Elijah and Elisha for Today

The Shaking and the Judgement Begin

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

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Genre: Sermon Series

Lesson: 6 of 16

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[Rushdoony] Our scripture is from the first book of Kings the 19th chapter, verses 1-18. I Kings 19 verses 1-18. “And Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and withal how he had slain all the prophets with the sword. Then Jezebel sent a messenger unto Elijah, saying, So let the gods do to me, and more also, if I make not thy life as the life of one of them by tomorrow about this time.  And when he saw that, he arose, and went for his life, and came to Beersheba, which belongeth to Judah, and left his servant there.  But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die; and said, It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers.  And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat.  And he looked, and, behold, there was a cake baken on the coals, and a cruse of water at his head. And he did eat and drink, and laid him down again. And the angel of the Lord came again the second time, and touched him, and said, Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee. And he arose, and did eat and drink, and went in the strength of that meat forty days and forty nights unto Horeb the mount of God. And he came thither unto a cave, and lodged there; and, behold, the word of the Lord came to him, and he said unto him, What doest thou here, Elijah?  And he said, I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts: for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.  And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake:  And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.  And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out, and stood in the entering in of the cave. And, behold, there came a voice unto him, and said, What doest thou here, Elijah?  And he said, I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts: because the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.  And the Lord said unto him, Go, return on thy way to the wilderness of Damascus: and when thou comest, anoint Hazael to be king over Syria:  And Jehu the son of Nimshi shalt thou anoint to be king over Israel: and Elisha the son of Shaphat of Abelmeholah shalt thou anoint to be prophet in thy room.  And it shall come to pass, that him that escapeth the sword of Hazael shall Jehu slay: and him that escapeth from the sword of Jehu shall Elisha slay.  Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him.”

Elijah appeared before Ahab and declared unto him, we are told, “that as the Lord God of Israel liveth before whom I stand there shall not be dew nor rain these years but according to my word.” And a drought of three and a half years followed. During that time we are told that Ahab sent to every land round about demanding that if Elijah be there he be surrendered to him for execution. He required an oath of them, that Elijah was not in their land. The end of the time Elijah appears before Obadiah, the governor of the palace, and he tells him “go tell thy Lord, ‘behold Elijah is here.’” Now at that point Obadiah, a Godly man who had saved the surviving preachers of the word, was terrified and with good reason, because what Elijah was requiring was something unprecedented. Ordering a king to come to him, this was a summons.

Now in antiquity men only approach the king at his summons. We read in the book of Esther that no man could come into the king’s presence without his bidding, and Esther declares that “if I approach him without his bidding, unless he extends to me his scepter, I die.” Summons constitute a legal fact, a declaration from the sovereign that a man is to appear into his presence for judgment. And for a hunted man, a wanted man, to tell the governor of the palace “Go tell Ahab Elijah is here, bring him to me” required an unparalleled audacity.

Ahab went, Ahab went knowing the significance of it but Ahab was a desperate man. Very shortly he would have no kingdom. The drought had reached the point where there was no food and very, very few streams of water trickling. Drought can be totally destructive if it continues long enough; and so he went. And Elijah appointed the trial on Mount Caramel with God establishing the conditions of that trial and the prophets and the priests of Baal and of the groves were summoned, and Elijah ordered by God gave the terms of the trial, test before all Israel; and then the judgment.

Now the sin of Israel was syncretism. The word syncretism means that one holds to a form of the faith, that brings into it almost every doctrine that appeals to them so that they have a smorgasbord. They may say they believe the Bible from cover to cover, but they believe what suits them, and they reach out and they take any doctrine of man, and they absorb it into their doctrines. Israel from first to last was syncretistic, even as America is today. Most of the United States professing to be Christian, close to 55 million adults professing to be born again Christians will believe the Bible from cover to cover. But they are like Israel of old, having the form of Godliness but lacking the power thereof. And then the test, and God answered by fire. And Israel that stood silent previously when Elijah said “how long halt ye between two opinions? If the Lord be God follow Him, but if Baal follow him, and the people answered him not a word” rose at that point and said “the Lord, He is the God. The Lord He is the God.”

But now we pass on to the next episode. We are not told how much time elapsed, perhaps two or three weeks, perhaps a month, perhaps longer; enough for the temper of the people to reveal itself. And what was that temper? They were all for reformation provided someone else did it. They were all for it provided it didn’t go too far or cost them too much. They were all for it, provided it meant saying only “the Lord, He is the God, but don’t ask me for my tithe, now you’re getting personal.” And Elijah was dealing with a shrewd adversary, Jezebel. And Jezebel, when she saw the temper of the people moved, and the people also moved, because it is at this point that what Elijah says “the children of Israel have forsaken Thy covenant, thrown down Thine altars and slain Thy prophets with a sword, and I, even I, am only left and they seek my life to take it away.

