1 Kings 17

Discussion Questions

1. Referencing the four questions from the sermon “Am I listening for, following, obeying and speaking the word of the LORD?”—which of these are you currently doing best, and which should you work on to improve?
2. Compare and contrast times in your life where you’ve felt “sent away to the wilderness”—perhaps in preparation versus. being in the middle of the action and story. Were the periods of isolation and rest beneficial to prepare you for the other times? Where are you today?
3. Ponder Tozer’s statement that “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”  Share what comes into your mind—and if/how you’d like to adjust this.

Transcript

We study through books of the Bible here at The Village Chapel and we do have some extra copies. If you would like one to follow along, raise your hand up real high. Somebody will drop one off at your aisle. There’s also, I believe, the QR code is up on the screen there and you’re welcome to use your phone and grab that QR code. You’ll get the sermon notes and quotes in advance and be able to take those home and/or to lunch and talk those over if you would like.

Today, we’re going to look at 1 Kings Chapter 17. Before we get started there, I want to put the map up on the screen. You will notice that Israel there—I’m going to call that color kind of “pinkish purple”—that’s the Northern Kingdom, Northern 10 tribes. And the people of Israel have been divided into two kingdoms. So, you have Israel. And then right below it in the center, you don’t see the word Judah because I wanted to be able to zero in on that Northern Kingdom a little bit. But Judah—I’m going to call that “dark blue.” You also see some of the bordering nations, Ammon, to the east or to the right there, Philistia to the left here on the bottom area. You see the five major Philistine cities are listed there. Phoenicia is up above. We’re actually going to travel there a little bit today as well. And then Aram, which is another way of saying Syria back in those times. Just to give you a little bit of an idea of where we’re going to be traveling here in 1 Kings Chapter 17.

Also, because of the fact that today I get to introduce you to a new friend that we’re all going to make, his name is Elijah and he’s one of the prophets. Our emphasis now will become a little bit more about the prophets. And here, I just put together a quick list of them for you in a chronological order. It’s a little hard. Some of these overlap and some of them served in both the Northern and the Southern Kingdom, but some of them, it’s pretty clear. Elijah and Elisha, who we’ll also study for those of you that elect to go with us into 2 Kings. So those are ninth century. Eighth century, we pick up Jonah, then we move to Isaiah, Hosea, Micah, Amos, Zephaniah, Jeremiah Habakkuk, Obadiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. These are just some of the names you’re probably familiar with, but it helps me, I don’t know if it helps you. It helps me to be able to put them in a chronological line. I go, “Oh, okay. All right.”

So, the emphasis now is not that we’re abandoning the names of the kings. As a matter of fact, we’ll be talking about Ahab for longer than we want to, to be honest with you. He’s a nasty dude. So, we’re going to be talking about Ahab for a little bit, but we’re also going to be talking about the prophets. I think that’s important for us.

Now, before we read Chapter 17, I wonder if you would join me in this prayer for illumination. I’m going to borrow this from St. Patrick:

May the power of God preserve us. May the wisdom of God instruct us. And may the way of God direct us. May the hand of God protect us, and the hosts of God guard us against the snares of evil and the temptations of the world. Amen and Amen.

So, turn in your Bibles then, if you will, to 1 Kings Chapter 17. I’ll give you a little something as I go through the text to give you something to do. I know this is always helpful when you go to the dentist’s office, you always had your little Highlights magazine, find the squirrels in this picture. So, I’m going to tell you that there are three scenes in this chapter.

