The Lord Will Provide

Great rivalries. History is full of them. Octavius and Mark Anthony. Churchill and Hitler. But it’s easier to pick out great rivalries in single-athlete sports, like tennis or boxing. John McEnroe, the mercurial, emotionally charged, brash American and Bjon Borg, the icy, mechanical Swede. Don’t snub the women! Cute and talented Chrissy Evert against the killing machine of Martina Navatilova. In boxing? Muhammad Ali and Joe Foreman. The stuff of legends.
There is a lesser-known rivalry in the Bible. Today we start the stories about these two men at odds about everything under the sun and in the heavens above. In the one corner, the prophet of God, Elijah the Tishbite. In the other corner, Ahab, King of Israel.
No men could be more different. No two lives could be more antagonistic to each other. Elijah will have nothing but condemnation for Ahab. Ahab will seek to kill the prophet more than once. As the writer of the sacred history introduces us to these rivals, right from their first confrontation, they don’t even agree that
The Lord Will Provide.
1.Food for the soul.
2. Food for the body.
“Ahab son of Omri not only considered it trivial to commit the sins of Jeroboam son of Nebat, but he also married Jezebel daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, and began to serve Baal and worship him. He set up an altar for Baal in the temple of Baal that he built in Samaria. Ahab also made an Asherah pole and did more to provoke the Lord, the God of Israel, to anger than did all the kings of Israel before him (31-33).”
When Jesus rebuffed the devil’s temptation with “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God,” few would have objected. People expect their gods to give them more than food for the body. They expect their gods to ennoble their lives, give them a spiritual dimension (whatever that might be). So with Ahab. He was a well-rounded guy. Young, powerful, handsome. Baal worship brought out the spiritual in him.
Like bloody meat in the water brings out the piranhas.
Baal was the old Canaanite sky god. He brought rain upon the earth through the thunderstorms. Asherah was mother earth in the Canaanite pantheon. When her consort, Baal, fertilized her with rain, she brought forth food for man and beast. Quaint picture, but in every pagan, agrarian culture, the gods always lined up this way, Father Sky, Mother Earth. The kicker here was that Baal and Asherah were worshipped with male and female prostitutes in the temple. That’s why the prophets said cheating on God by worshipping Baal was adultery, because you were also cheating on your wife or husband.
Ahab and Jezebel promoted Baal worship. It put the zing in their step and the glint in their eye! How charming! What food for the soul was there?
It showed in society in general. “In Ahab’s time, Hiel of Bethel rebuilt Jericho. He laid its foundation at the cost of his firstborn son Abiram, and he set up its gates at the cost of his son Segub, in accordance with the word of the Lord spoken by Joshua son of Nun (24).”
People didn’t care about each other. Fathers didn’t care for sons. To make sure the Canaanite religion and culture that they had destroyed would never rear its filthy, perverted head again, Joshua, when the Lord had given Jericho to the Children of Israel (remember Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho?), had foretold that the man who would rebuild Jericho would lose his oldest son when he rebuilt its foundation and his youngest son when he rebuilt its gates. For over 500 years the people of God had respected his word enough to leave Jericho in ruins. But in the age of Baal and Asherah worship, during the Playboy bunny days of Ahab and Jezebel, there’s money to be made developing that old site! And Hiel was going to make a bundle. When his first son dies, he keeps at it. When his youngest son dies, ach, that’s the overhead of business!
Profit instead of parental care, lust instead of conjugal love. Me and nobody else matters. Why, this could be describing a night out with Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton, huh? But it also describes you and me, when we let our sinful human nature sit behind the wheel of our life. Parents blow the hard-earned savings of years on drugs and booze, or blackjack and craps, taking a college education out of the mouths of their kids. Husbands, wives, walk away from each other for “true love” with someone who has nothing true or natural about them. Me, Me, Me. There’s always time for me, but never time for you. And certainly never time for God.
Now here’s where the rivalry picks up. “Now Elijah the Tishbite, said to Ahab, ‘As the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, whom I serve, there will be neither dew nor rain in the next few years except at my word (17.1).”
There is a higher good than self. There is a higher goal than pleasure masquerading as piety. That higher good and higher goal is the true God, the Lord. He is the Savior of the soul. By his word our faith is fed. He tells us of his love. He tells us of his forgiveness. His absolute commitment to us calls forth lives of service to him. “I serve him,” Elijah says. Not for the girls. Not for the giggles. I serve him because he is the only God who can save.
Now, the problem with a God who feeds our soul is that it is pretty hard to see that happening. A rainmaker comes into town, takes his advance payment, and, until the rain comes, you don’t know if he is a con man or there really is something to this stuff. A God who claims to save the soul from the everlasting fires of hell, well, you got to put your money down on him here in this life and wait until the next life to see if your bet paid off.
