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Now let us read together in the first book of Kings from chapter eighteen. The first book of Kings, chapter eighteen and verse twenty one. And Elijah came near unto all the people and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? If the Lord be God, follow him, but if Baal, then follow him.
And the people answered him not a word. Then said Elijah unto the people, I even I only am blessed a prophet of the Lord, but Baal's prophets are four hundred and fifty men. Let them therefore give us two bullocks, and let them choose one bullock for themselves and cut it in pieces and lay it on the wood and put no fire under it. And I will dress the other bullock and lay it on the wood and put no fire under. And call ye on the name of your God, and I will call on the name of the Lord.
And the God that answereth by fire, let him be God. And all the people answered and said, it is well spoken. And Elijah said unto the prophets of Baal, choose you one bullock for yourselves, and dress it first, for you are many, and call on the name of your God, but put no fire under. And they took the bullock that was given them, and they dressed it and called on the name of Baal from morning until noon, saying, O Baal, hear us.
But there was no voice, nor any that answered. And they leaped about upon the altar which was made, and it came to pass at noon that Elijah mocked them and said, Cry aloud, for he is a God, either he is music or his chastisement. If only they would turn again and pray towards that house, and God in his high heaven would hear them and forgive their sins and restore them to himself.
This afternoon we must begin together the delightful study of the ministry of the great prophet Elijah. Delightful because Elijah was one of the early prophets to lead a revival, an astounding revival amongst the people of God at the time. I know you may well say that the revival was very short-lived, and so it was. For all that, it was glorious and became a prototype of other revivals that yet shall be. As Isaiah stood event- as, as Elijah stood eventually by his altar and openly prayed to the God of heaven to show his reality to his people and answer their sacrifice by fire from heaven, that the people might know that he was the true God and know that he had turned their hearts back again to the realities of the true God.
Elijah became a prototype of coming greater things. The very last book of the Old Testament issues the promise that whereas the great and notable day of the Lord shall one day dawn, on which day the very heavens shall be broken up and the earth shaken like a boat in a storm. The judgments of God are poured out on this godless civilization. Nonetheless, in the mercies of God, before that great and notable day of the Lord shall come, God shall send Elijah once more to restore his people, lest the Lord God come and smite the earth with a curse.
Moreover, you will remember that, um, when John Baptist was born, the angel promised to his father Zechariah that there would be a sense in which John Baptist would be a kind of Elijah, going before the Lord Jesus to make ready the people to turn their hearts back again to God. And with the coming of the Lord Jesus and his great sacrifice at Calvary, Israel might find a way back from their sinfulness to repentance, faith, and forgiveness. We are then to begin studying the ministry of Elijah, and in particular his leading of this revival.
It is true to say, however, that Elijah, as far as we know, never went anywhere near the house of the Lord at Jerusalem. He ministered amongst the ten tribes who had abandoned the house of the Lord at Jerusalem and made themselves their own pseudo headquarters at Bethel and Dan. Doubtless Elijah was persistent in his constant denunciation of the follies of their idolatry. But he never went anywhere near the house of the Lord at Jerusalem, as far as we know. Nevertheless, when we study his life, we shall find here a man of God, in touch with the living God, and in the daily benefits of all those great spiritual realities that were symbolized in the details of the house of the Lord at Jerusalem.
And therefore, as the order of our study this afternoon, let's turn back, shall we, to one Kings chapter six, to consider briefly some of the provisions that God made in that house of the Lord, and in particular its interior uh furnishings. Installations and decoration. Here is one Kings chapter six and beginning in verse fourteen. so Solomon built the house and finished it. We have a description of what the house of the living God was like inside. He built the walls of the house within with boards of cedar, it says, from the floor of the house until the walls of the ceiling, and he covered them on the inside with wood, and he covered the floor of the house with boards of fir.
And he built twenty cubits on the hinder part of the house with boards of cedar from the floor unto the walls. He even built them for it within, for an oracle, even for the most holy place. Verse nineteen, and he prepared an oracle in the midst of the house within, to set there the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord. First major provision, lying at the very heart of the house of the Lord in Jerusalem, was the Ark of the Covenant, symbol of the very throne and footstool of Almighty God.