Up until this point we are told that the persecutor was Jezebel, and that Obadiah had hidden the prophet from the wrath of Jezebel. But now it is the very people themselves, after that miracle of Caramel, who become the persecutors, who become the murders of God’s prophets. Is it any wonder that Elijah was heartsick and dismayed? The great miracle, the people jarred for a moment out of their idolatry, but quickly settling back into a more hardened apostasy and acting as though it never happened. It was a once in a lifetime event, something to forget about, people will do that regularly.

In 1971, I think it was February the 6th, I was in the earthquake in southern California. Six o’clock in the morning I woke up to the tremendous jarring, it was though somebody were shaking the whole building like that, to the sound of crashing books and breaking glass. It was very interesting then for days and for two or three weeks to see the reaction of people when you stood in a checkout line at the grocery store, or sat in a restaurant, or wherever you went people talked about the earthquake. Psychiatrists had appointments pile up suddenly. People were shaken, all their humanism for a moment was jarred and shattered; when you can’t trust the very ground beneath your feet, what security do you have? In fact one person told me that at work several people didn’t show up and one woman who had come out there to take a very responsible position called them the next day from Missouri and said “send me my check.” She had gotten on the plane as fast as she could [laughter.] It was very, very jarring to people in their Humanism. But then they settled back, these things happen only once in a lifetime so what do we have to worry about? The area won’t have an earthquake like this in all probability for another 50 or 100 years. And very quickly these people who were so uneasy in their Humanism, so shaken in their sin-hardened ways, cracked up in it, settled back into it, and forgot it; did not want to be reminded by anything of that which they had experienced.

So it was with Israel. The miracle of Mount Caramel, the judgment, God having summoned all Israel and Ahab and the prophets of Baal and the groves and having passed His sentence, all Israel was shaken. But then “well you don’t see things like this but once in a few generations. And God doesn’t come around very often to pull a stunt like this. So let’s go back, lets settle down in our old ways.” And all desire for reform was quickly gone and Jezebel grasped that. This time it was not she who was the persecutor of the Lord’s prophets, it was the children of Israel, and so she acted, and she sent a messenger unto Elijah saying “so let the gods do to me and more also if I make not thy life as one of them by tomorrow about this time.” When Elijah saw that, when he saw what had happened to those servants of the Lord who had arisen, those whom Obadiah had hidden and had come out, and others who may have returned to the land, he arose and went for his life.

And then exhausted he sat down under a Juniper and he requested for himself that he might die. “It is enough, now oh Lord, take away my life for I am not better than my fathers.” Elijah loved Israel, he longed for the conversion of Israel. It was one thing to face the apostasy of Ahab, but to see the apostasy of the nation whose salvation he yearned for, this took the heart out of him. And so he laid down and slept and an angel touched him and said ‘arise and eat.” Just as Israel when it journeyed from Sinai to the promise land was miraculously fed, so now God’s faithful servant as he reverses that journey, from the promised land to the mountain of God, for the law was given, he too was miraculously fed. The first Moses led Israel from Sinai to the promise land with the law and the promises of God. The salvation of God and then the word of God by which they were to live; and the second Moses, Elijah, reverses that journey. And then the third Moses, Jesus Christ, he gives the law from the mountain in the sermon, is met on the mount of transfiguration by the first and second Moses, and they speak Luke 9:31 tells us, of his decease that very literally in the Greek, his “exodus.” His exodus whereby the covenant is to be renewed through the justification he was to affect by satisfying the law of God and reestablishing a people under the Lord who would now walk by faith and in obedience to the Lord.

And there on the mountain he lodged in a cave and God ordered him to go forth and stand upon the mount before the Lord, at the mouth of the cave. And there proceeds the wind, the fire, the earthquake heralding God’s coming. We are told the Lord passed by, and a great wind, a strong wind, rent the mountains and break in pieces the rocks before the Lord. The Lord was not in the wind; and then an earthquake, and then the fire, and then after the fire a still small voice, or more accurately a sound of the gentle stillness, a stillness that you could hear.

I recall once talking in the mountains of Nevada to a man who had spent a great deal of time up in the mountains rounding up stray cattle, checking the fences, and so on. And he said “whenever I have someone helping me who is doing this for the first time, or some friend who wants to go up into the mountains and stay with me for a week or two, do some fishing and some hunting while I do my work, the thing that bothers them as we camp by the night and stay in our sleeping bags there, is the sound they hear, sounds. And they’ll start up and say ‘what’s that?’ and I tell them ‘don’t worry about the sound, worry about the silence. Because when the sounds end you know there’s a mountain lion around or a bear, and any small thing that would make a sound is gone.’”