Granted, Jesus’ words make our hearts zing and they put a spring in our step. His words are the light of our life and the joy they give, lasts a lot more than a moment. But this jaded old world can’t see inside our hearts and the joy that we feel as Christians, they view that as about as real as the tea in a little girl’s tea party with her dollies.
To prove to Ahab and Jezebel, to prove to the Hiels of Israel, that the Lord God of Israel was no con man, the Lord tells Elijah to do something everybody would notice. No dew or rain for the next few years, except at the word of the Lord.
The Lord provides food for the body.
Royal Ahab and Jezebel were going to lose a few pounds. Wealthy developer Hiel was not going to have a lot of BBQued ribs in the near future. Many of the poor people, the commoners, were going to die of starvation. But Elijah? “He did what the Lord had told him. He went to the ravine of Kerith, east of the Jordan, and stayed there. The ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening, and he drank from the brook (5-6).”
As the Lord had promised him, the Lord provided. In a wilderness area on the other side of the Jordan, like a brook that flows into the Colorado River down below Nelson landing, out of the way, Elijah finds the brook of Kerith and from that water he slakes his thirst. He stays in that little canyon, for at the Lord’s command ravens, birds not known to be all that generous with their food, bring Elijah bread and meat, both in the evening and in the morning. He has everything he needs and he stays alive during the powerful drought that strikes Israel.
It should be good enough. But you know it won’t be. Unbelievers will not be moved by God’s goodness, even when God reveals it in miraculous ways. If Hiel found out how Elijah was being provided by God, he’d make fun of raven left-overs or the spring water’s lack of alcohol content. If he actually took it seriously, far from proving to him that God was a good and loving Savior, Hiel and the rest of the unbelievers would hate God. I can say this because Ahab and Jezebel are going to display all these qualities. Miracles will never convert unbelievers. They will never trust in God’s goodness for the soul as proven by his goodness in feeding the body.
But believers will.
It looks like hard times are coming. It seems in America, whenever some President, it doesn’t really matter of which party, whenever some President is approaching the end of his eighth year in office, the American economy sort of falls flat on its face. I guess the politicians just get tired of juicing the system and spinning the figures. So it looks like the next two years are not going to be the greatest for us. Some of you who are in the construction industry already may be feeling the pinch. The work isn’t there like it used to be. Forget about any overtime. Maybe you’ve gotten out of the construction business already and started something else. For others, the once a month trip to the website that tells you what your house was worth has turned into an almost daily peek, and every day your house is worth a little less, but you keep on looking, like a person who can’t take his eyes off the smashed cars in the intersection. And if the inflation rate is so low, as all the retirees can see by how little their Social Security checks have gone up, then why are groceries so high? Why is the cost of gasoline seem reasonable only when you compare it to the cost of your prescription drugs?
Yeah, there will be some hard times coming. And there will be days or nights when we wonder if we will be able to make it through. Then you remember this Bible story. God proves to us he provides food for our soul by providing food for our body. He didn’t let Elijah starve. He found a way to provide for his believing prophet. God will not let you and me starve. He will get us through.
I mean, it isn’t like this is the first of the hard times some of us have experienced. Some of us were kids when they were actually rationing food, things like meat, and sugar and butter, in America, because we had to ship it all overseas to feed our troops in England before D-Day. Some of us were afraid to go out and play in the snow because of the above ground nuclear tests and the fallout that spread across the globe. Some of us thought we’d bleed out from a leg wound in Viet Nam. Some of us thought we’d be dead in six months after the doctor first told us it might be cancer. Some of us expected divorce the first time the dear hubby or dear wife said they weren’t really having as much fun in the marriage as they thought they would. And yes, there was the building moratorium in town in 1992, the dotcom blowout of 1998, the 9/11 wake-up call in 2001. And who of us was rolling in the dough after we bought our first new car or signed our first mortgage?
And here we are. The Lord saw us through. The big boys have allowed us to keep a little of our savings. There seems to be food on the table, judging by the series of belts we’ve out-grown. A roof over our heads and a shirt on our back, with central air and maybe even a pool or spa in the back yard. No matter what the next few years bring,
The Lord Will Provide.
1.Food for the soul.
2. Food for the body.
Maybe I left the greatest rivalry out. But it’s not really a rivalry, because you have to have equally matched antagonists for it to be a rivalry. God and the devil, I was going to say. But that would be wrong. What can the devil give you? Happiness? Nope. Eternal life? Nope. He can’t even keep life going strong here on this earth. But the Lord has provided and will continue to provide all of them. Love him and serve him only.