Elijah's Job
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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 along the way. I’m your host this evening, Bryan Broome, and I’m joined by Greg Uttinger and Emily Maxson.
Tonight we’re going to be talking more about Elijah. I’m happy to be here for it. There’s been no gnome kidnappings this evening.
Not today. Greg, why don’t you start us off. Give us some context again and we’ll jump into it.
The context goes back a bit. As we’ve looked at this we’ve kept saying, “What? Another Elijah article?” Yeah, okay. There’s a long train of thought here because there’s a long history.
It begins when Ahab of Israel marries Jezebel of Phoenicia and they introduce Baal worship, which is nature worship. The basic idea is that the state serves as a social engineer, using magic to stimulate nature and produce a healthy economy, good crops, fertility of man and beast, and all of that.
God was not happy with this and, in response to Elijah’s prayers, God tells him to go say, “No rain till I say so,” and so for 3-1/2 years there’s been no rain. Since Baal worship showcased the thunder god Baal, this is bad press for Baal. He doesn’t seem to be able to do his stuff, which is a threat to the monarchy because if the king can’t get Baal to do stuff, then maybe the king shouldn’t be king. So with that in mind, Ahab has been looking for Elijah and God says, “All right, it’s time. Go show yourself,” and Elijah has called for a contest between the prophets of Baal and himself.
It’s set on Mount Carmel, which is Baal’s backyard. It’s Phoenician territory. It’s up high, so the clouds are nearby. Baal is the thunder god, so the contest is, “Call fire from heaven. Bring a lightning strike. You have lots of prophets so you go first,” so all the home court advantages, but nothing happens.
After lots of yelling, “Oh Baal, hear us Baal, hear us, oh Baal Baal Baal, hear us, oh Baal, oh Baal” for three hours or better, then Elijah starts mocking up. “You can go for another three hours until the time of the evening sacrifice.” Then Elijah calls time and just goes and talks to the Lord. He talks to Yahweh and says, “Show them I’m your prophet. This is your word, and you’re moving here,” and God sends fire from heaven and all the people yell, “The Lord, he is God.”
It seems like win-win-win. Everybody is jumping on the bandwagon. Elijah is able to execute the prophets of Baal without any interference – in fact, with a little help. Ahab is cowed. Rain returns because Elijah prays, or God uses Elijah’s prayers to send the rain. Everything is great. A personal, active, sovereign God who works by covenant has intervened to reclaim the hearts of his people. What could possibly go wrong…go wrong…go wrong.
Well, Jezebel sends a message to Elijah that says, “You are so dead,” and Elijah goes from a mountaintop experience to bottom of the valley and runs. He runs all the way out of Israel, through Judah, into the wilderness, and he sets his sights on Mount Horeb/Mount Sinai.
When he shows up there he has a very simple message for God that he’s worked really hard on, because he’s memorized it. He says it twice exactly the same and it amounts to, “This didn’t work.” He’s come back to the very place where Moses received the law to tell God, “This whole covenant structure has absolutely failed. We gave it our best shot. You sent fire from heaven. I’ve been faithful and persecuted. I’m the only one left. Let’s just call it a day.”
God ignores all that and says, “Go stand in the mountain” and Elijah sees and experiences fire, tempest, and earthquake, and they are all terrible and mountain-shaking. Yet each time he notes God was not in the fire, God was not in the earthquake, God was not in the tempest. Then a still small voice, and Elijah stands in awe and the voice says, “What are you doing here?” and Elijah does the same thing again. That’s what we’ve seen so far.
There are a number of messages here. We get that Jehovah, that Yahweh is not a nature god. He’s not a puny little finite god who can be manipulated with magic. He is sovereign. There’s still something going on here, though.
We have a tendency in our selfishness, pride, and laziness and our desire for simple comforts, especially we Americans in the 21st century, to think that means, “Oh, now God’s going to do everything our way. He’s just going to step right in with revival and cultural transformation, and everyone’s going to start tithing, and everyone’s going to go out and evangelize, and it’s just going to be so great because God’s sovereign. So now everyone will do what they’re supposed to do, and my work is done here. I can sit back with a mint julep and relax.”
What Elijah has to understand is a couple things. First, special effects don’t change the heart. We’ve been pounding on that for months or years now in this podcast. Special effects don’t change the heart. Yes, they saw the fire fall. It didn’t do anything, any more than originally when God gave the law at Sinai. There was tempest and there was fire and there was earthquake and other things, and the people still had a religious orgy celebrating a golden cow in the middle of all of that.