Here is what that house stood for. And should we be asking ourselves this moment why, on a pleasant Saturday afternoon in the civilized city of Vancouver amongst Christian people, we should be bothering our heads to study this ancient form of temple? We say to ourselves, this world is full of temples. Goodness me, there have been millions of temples, are still in many countries. Why should we be bothering our heads to be studying one more temple? And the answer to that question is that this temple was unique. Unique in its day among the temples of the surrounding nations.
For one thing, it had no image of its God. Witnessing, therefore, to the truth of the one true, transcendent, imageless Lord. When the temples of the nations were bung full of their idolatrous images of the deities, Israel stood unique among them, in eloquent condemnation of the folly of the idolatrous interpretation of the universe, and witnessing to the true God.
In that Ark of the Covenant were the two tables of the covenant, and they witness to a number of things. They witness first to this, that God is the creator. In six days God made heaven and earth, and he rested on the seventh. Herein again was Israel unique among the nations. The other nations had gods, if you please, galore of gods. And their gods were said to make the world in some sense. But when you probe a little bit more deeply, you'll find that those ancient gods were themselves but part of the forces of the universe.
They were but deifications of the great forces that control our world. Israel's House of the Lord stood for the direct opposite of that. God is not part of the forces of the universe. God is transcendent over his creation, and as being transcendent over it, he made it. Why is that important? Because that same God who is creator, according to Israel's sacred book, is said to have made man in his own image, and made him to have dominion over the earth.
See the noble position that God has given to human beings. In the ancient idolatries, man was made as a slave of the God to grovel before the great forces of the universe. My, oh my, in those ancient days, if a woman went to bed and combed her hair as she was going to bed, and it sparkled a little bit, not understanding electricity like we understand it, she said, it was a god that got into my hair, and the poor woman spent the next two hours in terror. And if the moon should go into eclipse, lo and behold, the ladies got the bin lids and went out in the street and banged them hard to chase away the demon that had got hold of the moon.
And men lived in fear of the great processes of the universe that they didn't understand. It was no innocent little mistake when men abandoned the true God of heaven because they did not like to retain him in their knowledge, and in his place deified the forces of nature. Oh, what folly it has been, and we shall come back to it again. But you can see it with your own two eyes, it's wrong, can't you? And the Bible, right? Man made in the image of God, and therefore ultimately more important than all the impersonal forces, however vast, in this great universe.
You know, my little brain is exceedingly small. The sun up in the sky is tremendously large. Without boasting, I dare to tell you that my brain is more significant than the sun. My brain knows the sun is there. The sun doesn't know I'm here. My brain knows how the sun works, because the scientists have told me. The sun doesn't know how I work. You count me just a creature of a few years, and the sun lasts how many bouncy million years, I don't know. But the Bible's view of man, the man is more important than the whole vast impersonal forces of the universe, because man is made in the image of the transcendent Lord, made under God to have dominion.
It was no innocent little thing that men did when they abandoned their belief in the transcendent Lord and began to deify the forces of nature. And then, of course, in that, uh, on those two tables of stone, not only expressed God as creator, but by the very terms and details of his law, it said that God is the authority lying behind our moral sense. All of us as men and women, it is true, is it not, have a sense of right and wrong.
What is this sense of right and wrong? That gives you a bad conscience just when you prefer not to have a bad conscience, because if you didn't have it, you could make a deal, would make two million pounds, uh, though it was a bit shady or something. But you get a conscience about it. What is this, uh, sense of right and wrong? Is it merely a matter of taste? You know, mm, you say, I like strawberries, and I say, well, do you fancy that? I'm surprised at you. I don't like strawberries, I like peaches. You also like peaches. You say, I don't like peaches.
I don't intend to like peaches. If you like peaches, have it your way. That's your taste. I don't like peaches. Uh, I like strawberries. And there's no settling of that argument, is it, because it's a matter of taste. Is the... is the moral law a matter of taste. You go along to Master Hitler and say, now here, Hitler, I hear you're, you're proposing to gas six million Jews. And Hitler says, yes, I am indeed. You say, Hitler, my boy, you wouldn't gas Jews. I don't think you should.
