Sermons

Philip Ryken said this: “God is the main character of this chapter; he is the hero, or protagonist. Thus the lessons to be learned from 1 Kings 17 are not about Elijah primarily…but they are really about the living God.” Aaron takes us through this resurrection story with three main points: 1. From Life to Death (v. 17-18) 2. Faithful Prayer (v. 19-21) 3. From Death to Life (v. 22-24)

When someone dies, we can think about a lot of things and those who speak can easily talk about someone’s achievements. It might do with their character, the business they have built up, their contribution to the family or even their work in the community. Yet, if you are a Christian, you want to hear about the more important things, like what spiritual legacy did that person left behind. How did that person contribute to the proclamation of the Gospel? It might be to do with how they shared their faith with their children or how they serve the Lord, building up the church and kingdom. In today’s sermon we look at Ahab’s legacy.

Ahab demonstrates what a poor king he is when he stands by and lets Jezebel murder Naboth for a piece of land that he is desperate to have.

There can also be those, who like Ahab, think that you can lay in bed with the devil. That you can compromise on God’s truth. These people don’t look through the lens of Scripture to be their guide, but rather they think with their own human ability they can negotiate with the forces of evil. As Christians there can be no compromise with truth! We say that Jesus is not only our Saviour but our Lord.

This is very significant for Elijah to hear. Elijah up to this point had what we might call a “Messiah complex”. He thought everything depended on him! He had said, “I am the only one left and now they are trying to kill me too!” The truth was that he thought he was the only one but there were thousands of others who hadn’t bowed to the Baals and there were others who would be willing to be called into service. I think we need to hear these words well! If we want to have joy in our ministries, we should never think that everything depends on us. We should always remember that God can and will use others to do his will in the world.

Amazingly, Moses stood in the presence of God, on Mount Sinai, perhaps in the same spot as Elijah and instead of condemning the Israelites for their sins, like Elijah did, he pleaded with God for them. He was their intercessor. Hundreds of years later, Jesus, on another mountain pleaded with God for his own people. His first pray was for the Roman soldiers that nailed him to the cross. “Father forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.” Elijah at this point was light years away from where he should have been. He no longer loved his own people! Love for God’s people is what sustains us in our ministries! Yet God restored Elijah!

We need to ask the question at this point, as to whether we are free as Christians to walk out of the battle. Is a soldier allowed to leave his place in the ranks or on the field of battle? Shouldn’t he wait for his commanding officer to tell him where he is to serve next? Jezebel had badly frightened Elijah or burst his dreams of a nation under God! He felt that his burden was too heavy and his yoke too much for him to carry.

Jezebel wants to take Elijah’s life and yet she is limited by God in her ability to do so. Elijah serves the one true God. Jezebel is a servant of Satan opposed to the Kingdom of God.

I use to think this was a power encounter between God and Baal but that is wrong. Baal has no power. Rather God demonstrates his power here so that his covenant people would believe in him and worship him only.

You can then appreciate the place that Obadiah found himself in. He worked for Ahab, in fact he appeared to be one of his most trusted advisers, but he was also a believer in God. He stood between the most powerful man in the physical Kingdom of Israel, someone who could take his own life and almighty God. We wouldn’t find that a particularly enviable position to be in!

In this series on 1 Kings we discover one disappointing king after another and in this sermon we come to the lowest point where King Ahab decides to institute the cult of Baal as the state religion. God, by his grace, however, doesn’t let him get away with it and sends his prophet to rebuke Ahab and discipline in love, the whole of the Northern kingdom of Israel. God wants his people to repent and return to him and live. Elijah represents the Word of God to Israel and he departs and the results are catastrophic for the Israelites. AT the same time we see how God’s word bring life and even resurrection to people who accept it.

King Ahab marks a new low in Israel’s relationship with God. There is the entry of a powerful woman, Jezebel, who brings her gods from Sidon to Samaria. There is no-longer any pretence that they are really worshipping God, as they have done in the past but now there is no room for God at all. The official state religion is now “Baalism” and woe to those who do not conform! For us it is to be aware that if Israel could fail as the Old Testament Church that we should always be vigilant and always be determined to make our calling and election sure.

In this Sermon we look briefly at a number of the kings of Israel and how each of them failed. The primary reason for their failure was because they refused to acknowledge God and even though some of them has a success of sorts, none of their success was beneficial to God’s people and brought them closer to God. What about us? Are we making the most of our lives?

If there are lessons to be learnt from Asa for us as individuals is that as Christians, we can become less gracious and in fact harsh as we become older. The more important lesson is that we start to rely on ourselves too much and less on God! Our natural inclination is to rely on all our own attributes and gifts rather than on God and the results can be disastrous.

We sometimes think to ourselves that people cannot escape a legacy of depravity? We sometimes think that people are forever trapped by their upbringing; that they are merely products of their environment? The thing was that our text tells us that God refused to destroy Abijah’s house because of his promise and love for a righteous King in David.

One commentator I read wrote that Jeroboam was busy taking his people back to Egypt. When Jeroboam first comes on the scene, he is a kind of Moses. Moses pleaded with Pharaoh to ease the burden on the Israelites and Jeroboam did the same. Rehoboam was like Pharaoh at that time and said, “I’ll make life harder instead!” and then Jeroboam led the people of Israel to freedom. At this point we can see Jeroboam in a pretty good light! But then our new Moses, Jeroboam, starts the journey back to Egypt. Instead of being a Moses he becomes an Aaron who made a golden calf. He even mouths the same words as Aaron and says, “Here are your gods, who brought you out of Egypt.” (12:28b). So, he is leading his country and his family from the Promise Land back to Egypt. He is taking them from freedom to slavery, from home into exile, from life to death.

