Elijah and Obadiah

Hello and welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything else along the way. I’m your host this week, Bryan Broome, and I’m joined once again by Greg Uttinger and Emily Maxson.

This week we are continuing our discussion of the prophet Elijah. Last time we talked about who he is, and this week we’re going to be talking more about the particular ways he served the Lord, contrasting it with another way that a different servant of the Lord served the Lord in his particular position of authority, and the lessons we can glean from that. So let’s just hop right into it. Greg, why don’t you start.

Remember Elijah had come before Ahab and said, “There’s not going to be rain until I say so,” and then he had vanished. Ahab had probably ignored him for a while until the rain stopped, and stopped, and stopped. The drought was 3-1/2 years long, and someplace in there the grass was dying, the animals were dying, and people were probably dying. It was getting desperate, and Ahab was sending out messages not only throughout his own kingdom but to other kingdoms saying, “Have you seen this guy, Elijah? I’ve got to find him.”

But almost as pressing was finding water, not so much for his people but, of all things, for his horses, because if you don’t have water for horses, you have dead horses. You don’t have a war machine and neighboring countries come in and conquer you.

It starts sort of like this. This is 1 Kings 18.

And it came to pass after many days, that the word of the LORD came to Elijah in the third year, saying, Go, shew thyself unto Ahab and I will send rain upon the earth. And Elijah went to shew himself unto Ahab. And there was a sore famine in Samaria. And Ahab called Obadiah, which was the governor of his house.

This is the other guy we’re going to talk about. This is not the Obadiah who wrote the little book of Obadiah. He’s the governor or steward of Ahab’s house. He works for Ahab, the apostate king. It says, “Obadiah feared the Lord greatly.” It’s important that we remember that. This is the inspired writer’s evaluation of the man’s character, because when we’re done we may not be so sure, or at least we may have a couple questions.

For it was so, when Jezebel cut off the prophets of the LORD, that Obadiah took a hundred prophets and hid them by fifty in a cave and fed them with bread and water.

That’s very possibly from Ahab’s own table or resources.

And Ahab said unto Obadiah, Go into the land, unto all fountains of water, and unto all brooks: peradventure we may find grass to save the horses and mules alive, that we lose not all the beasts.

Notice he’s more concerned for the animals than finding water for the people.

So they divided the land between them to pass throughout it. Ahab went one way by himself and Obadiah went another way by himself.

I’ve never checked the commentators on this, and maybe you two will have an idea. I don’t know why a king is out there by himself with his steward. The two most powerful people in the kingdom are out there unattached, unescorted, looking for water.

It could be a top-secret mission. You don’t want everyone else to come in and get the water.

That was my first thought.

Okay, that sounds good. I would go with that, because normally these people would have whole entourages, but for some reason it’s just the two of them. Perhaps they’re hoping they’re going to get lucky enough and they’re going to find something and don’t want others…I like that.

And as Obadiah was in the way, behold, Elijah met him, and he knew him and fell on his face and said, Art thou that my lord Elijah?

He’s very respectful. He doesn’t say, “Aren’t you that guy Elijah?” He says, “My lord Elijah.” He knew him in the sense that he recognized him. It doesn’t seem that they had actually met face-to-face, or at least knew each other on any personal level, because of the question. “Are you the guy we’ve been looking for? Are you that Elijah we’ve been looking for?”

The description had been, “There’s this hairy guy who girds on his clothes with a leather belt, a Nazirite most likely,” so here he is and Obadiah says, “You’re Elijah, aren’t you?”

And he answered him, I am. Go, tell thy lord, Behold, Elijah is here. And he said, What have I sinned, that thou wouldest deliver thy servant into the hand of Ahab, to slay me?

I think we should all go, “What? Huh? What are you talking about?” He has it reasoned out. Here’s his thought process, and he gives us some background.

As the LORD thy God liveth, there is no nation or kingdom whither my lord hath not sent to seek thee. And when they said, He is not there he took an oath of the kingdom and nation, that they found thee not. And now thou sayest, Go, tell thy lord, Behold, Elijah is here. And it shall come to pass, as soon as I am gone from thee, that the Spirit of the LORD shall carry thee whither I know not, and so when I come and tell Ahab, and he cannot find thee, he shall slay me.

There’s a little bit of paranoia going on here.

Again, he probably knows Ahab really, really well.

You’ve got a point there. Ahab has been looking desperately for Elijah. Remember that Ahab’s thought patterns are magical. He’s bought into Baal worship, and what he sees here is not an ethical problem – his own disobedience and covenant apostasy. In his mind, the problem is Elijah. He is basically a sorcerer for the other side, and if we kill the sorcerer we stop the problem.

The problem is now devastatingly serious. People are dying, animals are dying, there’s no let-up, there’s no clouds in the sky, we have no solution. Obviously, the best thing to do is to find this guy and kill him, so he’s been sending to all the nations round about and extracting oaths from their kings to the effect that they have not found him.