Hitler says, mind your business. I like gassing Jews. You don't like gassing Jews? What do you mean gas Jews? But I do like gassing Jews. Matter of taste. You think adultery is wrong? And I say I don't think it's wrong. You think homosexuality is okay? And you say it's all a matter of taste, every man has a right to his own taste. Is that so? No, says the Ark of God in the house of the Lord. No, says the covenant between God, the transcendent Lord, and his people Israel.
It is not a matter of taste. For behind the moral law stands the authority of Almighty God. Not only was there the ark, but as you'll see, if you care to read down the further details of that house, the decorations, the decorative motifs inside the house of the Lord were such that you could scarcely have gone ten paces inside it. What you would have become aware that this house was the house of the living God.
In the most holy place, there were cherubim upon the mercy seat. Of course there were. But in addition to that, unlike Moses' tabernacle, in the most holy place there were two huge olive wood cherubim standing with their wings outstretched from wall to center, from center to wall. Round the cedar wains cotting of the house were carved other cherubim, along with open flowers and palm trees, symbols, all of them, of life.
From the humble though beautiful flower, what a lovely expression of life it is, and how gorgeous your city of Vancouver at this time of year. Oh, what a God of life God is. From toads that croak in the pool to giraffes and their extended necks, from those funny old geese to the gorgeous peacock, angels, giraffes, hippopotamuses, and you. What a God of life he is. And of it all, John chapter one tells us where that life came from.
It says that without the blessed word of God, the one whom we now know as Jesus Christ our Lord, nothing was made that was made. And you'll say, where did he get the life from to make all this variegated life? He didn't get it from anywhere. In him was life, says the word of God. The whole creation teeming with every conceivable kind of life. He made it. He is the source of life. The very highest form of created life that you could imagine is represented in scripture by cherubim.
They are sometimes pictured as having four heads, that of a lion, an ox, an eagle, and a calf. Four different types of life, all rolled in one. Oh, how gorgeous that is. Sometimes I wish I were a cherubim, you see. Um, I've only got the human bit, not too much of that. But, uh, you and my good friend Lacey here took me to see the lions in Nairobi and around, what creatures they were. I paid them respect. He took us rather near them, but I shut the window in case I didn't like the smell of their breath, these lions. Ah, you'll see. Ha, ha. What strength they had, you'll see.
And then the eagle. Oh, I wish I could fly sometimes, don't you? I envy those birds. Wouldn't it be lovely to take off sometimes and fly? And the arts, with his patient ability to persevere at his work. Oh, why has God given me so much s- wisdom and very little strength, and very little power? Serious, isn't it? We stand in awe of the all the forms of life that God has created. This is the house of the living God.
And because he was a living God, the place of his throne was a place where his people's representative might come, and God speak to him. Said God to Moses over the mercy seat in the tabernacle, there I will meet with you. There I will commune with you. Oh, for men. That can make us hear today the living voice of a living God.
And there, as we said yesterday, outside the veil was the golden altar of incense, where men who came and listened to God as Israel's high priest might in their turn respond and speak to God. Oh, wonder of wonders. The great, unique, transcendent soul God is prepared to bow to listen to the suggestion and pleas of his humble creatures and move heaven and earth to answer their prayers. Oh, how I wish I could tell you the wonder of your relationship with God.
You may go home tonight, my dear sister, and kneel at your bed, and you sir, in your study, and breathe your prayer, and heaven shall stand still. And the blessed Son of God himself shall do for you what he did for the blind man outside Jericho's Gate, who cried and cried and cried, and the crowd said, shut up, do! Jesus of Nazareth has more important business to be at than listening to you, a free-bitten beggar. But our blessed Lord stopped in his tracks and bade him be called and said, my man, you called me.
