The prophet Elijah really liked fire. When soldiers came to take him to the king, he called fire from heaven to consume them (2 Kings 1:9-15). When he faced down the 450 prophets of Baal, he gravitated toward fire as the most obvious sign to determine which of the two gods was truly God (1 Kings 22-24). And in the end, he couldn’t even die normally— God had to send chariots of fire to escort him into heaven (2 Kings 2:11). All this fire surrounding Elijah reflected the fiery spirit on the inside. When we first meet him, he’s face-to-face with most evil king Israel has ever known, declaring that a drought will come as punishment for his crimes. Elijah’s zeal for God drives him to confront idolatry and injustice wherever he sees it, even in places that could endanger his life. And yet, after Elijah declares the drought, God sends him away. I imagine that such a zealous personality would’ve preferred to stay in Jezreel, where he could continue to warn against evil. But Elijah obeys the word of the Lord. He leaves civilization for the side of a brook in the wilderness, where ravens bring him food to eat (1 Kings 17:3-7). I suspect this was a divine cool-down time. Perhaps God knew that Elijah, after stoking his fires in a high-stakes confrontation with an evil king, needs time to rest. Or maybe Elijah just needs a place to hide because Ahab wants to kill him. Either way, he can’t stay long. The brook might be a prime vacation spot in ordinary times, but Elijah just called in a drought, and pretty soon he’s left sitting by a dusty riverbed. Fortunately, God has a new assignment for him: “Arise, go to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and dwell there. Behold, I have commanded a widow there to feed you” (17:9). Here’s a weird detail: Elijah is traveling out of the country. Sidon isn’t part of Israel— it’s a pagan nation, one that the prophet Isaiah will denounce for its wickedness hundreds of years later (Isaiah 23). But that’s not the weirdest part. The weirdest part is that God expects Elijah to get food from a widow— one of the poorest and most vulnerable members of society. The last thing any widow needs is a random prophet showing up and eating her food. An extra mouth to feed would be a burden even in times of plenty. But now… Elijah finds the widow— but he also finds a desperate situation. The widow makes an impressive sacrifice when he asks for water. Despite the drought, she’s immediately willing to give this stranger a drink. But when he asks for a morsel of bread, the widow replies, “As the Lord your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of flour in a jar and a little oil in a jug. And now I am gathering a couple of sticks that I go in and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die” (17:12). The first words out of the widow’s mouth parallel the first words we ever hear from Elijah: “as the Lord your God lives.” This must come as both a surprise and an encouragement to Elijah. He’s just been among the Israelites, God’s chosen people, and witnessed how they’ve abandoned the God who loves them and forgotten everything God calls them to be. Then he leaves for a pagan nation steeped in idols and oppression— and he finds a destitute widow who calls on the name of the Lord. God isn’t working in the halls of power. King Ahab rejects him and seeks only to fulfill his own lusts. But God is working among the weak and broken, and there’s a widow who invokes his name even as she prepares to die. But there’s a deeper significance to the parallel between the words of Elijah and the words of the widow. Elijah says to Ahab, “As the Lord, the God of Israel lives, there shall be neither dew nor rain” (17:1). The widow says to Elijah, “As the Lord your God lives, I have nothing.” Why does the widow have nothing? Because there’s a drought. Why is there a drought? Because of Elijah’s pronouncement to Ahab. As I explored in my last post, Elijah invoked God’s promise to punish evil in Israel. Elijah yearns to see righteousness, and he knows that God will be faithful to carry out his words in Deuteronomy 11:17. I think that, amid all his zeal, Elijah missed something. I think he was so on fire for justice and the honor of God that he forgot to ask an important question. He forgot to ask why God hadn’t sent the drought already. This widow is God’s answer to that question. The problem with shutting up the heavens is that it doesn’t just harm evildoers. Wicked and righteous alike need food, and without rain, neither of them is going to have an easy time getting it. By sending Elijah to this widow, God reminds him that he cares for widows, for orphans, for the oppressed. He reminds Elijah that there’s more at stake than Elijah can see. God miraculously provides for the widow. That little bit of flour and oil that she was going to bake and eat right before she died— that wildly insufficient portion lasts the entire drought, providing enough for the widow, her son, and Elijah (17:13-16). In confronting Ahab, Elijah gave all Israel a reminder of God's justice. Now, he receives a reminder of God's mercy. Three years pass before God sends Elijah to confront Ahab once more. Three years in which he presumably stays with the widow and, as far as the Biblical text records, doesn't make any great prophetic pronouncements. There's one intense moment where he raises the widow's son from the dead (17:17-24), but other than that, Elijah simply waits for God. I don't know Elijah's thoughts during this time, but I suspect he's growing restless. Ahab still rules Israel. Idolatry rages. Jezebel kills any faithful servant of God she can get her hands on (18:4). Surely Elijah aches to do something about the injustice running rampant among his people. But what if this period of waiting is exactly where God wants Elijah? What if simply witnessing God's faithfulness day after day is the most important work the prophet could be doing? What if all Elijah needs to learn is to receive the flour and oil that keeps him alive? In that case, it seems that Elijah's walk with God would not be too different from that of an ordinary Christian. Intense fiery ordeals at times-- but for the most part watching, and waiting, and receiving reminders of God's steadfast love and mercy.
