The contrasting lives of Elijah, Ahab, and Obadiah to illustrate different responses to God's will and challenges. Elijah exemplifies consecration and obedience, moving from periods of hiding to public action as directed by God. King Ahab represents a counterfeit leader, consumed by self-interest and idolatry, prioritizing material concerns over spiritual matters. Obadiah embodies compromise, a man who feared God greatly but served a wicked king, highlighting the danger of relying on past good deeds rather than present commitment. The message emphasizes the importance of a mind made up for God, total commitment to Christ, and a balanced life of both private devotion and public service, cautioning against the pitfalls of compromise and spiritual complacency.
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Good evening. Nice to see you all here tonight, braving the cold in order to be able to come here tonight. I apologize for that. Years ago, Bob Willie said one thing we don't mention here is cold. And the other word we don't mention here rhymes with cold, but I won't tell you what it is. I've never forgotten what he said. Now, as you may recall, from the scheduled announcements in the morning in our sessions together here at nine thirty we're considering God's arithmetic this morning hour we studied God's addition and Lord willing tomorrow morning at nine thirty should he give it to us we anticipate studying God's subtraction that'll be Lord willing tomorrow morning at nine thirty we hope the number won't be subtracted from the meeting we're very pleased with the number that were out this morning hour and we had a good time I think in the word of the Lord In evening sessions, we're considering some selected lessons from the story of Elijah.
We don't have enough time to look at all of the things in the story of Elijah that we ought to look at. In fact, Sunday night we just got started in the beginning of the seventeenth chapter of First Kings, and we're going to have to start tonight the beginning of the eighteenth chapter of First Kings, even though we have to skip over some wonderful things in the remainder of the seventeenth chapter of First Kings. In the eighteenth chapter of First Kings, I'd like to read there from the first sixteen verses, if you would like to follow with me in the Word of God. First Kings chapter number eighteen, beginning with verse number one, and going down through verse number sixteen. First Kings eighteen, beginning with verse one. Your Bible says, And it came to pass after many days that the word of the Lord came to Elijah in the third year, saying, Go show thyself unto Ahab, and I will send rain upon the earth.
And Elijah went to show himself unto Ahab. And there was a sore famine in Samaria. And Ahab called Obadiah, who was the governor of his house. Now Obadiah feared the Lord greatly, 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. And Ahab said unto Obadiah, Go into the land unto all fountains of water, and unto all brooks, per adventure we may find grass to save the horses and mules alive, that we lose not all the beasts. So they divided the land between them to pass throughout it.
Ahab went one way by himself, and Obadiah went another way by himself. And as Obadiah was in the way, behold, Elijah met him, and he knew him, and fell on his face, and said, Are thou that, my Lord Elijah? 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? 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 that you 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. But I thy servant fear the Lord from my youth. And then we get his testimony again, you see. 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, 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 show myself unto him today.
So Obadiah went to meet Ahab and told him, and Ahab went to meet Elijah. Before we get started in that, there's just those two incidents We ought to briefly recall to mind as we finish out the seventeenth chapter of this first book of the Kings. And that is the Lord gives further directions to Elijah when the stream dried up at which Elijah had been drinking and undoubtedly which he had enjoyed very much, the time of solitude and so forth, the Lord providing, of course, the meat and the bread and Elijah drinking of the stream. But the time came when the will of God urged him on. And God told Elijah, you remember, you need to go down to Zarephath because I have instructed a woman, widow woman, down there to feed thee.
Now, we noted it's very important to notice in these narratives the word T-H-E-R-E there. The ravens, you remember, were to bring the bread and the meat there to the side of the stream. And the idea is that God delivers certain things in certain ways, and if you and I are in the proper place, you and I receive the blessing. But very often we are not in the proper place and we miss the blessing because God never operates any other way than according to his own holy, righteous character. This is the way God has to operate. It says the ravens will deliver the blessing at a certain place and if you want the blessing you will be there. And that same lesson is true in this age of the church in nineteen eighty-eight.