I called him a “wily old prophet” but he is really a false prophet, a conniving and wicked prophet, who did not speak for God at all! Jesus described Satan as being the “Father of lies” and this man then was one of Satan’s children. Yet, there is more to the story than that!

I entitled the sermon, “A perplexing Tale” because it is more than confusing. We have a prophet, who for the most part is good and faithful but does “disobey” God’s expressed command and then dies and is buried in Israel. We have a wily old prophet who lies and seems to get away with it. We have a king who is morally and spiritually bankrupt and he gets a reprieve. All up a hard passage to understand. In this sermon I concentrate on the “Man of God from Judah.” In the following one I look at the old prophet who I call, “The Wily Old Prophet.”

Jeroboam created high places, religious centres of worship, idol practices, and also made sure that the days of worship in Israel would coincide or replace the religious festivals in Judah, ordained by God. Again, the aim was to get the people to worship in Israel, and he thought that it was important, that he as their king should lead them in this worship. As such he was doing something expressly forbidden by God. He created an artificial priesthood, false shrines of worship. His aim at the end of the day was to create something that would rival true religious worship, that God himself had ordained. I would say that his strategy is still copied today where many regimes feel threatened by Christianity and attempt to create their own version of the truth, which happens always to be a lie.

As a “Reformed” Christian I know that there is such a thing as Human responsibility and God’s Sovereignty. I can’t always work it out, but I simply accept that it is true. Rehoboam made his choices and they were poor choices, demonstrating immature and selfish leadership. Yet, as the passage reminds us, God is behind all these things! If God wasn’t behind these things, he would simply be less than he should be. If Rehoboam wasn’t responsible for his actions, then he can’t be held responsible for them!

To me the whole thing is about forgiveness and grace. We sin, and yet, we can come to God at any time and find mercy. In the Old Testament the people suffered the consequences of their own sin but in the New Testament Jesus does – and in that we experience grace. Solomon’s prayer seems to cover every sinful contingency and God will and did forgive.

If you were to ask what the very epicentre of our own life, what would you say? For many people, who do not know God it would be their families (wife or husband) or their business or their recreations or their sports. For some it would be their money! All people have things they consider to be the most valuable. What Solomon did in building the temple was declaring that God was to be the very heart of his existence and more to the point, “The heart of the nation’s existence.” He would wake up in the morning, look out of the window of his place and see the temple in all its glory and he would know that God was of supreme importance to him. He would know that inside the temple was the Holy of Holies and in that room was the Ark of the Covenant, the most holy of all furniture at the temple.

No matter how limited access might have been in the temple of Solomon, there was still access. A sinful human being, (High Priest) after making atonement, could come into the very presence of God, through the curtain. What God was conveying in the story of the temple was that there was a way for Paradise to be regained. One commentator (Philip Ryken) said that the temple was a spiritual portal. That Paradise lost could be regained (p. 158 of his commentary). The gold inside the temple whispered rumours of everlasting life – streets that would be paved with gold.

To me, this sense of awe and wonder affected by the building of Solomon’s temple would have affected each and every one of those who worked on the site or visited that building site. Their God, was coming to make a home with them, and as they laid the stones they would have contemplated that their God, who had defeated Pharaoh and his armies, who had given them the land and freed them from all their enemies: that this God was dwelling with them!

The problem can be that that we put far we can feel spiritually superior because we have a great building or big numbers or a great budget. The real outcome of a relationship with God must be obedience. The real outcome of a relationship with God has to be faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as our only means of being declared right with God. From time to time I meet people who put too much confidence in church attendance or in fasting or in tithing or in ritualistic worship. That is what offends me when I travel to Europe and see cathedral after cathedral. They might all be dedicated to the Lord God but in reality they were build to glorify those who instituted them! What a mistake Solomon would make if he thought that he had ticked all the boxes God wanted from him when he built the temple. It would be the same mistake we would make if we put too much confidence in tithing, or church attendance, or doing some spiritual thing. The Christian life is all about continued service, continued obedience.

As you look at Solomon’s wish you can’t help but be impressed. In chapter 2 David handed over the Kingdom to his son, Solomon and told him he need to do two things to establish his reign. The first one was to keep the Word of God close to his heart and to do it! The second one was to remove anything that threatened his reign and kingdom and that meant that some people had to go! Now these two things are very helpful for us as we too want to be established, rooted firmly in our Christian walk. The third key ingredient, to being established is “Wisdom”. The truth is that we need wisdom to live the Christian life. That is what Solomon asked for and it is something that we also need to ask for. I tend to think of wisdom as doing the right thing in the right circumstance. Wisdom in the Bible is intensely practical, and it is often about doing something in a just way. Solomon recognised the great need for wisdom and the whole book of Proverbs is basically a call for us to be wise!

We know that David and Solomon were ancestors of the Lord Jesus and that Jesus is David’s greater son. We also know he came to establish his Kingdom and that his enemies were the greatest enemies of all – sin, death and the devil. The difference between Jesus and Solomon is this. Solomon’s enemies got what they deserved for their violence, intrigue, hatred towards God’s anointed King. Today, Jesus’ enemies can be forgiven because Jesus himself took the violent punishment for us! All the violence of God’s righteous anger against his enemies fell upon Jesus and in that sense, through faith in him, we are set free, for ever.

David believed the key to being a man was to have courage to walk in obedience to the Lord, to keep his command and decrees. Some people like the expressing, “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” But for David the line went this way, “manliness is next to godliness.”

In a chess game, if you can get one of your pawns to the other side of the board, something that can happen right near the end, then you say to your opponent, “Crown me.” As human beings we don’t mind a crown and that is certainly the case here. Adonijah, supported and encouraged by others attempts to wrestle the throne for himself. Adonijah, who had been indulged all of his life says, “I will be king.”  (v. 5).