You get used to the special effects, however big and terrifying and wonderful they are, and you go right back to your sins. They hear not Moses and the prophets. They will not believe the one who rose from the dead.
Secondly, the Mosaic law was never designed to do that, because these are the images of Sinai. God gave the law knowing full well that the law in and of itself does not work grace, does not work conversion, does not bring in the millennium, does not change people’s hearts.
There was nothing wrong with what he gave Israel. The problem is that Israel was a sinful unbelieving nation. Finding fault with them, Jeremiah says, he began to speak of a new covenant. The problem wasn’t the old covenant. It did what it could do, was not much, given the hardness of the human heart. It pointed to Jesus. That was the main thing it did.
Now, that’s the first bit. Now the last little bit. “I’ve learned my lesson. I’ve learned not to trust in special effects. I’ve learned gospel, not law. So now you’re going to change everything, right?” and that’s where we pick it up, and this is what the text says.
Elijah has just repeated his covenant lawsuit against God, saying it didn’t work, and God says simply –
And the LORD said unto him, Go, return on thy way to the wilderness of Damascus…
…and when thou comest, anoint Hazael to be king over Syria. And Jehu the son of Nimshi shalt thou anoint to be king over Israel, and Elisha the son of Shaphat of Abelmeholah shalt thou anoint to be prophet in thy room. And it shall come to pass that him that escapeth the sword of Hazael shall Jehu slay, and him that escapeth from the sword of Jehu shall Elisha slay.
That’s internal civil war and foreign invasion, and that’s covenant lawyer prophets calling for more covenant lawsuits to denounce Israel’s sin more thoroughly and call down more of the same.
No. I mean, that sounds so amillennial or something. It sounds like, “Victory? Yeah, victory? Messiah?”
You can so relate to Elijah. It’s like, “Okay, I figured out what I was supposed to do, Lord. Now just make everybody else do what they’re supposed to do and everything will be fine.”
“Yeah, just everyone get their act together. I figured it out. They can. I’ll go back and explain it maybe.” He’s still back at, “They’ve broken your covenant, killed your prophets, denied your word, and I’m the only one left.”
Sometimes in our complaining, God does not step right in with a theological explanation of where we’re wrong. And sometimes when we find someone who’s our responsibility, our flock, our child, our student, sometimes trying to step in and argue the theology is not necessarily always the thing that needs to happen.
Sometimes it seems like the theology sorts itself out after you’ve been through the heart change. The Lord shows you a truth in your heart before you can articulate it, and he does that by refining fire.
Refining fire and, “I have some things I want you to do.” Back in my previous school there were a couple of girls who were having boy trouble. These were high-school students. They were having boy trouble. One of the moms came and took them home so they could talk about their boy trouble.
When their teacher heard about that he said, “You know, they should have stayed and done algebra. There’s nothing better than some algebra for boy trouble.”
And that’s kind of the point here. Sometimes we just need to get back to work. This is a good lesson for young parents with kids. Your kid’s grumpy and depressed and just wants to laze around? Go have him weed the garden. Go have him paint something. Go have him collect the garbage. Go have him mow the widow’s lawn next door. Sometimes we just need to get up and get busy.
Yes, it is, isn’t it. At the beginning of this when Elijah was depressed, God did not immediately address him. In fact, he made him take a nap, twice, and gave him food. He did not engage. He did not reprimand. He did not particularly encourage. He just said, “You’re going on a long journey and you don’t have the strength for it. Here, have some food. Now, take a nap. Go to bed.”
Man is body and soul, and sometimes we need to tend to the outer man before the inner man is ready to listen.
Like James says, you can’t say, “Go in peace. Be warmed and fed,” when you haven’t actually warmed and fed them.
The interesting thing just in passing is that Elijah only does one of the three. He never gets around to the others. He’s busy. God has things for him to do, other chores, and so he eventually delegates these to Elisha, who does fulfill them. We need to look at what these tasks were, what they implied, and why there’s not a clearer mark of hope.
Let me just say this while it’s in my head. Sometimes when we talk about hope, especially eschatologically – “All kings shall bow down before him. All nations shall serve him. Go and make disciples of all nations. All families shall be blessed…”
“Oh, that means within 20 years the whole world is going to be Christian!” No, that’s not what that means remotely. Long perspective. Sometimes it’s better just to say, “You know what? It’s going to get really tough for a very long time, and your grandchildren may see the other side of this.”