One is essentially a confrontation, one is about isolation, and the third one’s about education, but they’re all a preparation. Okay, so there you go. I’ll give you that little musical outline-ish kind of thing. You be looking, you see if you can tell which is what and when we pass from one of those kinds of sections into the other in the life of Elijah. We’re going to call this study, “Who is Your God?” And it is Chapter 17. And chapter 17 goes just like this:

“Now, Elijah, the Tishbite who was of the settlers of Gilead, some of your Bible translations will say, who is of Tishbe of Gilead.” Gilead, we saw on the map, was over to the right by Ammon. Okay, so toward the east, it’s Transjordan from the rest of Israel, it’s the section of the promised land when the Israelites were coming out of the wilderness into the promised land. And several of the tribes, two and a half, I think, decide that they would like to stay in that area and not live and settle over on the western side of the Jordan. And so that all gets arranged. You can read about that yourself in the book of Joshua. But for now, he’s from there. We don’t know a lot about Elijah, by the way, but we know he’s a Tishbite and we know he’s from the settlers of Gilead.

And he said to Ahab…. Now whenever you hear the name Ahab, your mind should go ‘dun du dun dun’(♪). He’s just an evil guy. Look at Chapter 16 verse 29, which we studied last week. 1 Kings 16:29: “Ahab, the son of Omri, became king over Israel in the 38th year of Asa, king of Judah. And Ahab, the son of Omri, reigned over Israel in Samaria for 22 years. Ahab, the son of Omri, did evil in the sight of the Lord.” It’s the sight of the Lord that matters. That’s the only assessment that matters. What does God think? He did evil in the sight of the Lord. And then it goes on to describe it in a greater detail. It says, “He did more than all who were before him,” because we thought it was pretty bad with some of the other ones, but this is telling us that Ahab is actually worse, takes it up a notch. Where some of the kings were just allowing some things to happen, he’s actually going to go in pursuit of some really nasty stuff. “It came about as though it had been a trivial thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, and he married Jezebel, the daughter of Ethbaal, king of the Sidonians. And he went to serve Baal and worshiped him. He erected an altar for Baal in the house of Baal, which he built in Samaria, that’s in Israel territory. He built an altar for Baal.” Interesting. “He also made the Asherah.” Asherah would’ve been another Canaanite, but this time a goddess. Some would say the wife of Baal, another fertility goddess. Thus, “Ahab did more to provoke the Lord, God of Israel, than all the kings of Israel who were before him.” This guy’s really, really bad.

So drop down to verse 1 of Chapter 17. “Elijah, the Tishbite from Gilead, said to Ahab”— somehow he gets an audience, we’re not told how, but somehow he’s right in front of this guy because God clearly has sent him to say something and it’s shocking. It’s like, would you really say that in front of a guy who would lop your head off without even thinking about it? That’s the tension in verse one. Here’s what he says: “As the Lord, the God of Israel, lives before whom I stand, surely there shall be neither dew nor rain these years except by my word.”

Now, this isn’t just a few minutes spent on the weather channel. This is way more than that. This is Elijah, the Tishbite from Gilead, from the other side of the tracks, marching into the palace in Samaria, in front of the king who has total authority and literally saying, ‘Your economy is going down until I say so.’ Because for them, agricultural economy, everything was about being able to grow crops not only to be able to feed themselves, but to be able to feed their animals. And no rain for an undetermined number of years—it’s plural—until I say it comes to an end is what he says, “except by my word.” Well, what do you think is going to happen here? That, my friends, if you were thinking that’s scene one, you are correct. It’s the shortest scene in the chapter because now we move to scene two.

Spoiler alert! Here’s scene two. “The word of the Lord came to him, Elijah is saying, ‘Go away from here, turn eastward, and hide yourself by the brook Cherith, which is east of the Jordan.’” So there’s the Jordan River and then there’s going to be this brook that breaks off from it and goes further east out into a wilderness territory. “It shall be that you will drink of the brook.” It’s actually more likely a wadi, which would mean it’s a seasonal waterbed that, when it rains, there will be some water in the brook Cherith. The Lord says, “You’re going to drink of that brook. I’ve commanded the ravens.” Those would be not the Baltimore Ravens. This would be the birds, the ravens, okay, to provide for you there. If I’m Elijah, I would say, ‘What about an eagle? How about a horse?’ Why? Because ravens are filthy, dirty scavenging birds that only eat carrion. They eat roadkill. And they’re going to provide for me? That’s what the Lord tells Elijah. Go out there, out to that brook in the wilderness, and I’ll have some ravens provide for you.