There are certain places wherein the Lord delivers blessing and the Lord doesn't chase you up and down all over the hillsides to try to throw a blessing at you. If you and I are in the place where God can deliver a blessing, we receive a blessing. But it's in a certain place and in a certain way that God operates. Now, that was true. T-H-E-R-E. The ravens deliver the groceries at a certain place. And Elijah, if you want to be fed, you better be where I told the ravens to go. Now, we can understand that. Now, God uses the word T-H-E-R-E twice more in the story of the widow woman. He says, I want you to go down to Zarephath. I have instructed a widow woman there in Zarephath to feed the and to give the hospitality.
There's all sorts of ramifications, dear friend, from this story. Must have been a very difficult place for Elijah to go to be dependent upon the subsistence of a widow woman, especially one who with her son was starving to death. He probably would have liked it better to say, I want you to go and go to this particular condominium at the country club. The folks there have a guest house over the garage, and you can stay there. He probably would like that a lot better. Imagine it would be a very humbling thing for a man to have to go and depend upon a starving widow woman for his subsistence. Nevertheless, that's what God told Elijah to do, and he did it. It may be that Elijah needed the time in solitude by the creek bank before he was ready for a step number two in the lesson of going to be dependent upon the widow woman.
And to her great her great honor and praise, she did not say, Why me, Lord, you see? Because over in the Gospel by Luke chapter number four, she's mentioned over there, the Son of God mentions her. She said there was a lot of widow women in Israel at the time of Elijah, but unto none of them was he sent except to the woman at Zarephath or Sereptas that appears in Luke chapter number four. So when you do something for God, dear friends, you don't know how far the ripples are going to go. The widow lady probably never thought she'd ever be mentioned in the Gospel by Luke, by the incarnate Son of God, but she was, and never despised the day of small things. You never know what God is going to do with your life, or how infinitesimal seems to be His will for you at any one particular time.
You never know how eternal those ripples of that action might be. So always be obedient. So he lives for a while in the widow woman's house, and of course there's a problem, you know, meal of oil or the oil continued to expand and to be abundantly provided together with the meal and all that. And it says they ate of those things throughout the whole famine season. But then again, the will of God changed and the boy died. And not only is the widow woman upset about that, but Elijah can't understand it. And he goes to the Lord and he complains a little bit about it. And he said, Lord, is this the way you reward this lady who has given unto me of her hospitality and now you have taken the dearest one in her heart and her son is gone now.
And of course, God works a miracle and brings the son back to life again. And the way chapter seventeen ends up is that now the lady is convinced that truly, well, as she says in that last verse, she says to Elijah, now by this I know that thou art a man of God and that the word of the Lord in thy mouth is true. Isn't that interesting? The multiplying of the groceries in her house did not convince her that God is a God of miracle-working power. But when her dead son was restored to her, this is that which convinced her, which leads us, of course, to come to this conclusion, that it is the God of life who convinces people that He exists and that His Word is true and that which the believers give unto them, by the way of the message of the Word of God, is absolutely applicable and it works even yet today.
Someone has said recently, he said, it is not that Christianity has failed these days. It's that very, it is applied very little. In other words, when the Word of God is believed and Christians are obedient, then these sorts of things happen. So I have those two wonderful things that happen as chapter seventeen closes out. But then we move into chapter eighteen and we are concerned in this chapter, in this lesson tonight, the three personalities. We're concerned, of course, with Elijah because we're studying about him. We are concerned about this very godless king named King Ahab, terrible wicked man. And they married this lady named Jezebel, and to this day and age yet today, anybody named Jezebel. Well, the name Jezebel has a rather evil connotation associated with it, even to this day and age.