“It’s part of God’s plan. It’s accurate. You think God doesn’t know what he’s doing?”
What’s going on here is we have to trust God when the moves he makes and the cards he plays look to us like a complete surrender, complete disaster, like he’s taking five steps back and it’s not the way we would do it.
We look at our particular ministry. “If only God would have blessed! Everything was set. It was key. We had the right people at the right time. If God had just poured out his blessing here…but we crashed and burned after three weeks. What was that all about? Where was God? What’s God thinking? Didn’t he know we could change the world?”
Part of the problem is probably the pride there in thinking that God couldn’t do it without you.
There’s two connected points to that. One, you can think of how many broader evangelical but also a handful of Reformed-ish mega-churches led by a personality have crashed and burned because they essentially thought, “We’re the ones that are changing the world for the better. It’s all us and God is so lucky to have us.”
Then also, not directly related to that point, is going back to what you were saying about sometimes you just need to be prepared for a long haul of what looks like defeat. I feel I am particularly equipped as the podcast’s representative amillennial, but I respect people who come to their different conclusions from mine.
I don’t respect people who then change their supposed convictions brought on by scripture because the news turned bad for a week and they start to question their post-millennialism or they start to question their amillennialism and think, “Maybe post-millennials are onto something and I should think about them because X, Y, and Z happened in politics.”
“Let’s get our eschatology from the newspapers, because that’s always worked so well.”
I have always found that funny, that people will look at the news and be like, “Oh yeah, #datpostmill.” It’s like in different words you’re doing exactly what you claim dispensationalists are doing erroneously.
We need to, like you said, really keep that long-term perspective and not look from week to week. I mean we can look at things and say, “Hey, there’s hope here.” I can do that without being post-millennial as well.
I think you need to address the pan-millennials because I feel left out of this conversation.
I feel like a- and pan- are friends, really close friends. They’re almost the same.
Sometimes the problem is that we have labels. I’m all for labels in their place, but sometimes when a label can mean five or six different things it ceases to be helpful. There’s a lot of labels that I kind of warmed to when I was younger, never really wholly embraced them but if you’d asked me, if I get to define it, sure.
I’m even hesitant to say Calvinist or Reformed anymore because of what people think that means. I’m still using covenantal, but that will probably go the way of all flesh, too, and end up with just ‘biblical.’
“Oh, that’s cheap. Everyone thinks they are.” Well, at least it’s a good thing to think. That’s something. When I say biblical I mean it’s what the Bible says as opposed to what the newest neo-orthodox theologian says, so at least it’s got a little context.
I think the best label you could ever claim is, “I’m not a 20th-century liberal theologian.”
What you said, Bryan, about thinking we’re indispensable reminds me of Schaeffer’s commentary on Joshua, where he talks about how Moses was special, he was picked out, and then Moses died and God was okay with that. He wasn’t taken by surprise. He kind of actually planned it and told Moses what was up, so he had prepared Joshua. Moses wasn’t the be-all end-all.
Every other prophet up until Jesus, everyone was like, “Is this the next Moses?” Moses was the benchmark for the prophet of God, and he still died. He still had the wages of sin against him because he was human and not the Messiah. That’s probably the most important take-away we could ever tell you is that no one except Jesus is the Messiah, so don’t think that you’re indispensable.
The three tasks, let’s look at them probably briefly because they’re pretty straightforward.
“Go to Syria and anoint the next king of Syria, Hazael.” We find out later that Hazael is not in the established line. The kings of Syria bore the title ben-Hadad, son of Hadad, which was their god. Hazael was a retainer in the court, and when Elisha comes and says, “God says you get to be the next king,” Hazael took that as permission to commit regicide, killed his king, and took the throne. God didn’t say to do it that way.
Yes, exactly, but the point is that Syria was not Israel. They were not God’s covenant people. God had not sent them prophet after prophet. They had no special relationship with Jehovah. The only connection was they were the nation to the north. They were the long-term enemies. A good deal of I and II Kings is Israel and Syria attacking each other back and forth. Then right at the end they decide, “Oops, Assyria is even a greater threat. Let’s get on the same side,” and that doesn’t save either of them, and that’s that.