What would you like me to do for you? He said, Lord, that I might receive my sight. And he gave him his sight, and for the first time his eyes were open to see what God is really like. This transcendent son of the transcendent God now become human flesh. Son of David, marching not to his throne, but to Calvary's tree, travel stained and weary, coming to serve and to die, as we have so eloquently heard from our brother, even for the flea bitten beggar, who by his prayers may stop the Son of God in his tracks, and the Son of God will bend his ear and answer his prayer.
This is the real God. And it was Elijah, who, as we presently shall see, because he was in the good of these realities, that was able to lead God's people back when they had strayed from the true and living God and gone off into their crude and absurd and ridiculous and evil idolatry. But before we proceed to think about the nice bits, that is the revival, we must think about the nasty bits, mustn't we? What was this idolatry into which Israel fell at this time?
Last night we were considering how Jeroboam led Israel in rebellion against the house of David, abandoned the house of the Lord at Jerusalem, and built his own religious houses in Dan and, uh, Bethel. And there they worshipped. Still they kept the name of Jehovah, but now they worshipped Jehovah under idolatrous forms. He made two golden calves and said, these be thy gods that brought thee out of the land of Egypt. But alas, as the years went by, Israel was not content with such a heresy. And presently, under the reign of Ahab, son of Omri, husband of Jezebel the Notorious, Israel abandoned any pretense of worshiping Jehovah and went over to the worship of Baal, Baal, in other words.
And you say, who, pray, was Baal? Well, Baal, when he's at home, was, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, the god of the storm, and he was the god of fertility. Must have been a terrifying thing, don't you think, if you were a Canianite standing on the shore there and watching the Mediterranean put on her moods of a storm and foam and hungry winds and watching the lightning come crashing with its thunder. Presently, man, instead of keeping hold of face in the one true God creator above it all, let go of the true creator and divide the power of the storm.
You say, well, what's the harm in that? And what's the difference anyway? You just said just now that God is the creator of life, and all around his house there were emblems of life, cows, cherubim, palm trees. So what's the, what's the great point? What's the difference? Well, take Mr. Ford. I mean, you know, Mr. Ford who used to make motor cars. Mr. Ford apparently made millions of motor cars, and inside these motor cars worked on the principle of, uh, internal combustion. Now, if you stand looking at a Ford and you're thinking, yes, inside isn't it a great mystery how the thing works, but there, here goes the old sparking plug, and here goes the petrol vapor, and here goes the explosion, and now the old cylinders are beginning to go up and down.
What a marvelous thing, uh, process it all is. You say, did Mr. Ford make that? I say, yes, he made that. What do you mean, you say? Is that Mr. Ford inside the cylinder? Should, well, you say the thing is stopped now. Well, let's get down on our knees and pray, Mr. Ford, uh, who, who in that cylinder, make it go again. You say, no, don't be so daft, don't. Isn't Mr. Ford in the cylinder? That's only one of the processes he made. Mr. Ford isn't so much gas and sparks off an electric plug and a few cylinders going up and down with some horrible stuff coming out of the exhaust pipe. That's not Mr.
Ford. Mr. Ford is transcendent about that kind of thing, though he made it. Oh, it's no little mistake to think that God is the storm, the storm is God. He made the processes, of course he did, but God isn't lightning nor electricity. They are but the impersonal forces of the universe. Every one of us being human is more important, let alone God who made them. Baal was a deification of the forces of nature.
He was also a deification of the sexual urge. Of course, to ancients, the processes of reproduction were great mysteries, and they had very, uh, important practical implications, didn't they? Hm. You'll say, if you are an Israelite farmer, your very life next year depended upon your crops being fertile and productive. Your very life depended, and that of your family, on your cows and your bullocks being fertile and re- and reproductive.
And if you were a farmer who needed a lot of help, the success of your farm depended on a wife who could produce you sons that could labor on the farm for you, not to speak of her laboring in the kitchen. And the processes of reproduction being a mystery to them, they felt it deifying. Sex. That's making the same mistake as saying electricity is God, isn't it? And the old Canaanites used to tell the Israelite farmers, you want good crops, my boy?