And then, of course, the third personality that we want to look at is this man named Obadiah, and they come to us. So there are three men in this picture. First of all, there is Elijah. He is the consecrated human being. He is the consecrated believer. For instance, in First Kings chapter seventeen, verse number three, God says to him in verse three of chapter seventeen, get the hence, turn the eastward and hide thyself. Hide thyself. Now you keep that in mind and you couple it together with something over in chapter number eighteen, verse number one, where God's word to him there is go show thyself. Now, you ought to somehow connect those two phrases, whether you do it mentally or with arrows in your Bible or however you want to do it, those two words ought to be somehow coupled together because that's still the way God talks to you and to me in this day and age, you see.
In the age of the church, sometimes God says, go hide thyself, and then sometimes God says, go show thyself. And there needs to be a balance, dear friends, in these things in our Christian life. There's something wrong if you're hiding yourself all the time. I think some Christians love to sing the hymn, Jesus, I am resting, resting. And they never get beyond the title. They're always resting. But there's a short change in just one letter from resting to resting. And you have to be careful. First thing you know, you're singing Jesus, I am resting, resting. Some people are always recuperating in their strength. They're always meditating. They're always, you know, they're always hiding this sort of a thing.
And they're always, well, as I said before, meditating or contemplating or getting ready or storing up their strength, this sort of thing. We live in Rhode Island. I used to go out fishing sometimes with a cod fisherman in the wintertime, and that's a rough way to make a living, I tell you, out on the Atlantic Ocean before dawn on February morning, trying to handline for cod. and we would spend the first two hours in that pitching boat just cutting up bait. And the fisherman had an expression up there says, you're going to fish or you're going to just cut bait. You could spend all day long just cutting bait and never catch a fish if you never got a hook in the water, you see. And, of course, my extremely... extremely logical mind.
I said, why can't we cut this stuff up in the fish house on the shore before we get out in this pitching boat on the waters of the Atlantic before dawn on a February morning? Why do we have to wait to get out there to cut bait? But there didn't seem to be any logical answer to this, just logical questions. But anyway, that was the problem. And it seems as if we cut an awful lot of bait before we finally began to put a hook in the water. Some Christians might always be hiding themselves. They never try anything. They never serve God. They never give out a tract. They never talk to anybody about the Lord. They never try to influence anybody for Christ. They never pass along a cheery testimony. They're always in chapter seventeen. They're always hiding themselves, waiting for something to happen, but they don't know what.
I'm not ready yet. I'm not strong enough. Whatever the case might be. And of course, the devil comes along and says, you're absolutely right. Keep hiding yourself a while longer. Always hiding. But then chapter number eighteen, go show thyself. You can't always be showing yourself either, because pretty soon you get worn out in the things of the Lord. I've never done such exhausting work as I do in Christian service, and neither have you. When you give of yourself and of your testimony to the things of Christ regarding somebody else's life, it takes something out of you. And you need those times of recuperation, and this is one of the reasons that these meetings are held here in the winter. You and I come from a lot of different assemblies. And most of these assemblies are very small assemblies and they're struggling assemblies and there's one problem after another.
And it's nice to come to a place like this where there's a lot of us. And when we can enjoy a lot of good voluminous singing, if you will. And when we can just kind of sit there and not have any responsibility. Isn't that nice? Not to have to worry about the announcements. Let Jim worry about the announcements. He always forgets a lot of them anyway. Let him worry about them, you see. He wants you to read the yellow paper, you see, this sort of a thing. Isn't it nice just to sit and enjoy? I like to do this. I like to be in a conference program with another preacher, and you probably wish there was another one here that you could enjoy at least every other message. But at any rate, I enjoy because I like to sit and listen. You and I need to be ministered unto by the Word of God.
And so chapter eighteen is also true of your people. There's times when you have to also show yourself, and there needs to be a balance between those two things. Now, see, that's what the Lord taught over in the Gospel by John, chapter number ten, when he's talking in the context there of a good shepherd and whatnot. Over in John chapter number ten, he mentions this. John chapter ten, verse nine it is. John chapter ten, verse nine, the Lord himself says, I am the door. By me, if any man enter in, he shall be saved. Well, we understand that. And he shall go in and out. In and out. Not just once, but back and forth, you see. He shall go in and out and find pasture.