“So he went (Elijah did), and he did according to the word of the Lord, for he went and lived by the brook Cherith, which is east of the Jordan. Ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening and he would drink from the brooks.” So, he’s his diet is Hebrew hamburgers, man. I mean, it’s just on and on every day a burger from the same burger factory—the birds. And the birds that deal with roadkill. They’re the ones bringing you burgers. I’m not excited about this for him at all. “It happened after a while that the brook dried up because there was no rain in the land.”

Remember he predicted there would be no rain in the land and now it’s evidently impacting even where the Lord sent him after he delivered that sort of a shocking word to King Ahab. “Then the word of the Lord came to him saying, ‘Arise, go to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and stay there. Behold, I’ve commanded a widow there to provide for you.’ So he arose and he went to Zarephath.” And I’ll just recall the map. Maybe we can post that map back up there again. If you look at that map and you see all the way up at the top on the left where it’s yellow and it’s about to say Phoenicia. But Zarephath is off the charts to the north in a foreign land behind enemy lines, actually, if you want to talk about the Phoenicians, and that it’s Yahweh God sending Elijah into deeper and deeper and deeper into Baal territory. And he just delivered a harsh word of prophecy against Ahab in Israel, in Samaria, because they had turned to worship Baal and turned away from Yahweh.

And now the Lord says, ‘Go out in the wilderness for a while, now go up to this capital of Baal worship.’ And he’s up there, inside, and to this widow, it’s interesting. In the enemy lines, there are still some very fragile and vulnerable people. There’s some real people with real needs in the darkest of darkest places that you can imagine.

“So, he arose, he went to Zarephath. When he came to the gate of the city, behold, a widow was there gathering sticks.” We’re not told how he knew she was a widow. We’re not told how he knew she was the widow. The narrator is just giving this to us pretty quick, right? She’s gathering sticks. “He called to her and he said, ‘Please get me a little water in a jar that I may drink.’ He traveled about 80 miles from the brook at Cherith all the way to Zarephath, okay. And that’s not in a nice motor coach. That’s walking with ancient dockers or whatever those shoes would have been back then, the sandals, and he’s walking all the way up there and gets 80 miles along and he asked for some water. “And as she was going to get it, he called to her and said, ‘Please bring me a piece of bread in your hand.’ But she said, ‘As the Lord your God lives,’ and that’s fascinating to me because we don’t have any indication that he has said, too, ‘Hey, let me share Yahweh with you.’ How does she know this? How does she know? Because she says, “Your God”—not “my God,” but “your God.” She’s living in the land of Baal. It’s your God, as “the Lord your God.” And “the Lord” is capitalized there. It’s all capital letters, which means, in the Hebrew, it’s Yahweh, it’s Jehovah.

And so, she says this: “‘As the Lord your God lives, I have no bread, only a handful of flour in a bowl and a little oil in the jar. Behold, I’m gathering a few sticks that I may go in and prepare for me and my son,” and look at this. This is how desperate she was now, “‘that we may eat it and die.” Why is that? Well, because there’s been a famine in the land and the drought has choked out all resources. That’s how serious that drought from verse 1 is. That’s how serious it is. It’s affected the whole region. And now she’s running out of resources. And so she now is at her last meal and she knows she’s going to take whatever little bit she’s got left to her son and they’re going to eat it and it’s their last supper together.