But here is God sending a prophet to a pagan nation saying, “I’m picking your next king,” and as it turns out it’s going to be regicide, and the people of Syria don’t get a vote. The king doesn’t get a vote. Even the guy who’s going to be king – he didn’t ask him if he wants to be. He’s going to be king. God expresses complete sovereignty with respect to a pagan nation and does not apologize because they haven’t covenanted with him, so what’s God doing in there poking around? They don’t believe in him. How can God possibly tell them what to do?
We sometimes get the idea that God is desperately looking for a few good men to be rulers of the planet, and the problem is he can’t find any.
But he doesn’t even say that. He just picks a bad guy and puts him on the throne.
Here’s the next thing, and we get this from what follows. “Well, at least you put somebody there who will be nice to Israel, right?”
No, as a matter of fact, he put someone there with the deliberate purpose of having them invade and destroy Israel. “Um, wait. My Jesus isn’t like that, though.”
“Yeah, your Jesus might not be, but this Jesus is. This is what Jesus is doing here.”
Don’t we all know that Jesus is so different from the God of the Old Testament. Wait, Marcionism!
Yes, Marcionism. For those of you who don’t know that, it was an early Gnostic who renounced the Old Testament as a different kind of religion ruled over by a God who was basically a bully, and then Jesus came along and God became a Christian and things were better.
It’s very often, unfortunately, how the Old Testament is taught. So that’s the first thing.
The second thing is, “Go and anoint Jehu, the son of Nimshi, to be king over Israel.”
At least we’re in Israel. We’re among the covenant people, but Jehu was not in the royal line. He was not in the line of David. The line of David ruled south in Judah. He was a captain. He was a warrior. So far so good, but basically by anointing him you are committing Israel to civil war and revolution. You’re telling a general, “Go assassinate your king, his family, and everybody else who might possibly be involved in that. Oh, and wipe out one particular religion in the process.”
Not in heaven, not even in hell, technically, because people are there in hell because they picked the wrong religion, and God continues to remind them of that – and on earth. No, Jesus is the truth, the life, the way.
So that, but also again political revolution. You know what happens when there’s a revolution. People die. Fortunes are lost. Families are destroyed. Cities are burned.
Blood runs in the streets. It’s not nice, and yet this is what God commissioned Elijah to put in motion.
So once again we’re left with, “But this is not the God I know and this is not the way God should be doing this. I mean, think of Jonah.”
Yeah, if Elijah had gone like Jonah to Syria and all of Syria had converted, and then God had installed a godly man on the throne who would dismiss the prophets of Baal and have them leave the country and reinstate Jehovah worship, that would be so cool and wonderful, and it would so prepare the world for the coming of Messiah.
He did that with Nineveh. There’s that wonderful line in Narnia, which is not scripture, where Aslan says, “You don’t get to hear somebody else’s story.” That’s not how he works. He’s telling your story with your life.
Then thirdly, “Go appoint the next prophet.” Elijah probably liked that one, actually, because he wants to quit so, “Set up your retirement plan now. Move early, move soon.” We’re not told if he knew who Elisha was, but he’s told the town, and since Elisha was from a wealthy family it wouldn’t have been hard to find the man.
It turns out that Elisha is in fact a very godly man who’s ready to jump at the word of the Lord, so when Elijah finds him and gets to know him, I’m sure there’s a great deal of encouragement, things that aren’t said in scripture, because Elijah in the end just entrusts everything to Elisha and he finishes the mission that Elijah doesn’t, because Elijah is not long for this world. God’s going to take him home because he’s about done.
But the good news is that when Elijah goes, God has an adequate replacement, kind of like the Moses/Joshua thing, who will do what God needs done. So Elijah can lay down his burden, his calling, knowing that whatever it is that God wants done, in particular these tasks, there will be someone to do it.
When you begin a ministry or are part of a small ministry, and you see it begin and you’ve worked to build it up, there does come the day when you’re ready to retire or you’re being moved or transferred or something, and the temptation is to worry. “I spent all this energy building this thing up. It was so important. God has used it so much, and now if I leave – I mean these are all good people, but I’m not sure I trust them to continue the vision.” It’s not your vision.
Yeah, and sometimes we have to let go. The Puritan, John Cotton, preached a sermon called “The Way of Life.” In written form it’s a long essay, typical Puritan, point 1, point 1 under 1, use 1 under point 1…
Yeah, but after talking about what a warrantable calling is and how you find your calling and how you live in your calling by faith, he ends with “and how you lay down your calling,” because sometimes that’s the hard one.