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The letter of James ends with an apparently absurd description of prayer:
“Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain in the earth. Then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit” (James 5:16-18). Elijah prays that the rain would stop, and the rain stops. He prays that rain would return, and the rain returns. James makes clear that Elijah isn’t a special case— rather, he has ‘a nature like ours’. Which means that every Christian who reads James’ letter should expect their prayers to wield the same kind of power as Elijah’s. Except that’s not how prayer works, and James’ persecuted 1st-century audience knew it. Maybe some early Christians wished they could control the weather through prayer. That would’ve been a convenient way to stop the Roman Empire from killing their friends and family. But it’s not that simple. So what is James talking about here? The reference to Elijah isn’t just an isolated example of the power of prayer. Instead, it references the broader context of Elijah’s story— a story intimately familiar to first-century Jews. To understand the point James makes in his letter, we need to go back to Elijah’s first appearance in the Old Testament. ”Now Elijah the Tishbite, of Tishbe in Gilead, said to Ahab, “As the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years except by my word” (1 Kings 17:1). Notice that this verse gives us no reason to assume Elijah that is relaying a message from God. He warns that a drought is as certain as the fact that the God of Israel lives (pretty darn certain), but he doesn’t say “God told me to tell you this.” The text isn’t shy about telling us when God speaks directly. The very next verse reads, “And the word of the Lord came to him: Depart from here and turn eastward and hide yourself by brook Cherith, which is east of the Jordan” (17:2-3). God tells Elijah where to hide after confronting Ahab, but he doesn’t tell Elijah to confront Ahab in the first place. So what makes Elijah so certain? How does he know this drought is coming? To answer that question, we need to go even further back in biblical history. Because Elijah is a prophet— a fiery prophet devoted to God with all his whole being. I imagine that this dedicated, passionate servant of God has spent a good deal of time studying the words of God, particularly the Mosaic law given at Mt. Sinai. And in his studies he likely came across this passage: “If you will indeed obey my commandments that I command you today, to love the Lord your God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul, he will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the later rain, that you may gather in your grain and your wine and your oil. And he will give grass in your fields for your livestock, and you shall eat and be full” (Deuteronomy 11:13-15). That’s the first half of the promise in this passage— blessings for obedience. But there’s a flip side: “Take care lest your heart be deceived, and you turn aside and serve other gods and worship them; then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you, and he will shut up the heavens, so that there will be no rain, and the land will yield no fruit, and you will perish quickly off the good land that the Lord is giving you” (16-17, emphasis added). Back to Elijah. Remember, he doesn’t deliver the warning of a drought to Israel in general. He delivers it to the king. And not just any king— Ahab, who “did evil in the sight of the lord, more than all who where before him” (1 Kings 16:30). Ahab has led all of Israel into idol worship. He’s done everything he could to break the covenant between Israel and Yahweh. He’s killed any who remain faithful to Yahweh, so much so that at one point Elijah thinks he’s the only survivor (19:14). If the warnings of Deuteronomy were meant for any king, they were meant for Ahab. When Elijah warns Ahab about the drought, he’s not trying to control the weather through prayer. He’s not making up his own plan to deal with the evil king and expecting God to go along with it. Instead, he’s calling on God to fulfill a promise he made hundreds of years ago. Elijah sees the evil of King Ahab. And he knows that God promised not to let such evil go unchecked. So he makes a bold move based off the utter trustworthiness of God, and he invokes the promise in Deuteronomy. The prayer of Elijah isn’t “God, I want it to stop raining, so please make it stop raining.” It’s “God, you made this promise, and I know you are always faithful, so I know that you will fulfill it.” That’s the prayer James is talking about when he references Elijah in his letter. The prayer of righteous person isn’t effective because we can pray for whatever we want and get it. It’s effective because God loves his children, and always, always fulfills the promises he’s given them. Elijah’s confrontation with Ahab displays a gutsy faith that’s based on an intimate personal relationship. Elijah doesn’t just know that God keeps his promises. He expects it, demands it, because anything less would be out of character for the God he knows and loves. God honors Elijah’s faith. The heavens are shut up. Israel receives no rain for