“And Elijah said to her, ‘Do not fear.’” How beautiful is that? How beautiful are those words? “Do not fear,” the most often repeated command in the Bible. Do not be afraid. Do not fear. When the Lord speaks or the Lord speaks through one of His emissaries or the Lord speaks through one of His angels or this prophet, so often it’s “Do not fear.” “‘Go do as you have said, but make a little bread cake from it first or make me a little bread cake from it first and bring it to me. And afterward, you may make one for yourself and for your son. For thus says the Lord God of Israel….’” Remember, he’s not in Israel. He’s up in the land of Phoenicia near the Sidonian region, which is, by the way, the hometown of Jezebel. And he’s saying this: “‘As the Lord God of Israel says, “the bowl of flour shall not be exhausted nor shall the jar of oil be empty until the day that the Lord sends rain on the face of the earth.”’ So, she went and did according to the word of Elijah and she and he and her household,” meaning her son, “ate for many days. The bowl of flour was not exhausted nor did the jar of oil become empty, according to the word of the Lord, which he spoke through Elijah.”

Right now, I just want to fade to black and say, what an awesome Hollywood ending that is! But that’s not the way this one’s going. We’re going from confrontation and isolation and we’re still in the middle of education. And this time, it’s a really deep education. Notice what happens.

“After these things, the son of the woman, the mistress of the house,” this lady, this widow, “became sick. His sickness was so severe that there was no breath left in him.” Just as they’re rejoicing and enjoying the provision, the providence—we just read about providence,  the providence and provision of God—just when they’re cruising into that and getting settled into that comes this. “And she said to Elijah, ‘What do I have to do with you, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my iniquity to remembrance and to put my son to death.’ He said to her, ‘Give me your son.’ Then he took him from her bosom and carried him to the upper room”—interesting—“where he was living and laid him on his own bed.”

“He called to Yahweh the Lord and he said, ‘O, Yahweh, my God, have you also brought calamity to the widow with whom I am staying by causing her son to die?’ And he stretched himself upon the child three times and called to the Lord and said, ‘O, Yahweh, O Lord, my God, I pray you, let this child’s life return to him.’ The Lord heard the voice of Elijah and the life of the child returned to him and he revived. Elijah took the child and brought him down from the upper room into the house and gave him to his mother, and Elijah said, ‘See, your son is alive.’”

Now, when I first read that, I read it flatly with no [doubt]: “See, your son is alive.” It was just like checking off the box of the honey-do list of things to do today. Raise a kid from the dead. I mean, that just amazed me. That’s all he said: “See, your son’s alive.”

The woman said…. This is fascinating to me. Remember, this is the lady from the capital of Baal worship. “And the woman said to Elijah, ‘Now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.’” Wow, that’s pretty amazing.

All right, just a couple of little sidebar details I want to point out. Look at verse 2: “The word of the Lord came to him saying….” Look at verse 5: “He went and did according to the word of the Lord ….” Look at verse 8: “Then the word of the Lord came to him….” Look at verse 16: “The bowl of flour was not exhausted according to the word of the Lord, which he spoke through Elijah….” Look at verse 24: “The woman said to Elijah, ‘Now I know that you’re a man of God and that the word of the Lord is true.’” Really powerful.

The repetition of that phrase caught my eye as I read the chapter over and over again. And then as I began to read some commentaries, some of those guys also said, who is the real focus of this? It’s “the word of the Lord.” It’s an interesting thing.

But I love that we do get to meet Elijah. His name means “Yahweh is my God.” And the significance of that is that, again, the context. Here is Israel turned completely away from Yahweh to worship Baal. And here comes Elijah. I wonder what his parents were thinking when they named him that. When mom was about to deliver and they’re going, “I think it’s a boy,” and they’re trying to pick names. What do you want to name him? Let’s go with Abraham. Let’s reach back into history. Let’s call him Sampson. Let’s call him…. There’s lots of choices. And if you want to go for a deity back then, could have said, “Let’s call him Moloch, or Baal, or Chemosh.” Instead, they say, “Let’s name him ‘Yahweh is my God.’”

You realize what trouble that might have given young Elijah as he grew up in a land that worshipped Baal because this isn’t just one week in the life of Elijah. Jesus tells us in Luke Chapter 4 that the time at the brook Cherith was three and a half years. Three and a half years in the wilderness. Verse 1 is a moment, but it’s a tense moment, that moment of confrontation. But the isolation, that’s three and a half years long according to Jesus in Luke chapter 4. That’s wild. So, he gets named “Yahweh is my God.” And I think that could have been a real annoyance to people like Ahab when this guy named Elijah steps in and begins to speak publicly and even goes so far as to pronounce a bit of a covenantal curse on the land saying, ‘No, it’s not going to rain for a long time. It’s going to ruin your economy.’

