think that what really matters is just economics, good economic theory, and that if they had that it would solve the problems. What we see more and more in the Bible is that the starting point isn’t economics and it is not politics; it is the divine institutions. The divine institutions are fundamentally social and not legal, political or economic. The very core of man’s relationship to God is this social element. It is integrally and intimately connected to economics but when you thing about what comes first it is social. If you are a social liberal and you believe in changing the definition of marriage and legalizing homosexual relationships then that is going to have economic consequences. If you believe in establishing a moral system that is taught in the public schools, that doesn’t teach moral absolutes and that it is wrong to engage in promiscuous sexual activity, premarital sexual activity, then the result is going to be a high rate of teenage pregnancies. That has had drastic economic consequences to the nation. Social policies impact economic realities and we can’t get away from that.
What we see in
Elijah challenges Ahab and
says: “As the LORD, the God of Israel lives…” From the very beginning he
is structuring everything he says counterpoint to the entire way of thinking
that has come to dominate the northern kingdom. He is not going to validate any
of their presuppositions, he is not going to legitimize any area by seeking a
neutral, common ground. Often that is what happens between believers and
unbelievers, especially in witnessing situations where people thing they have
to find some area of common ground, areas of neutrality, and then they can
communicate with an unbeliever. The trouble is we don’t live in a universe
where there is neutrality. It is either God’s way or man’s way; there is no
area of neutrality. Elijah’s starting point here is: “the God of Israel lives,”
he is a living God and we are going to start there. Elijah is basically saying
that because He is a living God He is true to His Word, His promises in the
Mosaic Law, and because of that I know that he is going to function in a
certain way; He has promised to bring discipline on the nation and withhold
rain. In contrast, Ahab is trusting in Baal who is supposed to be the god of
rain and thunder and productivity and agricultural prosperity, and so part of
this is a direct challenge to the system of thought that is dominating in the
north. What Elijah is basically saying is: Okay, you have your view and I have
my view and if I start with my presupposition that God is a living God and you
start with your supposition that Baal is the god of rain, we are going to see
who can actually live consistently on the basis of this presupposition. That is
a great apologetic strategy when dialoguing with an unbeliever or a Christian
who is completely confused by paganism.
There are some verses in
Deuteronomy that show us the pattern of how Moses warned the Jews before they
went into the land. Isn’t it interesting how many times we have to go back to
Deuteronomy? It was the parting message and challenge before he left them.
Deuteronomy
Deuteronomy 11:16-18
“Beware that your hearts are not deceived, and that you do not turn away and
serve other gods and worship them...
We have to realize that if
we are not thinking God’s way we are thinking Satan’s way. Those are the
options, and that is why Moses said in Deuteronomy 32:17 that those who were
sacrificing to idols were sacrificing to demons who were not God. Every day we have
decisions to make as to what our priority is. Is it going to be the Word of God
or is it going to be the details and circumstances and pleasures of our life.
Deut 32:46, 47 NASB “he said to them, ‘Take to your heart all the
words with which I am warning you today, which you shall command your sons to
observe carefully, {even} all the words of this law.
The challenge in the
northern kingdom is that they have completely rejected God; He is no longer a
reality to them, He is simply one of a number of options and a number of
explanations. So when Elijah begins and says, “As the Lord God of
This is going to bring
about a direct challenge to Baal who was the god of thunder, the god of rain,
the god who is going to bring rain at the right time so that there would be
agricultural productivity in
Points we have to think
about in terms of understanding and applying this passage: Elijah is going to
be taken through three tests in this chapter and the purpose for these tests is
to train him and prepare him for what is coming. Elijah doesn’t know what is
coming and so God has to prepare him. But what prepares him isn’t simply going
through the tests, what prepares him is going through the tests and handling
them by applying doctrine. The only way for Elijah to be trained for what is
going to happen on
The second thing is that
God is teaching us about grace. Any time when we are in terribly tough times,
when we don’t want to deal with tomorrow, when we don’t want to face to0morrow,
when the crisis is coming and things seem hopeless, we need to be driven back
to what Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians 12, that God’s grace is sufficient
for us. That is what God is teaching us, and we can’t go anywhere in the
Christian life until we get to the point where we realize that God’s grace is
sufficient for us. 2 Corinthians 1:5 NASB “For just as the
sufferings of Christ are ours in abundance, so also our comfort is abundant
through Christ.” In other words, we can only realize how to handle these
circumstances as we come to grips with God’s grace provision and seeing how
Jesus Christ handled all of the adversities that came His way when He went to
the cross. God’s grace was sufficient for Him so God’s grace is sufficient for
us.
In each of these cases
Elijah will pass the test so that in effect he becomes what he was not when he
first faced Ahab. He is going to go through a spiritual growth process for
three and a half years when God is going to take him through advanced prophet’s
training. He is going to learn how to trust the Lord is ways that he had never
trusted the Lord before. That is going to enable him to face the false prophets
on
Because of apostasy in the
What we discover at the
foundation of this is that the emphasis in 1 Kings 17 is the importance of
logistical grace—learning to trust in God’s grace provision moment by moment.
That is the difficulty. It is always hard to learn to rest in God’s grace in any
kind of disaster, crisis, adversity, whatever it may be; to stop and relax and
to think our way through certain promises and passages so that we can get our
emotions under control and become stabilized. We don’t know all the facts; we
don’t know half of what is going on; it is completely out of our control. But
God is still in control and He is going to bring about exactly what he wants to
bring about.
Today we are in a three
and a half-year drought, as it were, and we are, like Elijah, sitting beside a
stream that we are going to watch dry up on a day to day basis. The only things
that is going to get us through this is the word of God—the promises of God,
the plan of God—and we have to have this embedded in our souls because if it
gets bad it is going to get really bad. The only thing that is going to get us
through is doctrine, and doctrine is going to give us as believers the
stability to survive. It is going to give us happiness and peace in the midst
of whatever happens, and it is going to give us a tremendous opportunity to
witness, to share the gospel, and we can stand firm. But we can’t do it on just
empty hopes alone that somehow things will change. It has to be based on the
only hope that counts and that is the hope that is grounded in God’s Word. This
is what we see in Elijah. He is going to be taught about God’s sufficient
grace.
1 Kings 17:2 NASB
“The word of the LORD came to him, saying,