He enters in through the door. The Lord Jesus Christ is the door. He gets saved. But then after he gets saved, there's this going in and out. He needs to go back into the fold, back where the flock is, back where the shepherd is, you see, for times of sustenance and for strengthening and getting his spiritual batteries recharged. But he shouldn't stay in there all the time. He needs to go back out again, out where the pastor is. And so there's this continual going backwards and forwards. And you and I appreciate that in our Christian life. We recognize we need to meet at the feet of the Lord. We need our personal devotions that go beyond even our family devotions and our congregational devotions. We have our private, quiet times with God.
Then there's also the times when you and I need to serve some way, and every Christian can serve. Every Christian ought to serve. And so there's this wonderful, perfect balance between chapter seventeen and chapter eighteen. There's the times when the Lord says, Go hide thyself, and there are times when the Lord says, Go show thyself. And the Holy Spirit, you see, gives guidance and direction as to which time is to be done at what particular time in your life. We won't take time to do it, but you probably know of a number of the folks in the Bible who had their quiet times with God before they even started out. You know, there's a number of them. You could probably name them off right now tonight. Even the Lord Jesus Christ himself, the only perfect servant of God, the Father, didn't start out until he was about thirty years of age.
And they all had their quiet times with God. And I'll tell you this, I tell you, if you'll vacillate and you'll break down in Christian service publicly, unless you have those quiet times with God when you meet with him privately. And so there's these times, you see, in Elijah's life, go hide thyself. And then he says, go show thyself. Now, I'd like to have you link those two things together somehow, if you can remember it well and good. If you have to draw arrows and lines and these sorts of things, then do that sort of thing. But I don't want you ever to divorce those two things between chapter seventeen and chapter number eighteen. All right, this is what he says then in this particular way. Now, Elijah is the consecrated one that we're talking about, and his name means Jehovah is God.
That's what Elijah means. Jehovah is God. He's the consecrated one. But then there's another personality you see in chapter eighteen, and that is Ahab. We know about Ahab. Ahab is the counterfeit. If Elijah is the consecrated, then Ahab is the counterfeit because the directions that David said back in Second Samuel, let me read it for you. Second Samuel chapter twenty-three and in verse number three. Second Samuel chapter twenty-three in verse number three, David says this, The God of Israel said, The rock of Israel spake to me, and this is what he said, He who rules over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God. And Abraham, Ahab certainly wasn't.
And yet this is the direction that God on the throne gave to David on his earthly throne. And he said, whoever rules as a magistrate over men must be just and ruling in the fear of God. And Ahab certainly was not doing that, was he? He was the counterfeit. king, the counterfeit king. That's what said about Ahab. All right, we have Elijah the consecrated man. We have Ahab, the counterfeit man. Then we have this third one mentioned here, Obadiah. He is the man of compromise, the compromise man. And I will confess to you, there are things written here about Obadiah that I can't put together. So don't come up to me after the service because I'll confess right now, I can't do it.
Here in First Samuel chapter eighteen, verse number four, This is what the Holy Spirit says. Later on Obadiah gives you the same testimony. He treads on this sort of a testimony, but this is what the Holy Spirit says about him. Verse number four, chapter eighteen. It was so, the Holy Spirit says, 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. And this is the credence that the Holy Spirit gives to Obadiah. This is what he has done in the past. And yet, The latter part of verse number three says, Obadiah feared the Lord greatly. I say, you have this very strange conundrum here in the Bible, and I can't explain it.
Where you have on one hand this man named Obadiah, about whom the Holy Spirit says in the Word, he feared the Lord greatly, and yet here he is, serving Ahab, the counterfeit king. And I can't put those things together. I could understand it why, if we could read in the word of God, he served Ahab because he was a carnal prophet. I could understand that sort of a thing. But the Holy Spirit says he feared God greatly. And yet he served Ahab, the counterfeit king. Why don't you see something else about this same sort of thing? Over in Second Kings chapter seventeen. Second Kings chapter seventeen, this same sort of a conundrum is revealed over there and the same story is told over and over again and the more you tell it the worse it gets and again I can't explain it.