We skipped over this story, and I’m not sure why we skipped over it in the original articles I wrote, but in the story we skipped over that God had sent him first to an out-of-the-way brook where birds fed him, unclean birds, table scraps or something that they got someplace, and he drank of the brook, but the brook dried up because of drought.

Then he went into Phoenician territory to Jezebel’s backyard, and God had a Phoenician wood woman feed him there by miracle. He’s been hiding kind of under Jezebel’s nose, but they’ve tried really hard to find him and they can’t.

Obadiah’s thinking is, “He is just so upset and out of his mind over this that if I say, ‘Here he is’ and here you’re not – because who knows what God will do. You’re one of those spiritual guys and weird things happen and you’ll just vanish. God will teleport you someplace, and I’ll be the one there and he can’t kill you, so he’ll kill me just because he’ll be in a killing mood.” But he says this –

But I thy servant fear the LORD from my youth. Was it not told my lord what I did when Jezebel slew the prophets of the LORD, how I hid a hundred men of the LORD'S prophets by fifty in a cave, and fed them with bread and water?

We’re being told this a second time. We’re not told where the cave was. We’re not told how many prophets Jezebel actually killed, but apparently a lot because this was a remnant.

It’s interesting that Israel, the northern kingdom, in its apostasy had lots of prophets God had sent, or prophets in training, basically pastors who would have the gift of inspired revelation at times. They were God’s servants, God’s covenant lawyers, and Obadiah has hidden them.

Jezebel can’t find them and doesn’t know about them. He’s actually feeding them with whatever resources he has, whether it’s directly from Ahab or simply out of his own salary which Ahab pays. Anyway, if Ahab knew about this he would not be happy, let alone Jezebel. “So knowing that, knowing I’m on your side and I tried to do what I could, you’re going to put my life in danger?”

And now thou sayest, Go, tell thy lord, Behold, Elijah is here, and he shall slay me. And Elijah said, As the LORD of hosts liveth, before whom I stand, I will surely shew myself unto him today.

So encouraged by the word of the Lord, Obadiah goes. He went to meet Ahab, told him, Ahab went to meet Elijah, and I just have to read this because, as I say, Elijah gets all the great lines, except that Ahab gets a few, and here’s one of them.

And it came to pass, when Ahab saw Elijah, that Ahab said unto him, Art thou he that troubleth Israel? And he answered, I have not troubled Israel, but thou and thy father's house, in that ye have forsaken the commandments of the LORD, and thou hast followed Baalim.

Then he proposes a whole elaborate contest that we’ll talk about next time, which Obadiah probably arranged because he’s the governor and steward and would have the resources and send the messages and such, or he had a hand in it most likely. But any competent manager could have done that part of it.

What he did – the one thing he did, the one evidence we have that this Obadiah feared the Lord, was that he took on the risky assignment of hiding the Lord’s pastors, the Lord’s prophets, when a purge was going on, when there was a death sentence on them all.

He probably had to cut some corners and tell some fibs and allocate resources that may not exactly have been his to allocate, and do things that his employers would most certainly have objected to, had they known, but it was all quiet. It was all on the sly, and every night he could go home and, with some degree of ease, kiss his wife, have dinner, go to bed, and go back to work the next day – whereas Elijah has been on the run, first in the wilderness and being fed by birds, then in Gentile territory, far away from the life of God’s people.

The thing I would like to talk about is how these two men might see each other. Here’s Elijah the fanatic, the rabble rouser, the firebrand, the guy who stirs up trouble, who calls for famine and starts all kinds of trouble and makes it difficult on everybody, and here’s Obadiah the compromiser, living in comfort while the prophet suffers.

Where’s his witness? Where’s his testimony? What difference has he made? Well, he made some, as it seems. And rather than go on about this, I would rather turn to you two and ask what would you say for or against these guys or for some balance in-between? What do you think, and why do you think there might be a problem here?

I think for any individual there’s one side or the other that seems preferable, because we’re all different people and we all have different gifts. It’s tempting to look at our situation from our perspective and say, “Well then, there has to be one right answer and I think it’s going to be this.”

Whereas someone else a) is in a different situation because they’re not you, and then b) has different gifts, and the Lord works through all of the gifts that he gives to his people.

It’s really easy to say we all need to be like Martin Luther, but the issue is that nobody but Martin Luther was Martin Luther.

Somebody had to be Zwingli.

Let’s hope none of us have to be Zwingli. It’s a joke.

I forget where I read this, but I read something this week that got at that same point, which was essentially to say if you look at a situation and – I remember now, it was in a sermon from 2006 on Romans 7, I think it was, by R.C. Sproul. He basically said you have a very strong temptation as a believer to take your own personal experience as a believer in the course of sanctification, to say, “Well, because I haven’t struggled with this, anyone who does is a weaker believer. They’re not as sanctified as I am,” even though they may have other issues.

He used the example that ever since he was converted, ever since he came to saving faith, he had never really had any struggle with wanting to read scripture. He said for the longest time – and this was R.C. Sproul talking – he had a prideful issue where he looked at these other people who struggled to read and struggled to find the joy in the simple act of reading the Word, and thought, “What’s wrong with these people that they don’t love this?”