That can be with, say, a Christian school or a pastor having to leave a church or some other ministry, or it can be with parents having to let their kids go out on their own. “How are they going to do it if they don’t follow all the things I set up for them to follow?”
“Well, yes, but they’re not doing this and this that was always so important to us. They’re not really doing that. I don’t know.”
“Yeah, you don’t have to. It’s not your concern. You’ve done what you’re supposed to do. You can keep on praying, but ultimately you trust God. You let it go.” That’s one Disney movie I never thought I would keep quoting, but sometimes it just applies. You have to let it go sometimes.
It took me a while to try to figure out, and then it was pretty easy, what was meant by the sword of Elisha. So often when you think of a sword with respect to a prophet you’re talking about the Word of God, and that can be conversion and that could be good, but that’s not the flow of what’s going on here.
In Hosea, who also ministered to Israel in the north, God in summing up the work of the prophet says, “Therefore I have hewed them by my prophets. I have slain them by the words of my mouth.” He’s not talking about conversion and revival. Israel never experienced that. He’s talking about the prophets calling down covenant lawsuits, calling down covenant sanctions, which produced more of the same – more internal revolution, more anarchy, more plague, more foreign invasion, more famine.
Far from being people who come with happy messages of revival and renewal, the prophets in Israel almost uniformly spoke of judgement in their day. Now, they pointed beyond their day, and in the last days a lot of important things were going to happen, a lot of happy good things, but they never put it on a timeline. “Well, when are the last days?” It’s just left, “When Messiah comes.” “When’s that?” So this is an unmitigated message of judgement.
We love our neighbors. We love our cities. I love California, despite everything, but I’d love to see revival on a massive scale. I’d love to see revival in California’s churches, let alone in the secular surrounding culture. I don’t know that God’s going to do that, and right now it looks like very possibly he will be doing exactly the opposite, because things have continued to decline.
People are leaving the state. There are new versions of plagues and diseases. San Francisco is rampant with all kinds of disgusting things, morally and medically. People are flocking away from San Diego, once the garden spot of the country.
Is there a stopping point? Will God intervene? Will God send revival? I don’t know. I know God is very much at the move all over the world. We keep hearing little reports here and there from obscure countries where revival is taking place, but around here, I don’t know.
But it’s one thing for me to look at the world. It’s another thing when I start realizing that I know lots of people who live in California, Christians, brothers and sisters, people I love, and they’re having to go through all of this, and some of them aren’t going through this. They’re leaving. Idaho, Tennessee, and Florida – Tennessee especially – are getting all kinds of my old friends, because right now that seems like better places for them.
But there’s something along those lines that Elijah had missed, something he did not know, because twice now he has said, first to Israel and then to God, “I’m the only one left.” Assuming that wasn’t pure hyperbole, or even if it was largely hyperbole, he honestly thought there weren’t any worshipers of Jehovah left, and his last shot was that mountaintop thing.
That’s likely, but there was one other possibility, that when the victory was announced the prophets came out in the open, then Jezebel killed them. So we don’t know. It’s not clear whether Elijah is just ranting senselessly or whether things had actually gotten worse, and it doesn’t matter for the point of what God is saying. Things were bad enough, and yet God says this –
Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him.
Seven thousand who have never given in to Baal worship. At first it’s like, “Wow, 7,000.” I mean, that’s not huge. The little town I grew up in was about 6,000 people. 7,000 is not huge. Symbolically, 7 x 1000, that’s a number of completeness and fullness.
“There really are that many people left – people who have not compromised one whit, people like me? Wow, that is really cool. Wait a second. First, I just called for a famine that last 3-1/2 years, and all these people, these 7,000 brothers and sisters, they had to live through that famine.”
There were no special rainstorms for the elect. There’s no note that God somehow imported food and water for 7,000 people on some kind of special freedom train. “They went through everything the ungodly went through when I prayed for famine, when I prayed for drought. Huh. Oh wait, so I’m now being commissioned to start a series of revolutions and wars in the north, and those 7,000 are going to go through all of it.”
Now, individually God may spare a life here or there. God may sneak a family down into Judah where they’re safe, and yet overall by and large these people are going to suffer. They’re going to experience tribulation. All the fallout we described earlier of war and anarchy and revolution, they’re going to go through this and I don’t know where it ends.
That’s a sobering thought, I should think. You call for judgement and then suddenly realize, “Oh, but there’s no rapture for the saints.”