Now the silence. The Lord is in His holy temple let all the earth keep silence before Him. And it was so when Elijah heard it that he wrapped his face in his mantel, and went out and stood in the entering in of the cave, out beyond the protection of the mount, a behold there came a voice unto him and said ‘what doest thou here Elijah?’ and he said ‘I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts because the children of Israel have forsaken Thy covenant, thrown down Thine altar, and slain Thy prophets with a sword, and I, even I only am left, and they seek my life to take it away.” Now the Lord had already indicated the answer, and the Lord passed by in the wind that broke even great boulders, and the earthquake, and in the fire; all things we see when the law was first given at mount Sinai and signifying God’s judgment. And the Lord said unto Him “Go return on thy way to the wilderness of Damascus, and when thou comest anoint Hazael to be king over Syria:  And Jehu to be king over Israel: and Elisha shalt thou anoint to be prophet in thy room.  And it shall come to pass, that him that escapeth the sword of Hazael shall Jehu slay: and him that escapeth from the sword of Jehu shall Elisha slay.” Elijah wanted Israel to be saved, God ordered that Israel be judged, and he anointed an enemy king as the instrument of that judgment. He anointed an army captain as the instrument of rebellion, of revolution, and he ordered anointed Elisha to be prophet in his stead.

“ Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him.” Elijah was to start before his time was finished three seminaries, three schools of prophets together with Elijah [I think he meant Elisha] to train men to go out and to bring together a remnant which the Lord would preserve. But the wind of judgment, the earthquake and the fire went forth from the mountain of the law against all covenant breakers. The Lord was not to be in Israel as their redeemer, but as their judge.

Elisha [he meant Elijah] wanted Israel to be saved, and we like Elijah want men to be saved, but the future is the Lord’s and of His ordination, not ours. And God ordains the kind of building we are to do, here God decreed that a building program was going to be built, but not there. “Go ye therefore unto all nations.” The building now is greater than Judea, the building now includes the whole of the world. And today as we yearn for the salvation of our loved ones and of our communities and of our country and we make our plans and say “Lord it is good for us to be here, let us begin a building on this spot.” God tells us sometimes to build here, but always to go forth, and God reminds us that He is not only the God of grace but also of judgment. There was a great shaking from Sinai and Caramel to the fall of Jerusalem, and Paul tells us that the things which were, were shaken and that now with the fall of Jerusalem another great shaking was to begin, the things which are, are being shaken so that the things which cannot be shaken may alone remain.

And we are in an age of shaking, we are in an age when men are like the people of Israel of old, and they are syncretists, when they have the form of Godliness but not the power thereof; when they are all for the Lord and for His house when it’s a place of entertainment, but not the faithful preaching of the word. And so the wind and the earthquake and the fire of judgment shall go through our generation from pole to pole, from continent to continent, from one end of the earth to the other. And at the same time we must prepare ourselves with our churches and our Christian schools and everything that we establish, that the word may go forth. “Look unto me and be ye saved all the ends of the earth.”

Elijah, a great man of God whom we dare not criticize, had under frightening conditions his moment of dejection and sadness. But God sent him forth with the word of judgment, and also with the word of grace. “Anoint Elisha to be prophet in your stead.” And Elisha, and the school of prophets, three of them, what a joy to the old man, surrounded by students coming together to be instructed in the word to go out and to proclaim it. God blessed Elijah and when he was dejected it was the Lord who by an angel fed him and strengthened him and sent him back to the battle against Ahab and Israel.

{?} God has not grown old nor His arm become shorter, He is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and His judgment upon the covenant breakers today and the Ahab’s of our time remains, and so we stand in terms of that word, and we issue the summons to men and nations “Go, tell the Ahab’s of our time, ‘thus saith the Lord’ God summons you to bow down before Him, kiss the Son lest He be angry and ye perish in your way.” Fall before that means, kiss His feet in repentance, lest ye perish in your way when failing to acknowledge Him as Lord you face Him as the judge. This is not the word of pleading, nor is the pulpit the place for begging the people, it is the place for proclamation of the sovereign word of grace and the sovereign word of judgment ‘hear ye the Lord.” Let us pray.

Almighty God our heavenly Father we thank Thee that Thou art God. That in all the events of men Thou art present using all things to effect Thy sovereign will. We rejoice our Father that Thy grace and Thy judgment are at work in our time, in our generation, to accomplish Thy holy and unfailing and infallible purpose. Teach us therefore our Father to wait on Thee, to rejoice in Thee, to obey Thee, to go forth at Thy bidding, knowing that in Jesus Christ we are more than conquerors. In His name we pray, amen.

