pathway of history there have been no examples
of the divine intervention in human affairs more
dramatic than that which we have read this
evening in the 18th chapter of first Kings
when God answered by fire the faith and
the prayer of his solitary servant Elijah who
stood alone against all the assembled might of
this world and believed in God and turned
the heart of a multitude of people back
to the true God and eternal life.
There is no consequence people saying well God
doesn't work like this now therefore he never
worked like that but then you see the
divine interventions often vary in form even Mr.
Churchill said at the time of the evacuation
of Dunkirk after had been a day of
prayer in this country which the churches were
full and the streets were empty.
Those of all of you who are old
enough will well remember the circumstances and 330
,000 men were brought back across the English
Channel the only trained men that we had
in the service of the King at that
time and Mr. Churchill said the way in
which he only could say it, it seemed,
he said, as though some power had intervened.
We all know exactly what he meant.
Yes, it's the same power of God which
intervenes in your life and mine.
Your next door neighbour might not know about
it but you know about it.
I know about it.
We all surely have had those experiences of
life when it seemed that some power had
intervened.
Go on believing dear friend.
Someone once said God will not let you
down, rather modern language that's what it means
that God is faithful, will be true to
his word, true to his promises and if
there is a God in heaven and there
is we may expect him to intervene.
No, not fire coming down from heaven now.
There's no special need for that.
There was in that day, the circumstances were
peculiar.
They've never been repeated nor are they ever
likely to be.
There are certain things which the Lord does
which only need to be done once in
all history.
As for instance, when God intervened in the
days of Moses and Egypt, when they crossed
the Red Sea, dry shod and Pharaoh and
his great army, probably the greatest army on
earth at that time, were drowned in the
depths of the sea.
Someone asked me only this week in connection
with that, how it was that there was
no memorial of this on the Egyptian monuments,
nor any reference so far as we can
find on the Egyptian monuments to the fact
that the children of Israel had ever been
in Egypt.
Well people don't put things on monuments you
know, at the time that they happen.
Time elapses, it becomes history, then they put
them on monuments and write books.
It has to happen first.
Before ever they were likely to put these
events upon their monuments.
Well in this particular case, the very event
itself was not an event which any Pharaoh
or any of his architects and sculptors would
have been likely to have commemorated.
Terrible judgements which God visited upon them in
the ten plagues and the final destruction of
their host in the waters of the Red
Sea.
That's not a thing that you build monuments
about you know.
Build monuments to other things, to the triumphs
of the country, the great victories which were
won.
Monuments to the great men who triumphed in
the battle of Trafalgar or on the field
of Waterloo or somewhere else.
Yes, these things are monumentalised in the histories
of nations.
They don't build monuments to their own shame
and confusion.
Therefore it's not surprising that the only reliable
record we have of the God's dealings with
his people in ancient times is in the
Bible.
Where else would you expect to find it?
It's there.
Don't look for it anywhere else.
It's here in the scriptures.
So we read these stories of the divine
interventions and we certainly do believe them.
And we are very comforted to know that
they are true and that when God chooses
he can alter the whole course of history
and change the whole aspect of things in
a land, a country or even a continent.
He sent his son to be the saviour
of the world.
Thirty-three years later he was crucified upon
the tree.
The world, as I said this morning, has
nothing in its histories about this.
These histories are not written for that purpose.
Here was one amongst the thousands upon thousands
who were crucified throughout the Roman Empire about
that time.
Year after year and century after century it
was nothing.
Rome was also buried beneath the thousands of
crosses which were erected in Italy, in Rome
and throughout the Roman world.
One more or less didn't make any difference
to their historians.
It's the consequences which flowed therefrom.
Because of the death of that one upon
the cross the whole of history was altered
as all subsequent history has testified.
That great intervention by God in the history
of the world has conditioned everything that's happened
ever since, altered the whole course of the
thinking of men's minds.
Everything has been changed in this last two
thousand years.
It was a consequence of that great event.
Nobody can say otherwise or challenge that statement.
Yet history knows next to nothing about it
except what is inscribed here in the Word
of God, all the consequences which flowed from
it.
Now this great event in the history of
the children of Israel has so many sides
to it it's difficult to know where to
begin.
We have to remember the history of the
time, the setting, in which this episode in
history is found.