What actually really, really applies to what I was thinking of as you were just reading this story of Elijah and Obadiah is that he said, “The difference is those other people who have the trouble, they weren’t called like me to be a pastor of God’s Word. God gave me a gift and a love for this so that I didn’t find it difficult to study the Word that I was called then to preach to others.”

I think in the example that we have of Elijah and Obadiah is that Obadiah wasn’t necessarily called to live in the wilderness, sustained off of food brought by birds, partially because he didn’t have the level of authority that Elijah had as a prophet of God. He didn’t have that same level of spiritual authority and responsibility that he did, so it came down to what his calling was and what his duty was in the position that God had placed him.

I think one thing we could say in criticism of Obadiah, or that I would say in criticism of Obadiah, something you mentioned in passing, was that he never reminded Ahab of his covenant duties as king. My personal opinion at this point would be to say that was wrong of him. It was wrong of Obadiah to not ever risk the anger of the king in that particular way, even if it was in the most gentle and prodding of terms. I think because of where he was placed, he had that sort of responsibility. But that’s not to say that because he wasn’t also living in the wilderness and also suffering in the same ways that Elijah was that he was somehow innocent for that.

I think there’s also an aspect of this that is a question of degrees, comparable to when you’re laying out a budget. I’ll pick an example from David’s and my life, because it’s ready to hand. We want to be saving for our new baby’s education. Now, how much of that is going to be put towards her elementary school education? How about her high school education? How about her college education?

College is by far the most expensive, but if she gets there and we’ve not put anything towards the stuff along the way, is it really going to do her any good? So thinking of now and thinking of later are both important, and you have to put dollars towards both, so what do you do? And there isn’t a straightforward answer that applies to all situations.

And when the time comes, will you even choose college, given the condition of modern colleges? If I’m alive, maybe just send her to me.

There are many like things where we can see that. Time priorities – what’s important now as opposed to what’s going to be important in 10 years or 20 years or 30 years?

Or 100 years.

Right. As far as Obadiah, we’re not told he never said anything to Ahab. Again, there are degrees of, “Your Majesty, it would be in accord with God’s law to do this and so,” and Ahab turns and glares at him with those eyes that shine red. “Okay, I won’t be saying that again.”

I think there might also be another aspect, which is is it just for somebody who is – I don’t know what the term is, but essentially an enlisted officer in the S.S. and is using his Third Reich-provided salary to buy food for the Jews that are living in his cupboard at home. Is it a wise decision or a prudent or even a life-sustaining decision in the sense of the sixth commandment for him to turn to his S.S. comrades and go, “You know, do you really think we should be doing this? I don’t think God’s law really says that we should be killing people like this.” Now he’s not only jeopardized his only life, but he’s jeopardized all the people that he’s hiding from a dangerous and violent and murderous government as well.

Elijah could take the explicit wrath of the king because he didn’t have 100 prophets’ lives riding on him.

Yeah, very different kinds of circumstances, very different kinds of responsibilities. And of course, Elijah had an express commandment from God to go stand before the king, both first and now.

There is a pietism that has been at work in the American church for a long time that hates dilemmas like this. It wants a clearcut black and white “always do it this way.” As you said earlier, anyone who doesn’t is spiritually immature or morally compromised, is not living the full Christian life, is not sold out to Jesus, and we want to know what that is, and then we condemn anybody who doesn’t done it.

Oh man, doesn’t this go back to the Puritans and the Separatists? This is America.

And probably before that.

It did occur to me earlier on that that would be one such example. There are those who say, “This place is so bad, we must leave, and we must leave now. Reform without tarrying for any.” There are others who say, “But this is the church where we were baptized, to which we’ve made our covenant vows, the church of our fathers. There are still many godly believers here. We can still turn this around.”

“And we must. We must not leave.”

“We should at least try.”

Yeah, and then a few years later you find them living across the bay from each other like, “Wait. We’re reforming from a distance. We did what you did, but we did it for different reasons. “

“So we were right and you were wrong.”

I think either of us, to a certain degree, is either a Puritan or a Pilgrim. Sometimes we just say, “We’re done here. We’re so out of here,” and then there are others of us who want to stay and fight to the end, or at least hold on to the end and be the last ones kicked out of the building, as it were.

God works in all of these things. To say, “No, this is the way, and anybody who didn’t do it this way has failed God, has failed the gospel, has failed Christ,” really requires a great deal of arrogance or naivete and simplicity of mind.

Some people, in their immature Christian faith, are really very simple-minded, and you can give them that. “Okay, so she sees it as black and white. Either she hasn’t been a Christian very long, or she hasn’t been in a church that’s really taught sound doctrine. I can see why she makes it really simple,” but there are others who ought to know.

But also the Lord uses that black and white person, too.

Yeah, that itself is kind of the point. Elijah and Obadiah didn’t point fingers at each other, but probably there are people we could find who did, and God continues to use them anyway. He used the Separatists and he used the Puritans, and both oddly enough in America eventually.