Second Kings chapter seventeen in verse twenty eight and twenty nine and so on and so forth but the problem here dear friends is that the king of Assyria has captured some Jewish folks and God has allowed some lions amongst the Jewish folks and the lions have killed some of the Jewish people and the king of Assyria wants to know how come Why do these lions kill the Jewish people? And his advisors say, well, the God of these Jewish people is angry with them because they no longer serve him. They don't worship him, they don't love him, they don't serve him. And so God in his anger sends the lions among them and the lions kill some of the Jewish folks. And the king of Assyria said, well, I don't like my captives to be killed by lions and eaten up.
We need to do something about the situation. find one of the priests somewhere and let him and his aides come and instruct these Jewish people in how to worship and serve their God so that God won't be angry at them anymore and send the lions to kill them. Now, that's the whole context of this situation in Second Kings chapter seventeen. And so you read then finally in verse twenty eight of Second Kings seventeen, then one of the priests whom they had carried away from Samaria came and dwelt in Bethel and taught them how they should fear the Lord. Apparently they got good instruction. All right, that's verse twenty-eight. Now verse twenty-nine. How be it every nation made gods of their own. You see, immediately you go, how they should fear the Lord, and then you go right into the thought, but all these nations serve their own gods.
That's verse twenty-nine. And they put these gods, these false gods, in the houses of the high places, which the Samaritans had made. Every nation in their cities wherein they dwelt. Now that's verse twenty-nine. You skip down to verse thirty-two. Verse thirty-two. So they feared the Lord and made unto themselves of the lowest of them priests of the high places who sacrificed for them in the houses of the high places. Now you see, that verse seems to be a paradox. On the one hand, the Holy Spirit keeps saying they feared the Lord. They were taught how to fear the Lord and they feared the Lord. And the next thing you read about is they did something that the Lord wouldn't approve of. Here they've given up the whole priestly family.
They simply select those of the lowest to be the priest. In other words, they said, we don't want anybody talented to serve as a priest because we need men of talent in government and medicine and education and these sorts of things. So we'll find a guy that can't do anything else. We'll make him a priest, you see, this sort of a thing. And you keep reading about that. Now that's verse thirty-two, you see. Also verse thirty-three. You read the same thing again. Verse thirty-three. They feared the Lord and served their own gods. after the manner of the nations whom they carried away from Thence. And verse number forty-one of that same chapter, verse forty-one, the last verse. So these nations feared the Lord and served their graven images, both their children and their children's children, as did their fathers, so do they unto this day.
And I can't explain that. I could understand it if It might read they thought they were serving the Lord while they served these false gods, but that's not what the Holy Spirit says here, is it? It keeps saying they served the Lord. It says they feared the Lord. They feared the Lord. They feared the Lord. And then you read of them doing something that the Lord would not approve of. They made false gods. They serve false gods. They did their own thing and this sort of thing. But maybe it's something by way of message for us today. Maybe this is what America is doing today. They have a great reputation for being Christian America, and there are millions of people that go to some religious place of worship from eleven to twelve o'clock Sunday morning.
Maybe they fear the Lord. Maybe they say, well, we like our life. We better throw God a tip. We better let God see that we're in church at least one hour a week, and yet they go on and serve their own gods. Rather telling, the last verse said, so do they unto this day. Maybe the Holy Spirit would let us drag that right up to nineteen hundred and eighty-eight. Think of all the folks that you might know who have a name of naming Christ, the Savior, and yet their lives are anything but Christian. It's very easy to call yourself a Christian these days. It's very easy to use the terminology and the proper vocabulary, but maybe the life is not there. So Obadiah is a rather strange character, at least he is to me.