So here, again, thinking about that, what do we learn about “Yahweh is my God”? What do we learn about this “Yahweh who is my God”? When I see that that’s his name and that’s the focus of his name and that’s the meaning of his name, it led me to want to ask, who’s your God? Who is your God? Ahab, we know who your God is, it’s Baal. But what about us in our own day and time? Who is your God? Good question for us to ask. In answering it, I would like to focus on Elijah’s God. Elijah’s God is named Yahweh. That’s his personal name. God is a title. Lord is a title. Yahweh is his personal name, which he revealed to Moses all the way back in the book of Exodus. You can go and check that out on your own.

What kind of God is this Yahweh, as we go through Chapter 17? What do we learn about this God? Yahweh is:

• This is a God who speaks.
• This is a God who guides.
• This is a God who hears.
• And a God who provides.

And let me change my article:

• This is the God who speaks.
• This is the God who guides.
• This is the God who hears.
• And this is the God who provides.

Baal does not do that. Baal is a statue made with human hands. Baal might have eyes, might have feet, but couldn’t see, couldn’t go anywhere. Might have hands, but can’t do anything with them. And yet they attribute to Baal, the Canaanites do, all of them that run throughout that region, they attribute to this god, Baal, who’s seen as a fertility god, but he’s also known as the rainstorm god. And so here comes Elijah, which means “Yahweh is my God.” Elijah steps in front of Ahab and he says, ‘You know that thing your God is in charge of, rain, that’s going away because Yahweh is my God.’ That’s amazing when you start putting all of this together and how bold it would be for him to say that.

How does the fact that God speaks help us when we are in a confrontation in our own day and time, in our own lives, thinking pastorally, thinking about how we can apply this ourselves? I’m not going to have to go before Ahab, I hope and pray. But I might have a moment that for me is incredibly tense, nervous, fearful. Will I still say “Yahweh is my God”? Will it matter that he’s a God who speaks and says things like, “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Joshua 1:5)? Does that matter when you’re going to face some conflict or confrontation to you? I hope it does. I hope you’ll remember Elijah in this moment.

Verse 1 is just a small little snapshot but it is powerful because of all of the meaning and all of the symbolism to the name Baal, the name Yahweh, and the curse of no rain. We don’t live in a silent universe or a silent reality. The God who created everything that exists is a God that can speak. And I’ll go further—the God who has spoken. And I’ll go even further— the God who continues to speak. That’s great news. Why? Because silence can sometimes…. I know the song says “silence is golden,” but it’s also really horrifically lonely, and hopeless, and despairing sometimes. Think about them in the period of isolation, the three and a half years. The only one he’s got to talk to is a bunch of goofy birds that are disease ridden. They’re bringing him burgers, but they’re his friends. That’s it. That’s all he’s got. He’s alone in that education time. You need a God who speaks when you’re literally going into the darkest place anywhere, nearby to the center of Baal worship and your name is Elijah, “Yahweh is my God.” You need a God who speaks to remind you, ‘I got you. I will provide for you.’

And look at the difference between providence and miraculous things that are happening in this Chapter too, by the way. I see the time in the wilderness as providential. I see the time in Zarephath as miraculous. Providentially, the Lord uses some of the stuff that he created. And providentially, he goes, ‘Birds, take meat and bread over to that guy right there. And water, you keep flowing for a while. And now water, I’ve stopped the rain. Now, water, dry up because I need to move my prophet somewhere else.’ Over here in Zarephath, it’s like that woman in that dark place. That woman with all of those needs, who’s about to die of starvation along with her son, ‘go specifically there and her jar and her bowl will never run dry.’ And that’s miraculous. It reminds me of a time on the side of a hill later when Jesus took the bread from some kid’s lunchbox and kept breaking it and breaking it and breaking it and breaking it. And he fed 5,000 on one occasion and he fed 4,000 on another occasion with just a tiny little bit of nothing. That’s God recreating over and over and over again. And he did it in Zarephath.