Dispensationalism has thrived in this country so long because people – evangelical Christians – have been convinced that the rapture means they will never see tribulation. When I was in about 7th or 8th grade, I was talking to the guy who sat in the desk in front of me in school, and I don’t remember what we were talking about or how it came up. We didn’t normally talk about Bible prophecy, for sure, but I mentioned something about the church going through the tribulation, and he said, “What? Why? Then what’s the point of being saved?”
Now, he’s a 12-year-old kid, give or take. He can be forgiven for thinking like that, but he picked up that idea someplace from his elders, from his church, one of the largest Baptist churches in the Redding area. “We’re being saved so that we don’t have to ever suffer tribulation. Since we’re not going through the Great Tribulation, we’re never going to go through any kind of tribulation, and that’s why you have to come to Christ now. You have to be living like people aren’t going to be around much longer, so that you never have to suffer or live an uncomfortable life.”
Also inversely in a weird way, it’s part of what pushes them toward political action as well. Everything is a threat to the gospel. Everything is a threat to the safety that you think you’ve won, so you need to be extremely involved in politics and vote for the right people and be involved and push for XYZ. There’s certainly a good level of that kind of engagement to be had, but it sort of becomes the unintended tack-on to the gospel.
What happened historically in America from the time of Scopes trial forward is that the church, having for many decades pushed for reforms that were not particularly biblical, but they were done in the name of Jesus nonetheless, realized that on this one blatant thing – evolution, as it appears in the public marketplace and the school – the church lost.
I mean yes, Scopes was convicted and had to pay $10 or something – I don’t remember what the fine was – but the church was a laughingstock. The leading Christian representative, William Jennings Bryant, looked like an idiot, and Christians said, in light of their dispensationalism, “Well, that was stupid. That was pointless. Obviously Satan runs the world. Satan runs politics. Now he’s running education. Evolution is just going to take over. What that means, of course, is Jesus is coming back really, really soon!” And from there until Jimmy Carter’s election, the church stayed out of politics because the world belonged to Satan.
Jimmy Carter, the man from Plains, Georgia who will never lie to you, was born again and that was enough to get a lot of Christians to the polls. “Born again, we know those words. Chuck Colson had written a book called Born Again. We know what that’s all about, so we should vote for this guy.”
They never asked what in the world Jimmy Carter meant by born again. It turns out later he said, “It means there’s a little spark of divinity in all of us,” but that at least opened up the church so when Ronald Reagan comes along we see yet another – this time the issue is abortion, and that seems a little less negotiable because now babies are dying.
That little bit of success kind of switched channels for us for a little while and gave us what you’ve been talking about. Yes, the gospel is important but now particularly if we can deal a couple of death blows to some of the major cultural villains, then that’s the hallmark of revival.
It’s kind of a throwback to the early era, where if we can bring about revivals then we bring about the Millennium, and the gospel kind of recedes into the background yet again.
We do have to remember that Reagan is standing against the evil empire, which is validly against Jesus Christ, so there’s kind of a mixed bag here.
Yes, but the interesting thing was that this time that was okay. Before it had been, “Well, the evil empire Russia is going to invade Israel, and that signals Armageddon so you can’t really stop that. Let it go!”
That time, because the climate was a little bit different intellectually and different forces were in play, there was a temporary cultural optimism of “we can make a difference,” but it didn’t last. Someone like Jerry Falwell, who helped create the whole idea of the Moral Majority and Christians getting back into politics and things like that, he did his best according to his lights to lead the movement for a while, but in the end it wasn’t him. It wasn’t his cup of tea and he backed off and the thing disintegrated because there is no moral majority. Political action, although it has its place, does not change the hearts of men, which is of course what we’re talking about here.
There’s one thing political action can do. It can absolutely destroy a country if it’s the wrong sort, and that’s what Elijah is being told. “Set in motion political action that will absolutely destroy Israel,” and we don’t even get as far as Assyria. We get through Syria. “Okay, so when Syria is done it all gets better!”
No, then this war monster called Assyria shows up and Israel goes into captivity. “And then?” Yeah, about that. “What? What happens?” Well, Israel as a nation never exists again. “The remnant? Those 7,000?” God has a plan for them.
None of this gets explained now. It’s only with the coming of the New Testament that we begin to see what God was doing. See, all those people? Most of them are just going to get mixed in with the nations and lost to history, but out of that remnant, those who are faithful, those who cling to the God of Israel, when the Restoration comes some will return with those returning from Judah, and will come back and be that one nation that waits for Jesus.