I’d like to talk for a moment about political applications, because this is very much that kind of thing. Obadiah worked for the state. He held a bureaucratic cushy state job. He wasn’t elected, he was appointed. Somehow he had done something to get Ahab’s notice, maybe been promoted up through the ranks, maybe had done some great one-time service kind of thing. Anyway, he got put in this office by the king, and he is responsible for handling a great deal of money that has been collected 1) by taxes, some lawful, some not, 2) by confiscation of property, mostly not remotely legal, and 3) also any proceeds that come from aggressive wars that Ahab may have started along the way.

And probably any of the funds that were taken from slain prophets of Yahweh.

Yeah, good point. So we look at this guy and we say, “Okay fine, we understand you can’t stand up to Ahab (Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin) and begin witnessing right off the top of your head. You can, but you won’t get very far, and you’ll probably be dead before you get to the Jesus saves part. But shouldn’t you at least quit? Aren’t you tainted by the blood, by the greed, the covetousness of your secularism and paganism? You’re doing a great job as a steward, but what you’re doing a great job of is sustaining an absolutely tyrannical pagan anti-Yahweh government in power, and they’re doing a much better job than they would if you weren’t there, so quit!”

“How could you work for the military industrial complex?”

Exactly, and sometimes that’s a hard question.

I told you before we started that I have one example, and you assured me you had more, so get ready. When I was a kid there were a couple ladies in our church who were roommates, and one worked in some kind of office in the county government or some such thing. I don’t know what she did exactly. The other I think was an art teacher, and this kind of discussion came up in Sunday School or some kind of Bible study kind of thing.

The one lady who worked for the state said out loud to everybody, “I don’t really see what purpose I’m fulfilling in God’s kingdom with the job I have working in state bureaucracy for a pagan government,” and her roommate said, “Well, it’s easy. You’re helping the state enslave us all.”

Oh, that’s mean, but also true.

And there was a little laughter but I think it may have stung a little bit, and I’ve certainly remembered it ever since. That’s not a good answer. There may be some truth in it, but you know Daniel worked for Nebuchadnezzar. He was not a nice guy. Daniel did not say, “I’m not working for you. Kill me if you have to. Death first, over serving such a pagan as yourself, sir.”

The three Hebrew children eventually drew that line, but only when they were asked to bow down to an idol. And Daniel served faithfully under Cyrus/Darius until the whole, “Well, you can’t pray to Jehovah anymore” came up.

These men all worked for pagan kings, or at least extremely compromised kings, and they didn’t quit. They didn’t walk away, and a lot of the money that passed through their hands was not lawfully obtained in any godly covenantal sense.

What we’re really seeing is that God is consistent throughout all time with his own words, obviously. We’re seeing the initial kind of aspect of what Romans 13 talks about, that even governments which are not explicitly covenantally unified or under Christ explicitly still bear a legitimate kind of authority and they have their legitimate use in the societies of men.

It’s not something you can just say, “Well, because XYZ policy or ruler or whatever, we can completely discount your authority” – that doesn’t exist. They’re still instituted by God, and they bear the responsibility of that. That’s on them. Anything that they do that’s wrong, they will bear that responsibility. It doesn’t lessen the existence of the authority.

Romans 13 does say he doesn’t bear the sword in vain. He has the sword. It’s a real sword. It can stab you. He has it. The authority is there and it’s something that God does give to them. If they misuse the sword that they have that is not in vain, then that falls on them. That’s why kingdoms like Ahab’s fall under God’s judgement, because they have abused that authority. It’s why kingdoms like Greece and Babylon and Medo-Persia and Rome all fall eventually, is because of that.

What you were saying reminded me of something from the New Testament, the gospels. When John the Baptist was preaching in the wilderness, various classes of people came to him and Luke gives us some of his very specific answers, and I think they apply here. This is Luke 3:12 –

Then came also publicans to be baptized and said unto him, Master, what shall we do? And he said unto them, Exact no more than that which is appointed you.

He didn’t say, “Well, you’re collecting for Rome. The money you’re collecting is going to fund the lifestyle of that crazy bisexual polytheistic God-hating beast on the throne, and in a few years is going to be turned on Jerusalem and then on the church, so you obviously have to get out of this profession right now.” He didn’t say that. He just said, “Within the scope of your job, don’t steal. Just do the job honestly.”

And that is very black and white, isn’t it?

Yeah. “Here are the schedules set for you by Rome. Don’t take more than you’re supposed to.”

Because they were allowed, or at least not penalized by Rome, for taking more, right?

They didn’t even have to tell Rome.

Oh yeah, they were given a basic amount. “You have to get this, and anything you get above that is yours,” so there would have to be a certain degree of self-judging and self-honesty. “What exactly has been appointed? I’ve got to live. I’ve got to maintain a household,” so that might require some economic and financial thinking and some spiritual honesty. And yet it is, in a sense, pretty black and white. “Stop stealing. Stop robbing the poor. Stop oppressing people. You can have your job. Just do a good honest job at it.”

The government is doing all these things, is oppressing people, but you’re not supposed to.

Don’t join in with what they’re doing.

The next group are soldiers. These are probably soldiers of King Herod, because it’s unlikely that Roman soldiers at this point would ask this question, although they might.

