(Elijah #5/6)

by Paul Harrison

1 Kings 21:1-29

After the exhausting triumph of Elijah’s big day on Mt. Carmel, Queen
Jezebel’s threat against his life knocked all the stuffing out of him. It seemed to
him that all his endeavours had come to nothing, that the last word would always lie with
the Jezebels of this world. No matter how much effort he put into it, a good man’s
protest was never more than a lonely, futile gesture; at the end of the day, the power of
evil was always in the driver’s seat. So it seemed to him.

But in the cleft of the rock at Mt. Horeb, where he had fled, Elijah was granted a
tremendous experience of God’s presence and power in the silent inner world of a
man’s soul. His power there was more awesome than it was even in nature. God is
Spirit, and as such He is the hidden factor that shapes all life, whether an
individu-al’s or a society’s, and He is mightily to be reckoned on!

Elijah’s protest had not been futile. The sturdy resistance that Naboth will offer
to the king will supply evidence that the hearts of common folk were indeed turning back
to God, and that there was a new spirit abroad in Israel.

The appearance of power might lie with Jezebel still. She herself might believe it did,
and pursue her evil designs as though Elijah’s testimony to the invisible God of
righteousness were no greater obstacle than a fly she brushed from her face; but God by
His prophet had wrought a thing in Israel which, though it was hidden now like leaven that
a women might take and hide in three measures of meal (Matthew 13:33), would yet bubble
and stir and heave in the mass of Israel’s life until the whole kingdom swelled up
and burst in her face. "The rule of God," as Jesus said, "does not come
with observation. There will be no saying, ‘Here it is, look! Or there!’ for the
rule of God is a hidden thing until it bursts into view like a lightning flash upon the
darkness." (Luke 17:20) But the story of Naboth was a clue, for anyone with eyes to
see, to what was going on under the surface in Israel.

THE TIDE OF FAITH

Naboth was a citizen of Israel whose vineyard lay close by the palace confines of King
Ahab. Ahab saw it in his mind’s eye as ideally situated to complete his palace estate
with a vegetable garden, and he went to Naboth with what appears on the surface to be a
perfectly reasonable proposal to swap it for a better one, or buy it. Had he chosen to
sell, Naboth might have done very well out of the deal.

But his refusal to sell was a real indication of the effect Elijah’s stand had had
on the minds of ordinary citizens in Israel. Naboth would not sell, not because he clung
stubbornly to his land, as farmers tend to do, nor because he was an anti-royalist, but
because Elijah’s stand had made him strong in his faith.

The Law of Moses was that no man was ever to sell his land, "for" (here is
the important thing) "the land, says Yahweh, is mine." (Leviticus 25:23) To
Naboth’s mind, the land was not his to sell; it was Yahweh’s, and he, Naboth,
was Yahweh’s steward on it. Israel had a Covenant with Yahweh, and Naboth was not
about to betray it. Not even the King had the right to make him do that.

Naboth’s stand was in the same brave spirit as that of the Baptist forefathers,
like John Smyth and Thomas Helwys, who penned the first pleas for full religious liberty
in the English language. In 1612 Thomas Helwys wrote to King James, "Our lord the
King is but an earthly king, and he hath no authority as a king but in earthly causes, and
if the king’s people be obedient and true subjects, obeying all human laws … the
king can require no more: for men’s religion to God is betwixt God and themselves:
the king shall not answer for it, nor may the king be judge between God and man. Let them
be heretics, Turks, Jews or whatever, it appertains not to the earthly power to punish
them in the least measure."

So for Naboth, the refusal to sell his land was a matter of conscience.

Now from all we have learned in these studies, this is hardly the attitude we would
have expected to find among the common folk before Elijah blazed on to the scene. Before
his challenge to the nation had been heard, the people reckoned the land to belong to the
Baals. Naboth’s sturdy refusal to sell was an indication that they were indeed
turning back again in their hearts to the God of their fathers. In this man’s heart –
and if in his then in others’ too – faith in Elijah’s God was grown strong
enough to make him defy the King. Naboth was among the 7,000 who did not bow the knee to
Baal. It was enough to show that the tide of faith throughout the nation was turning.

THE VICTORY OF FAITH

It was all part of the evidence for the truth Elijah had learned at Mt. Horeb.
Outwardly, perhaps, things were not much changed. Jezebel and Ahab still ruled. But
inwardly men were turning back in their hearts to God, and soon this inward hidden change
would work for the total collapse of the ruling earthly power.

So it might have seemed on the day that the Spirit was poured out in Jerusalem on a
meagre assembly of 120 men and women. What did that amount to, on the surface of things?
Annas and Caiaphas still held the reigns of power in Israel, along with Herod, and could
dispose of James and Stephen as ruthlessly as they pleased. But within the space of forty
years, Jerusalem was in ruins and Jewry as a political entity was wiped out.

The rule of God does not work in human life in such a way that we can easily put our
finger on it; but it is among us, nonetheless. Always it is among us. As Jesus said once,
there will be times when we will wish we could observe it. "You will desire to see
one of the Days of the Son of Man …" (there will be more than one, as ever and
again the rule of God brings on the overthrow of yet another regime of evil) "and you
will not see it; not in your day."