Some won’t. They’ll be out there. They’ll be hanging out with their brothers from Judah and Benjamin and Levi and they’ll form synagogues all over the Babylonian empire, all over the Greek empire, all over the Roman empire, so that when it comes time for Paul and the others to go preaching, every city will have a synagogue, a landing place, a home base for the apostles to begin their ministry, to begin introducing the Gentiles to the Messiah who’s come.
That’s not the plan anybody saw. “You’re going to scatter us among the nations, bring a few of us back so we’re here to crucify the Son of God and then repent, and then become the nucleus of a church, and then the rest you’re going to leave out there and they’re going to be places where the apostles can stop and get a little bit of support, a little bit of money, and a bed for the night so they can go preach Christ to the Gentiles? Do we get to vote on whether or not we want to be part of that plan?”
In fact, again, God does not even tell them. All he tells them really is things are going to be very bad for a long time. He doesn’t recant any of his earlier promises. Messiah is still coming. All nations will be blessed, but it’s going to take longer than you think. It’s not going to happen the way you planned. And what you thought would be the greatest way in the world for God to do this is a way that’s not even part of his plan remotely. Do you have the humility and faith to embrace that and to wait on a sovereign God who is so much wiser than you, there’s no comparison?
That’s hard because 1) we think we know best, and 2) we like our comfort. “But I want to always have my house with its air conditioning and running water and indoor plumbing, and a car, and food in the refrigerator, and a Costco nearby. Aren’t these automatic things that come with being a Christian, or at least being an American Christian?” They’re not.
And even to go back to what you were talking about, how the judgement that Elijah called down on Israel affected 7,000, the other bright side to that – and it ties into what you were just saying there kind of in closing, I think – is that they went through all of that. They went through the 3-1/2 years of famine. They went through the persecution by Ahab and Jezebel, and they remained faithful by God’s grace. God brought them through that tribulation. The sheer fact that you are even potentially going to experience some kind of tribulation in your lifetime does not mean that God is somehow not holding on to you.
It’s just that’s not how we visualize it, which means we need to shift our visualizations a good deal, preferably before the tribulation comes. And if the tribulation doesn’t come and God sends mass revival and all your neighbors are pounding on your door saying, “Tell us about Jesus!” – well, wonderful, awesome, great!
Yes. But if he chooses another path, at least we won’t be surprised and our faith will be ready for some hard things, or at least know that it ought to be ready for some hard things.
We’re still in the middle of Kings. There’s a long way to the end of 2 Kings from where we are, so we have lots of stories still to tell and history to follow, but here in the middle of it we’re being taught what it means to say God is sovereign – not only that he can do what he wants, but he can do what we didn’t want, and it’s okay.
That’s a good spot to end. Thank you so much for this discussion. Do we have any recommendations?
Yes. I think I recommended Tortured for Christ already on a recent episode.
Good, because it’s relevant but I don’t want to repeat myself, so I have a different recommendation and that is a physical record player, CD, or tape player in your house. I love Spotify. I pay for Spotify Premium because I use it all the time and ads are annoying, but I not too recently acquired a boom box, except with a record player. It does all the things.
Recommendation: A physical record playerIt’s just so nice to be able to measure time physically. I feel like it’s a different sort of nice thing to have in your life, especially in the center of your home to kind of be like, “This is what we’re doing right now.” It’s a little bit more grounded than pulling something up on the internet, as great as it is to be able to do that.
That’s totally irrelevant, totally a luxury, totally nothing to do with suffering for the name of Christ, but I think it’s really great to have a record player, and it brings the home together audibly.
People keep asking me if I’m having a good year teaching. I’m having a fantastic year teaching. I have had far less to do. I’m finally at the point where most of my classes are scoped out and the outlines are done and when I come home I don’t have a lot I have to do, so I’ve gotten back into reading. And as I’ve said before, my favorite reads are mystery stories.
First I went back and re-read all the Agatha Christie stories, whose plots I couldn’t remember anymore, and it was surprising how many I couldn’t remember anymore unless we’d seen a movie version in the last five years or so. But having done that, I then went to Ngaio Marsh, who is a New Zealand author who wrote English mysteries nonetheless – cozy, kind of like Agatha Christie – and that was kind of fun. She always ties things into artsy stuff.