And the soldiers likewise demanded of him, saying, And what shall we do? And he said unto them, Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely, and be content with your wages.

Don’t lie. Don’t envy.

And don’t steal.

And don’t beat up people. It’s real simple kinds of things, but again what he does not say is, “You’re working for Herod. Herod is an apostate pretending to be a Jew. He’s an Edomite. He’s a very wicked man. He’s about to murder John the Baptist. In fact, he’s murderous in his wickedness, and he’s an adulterer and guilty of incest at that, so what do you guys think you’re doing supporting his regime? Obviously you have to quit immediately.” On the other hand, nor does he say, “Well, you need to go back to Herod and bear witness to him of your changed lives and invite him to my preaching.”

In other words, “You have a job. Don’t take the possible advantages that that job may bestow upon you to do evil, to acquire wealth for yourself, or power, or to express your pride and ambition. Serve people. Serve the guys who are over you. Serve the people around you. Don’t beat people up. Don’t lie about them to get stuff,” and interestingly, “be content with your wages. Don’t go on strike.”

In a sense he’s just holding up the Ten Commandments, right? It’s very straightforward.

Yeah, I was going to say he just keeps pointing back.

This is not new material.

There’s that, and that is interesting. It’s not new and it’s not complicated and there’s not some deep dark secret, although they seemed to think there was. But on the other hand, what he doesn’t tell them is equally important. He does not say, “Stop working for Rome. Stop working for Herod. Stop supporting the system. Get out of the system. You have to flee it. That’s worldly.” He does not say those things.

It's possible that some of them did eventually. We know that Matthew left his occupation as a tax collector, but Jesus called him to that very specifically. There’s no evidence that Zacchaeus gave up being a tax collector, though he did make full restitution four-fold for anything he’d ever stolen, then gave away half his goods to the poor on top of that, so the gospel does bring real character change in terms of some very basic commandments that came down from Mt. Sinai. And yet it doesn’t necessarily pull people out of what might seem to be compromised occupations or callings, because God can still use servants even here.

Even if you can’t walk up to your boss and say, “Boss, you got a minute? I want to tell you about Jesus,” – some of us can do that, and some of us would be fired before we got very far. Some of us don’t have to because we work for Christian bosses.

But you would also not want to be stealing time, like witnessing on company time is not what you’re paid for.

Exactly, or doing your Bible study on company time. This is a semi-real example. I know a gentleman who said something like this. “I can get done with my work easily. Everyone else is so lazy and slow. I can get my work done and get it done well and still have this free hour when my work is done, so the temptation is just to use my phone and do some Bible study for about an hour. I finally realized that’s wrong, because I’ve done what was required of me but I’m still being paid. It’s not my time. I should find ways to do more than is expected of me, not just stop at the bare minimum.”

Is it the parable of the talents where the king comes back and says, “You’re a wicked servant because you did only what was asked or only what was required.”

And particularly in the parable of the talents, “You wasted time. I gave you resources and you did nothing, and that time can’t be bought back,” which is a side issue to this whole thing. We don’t all work for Christian employers. We don’t all work in a Christian organization where covenant faithfulness is more or less the norm.

Most of us either do or have at some point worked in organizations where unbelief is the norm. Profit motive drives all. People may be nice, they may not be nice. They may be profane but nice. They may be professing Christians and really vicious. It’s the wheat and tares of life. Sometimes these businesses are doing good and sometimes they’re not, and when it’s the state it’s a mixed bag.

Our school got a call from two nice health officials. They were very nice and polite but basically told us, “Here’s the rules about vaccinations this coming year, and all of your people who have these exemptions, most of them are running out so you need to dis-enroll them if they won’t get them.”

“Thanks so much. We’re glad you were nice about it, but that’s….”

When our church was reopening in the middle of Covid, we were having church and a neighbor reported us, so we got a notice from the local health department, and the guy was nice apparently. “You’ve got to close. You can’t do this. You have too many people meeting in too small an area.” Our pastor tried to explain the precautions we were taking and all that.

“I’m sorry, but the law says you’ve got to close. Thanks,” so the pastor brought it back to spiritual counsel and we were about to debate how we were going to respond, and one of the other elders – and I was thankful that it was another elder and not me – said, “Well, you know, we’ve been told this but no one showed up at the door to put a padlock on it. Why don’t we wait and just see what happens? If they come, that’s one thing. If they don’t, that’s something else maybe.”

So we waited, and about a week later the same guy called back our pastor and said, “Okay, just checking up that you do understand that you were not in compliance and you know what you have to do, right?”

“Yes, you’ve told us.”

“Good. Well, I’m marking this file closed and have a nice day,” and that was that, and we never heard from them again.

It may be that the guy was lazy. It may be that he was a Christian and just protecting us. We have no idea why someone – especially in that period when things were up in the air – would just blindly assume that because he had told us to comply we had, and we didn’t really say we had, and he didn’t really ask us, “Have you complied?” It wasn’t that he was trusting our word. He was just telling us, “I’ve told you and we’re done now.”