three and a half years. But Elijah’s story isn’t over yet. He loves God, and he’s full of zeal for righteousness. He longs to see good triumph over evil in the land of Israel. But I think he’s missing something— something that explains why God didn’t send the drought earlier. After all, Ahab’s been doing evil for a while by the time Elijah comes to him. And he’s not unique. Rather, he’s the latest installment in a whole dynasty of evil kings, kings that have been building idols and murdering each other ever since the reign of Jeroboam. Generation after generation of ruler has given God more than enough reason to put the curses of Deuteronomy into action. But God waited. Waited until one of his servants invoked the promise. And as soon as it begins, God sends that servant away. Elijah leaves the evil king, leaves the halls of power. He leaves all the places where idolatry and corruption need denouncing. He leaves, I suspect, because God wants him to learn an important lesson. But that lesson is the subject of another post. Last year, while in quarantine, I was reading through the book of Numbers when I noticed something weird: God gets mad at a prophet for obeying him. At least, that’s how it appears at first glance. But I read the rest of the book, and some details stood out to me, details that made the weird bits make more sense. Today, I’d like to share what I learned with you. The story starts in chapter 22. Balak, the king of the Moabites, has a problem. A powerful nomadic nation has set up camp across the river Jordan, one too powerful for Balak’s armies to defeat. Two neighboring kings— Sihon of the Ammonites and Og of Bashan— have already attacked them, only to be destroyed. So Balak seeks out supernatural aid. There’s a prophet nearby, Balaam, who has a track record of successful curses. A good, solid curse— that’s what Balak needs to stop the Israelite threat once and for all. He sends messengers to Balaam, loaded with gold and silver to pay the prophet for his services. But Balaam— having been warned by God not to take the job— refuses. So Balak ups his offer, saying “I will surely do you great honor, and whatever you say to me I will do. Come, curse this people for me” (Num. 22:17). Balaam considers, and this time, he gets a new message from God: “If the men have come to call you, rise, go with them; but only do what I tell you.” This is where it gets weird. Because here’s the next thing the Bible tells us: “Balaam rose in the morning and saddled his donkey and went with the princes of Moab. But God’s anger was kindled because he went” (22:21-22, emphasis added). Let’s review: 1) God tells Balaam to go 2) Balaam goes 3) God is angry What?!? A look at the broader context of this passage reveals Balaam’s motivation and helps us understand God’s displeasure. Remember, God didn’t just tell Balaam to go— he also gave specific instructions to “only do what I tell you.” As later becomes clear, Balaam has a lot more in mind than simply following God’s instructions. He thinks he knows how God works, and he’s hatching a nefarious plan to remove God’s favor from the Israelites. But before we explore that, we get to look at the most famous part of this story: the talking donkey. Three times the angel of the Lord blocks Balaam’s path as he travels, and three times his donkey proves more perceptive than her master. Each time she turns from the road to avoid the angel, Balaam grows angry and hits her. The third time, she talks. “What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three times?” (22:28). Balaam, interestingly, responds as if conversing with his donkey were the most normal thing in the world: “Because you have made a fool of me. I wish I had a sword in my hand, for then I would kill you.” Now something really unusual happens. The donkey reasons. She offers a calm, rational response that shows Balaam how foolish he is: “Am I not your donkey, which you have ridden all you life long to this day? Is it my habit to treat you this way?” The donkey asks her rider to why she might be behaving differently than she has in the past. What it is about this journey that makes it different from all the other journeys they’ve been on together? In becoming angry with his steed, what truth has Balaam missed? Balaam, perhaps chastened, answers with a simple “No.” Then, at last, he sees the angel of the Lord, and realizes the truth— his life was in grave danger, and he was only saved because the donkey proved smarter than he was. “Why have you struck your donkey these three times?” asks the angel of the Lord. “I have come out to oppose you, because your way is perverse before me. If she had not turned aside from me, surely just now I would have killed you and let her live” (22:32-33). God uses the donkey to steer Balaam toward repentance. By undermining one of his basic assumptions (that he knows better than his animal), God gives him a chance to review his other basic assumptions— assumptions about the character of God. Assumptions about the “perverse way” that he plans to ally with the king of Moab. Balaam has plans that are far astray from anything God ever intended, and here he receives an opportunity to rethink them. Again God repeats his