We have this testimony, a wonderful service which he did to God in days past, and he keeps treading on that. In fact, the Holy Spirit mentions it, you see. And yet we have this strange conundrum, and I really don't understand it, how it can be said that they feared the Lord and then did whatever they wanted to do religiously anyway. I just don't understand such terminology as that. So Obadiah, the one of compromise. Well, those are the three men in the picture. Now, what made these three men in the picture this particular way? So, you have not only three men in the picture, but you have three men in pursuit. Let's see what they did. Well, go back to Elijah, the consecrated man. I think he's a consecrated man because he enjoys the blessing of a mind that's made up for God.
Now, that works in the church age, too, dear friend. The blessing of a mind that's made up for God. Same thing works today. The most joyous, victorious Christians you know are the ones that are totally sold out to Jesus Christ. Somewhere in their past experience, they have made the decision, I am bought with a price, I am not my own, I belong to the Lord, he can do anything with me he wants to do, they're totally sold out, and these are the stalwart, victorious, joyous Christians that you know. Now the world doesn't believe that, the carnal Christian doesn't believe that. Carnal Christian says, well, the way to be joyous and happy is to try to mix a little world in it and with a little churchy entity.
We've studied that before. But the Lord says in Matthew chapter number eleven, if you really want to find rest or relaxation, as the word is, for your soul, take my yoke upon you and learn of me. Be totally involved in the things of the Lord. And the upset, vacillating, conflict-ridden person that you know today is the one that vacillates between the things of the Lord and the things of the world. One day they're up, next day they're down. One day they're joyous, next day they're depressed about something. And Elijah is a consecrated man because he enjoys the blessing of a mind that's made up for God. God apparently says to him, do this and he does it. Go stay by the brook for a while and he does it.
Go down to Zarephath for a while and he does it. Stay with a widow woman for a while and he does it. Pray for rain, he does it. Pray for famine or pray for drought and he does this particular thing. And dear friend, if you're vacillating between these things, you'll never be truly joyous in the things of the Lord until you're totally sold out to Jesus Christ. That's what the Word of God teaches. And that's what scores of Christians could tell you tonight. And this is a man in pursuit. Recognition of God working and all these sorts of things. That's Elijah. Let's go on to Ahab. The sins of self and idolatry. The counterfeit king. Right back here in First Kings chapter sixteen. The chapter... before the one that we started with Sunday night.
Chapter number sixteen, the Holy Spirit tells you about Ahab here. First Kings chapter sixteen, verse twenty-nine. In the thirty-and-eighth year of Asa, king of Judah, began Ahab, the son of Ahmri, to reign over Israel. And Ahab, the son of Ahmri, reigned over Israel in Samaria twenty-two years. And Ahab, the son of Ahmri, did evil in the sight of the Lord above all that were before him. Now, we just read that a few verses earlier concerning his father. Holy Spirit says, Amri did more evil in the sight of the Lord than anybody was before him, and that lasted until his son came along. And he superseded his father in evil. He did more now in evil before all of his sons. In verse twenty-nine, he did more.
And in verse number thirty, it came to pass as if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebuchadnezzar, that he took to wife Jezebel, the daughter of Ephrael, King of the Zidonians, and went and served Baal and worshipped him. And he reared up an altar for Baal in the house of Baal, which he had built in Samaria. Ahab made a grove, and Ahab did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel that were before him. Why is he a counterfeit king? Because of the sins of self and idolatry. The kids use an expression today. The kids say so-and-so is a wimp. Maybe you've heard your grandchildren speak about it.
So-and-so is a whim. I asked one of them, I said, well, it used to be this type of person was a nerd. I tried to keep up with kids on this sort of stuff, and by the time I learned the definitions and the words, they're on to something else. I'm always one generation behind all these kids. I said, wait a minute, now, used to be a nerd. Well, yeah, but I've forgotten the definition of a nerd as opposed to a whim. By the time I figured out, they'll be on to something else. But I think Ahab was one of these types of fellas, you know. His wife pretty well pulled the strings. Now, you brethren would say, oh, that's a whimp, then there's a bunch of whims here. Well, we will get into that tonight. But you remember, he wanted Naboth's vineyard. And he said, I'll give you whatever you want. Naboth said, I couldn't sell it to you if you wanted to, because the law says I'm not to sell my inheritance.