Not to mention he crossed the barrier between death and life with this boy. The boy gets sick and only God could miraculously raise that kid from the dead. This is the first resuscitation of a dead person in our Bibles. And it points beautifully forward to another one that will be many years later in the person and work of Jesus. This is a God who speaks. He says things like, “Lazarus, come forth!” (John 11:43) He says things like, through these angels, “He is not here; he is risen. Go and tell his disciples” (Matthew 28:6). And then he says things to his disciples like, ‘Go and tell the whole world that this is a God who speaks.’

It’s also the God who guides. He guided Elijah all the way from Gilead in the east, all the way to Samaria, to the capital, to the palace, to the presence of Ahab. He sent Elijah back immediately after delivering that hand grenade prophecy. He sends him all the way back to Cherith, to the wilderness, to that brook, to be alone for three and a half years. He sent him to Zarephath 80 miles to the west and to the north all along being the God who speaks, all along being the God who guides. In confrontation, in isolation, we need the education of reminding ourselves over and over again that He speaks, that He guides as well. You need guidance, you need wisdom, you need instruction, you need help understanding something. Look to Yahweh. He’s the only God that speaks. He’s the only God that guides. And He’s given us His word, which is so beautiful for us to be able to know what it is He’s saying to us. I saw this online by a pastor named Nicky Gumbel yesterday and I didn’t have time to put it in the slides:

God is continually communicating with us. He does so primarily through the life-changing words of the Bible. Don’t simply read the Bible for information but to hear God speaking to you.

— Nicky Gumbel

So when you study the Word, don’t just study the object God or the subject God, listen for God to speak to you through His Word and by the Holy Spirit who will come and speak. This is the God who speaks.

He is the God who hears, too. I love that. Look at verse 20 and 22 here in Chapter 17 just for a second. It’s so beautiful. I love this. The boy is dead. He calls to the Lord and he says, “Lord my God, have you also brought calamity to the widow…” Yeah, he’s caring for, very much like a pastor, “…in a way with whom I’m staying by causing her son to die?” See, he doesn’t understand exactly everything that Yahweh is up to. So, he asks God questions like this. It’s okay to ask God questions. He stretched himself upon the child three times, called the Lord and said, “O Lord, my God, I pray, let this child’s life return to him. The Lord heard the voice of Elijah and the life of the child returned to him and he revived.”

I love it that the Lord heard that prayer. I love it that when we pray, Kim prays, when we pray as a church collectively, we can know that the Lord God of the Bible, He’s hearing us. It matters. We’re not just checking a box and saying a prayer. We’re actually communicating with the One who created us, the One who manages the entire universe, the One who can save us, the One who does speak, guide, and hear.

And fourthly up on the screen, he provided for Elijah as he dropped a prophetic hand grenade with harsh news in front of the King Ahab and didn’t get his head cut off. And then the Lord immediately in verse 2 says to him, ‘Head east.’ Was it because he was running to escape? I don’t know. It’s not said. Some have conjectured that.

But then God provides for Elijah when he’s in the wilderness. Don’t miss the three and a half years in the wilderness. Don’t hurry it. Don’t ignore the lessons of the wilderness because here God is using these birds to feed him and it’s actually not a bad meal. I mean, if I had to have hamburgers morning and evening, I could. That’s better than a lot of people have in a lot of places. And in his particular case, it was probably better than everybody living in the drought had. And God is providing for him even in the isolation of the wilderness. And when he goes to Zarephath, the Lord is providing for him, refilling that jar and that bowl over and over and over again, providing for him, leading and guiding him straight to this woman, providing for him. When he takes the boy and goes upstairs, God hears his prayer and provides life where there was death. This is the God who speaks, who hears, and who provides.