The surface of things will appear unchanged for so long; but then, with complete
unpredictability, the climax of God’s underground operations will erupt into
visibility. "As the lightning lights up the sky from one end of it to the other,
revealing in that sudden flash what till then was hidden, so will the Son of Man be in His
day."

The servant of Christ is unable, often to his own acute discomfiture, to put his finger
on the pulse of his times, and say "Here" or "There" is where God is
exercising His sovereignty … "This is what God is doing in our time." We try.
The Ecumenical movement was a hot favourite at one time. "The great new fact of our
time," the Churchmen called it. But I am not convinced it has contributed much to the
rule of God in the world’s life. The tongues movement is another, and I am not much
impressed by that either.

Where is the rule of God working in our day for the overthrow of a corrupt regime? Not
in any spectacular revivalist movement (God be thanked for them wherever they appear …
but in Rwanda not even revival in one generation warded that nation off from a blood bath
in the next) but in secular affairs where Christian men choose to obey God rather than
man-made authorities.

In Elijah’s day the kingdom of God was coming, not simply in the big religious
event on Mt. Carmel, but on a bit of farmland there by the palace wall, where king and
commoner were arguing over the sale of a bit of land – in an apparently non-religious
matter; for religion that fails to affect the whole of life is not real religion. True
faith enables men to see all life whole under God.

That happened even in Russia. An issue of the Voice of the Martyrs told how in the
prison camps of Mordvinia, the Communist Police came up with a scheme to break the faith
of jailed Christian girls. After years in prison subjected to constant hunger and often
denied even the simplest necessities of hygiene, they were taken one by one to the cinemas
and supermarkets in town. "You can choose whatever luxury you like," they were
told, "we will buy it for you if you renounce your faith." Their reply? "We
don’t need them. When we became Christians, we renounced luxuries," and went
back to their prison cells. Where men and women suffer for their faith, as Naboth
suffered, there is where the kingdom of God is coming, where His will is being done.

In the eyes of the world, of course, such things look like defeat. They are not. They
are the victory that overcomes the world. Their faith wins over the Spirit of the world.
They are the means in God’s hand, these seemingly futile gestures, whereby He
mysteriously brings on the overthrow of the strongholds of evil. Wherever men and women
suffer for their faith, there is where God is winning. We should know better than to
believe that the evil in the world is so big and impregnable that our little acts of
Christian obedience in it can make no difference. They can and they do.

Let us take heart. God is still on the Throne. He is.

THE DEFEAT OF EVIL

To be sure, the kingdom, the power and the glory all seem to lie, not with God, but
with the big battalions. Ahab and Jezebel are typical of the sort of success that seems to
attend flagrant evil. Ahab got what he wanted. Jezebel got what she wanted. And neither of
them appeared to be any the worse for the whole dirty business. Naboth, what is more, was
murdered and Elijah came too late to save him. The whole story is typical of the way life
works out so often, to the real distress of those who believe in God.

But that is not where the story ended. Ahab got his vegetable garden, yes. But he
found, when he got it, that it had Elijah in it – the very embodiment of his own accusing
conscience. He got his pleasure but he lost his peace.

"Have you found me, O mine enemy?" was his greeting to the prophet. Fool
Ahab! Could he not see that Elijah was the one friend he had in the world to anything left
in him worth saving?

The very unhappiness that follows from successful sin is one of God’s mercies,
like physical pain that alerts us to a sickness that needs treatment. But Ahab can only
see it as a curse. His sin has warped his vision, as it always does. It has made him blind
– blind to his own sin, blind to its real result, blind to his true friends, blind to his
real enemies, blind to his God. That is the tragedy of success in our sins. It works a
fearful change in us – fearful because the change, being a change in our real selves, is
not known to us. That a sinner should succeed in his sin is the worst tragedy that can
befall him.

Ahab, mercifully, found his way back to repentance.

But Jezebel did not. The last glimpse the Bible gives us of her is a grim one. Years
later, she is found still in the palace at Jezreel which her sins had built around her,
still in the tower she had fashioned by lies and violence and betrayal, and it has become
a prison around her. Outside it, she dare not venture; inside it, laughter is dead. When
her last hour came, she imagined, incredibly, that she had only to paint her face, adorn
her hair, disport herself at the window, and seduce her enemies to save her life. She did
not know, she simply did not know, that she had become disgusting, an object of revulsion,
so that even beyond her death, she did not rise to the dignity of a burial, but there was
left of her no more than a few bones and an empty skull to bleach in the street.

All her life, she had bent her considerable energies to the pursuit of just one thing –
the kingdom of self. She got what she wanted, and never knew that in the process she
systematically destroyed the very self she wanted it for.

"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death. Even
in laughter, the heart is sad, and the end of joy is grief…. But the fear of the Lord is
a fountain of life, that one may avoid the snares of death." (Proverbs 14:12-13,
& 27)

They all suffered – Naboth no less than Ahab and Jezebel.

But who would we rather be? A sturdy Naboth, dead under a heap of stones in his own
vineyard for his faithfulness, but having participated, even by his death, in the reign of
God by which He brings forth righteousness to victory?

Or the ruthless Jezebel, a heap of bones in the street in Jezreel, having in death come
into the waste and howling wilderness where there is nothing but loneliness and darkness
for ever?

What has our faith cost us lately?

—————

Rev Paul T Harrison BD

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