“You’ve signed the form that says you received these other forms.”

Pretty much.

That reminds me of Ron Swanson from Parks & Rec a little bit. “Oh yes, I’ve delivered the message. That is the extent of my job description. Have a nice day.”

So here we have a guy, and maybe he was a Christian. Maybe he was just a nice guy who figured, “This is too much hassle. Tell them, then it’s on them and no one is going to check. I’m sure the neighbor has better things to do then come back.”

That’s a bold assumption.

It may have been. He may have been risking something. What if the neighbor did come back and reported it to his superior? We don’t know. There’s so much we don’t know.

You spoke earlier of anti-Nazis within the German organization during WWII. I’m sure every now and then people would run into, “Oh wait, you’re German underground. Oh wait, you have a Jewish grandmother. Oh wait, you’re a Christian pastor? What?”

There were people within the Nazi hierarchy who were very quiet and still could look the other way at just the right time. They didn’t draw attention to themselves, but they made escape and avoidance possible at times, so you don’t know. What good could you do there? We don’t know.

There are some requirements if you’re in that situation. You have to be content to let people believe that you are complicit in all these wicked things.

Yeah, and that can be a hard thing. “I want to say something, but the moment I say something, then…”

“…all the laser sights go on my forehead.”

“And all these people I’ve been helping I won’t be able to help anymore, so where’s the line?”

We’re back to what I think is probably our premise tonight. Where’s the line? It kind of depends. That’s going to be between you and God, based upon your opportunities, your gifts, your calling, where God has placed you, the providential events that have surrounded you.

If God has made it possible for you to help 20 people, that might be a sign that God is going to help you with 20 more. On the other hand, if you tried to help one person and bungled it and almost got your family killed, then maybe you’re not the person to be doing this. It’s hard to say.

Sometimes God’s people do say, “Yes, I almost got my family killed, but I will do it again because this is literally worth dying for,” but that’s a call of conscience. We have to be very, very careful of trying to force that on other people or judging other people in terms of it, especially 10 or 20 years after the fact.

We can be living on our little memories of how great our victories were and how we never backed down and we never denied Christ, and the world has passed us by and gone in different directions, and so has the church, and God is moving in a different way.

We need to look and say, “I did what I did and God will judge me. God will judge them. In the meantime, what’s next? What’s my next assignment? What’s the next move?” We can’t always be living in the past and balancing our choices against other people’s choices. We get to choose in the moment and then commit to God.

All of our works are marred by sin and imperfection, but God receives them for Christ’s sake if done in faith, and sometimes we just have to be content with that, not only for ourselves, where it’s a little easier for most of us, but also for other people. “God is working on him, too, so I leave him to God.”

Another example that I can think of in the week that we’re recording this, we’re about three days after a leak from the Supreme Court regarding their decision regarding the status, efficacy, or legality of Roe v. Wade, which is most famous for being the abortion decision.

I found this really interesting question, which was you have a magic wand and it can give you one of two outcomes. One is the rate of abortion stays the same but it’s illegal, or it stays legal but through whatever other means it’s like 1/10 or even eliminated. Which one do you choose? I’m not a huge fan of those kind of false dilemma things, even with magic wand apparatuses being in view.

Another example that the same person offered forth was you have a spare $100 – you got really good stocks that month or something. Do you spend it on a pro-life politician’s campaign or do you give that $100 to a local pro-life ministry of some sort? Which one is going to have a better effect? Which one is going to actually make the change you want?

Actually, I think the answer is that’s going to depend. It’s not a thing you can say everyone needs to do option 1 or everyone needs to do option 2. In fact, you might even say, “I’m going to take $50 and give it to one, and take $50 and give it to the other, or $75 to one and $25 to the other.”

Or I’m taking my family out to pizza tonight.

Maybe your family needs the pizza. That’s a legitimate option.

It may be that my family has worked really hard serving God this week, and they need a break and they need to rejoice before the Lord. There was this thing called rejoicing tithes.

With regard to your first choice, I do want to make a comment because you brought it up. To declare abortion illegal but not have any major effect, or stop abortions while leaving it legal. I think probably the gut instinct is, “Well, we want to save the babies,” which is completely understandable, and I’m not sure that that’s not what I would choose, but I do want to point this out. There’s something else at stake here besides the lives of those particular babies, and it’s this – a nation in its public policy setting itself against God.

Abortion took place before it was legalized, but the nation and the government were opposed to it and were doing what it could to drive it underground, and it was in a large degree successful.

I’ve heard something like 75% of states had complete bans on it in 1972.

Yeah, but then we turned around and told God, “We’re going to murder babies and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

It’s somehow not his business?

“Well, we have this right to privacy thing, and really God doesn’t have any right to our privacy.” That’s what it means.

That’s what it means, and when we say that covenantally through our elected officials, just because we’re saving the lives of the babies doesn’t mean that they’re not going to be killed when the wars come and the plagues come and God says, “Enough of your apostasy. I’m going to get your attention.”

It’s at least something to consider here, and it’s not a way that most Christians normally do think. I’m not picking a side here. I’m just pointing out the decision may not be as simple as some people think it is.