And you remember, Ahab went back in the palace, went up in his room, and laid on the bed and turned his face to the wall and sulked, you see. He sold. And his wife Jezebel came in and said, What's the matter with you now? And they won't give me the vineyard. Don't worry about it. Of course, she killed Naboth and got the vineyard and gave it to Ahab. That's the sort of a fellow he was. All these sorts of things. The sins of self and idolatry. And in our passage tonight, chapter eighteen, verse five, look at the things in which he is interested. Verse number five, Ahab had said unto Obadiah, go into the land unto all fountains of water and unto all brooks. Per adventure we may find grass to save the horses and mules alive that we lose not all the beasts. You see what he's interested in? There are people starving to death.
The widow woman and her son who only had enough meal for one more little biscuit and then they're going to starve to death. Of course the Lord worked a miracle in their case, but this is the way it is all over the land. And what is the king interested in? He's interested in horses and beasts and all these other material things. And this is usually the case of an Ahab type person. A lot of interest in secular things, material things, but the things of the Spirit and the things of eternity could care less about. Now, the Lord warned us about those things when he was on earth. He said, in the last days it's going to be as it was in the days of Noah and in the days of Lot. They married and were given and married. Nothing wrong with that if you get the one the Lord has for you.
They ate and they drank. There's nothing wrong with that. We thrive on that here at Park of the Palms. There's nothing wrong with buying or selling or planting or building or any of these things, all of which the Lord mentioned. Those are all perfectly legitimate things. They're not a sin among them. But the Lord says you can get so busy with those legitimate things that the spiritual things are left to go out the window, you see. I say that they have. What about people they have? I don't care so much about those as I do my donkeys and mules and my horses and my cattle and so forth. He's interested in the secondary things of life. We have to be careful about those sorts of things. Well, if we hurry along now from Ahab into Obadiah, this compromised fellow.
Once again, past blessings are mentioned here in the eighth chapter, the eighteenth chapter, and verse number three, and verse number four, and then repeated again in verse number thirteen of this wonderful really death-defying act of service that he had done on behalf of the men of the Lord. When Jezebel would have put them all to death, he took a hundred of the prophets of the Lord and hid them in two different groups in a cave and fed them with bread and water until the crisis was passed. And the Holy Spirit mentions that in the beginning of the chapter. And then Obadiah mentions it again to Elijah, this sort of a thing. But maybe that's the only thing he can have that he can boast upon in his service for God. And if that's the only thing, he's a rather poverty-stricken fellow in the things of the Lord.
You and I ought to have an up-to-date experience with God. You and I ought to have a minute-by-minute experience with God and not have to go clear back into the past somewhere to remember one particular answer to prayer we got or some particular good act of service that we did as unto Him. There's danger in putting all of your hope of spiritual things in just one thing that God enabled you to do. That's one of the problems. Notice also he's got the wrong gaze. He's helping Ahab go look for water when he ought to be concerned about people. But the last thing I want you to see is this of his wrong attitude towards the way God works in the ministry of the Holy Spirit and so on and so forth. He's completely wrong in this sort of a thing.
In verse number seven, you see, he says, why have you... brought the judgment of God upon me. Elijah told him, well, you go tell Ahab I want to talk to him. Obadiah almost says, I'm not going to fall for that trick. I know what's going to happen. I know the way the Holy Spirit works. I'll go off to seek Ahab and I'll say, I found Elijah and he wants to talk to you. And Ahab will say, well, I want to talk to him. Let's go. And we're going to come back to the same place where you and I are talking now and you won't be here. Not that you wandered off somewhere, but the Holy Spirit of God will take you off somewhere, and Ahab's going to say to me, well, where is he? Well, he was standing right here, and he's going to think I played some kind of joke on him, and my life will be over.