I went to her partly because I didn’t want to go back to Dorothy Sayers, because I looked at my copies of Dorothy Sayers and they looked frigid. They looked culturally bound to a different time, place, and everything. The covers really did not inspire me. But finally, having exhausted everything else that I could read in my library – that I didn’t want to read even less than Dorothy Sayers – I said, “Okay, I will pick up a copy of Dorothy Sayers and I will see what’s going on with her.” I so had forgotten what she writes like. I just remember there were some things about her writing style I didn’t like.
I was tremendously blessed, for lack of a better word. I enjoyed it a great deal. I found out that she is a superb writer, that she does not take herself too seriously, that she does sometimes write tongue-in-cheek, that sometimes she winks at you and you say, “Wait, you’re supposed to be writing a story and you’re not supposed to acknowledge there’s a reader here,” and she doesn’t care.
I also found that she is one of these…I’m sure other people would say annoying people, but they’re the kind of people I like…who along the way drop every little thing they’ve ever learned anywhere about anything. I mean, she has her characters – not just the hero, but other characters, because a lot of the people are upper class – talking in Latin cliches, Greek cliches, quoting Shakespeare, quoting Wordsworth, quoting the prayer book with wild abandon.
I remember one section where she comments, “And he didn’t seem to respond. Perhaps it was because he didn’t approve of what the prayer book was saying, or possibly because he had not read the prayer book in a very long time.” It was like, “I feel like I’m talking to educated people who read the kind of stuff I read and enjoy it!”
So if you love books, you love reading, you love the broader culture of Western civilization and Anglo-American civilization, and just want to have a fun romp with a mystery story, I recommend go back and try Dorothy Sayers again. She’s better than I remembered her, by a lot. She’s not Agatha Christie, but Agatha Christie has a particular niche. She can be a very good writer. She can also be a lousy writer. If she writes about spies, don’t read her, but she can write very simply and to the point with very good English style.
Agatha Christie is telling a really tightly-written mystery. Dorothy Sayers isn’t. She’s just talking about, “Here’s this community of artists. Let me tell you about it. Let me tell you about the geography. Let me tell you about the topography. Let me tell you about fish. Let me tell you these odd things about fish that actually have something to do with the mystery story, but you probably want to know about fish, don’t you? Let me tell you about artists. And oh yeah, this all starts because when Lord Peter was looking around he noticed that one thing was missing. I just told you what was there and what wasn’t, so you obviously know what’s missing because you know about art, so I don’t need to tell you. Moving on…”
There’s a kind of lightheartedness about her and she lives in a Christian universe, but she’s not evangelizing.
Not at all, but she’s not ashamed. Lord Peter, her hero, is not a Christian as we would conceive of it, but he was raised in the church. He knows the Bible. He knows the prayer book. She’s writing at a time when non-Christians talked about such things. It was part of their culture of life. So they’re fun, and I recommend, if you like mysteries at all, going back and trying Dorothy Sayers again.
I love Peter Wimsey as a character. Sorry, I’m going to cut you off and recommend a specific Dorothy Sayers mystery, Murder Must Advertise. I could have lived in that world for about three more books. I just thought that was so fun. The cricket match was delightful.
I have to go back to that one next. I just did the one where he meets his wife, Harriet Vane, who’s on trial for murder, Strong Poison, which was lots of fun.
My recommendation, I think I have two – one is theology and one is technically also theology, but it’s Lewis, so everything is theology when he writes. Starting with Lewis, Perelandra. I’ve been reading it with my wife. Normally she has a puzzle and I read, because it helps her focus.
It is very cozy. We just read I think chapter 4 or 5 of Perelandra, because we had a big break between February and last night. He meets the Green Lady for the first time, and the whole thing is just this delightful exploration. What would happen if someone from Earth talked to the Eve of another world, and she was learning all sorts of new thing just by your offhand remarks? It turns into what Lewis does best, which is philosophical/theological debate and discovery disguised as witty dialogue.
Everything by Lewis is great, but Perelandra, I am finding a lot of delight in it. My first time reading it in high school I did not catch or obtain much of that in my experience of reading it, so it’s very nice to come back to it and actually find out that I’m enjoying it instead of slogging through it.
The second thing is I’m going to recommend the website ModernReformation.com. It’s run by a lot of the same people who are guests/hosts on White Horse Inn, so Michael Horton and Adriel Sanchez. I just looked on the website again to check. They have an article by Craig Carter, who’s a theology proper theologian, and really interesting topics. I haven’t read everything on their site, but a lot of it has been really edifying and interesting and worth my time for having read. Those are my two recommendations.
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