Absolutely, which is why I brought in the second clarification, because I don’t like either option for those exact reasons, even though I would absolutely love for the number to be zero of abortions. That doesn’t change the fact that if we’re stating, “You can still do this and it would be okay,” that’s wrong. That is something that has deleterious spiritual effects.

And sanctioned covenanted effects. God gets angry.

I’m looking at my notes, and one last thing I see just stepping back. Starting in the late ‘70s with the election of Jimmy Carter and on into the ‘80s we saw for a brief time a big push among fundamentalist evangelical Christians to get back into politics, which is not in itself certainly a bad thing. Obviously you want to put up some caveats, and let’s not confuse America with the church, and God’s law with American tradition and all that. We know that. We’ve got that. But sometimes Christians are a little naïve as to how much effect they can have once they get into office. That’s not to say they can have no effect.

I know a gentleman whose name I will not use on our podcast because he’s got enough political enemies already. If he’s listening, as he may well be – I know his daughter probably is – he’s got enough enemies and doesn’t need any help from me. I know how much as a Christian working behind the scenes in the previous administration he was able to accomplish. He had the president’s ear, and the president was pro-life, and there were a lot of things that they were able to do that never hit the press, because the president is waving his right hand over here, and the left hand is doing something else.

My friend was there and able to get some stuff done, but by and large most young people who get into politics with this vision of, “I’m going to go out there and change the world and never compromise” are sadly disappointed. Even if they remain faithful to their vision and calling, they find out that, 1) the government bureaucracy has an incredibly slow momentum of itself that’s almost impossible to reverse in 4 years or 8 years or 10 years, and 2) that in order to get along you have to get in here and there, and if you’re not going to compromise, your effectiveness is going to be compromised, and such things.

It's hard for one or two or 10 people, however well-intentioned, however dedicated to Christ, to accomplish anything, and then there’s this – the government is lousy at almost everything it does. I mean let’s face it. God gave it a sword and it can be great at blowing up cities, but short of that…

It might even blow up the wrong cities.

It does that on occasion. It’s not terribly competent about much of anything, much less about fixing the culture. So to go to it with the hopes that we’re going to bring about reform from a political point of view or political power and leverage, it’s not really what the gospel ever tells us.

Yes, there are phrases like, “Kings will be your nursing fathers, and queens your nursing mothers, and the kings will bring their glory and honor into Jerusalem” and such, but that’s a little bit of help along the way. That’s not, “So you want to materialize this promise to Abraham? Go become a king and conquer lots of countries.” That’s not the way it works.

Politics doesn’t save anybody, and it doesn’t save any nation, and it doesn’t fix deeply-rooted spiritual and cultural problems. It’s nice to have some people in office who are not insane and not terribly wicked and, if they’re there, stay there and do what you can, but let’s understand that a pastor preaching faithfully to a small flock may have a much, much greater impact on the next generation than someone who gets to be Vice President. That’s just the reality of God’s world.

Obadiah mostly just did stuff that anybody could have done, and he didn’t turn the world upside down, but one thing he did is he risked his life to hide some prophets, who may or may not have survived the purge afterwards when Elijah won, because Elijah is going to say, “I’m the only one left.” Did he not know about them? Or when he won his contest with Baal did they come out in the open? The text isn’t completely clear about that.

So Obadiah did what he could and we remember him, not for how he kept Ahab’s administration running, but that he saved the lives of some preachers, and that’s what God was concerned about.

I think that’s a good place to wrap things up for this call. Let’s do recommendations.

I heard that Emily has one.

I heard that as well.

I do. The rumors are confirmed. My recommendation is the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I’ve been reading it with my 9th-graders and having some really interesting discussions. I’m so proud of them. They’re making connections that I hadn’t made and that’s just something cool about teaching high schoolers.

It’s a very easy-to-read book, maybe not if you’re super into grammar being all correct and formal, but if you’re into a neat story with some really interesting ideas and characters, it’s a good one.

Lovely. I have two. My first one is the more serious of the two, which is I’m going to recommend that you not make false red-herring confusing and unbiblical shibboleths for what constitutes Christian action.

This sounds like a sub-tweet.

It partially is. I’m going to leave it at that. Let’s just say that when we turn anything outside of truth that we find in scripture into a measure of faithfulness, we’re on very dangerous ground.

My second recommendation is a wonderful essay that I found, and I must admit that I’m only about six pages into it because of lack of time, but the concept is very good so far. It’s called “A Mathematician’s Lament” and the author is Paul Lockhart. It’s very funny because the intro is two nightmares – one that is had by a musician and one that is had by an artist.

The musician’s nightmare is, “Music is mandatory. Everyone has to study music, but of course we need them to understand the sheet music first, and that’s the most important thing. They can’t understand anything about music unless they know that. Maybe once they’ve gone through all of their elementary and junior high and high school and maybe some of their first college classes, then maybe we’ll hand them a choral piece or an instrument and then they can really start to do the practical parts of it. But for the most part we just want them to understand this sheet music.”