And I don't appreciate that at all. What have I done wrong that you are going to punish me in this particular way? He's got a totally wrong comprehension of the way God works, as many people today have a totally wrong comprehension of the way God works. They see God is a frowning providence, don't they? And when some great disaster takes place, God gets the blame for it all, doesn't he? This is an act of God. Typhoon, earthquake, whatever this thing is. This is an act of God. But when you see a beautiful full moon like there is tonight, and you see a beautiful sunset as there was tonight, and you see a beautiful sunrise, who gets credit for that? Mother Nature.
Mother Nature. She gets credit for that, she. But any sort of a negative thing is laid at God's doorstep. God got blamed because he didn't stop the Vietnamese war sooner. God gets blamed because he doesn't show us what the answer to the cancer problem is. God gets blamed every time some little baby is given and then taken back home to be with himself again. God gets blamed for all sorts of things, and yet we don't see him in John three sixteen, you see. But God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. And Obadiah has totally the wrong idea of how and why God works. He only sees the negative.
He assumes the Holy Spirit works in very strange, negative, deathly sorts of types of things, as people think today. Some Christians who feel they can't trust the Holy Spirit for fear of the Holy Spirit will make them do some wildly emotional thing. This is not the case. This is not the case. So Obadiah is one who needs some correction in life, not only in his idea of the way God and the Holy Spirit works, but also in the use of his terminology. And he says to Elijah, are you my Lord? And I think Elijah rather pointedly says back to Obadiah, you go tell Ahab your Lord. I'm not your Lord. Ahab is your Lord.
You're serving him. So there's a lot of corrections that need to be made in the life of Obadiah. Just these three personalities tonight. You see, we have Elijah, the man that we're studying. He's the consecrated man, and we have Ahab. He's the counterfeit man. He's not being the king that God wants him to be, according to what God told David. Now we have Obadiah, who treads all of his spiritual experience about one thing that he did for the Lord, perhaps a long time ago, and he uses that as the means of getting the blessing of the Lord. The Lord tells a passage rather similar to this. He said, Many shall say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? Have we not cast out demons in thy name?
And when I was first saved, that passage gave me a great deal of problem. I agonized over that for weeks. I said, Lord, I've never cast out demons in your name. I've never healed anybody in your name. And Lord, if those people did those things and they still don't have your approval, what chance of I who have never done those things? And I agonized over that a long time until finally I saw what the Lord was teaching in it, that that's the way they hoped to get into heaven because they had done things. They had done things. And I think maybe that's the way Obadiah is going. He says, well, now... Don't treat me meanly. I know you. You'll disappear. The Holy Spirit will remove you and take you off somewhere else, and I'll bring Ahab back to this place, and then he'll get mad at me, and he'll have me killed.
And I don't deserve to be killed because you remember that thing that I did for those hundred prophets way back yonder, you see. He may be treading upon his good works. At any rate, we have to leave the whole story at this point. Elijah and Ahab and Obadiah, these three personalities, and perhaps the Holy Spirit will allow us to gain some help from these three. Let's bow together in prayer. Our Father and our God, we thank thee again for thy word as always we must. Thank thee, Father, that the entrance of thy word giveth light. We pray, Father, not only for mental entrance to thy word, but for heart entrance to thy word, because thou hast told us in the book to keep our heart with all diligence for out of it are the issues of life.
We pray, Father, for any who might be in this building tonight who know not Christ as Savior. Help them to see, Father, that the only way to be saved is to trust the Lord Jesus Christ, his personal Savior. For those of us fathers, Christians, who may be fighting some fear and some conflicts and some doubts, help us, Father, to become totally committed to thyself, that we might know that joy and the victory of thyself. Maybe it won't give us an answer to the problem. Father, help us to know that thou art in the problem with us.