You want to worship Baal. He's the, he's the god of fertility, and he'll make your crops, uh, fertile and prosperous. The Israelite farmers were sorely tempted and went over to the worship of Baal. You say, how could intelligent people do it? Well, I don't know, but only consider this, you'll see. There was an ex bit about Baal worship, because they deified the, the, the processes of fertility, they deified sex. They would have said that true religion consists in being in harmony with nature, with the forces of nature.
So in the temple, there were temple prostitutes, and as a form of religious service, the men might go and have use of these temple prostitutes, and the whole thing covered with the notion that when they had use of these prostitutes, they were, so to speak, the expression of Baal. This was God Baal, and they were having communion with God Baal, and they were helping Baal and his consort Estati, the goddess Estati. Man was part of the processes of nature, and one not enjoy it, or care. They'll leave the wife up in the scullery doing the hard work and have a little religious service in the temple, you'll see. Yes? And it's all experience of God, for God is everything.
You see at once what that did, didn't it? It removes sex from the area of morality. Now it was if you enjoyed it, well, why not? It's God in you. And you're not supposed to to resist gods, are you? I mean, if you suddenly feel God urging you to take this prostitute, well, why should you resist a god? And it wasn't long before Israel was sunk into the same consequences as came upon the Canaanites for that type of thing. There were many children born who weren't wanted, you know.
And so often they took them, and they sacrificed the little innocent babes to their gods. We don't do that nowadays, do we? We don't take children a few minutes after they're born and sacrifice them to the gods in the name of the goddess of pleasure. Our modern world sacrifices the little babes just before they're born, doesn't it? And does it by the million. That's what comes of making sex a god. And man who is supposed to be made in the image of God and in control of himself with godly self-control comes to thinking that the mere physiological and biological processes are gods in themselves, not to be resisted and not to be restrained by any moral consideration.
It was against that background that God raised up the great Elijah. To bring his people back to repentance. How did he do it? First of all, says, uh, chapter nineteen, uh, chapter, chapter 17, he learned himself by daily experience the reality of the living God. When, in answer to his prayers, God sent a disciplinary famine upon the nation, Elijah was first sent to the Brook Cherith, an out-of-the-way place, there being no supermarket within miles.
The question was, how would he get his food supplies? There were still food supplies in the cities, but not in this out-of-the-way place by the Brook Cherith. Elijah had the experience of God, who was in command of universal travel facilities and transport, and the ravens were commanded to bring him his food, morning and evening. He was then sent up to Zaretha, to a widow woman there, and there he saw God take that faithful woman's little handful of meal, cup full of oil, the basic staples of life, and multiply them by his grace and power to bring both Elijah and her through the famine.
Presently, the widow's boy died, and Elijah proved God once more as the living God in raising that boy from the dead. My good brothers and sisters, we not, may not be given to know any such spectacular miracles, but of this I'm persuaded, that if we would be a witness to God in our generation, a witness to the true and living God against the idolatries that are around us, we shall ourselves first have to have, in our daily life, experience of God as the living God.
We've got to live, haven't we? We've got to pass our exams. We've got to provide for our families. You can't do it without work. But is going to work a mere mechanical thing? When you go to work, says our blessed Lord Jesus, don't you be like the pagan old Gentiles? Oh, how now do they go to work? Well, when they go to work, their prime motivation is to seek for food and clothes. Well, you say, why else would anybody else go to work then? That's why I go to work myself, to get food and clothes. I mean, if I didn't had to have to get food and clothes, I'd buy a big yacht and go out to sea. Oh, how can we be different from the Gentiles when we go to work?
When you go to work, says Christ, don't you make the prime dividend, food and clothes? You make a prime dividend in going to work, the kingdom of God. Your work is but the training ground for developing principles of Christian character as you go about your daily work, so that God may use your daily work to build into your character the very rules of his kingdom and develop the gracious Christian graces in your life. And then, in addition, he will use your daily work to provide you with food and clothes.
You say, but to take that attitude, isn't that a bit unrealistic? I mean, no, sir, but it will demand in the end every bit of faith you've got. Prove God. In the daily affairs of life. I hesitate to quote myself, but I see young men and women here today. It's them I'm after, you know. I know what it's like to have to prepare for exams.