We’ll all go through seasons of confrontation, all kinds of confrontations, all kinds of isolation. Some of you may be in a time of isolation right now, it feels like a wilderness to you. You’re wondering if the birds are going to even show up tonight. Or you find yourself in a pity party complaining about the fact that it’s hamburgers again. And we all do that. But he’s literally alone as far as I can tell for these three and a half years. I don’t know if I could survive. I’m a bit of an extrovert. I need other people, annoyingly so to my wife who’s more of an introvert. But, yeah, I need other people around me all the time.

So, three and a half years, wow, amazing. And God provides all through that time for him. And all of Chapter 17, I’m not going to spoil it, but all of Chapter 17 is actually a preparation for Chapter 18, which is the most popular, most widely known chapter and event in all of 1 Kings, I would argue. And the Lord is getting his prophet ready for this major confrontation as he goes through this minor confrontation with Ahab, this period of isolation in the wilderness, and this period of education immersed in the ways of Baal and in the land of Baal with all of the way they think and act and then getting him ready to go up to Mount Carmel where he will have to confront a massive number of people who are experts in Baal and he’ll be equipped, he’ll be educated because of the time he spent in Zarephath.

So many questions, but I know this, like Tozer said:

“What comes to your mind when you think about God is the most important thing about you.”

— A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

The Knowledge of the Holy, great book. Really highly recommend it to you. God is a very powerful idea. There’s no denying that. It’s easy to see that. Look back through history. You can see that both for evil and for good, with Ahab evil, with more modern versions of the evil ideas of God, people have been led to do all kinds of horrible and wretched things in the name of who they think God is.

But God is also very powerful in terms of the great good and I’d say more powerful because there was a crucifixion—but by golly, there was a resurrection. And I’ll take that resurrection any day. Sometimes we have to go through the confrontation, the isolation, and the education to be prepared for what God wants to do on the mountain with us. But for now, this is what Elijah’s going through and he continues every day when he thinks about his own name. Every day, he thinks about his God. “Yahweh is my God,” he continues to say.

Who’s your God? Does your God speak? Does your God guide? Does your God hear you? Does your God provide? Are there promises in what God has said that you can count on? We have to understand what those promises are and that’s why He’s given us His word because I so often mistake my ambitions or my anxieties for the reality that’s out here or the results of what God didn’t do. I so often do that. I make that mistake. What has He promised? He’s promised to never leave me or forsake me. Though the storm rages, though the giants are large, though the confrontation is big, though the isolation is lonely, though the education seems arduous and too long, and then it gets deeper, and yet he’s there. He’s speaking, He’s guiding, He’s hearing me, and He’s providing. That’s because He is the Living Word, too.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him, nothing came into being that came into being. In Him was life and this life was the Light of men.”

— John 1:1-4

Jesus, the Word of God. I showed you how five different times in Chapter 17 of 1 Kings the phrase “the word of the Lord” appears. And see that “word of the Lord” just points forward to…, we can just keep going, pointing forward to and finding its fulfillment in the Living Word of the Lord, Jesus himself, who is the God who speaks, who guides like a great shepherd, a good shepherd that he is, who hears. He even taught us how to pray. We pray it every week because he’s a God who hears and he gave us the words to use. And then does he provide? Yes, he provided himself on a cross. And that’s one of the reasons we see him as our king, our Lord, our God. We know we belong to him and that he will hold us fast even when we have let go of him, that his mercy is more. Even though our sins are many, his mercy is way more than our sins.

I like the way Gary Millar says it:

“Even while Israel rejects God, He continues to work beyond her borders with unexpected people in unexpected places in completely unexpected and unprecedented ways.”