earlier warning: “Go with the men, but speak only the word that I tell you.” At first, Balaam seems to heed this warning. Three times, Balak asks him to curse the Israelites, and three times Balaam blesses them instead. Each time he reminds Balak— “All that Lord says, that I must do” (23:26). After his third blessing, the Bible tells us that “Balak’s anger was kindled against Balaam, and he struck his hands together. And Balak said to Balaam, ‘I called you to curse my enemies, and behold, you have blessed them these three times. Therefore now flee to your own place” (24:10-11). But before Balaam can run away from the angry king, he must deliver one more message, a prophecy predicting Israel’s ultimate triumph over Moab. The Bible doesn’t detail Balak’s reaction, but my guess is that if he was angry before, he’s absolutely livid now. Imagine you’ve hired a plumber to fix your sink. Not only does he break all the pipes, he also tells you that your septic tank is going to explode and spew human waste all over your house. Yeah... that’s pretty much what just happened with Balaam. But wait— perhaps Balak threatens Balaam, or perhaps the prophet wants another shot at all that honor and wealth the king promised. Either way, Balaam hasn’t given up on the job of cursing the Israelites. He ignores God’s warning. And he puts his nefarious plan into action. The Biblical narrative shifts abruptly, leaving behind Balak and Balaam to focus on the Israelites. Turns out they’re not doing so well at listening to God either. “The people began to whore with the daughters of Moab. These invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate and bowed down to their gods. So Israel yoked himself to Baal of Peor” (25:1-3). This is a fundamental failure on the part of the Israelites to be who God called them to be. The image of Israel’s yoke is one of bondage. The Israelite’s sexual immorality and idolatry has returned them to the state of slavery, as they were in Egypt before God called them. What exactly is going on here? And why does this story follow directly on the heels of Balaam’s failed curse attempts? The answer becomes clear in chapter 31, when the identity of the one who sent the ‘daughters of Moab’ is revealed. “Moses said to them, ‘Have you let these women live? Behold, these, on Balaam’s advice, caused the people of Israel to act treacherously against the Lord in the incident of Peor” (31:15-16, emphasis added). Balaam recognizes that he can never drive God away from Israel. That as long as God’s favor rests upon them, the Israelites will defeat the Moabites in every battle they fight. And God will never leave his people. But... I imagine him whispering in Balak’s ear after the failed cursing... but, if he can get the Israelites to leave their God... And so he sends in women with orders to seduce. This seems the most likely explanation for why the angel of the Lord called his way “perverse”— he had this scheme in mind from the very beginning. Balaam has an accurate understanding of God’s power. But he completely fails to grasp God’s love. The scheme anticipates that God will no longer aid the Israelites once they start worshipping other Gods, thus leaving them open to a Moabite attack. But that’s not what happens at all. God doesn’t abandon them to be attacked by the Moabites. Instead, he attacks them himself. In their idolatry and sexual immorality, the Israelites have brought a terrible spiritual sickness upon themselves, one they’re unable to recognize. To open their eyes, God links their sin to a physical sickness, one that kills twenty-four thousand of them (25:9). God raises up Phinehas, the zealous priest who purges evildoers from the tent of meeting and makes “atonement for the people of Israel” (25:13). He strikes down those among the Israelites who align themselves with the false gods, thus bringing an end to the plague. God attacks the Israelites, not to utterly destroy them, but to bring about repentance and restoration. He pours out fierce anger, but not forever. The Israelites repent of their sin and are God’s people once more. Balaam’s plan fails because he never accounted for God’s love. In the end, Balaam causes the very outcome he was hired to prevent. With Phinehas at their head, the Israelites attack the Midianites in order to avenge their deception. Balaam himself is among those killed in the conflict (25:16-18, 31:8). Thousands of years later, Jesus would utter some words that summarize the warning Balaam ignored: “Temptations to sin are sure to come, but woe to him through whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin” (Luke 17:1-2). Because God loves his people, he wants to free them from sin. And his love can never be stopped— so anyone who tries to interfere with a believer’s struggle to become righteous is bound to be defeated. That’s one lesson I drew from the book of Numbers last year— that, and the lesson that donkeys are sometimes smarter than people. |
Progress on Doombear, Rough draft:10%
Progress on The Lore of Yore, third draft:
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"In truth, by leaving, I was seeking only one thing. A journey."
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