I can still remember it. Exams on my, on which my, my career depended. And I know the temptation to put the old exams first, and God and his word second, what I'm about to say is not a recipe for passing exams on the cheap. You don't pass exams without working seriously, responsibly, as Christian students should. I found myself once in this situation.
It was, I was coming up to finals. And, uh, I needed, like all people do, time to do the final preparations. It so happened that the last exam, two exams, were on a Thursday, and I had calculated my schedule so that my final prep for revision for those final two exams would be on the Wednesday evening. But at that time, God moved in Cambridge, in the work that our assembly had, in the local corn exchange, where people came in off the streets of all shapes, sizes, and ideas.
Drug addicts and goodness knows what else. And at that time, God had moved and saved a number of them. They used to come to the assembly meetings. But they soon found fault. They said, you only have two meetings of a weeknight. Said, isn't that enough for any sensible man or woman? Oh, and they're too long. Um, uh, no, they said, what are we going to do the other nights? We can't go back to our drug places. We can't go back home. Our homes, you could not, well, you could, you can't believe what they're like. We can't sit there. Where are we to go if we can't come to the church and, and, and be taught scripture? So we put on a series of meetings for them on Wednesdays, and I was deputed by the elders to do it.
When it came up to this final Wednesday, I diplomatically said, you'll see now, next Wednesday, uh, you see, I got to do some revision for my exam on the Thursday, so I think we can't have a meeting on the Wednesday. They said, yes, we will. And normally it would have been an excess of zeal to carry on, but there were certain special circumstances which I cannot stop to tell you that made me think again. And because of the spiritual issue at stake, I said, all right, I'll take that meeting. So I took it, and that was Wednesday night gone. Thursday, I sat the first exam, had my lunch, and I had twenty minutes to spare, and went to my room.
I said, I'll do a little revision. I picked out a piece of Sanskrit that I was supposed to be able to translate and comment on the grammar and phonology of it. And to my horror, here was a story in Sanskrit. I couldn't even translate the thing. I'd forgotten it. Hastily, I worked through it so I could translate it. It raised the question of history of, uh, of, of syntax, which reminded me of a sample answer I had written some months before. I went to my files and I got that out, and I read through that, and the time was more than gone, and I ran off to the examination room. I was a minute or two late, and I sat down and turned the paper, and there was that bit of Sanskrit that I just worked through.
And there was the syntactical question that I had just read. And that was a little thing, for I was a little undergraduate. It taught me a lesson. This isn't a recipe for escaping work, but it was an example that if in your daily work you are prepared to put God first, God will honor you. Seek you first his kingdom, and these things shall be added to you. Oh, my young men and women, upon you is going to come the burden of witnessing for God in a day and age that's becoming fast more idolatrous than ever and returning to the pagan ways of ancient Israel.
And God wants you to be his witnesses. How shall he prepare you to witness effectively for the living God? Unless first in your daily life you are prepared to prove him as the living God. You see, what can easily happen is this. Here goes a Christian student up to university or somewhere, and they say, well, I've got to get my exams, you see, so I can't afford to be studying the Word of God very much yet. I'll do it when I finish my exams. Very good. So they finish the exams. God bless them. And then, lo and behold, what they didn't expect, uh, they got married. Oh dear.
Well, that's very nice, of course. But then here come the children, and they say, well, I can't study the Word of God just yet, you see. I've got this dear wife and children, and I've got to get a, a house and things, so, so all right. When, when, when, when I got the children off my hands, I'll begin to be seriously minded and study God's word. So eventually they get the children off their hands, but now they're fifty five and a half, and they've begun to get lumbago and arthritis, and they've got neither the energy nor the time to study. And life has gone by. There was a big, big world outside there, lost in its sin.
Waiting to see men and women who know the living God, not merely as a theory. Men and women who have proved him in the kitchen, over the daily food supply, in the examination room, in the stock exchange, as they have lived and tried in all their living to seek first the kingdom of God, and have proved that God adds the rest as he sees it. This Elijah's preparation, and in our next session we shall have to consider how he was used of God to lead the revival.