— J. Gary Millar, ESV Expository Commentary

That’s Zarephath. That’s the brook at Cherith. Unexpected places. God’s at work in the wilderness. What’s He doing? He’s telling birds what to do and who to feed. And every now and then, He says something to Elijah, even to the point of saying, ‘You know what, your time here is over. Let’s go 80 miles to the north and east or west.’ And then when he gets up there, God continues to work in Elijah’s life in a dark place, the darkest of places. You think we have a “sin city,” that’s the darkest of places up there where Jezebel was from and where the capital of Baal worship was at. Tim Keller in The Reason for God, some of you remember that book:

“Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your own imagination. So an authoritative Bible is not the enemy of a personal relationship with God. It’s the precondition for it.”

— Timothy Keller, The Reason for God

So here’s the God who speaks. Sometimes I don’t like what He says, but He speaks. If I want to bow my knee…. I mean, I do have to say, when I look at Elijah, he just seems to obey. And this woman in Zarephath as well, the widow, she said, ‘Here’s my reality.’ But then she obeyed. She did what Elijah told her to do. That’s fascinating to me that we find faith where we wouldn’t expect to find faith. And then back in Israel, we don’t find faith where we would expect to find faith. Don’t let that be the case here in this church or in your heart. Realize that sometimes the Lord God of the Bible, the Lord God who has redeemed us and rescued us, sometimes He’s going to say some things you disagree with and that I disagree with. If you don’t expect that, I’m not sure you’re believing in the God of the Bible because the God of the Bible is so holy that there’s no way I’m holy enough to think the same thoughts He thinks.

So, by definition, I’m going to sometimes get it wrong. Therefore, when He says, ‘This is really bad for you, Jim,’ I ought to believe Him instead of my broken “wanter” and desires. He’s the one that created us and designed us. He knows way better than we do what’s best for us. He might say to us that he wants us to go to Zarephath or that He wants us to go out in the wilderness for a while and we might not want to do that, but if He wants us to do that, that might be part of the education that’s part of the preparation for what God does want to do through us.

Scripture is far more than a collection of ancient documents in which the words of God are preserved. It is not a kind of museum in which God’s Word is exhibited behind glass like a relic or a fossil. On the contrary, it is a Living Word to the Living People from the Living God, a contemporary message for the contemporary world. The questions for us are these.

Am I listening for the word of the Lord? Now, only you can answer that. I can’t answer that for you. Are you listening for the word of the Lord? Am I following the word of the Lord? I saw Elijah do that. I saw widow of Zarephath do that. They’re not perfect, but in this moment, they’re doing that. They’re following the word of the Lord. Am I obeying the word of the Lord? He might call us to something that is uncomfortable or inconvenient. It might cost us something. Time, resources, money. Laying some opportunity down that he wants to give to somebody else that you might not think deserves that opportunity. And yet the Lord wants to use you to encourage that person.

Am I obeying the word of the Lord? Am I speaking then the word of the Lord? I love that with Elijah, man, from the get-go, I mean, no introduction, he’s just verse 1, boom! And he’s speaking the word of the Lord. And he speaks the word of the Lord up in Zarephath as well. And then as we will see next week, he will speak the word of Yahweh. Let’s pray.

Lord, for all of us, these questions are important because of who You are and what You do. Also, Lord Jesus, because of what You’ve called us to be, Your witnesses, Your ambassadors, and the Holy Spirit because of what You want to turn us into, effective, empowering us to do things that we couldn’t do on our own. We don’t have the strength. We don’t have the wisdom. We don’t have the endurance. We don’t have the courage. And yet You say, ‘Trust me,’ that You’ll never leave us or forsake us. So, Lord, as we walk through whatever comes our way in the coming week or weeks, may we carry with us the profound truths of 1 King 17. May we immerse ourselves in the Word of the Lord as You speak to us and through us, as You speak through Scripture, as You speak to us in prayer, as You speak to us through our fellowship with other godly brothers and sisters and Christ who are seeking to hear from You. May we cling to the assurances of Your protection and provision. May we intentionally obey the word of the Lord with unwavering faith. And may our lives bear witness to the transformative power of the God who is ever present, ever faithful, and ever worthy of our trust. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen and amen.