[Moderator] Alright we will take a while now and have some questions, and Lord willing some answers, and I trust that you’ve thought of some and Tony I told him that one which you asked me, now would be a good time to ask it tonight. But I wanted to ask one in light of the message first, and then if you have one light of the message I trust that you’ll ask it, and then just on whatever is on your heart.

My question is this concerning the message that was preached tonight it would be wrong, or unscriptural, would it not, to pray for salvation without judgment? Because judgment and salvation are inescapably connected, is that right?

[Rushdoony] Yes. We never meet salvation in scripture without finding judgment. For example, without the judgment upon Egypt there was no salvation for Israel. Without the judgment upon our sins at the cross, there was no salvation for us. Every time we meet with salvation in scripture it coincides with judgment and the cross is the freeing witness to the fact of the coincidence of salvation and judgment. They cannot be separated. Those who want to abolish judgment and hell are also abolishing salvation and heaven.

[Moderator] Then in light of that, nationally speaking, of our nation. What we can look forward to is two things then, judgment upon the Ahab’s, the covenant breakers, and salvation upon those who obey the covenant.

[Rushdoony] Yes, and we must say that if God does not bring judgment upon our nation, then we are indeed cast away.

[Moderator] Alright are there any other questions? Tony?

[Tony] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. At the judgment seat of God there is a forensic and public judgment of all our sins which are put away in and in our works of grace in terms of which we are rewarded and they are put away so that God says He remembers them no more, and we will not except that we will remember that it is all of grace throughout all eternity. Does that answer it, or did you want further?

[Tony] That answers it, it still doesn’t answer my own thoughts. {?} My thought was that {?}

[Rushdoony] It is, yes. It is forgiven in time, then on judgment day we see the fullness of what God has done that our sins, far greater than we realize here now, are still covered by the blood, forever blotted out by the Lord, and from our memory even, and only the memory of His grace. So then His servants shall serve Him.

[Moderator] I have two thoughts that might help on this. In this life then we would enjoy experiential peace of conscious. There, there would be a judicial, a legal, total cleansing. In other words it would be acknowledged what we have done, but not in such a way as to condemn us, but just such as a way as in God would legally and judicially blot it, does that answer it?

[Tony] Yes.

[Moderator] Ok {?} you want to?

[Audience member] {?} Will there be different degrees at each point {?}

[Rushdoony] In the parable of judgment we are told that one man is told “well done thou good and faithful servant, be thou ruler over ten cities.” And another “be thou ruler over five cities” so that the new creation is a community and a society, and we are told there His servants shall serve them, and there shall be no more curse. Our work not being cursed by sin it will be totally joyful and we will have varying degrees of responsibility, that we will all be perfectly sanctified. So just as there are, we have reason to believe from scripture, differences among the angels, so there are among the redeemed in heaven, and yet without any envy, or any less degree of privilege in salvation and in the grace of God.

[Moderator] {?} Do you want to?

[Audience member] These seven thousand people that had not bowed the knee to Baal, how were they kept secret in a city? How was there enough food? How were they hid?

[Rushdoony] Yes, the number of seven thousand, seven representing the fullness. God says I have all that are appointed, the elect are fully there and they have not bowed the knee to Baal. Now how they had maintained themselves, they’re not all together, they’re scattered throughout Israel, we don’t know. We know that Obadiah was faithful and very often throughout history we find that ungodly men rely on the Godly because they can trust no-one else. And even in a time of persecution we’ll wink at their face in order to use them, just as Genghis Khan used Christians in his bureaucracy because he knew he could trust them, and Nero we are told “they that are of Cesar’s household” now the word “household” there can mean cabinet. These were responsible men. So that Nero, reprobate that he was to the nth degree, still put his trust in some Christian men, and I’ve seen that over and over again on the part of thoroughly reprobate men. They don’t trust their own kind and they will put their trust in a Godly man, so Obadiah was trusted, and there could very well of been others of like character.

When I was on the Indian reservation one of the things that was quite marked was that things would get so bad under the rule of the tribal council that the tribe would turn upon their own kind and vote in our Christian Indians to the tribal council to run the tribe. And they would clean up everything, get strict law and order in, and everything would be ideal, only they couldn’t tolerate it then and they’d vote them out. [laughter] And then they’d find that they couldn’t tolerate their own way, and they’d be voted back in. That was happening over and over again as a cycle because their way led to destruction so obviously that it was intolerable to them.