And the artist, of course, has a nightmare of a world where all art is well-funded. It’s mandatory. They have AP art classes, AP paint-by-number classes, because really it’s all about the methods you use, and really at the end you still get the nice picture. You maybe won’t even get to see a blank canvas for art until you’re in your Ph.D. thesis for art.

What he basically says is, “That sounds really bad, doesn’t it? Well, we’re doing that with math. The way we teach math is completely devoid of the beauty of it as an artistic endeavor. We’re really mainly concerned about teaching people how to do the things we’ve already figured out,” and it’s very interesting.

As I’ve said, I’m only six pages in and it’s a 25-page document in the PDF that I have as a source, but we need to have a better idea of how to look at math as a subject, because no wonder people find it boring and stale and mechanical. It’s because we’re looking at it as if it’s a piece of mechanism.

“Some mechanisms are beautiful,” says the math teacher.

What you’ve said has given me two ideas, and they’re both rather abstract. One, like you, is a recommendation of what not to do. You said let’s not establish as shibboleths things that are outside scripture. I’m going to say let’s not take 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 arbitrary things in scripture and set them apart as, “These are the things that we really need to emphasize if we really want to change things or be spiritual or make a difference or have a successful church,” or whatever your particular goal might be.

Basically, the mentality is that God has some secrets and the church by and large has ignored them. Maybe some previous generation like the Reformers or the Puritans or the Victorians or the Founding Fathers or somebody found some basic principles and ideas. If we just readopted those and emphasized those, then we could change everything.

Well, you know, worldviews and religions and faith don’t work that way. They don’t come in bits and pieces. That’s not to say that some ministry can’t take one particular thing and see it as its strength. For instance, Ken Hamm does a wonderful job with Creation, but he knows that’s not all there is to the faith. That’s his strength and he manages to maintain balance. You can look at other people who emphasize other things and they say, “I’m emphasizing this because it’s my calling and strength, not because this is all there is to Christianity.”

But sometimes neophytes will come along and say, “Oh, this guy – he’s so great, he’s so fascinating, he keeps talking about these 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 things. That’s what it must all be about.” No, he knows a whole lot more than you do. He’s talking about these things because he’s making some points. He’s already assuming everything else you’re supposed to know and don’t yet, so knock it off.

Quit going for just the few things, and learn the whole scope and beauty of the Christian faith. It’s not nuts and bolts. It’s not rods and levers. It is an organic thing energized by the Spirit of God and coming together in the person of Jesus. When we start doing that, we basically dehumanize and undeify Jesus. Usually what happens is we push him aside in pursuit of our principles, so there’s that.

The second thing, and this is coming out of some personal experiences I won’t go into, but again it kind of aligns with what you’re talking about I think, my recommendation is to read broadly. We all for our callings or for our interests read particular things or particular areas because we like them. We enjoy them. We’re good at them. They fascinate us for right now and maybe for a lifetime, but most people are sensible enough to know that there is more to life, so act on that a little bit and read beyond what you normally read.

People who know me or kind of know me probably think I do a lot of reading in sci-fi and fantasy. I don’t. Both those genres mostly bore me and irritate me more than anything else, with a few exceptions. Enjoying Lord of the Rings and Narnia is not an excuse to read every fantasy novel or series by every unbelieving hack writer of the 20th century. And classic sci-fi with all of its details and mechanics – I don’t know, it’s not that interesting to me, honestly.

I’m a mystery buff. I read mystery stories, and generally British cozies. Five or six people in a small village were in one room, and you have the detective and all that.

This week I was reading for teaching my class Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, and I had forgotten what a beautiful book it is. I mean you are stuck in the mind of a murderer, so there’s that, but that’s a different kind of experience. I found myself actually thinking, “Oh, I could pick up my mystery novel. No, wait, Crime and Punishment sounds like more fun right now. Whoa, what did I just say?”

It’s a mystery of a sort.

It is, but that’s not what’s pulling me in as such, although maybe there’s something there. I should think about that. Meanwhile, the members of my family are reading all kinds of books on all kinds of subjects and everybody finds something interesting. We find out that there’s more to life than even theology.

Here amongst us as we talk, we bring up theology books and we certainly try to center everything around scripture itself, but I think if you went back and did some kind of auto-search on all of our comments on titles and authors you’d probably find that most of it is not theology. It’s everything else because it gives us a place for our theology to go, and gives us ways of illustrating and developing our theology.

When I say theology, we’re talking about knowing God. You know God better when you know his world better and when you know other people better, and one way to get at that is to not just read your devotional books, but to read other things as well. But don’t stop reading the Bible. Don’t sacrifice that.

I think that’s one of the reasons why a lot of blatantly Christian media of the past 30-40 years is bad because they’re like, “Well, we can’t just tell a story about life. It has to have a devotional evangelistic quality to it or else it can’t be considered Christian.” That’s a weird closing note to end on, but we’ll go ahead with it.

Thank you all so much for joining me for this conversation. It was wonderful. Thank you to our listeners for joining us for this episode. We hope you join us for more, if you don’t already.

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