The children of Israel have been the subjects
of many great deliverances.
In the days of Moses, in the days
of Joshua, in the days of the judges
who succeeded Joshua, and in the days of
the prophets and kings who came after them,
the centuries were advancing, generations were coming and
going, and this world very soon forgets all
the lessons which God teaches.
Even the church does that too.
We are inclined to forget the great lessons
God has taught in our own individual lifetimes.
He has intervened.
He may be intervening now.
Learn the lessons of it.
Very, very important.
Are you looking for deliverances?
Are you praying for them?
Are you praying for them with humility, with
grace in your soul?
Are you praying for them with submission to
the holy and divine will of God, whatever
the outcome may be?
This is how our many changes should be
met and confronted.
We should always commit the issues to God,
whose wisdom is vast and knows no bounds,
and deep where all our thoughts are found.
So in Israel, they very soon forgot.
This was the history of the nation as
it is of all nations, but peculiarly of
theirs.
We often wonder why, but then, fathers cannot
pass on their own faith and experience to
their own children.
Mothers can't either.
Parents can't do this.
Within two or three generations, families die out.
Those who were great become little.
Those who were little become great.
Those who were pious become the opposite, or
the reverse, if what we are now thinking
of is a time of impiety.
Who knows what another generation may bring forth
in the mercy and providence of God?
No, it doesn't matter what a family or
a nation's history may be.
Every succeeding generation has to know its own
deliverances.
The deliverances of their fathers are not sufficient
for them, and the generation soon forgets.
And so it is that even the people
who had crossed over the Red Sea, they
hadn't advanced a few weeks upon their journey
through the wilderness, but they were murmuring against
Moses and against God because they wanted a
drink of water and couldn't find one.
They forgot the deliverances of God, were ready
to turn back to Egypt because they didn't
have flesh to eat.
And so God sent them flesh, and it
wasn't a blessing to them.
While the meat was yet in their mouths,
the judgment of God overtook them, and the
dead lay in heaps in the midst of
the camp.
They didn't learn either the lessons of judgment
or the lessons of grace and favour and
mercy, because that is the heart of man.
We soon forget.
We ask God to forgive us our sins
and go away and commit the same sins
again, don't we?
We see our own wrongdoing.
At night time we pray maybe when we
go to sleep, lest we shouldn't wake up
in the morning.
We should find ourselves in eternity.
We pray very earnestly for the forgiveness of
our sins, and then go and do the
same things the next day or the next
week.
This is the history of nations, it is
also the history of individuals, the individual soul.
When will we learn the lesson that we
are in ourselves altogether corrupt, sinful, inconsistent, contradictory?
We need the grace of God, we need
the preaching of the Word.
We need to come to this house or
whatever house it may be in order to
worship God and sing His praises, to get
strength here, that we may stand in the
evil day and having done all to stand.
There is evil in your heart and in
mine.
We are not proof against any of these
trials and temptations.
We need the grace of God continually.
Sovereign grace and mercy in all our circumstances.
We know not what a day may bring
forth.
So this was the history of the children
of Israel right up to Elijah's day and
afterwards.
They had received great deliverances.
They knew who the true God was, but
they wanted another form of religion than that
to which they were accustomed.
There was no drama in it, it didn't
excite their interest or their piety.
They wanted something to see, not a God
who was invisible.
So they were tired of the ways of
God and the preaching of His servants and
the reading of His Word.
And so they went to Tyre and Sidon
and they got a fresh load of gods
from there.
In particular, they got the god Baal and
they got his infamous mistress, a heathen god
known as Ashtoreth or Ashtarth.
She appears here as the god of the
groves.
Some say the word groves there means the
goddess Ashtoreth.
And of course, like all heathen gods, both
Baal and Ashtoreth were very, very worldly gods.
And they were very, very adulterous gods.
Because when men make to themselves a god,
they fashion him according to their own evil
desires and imaginations.
That's why the heathen have the kind of
gods they have.
Because they're brought out of their own hearts.
They're fabrications of their own wicked imaginations.
And they make gods which tyrannise over them
too.
As men are afraid of their own imaginations
and their own dreams.
Terrified of the thoughts which go through their
minds.
And they take the form of phantoms and
apparitions which rise up in their imagination and
their dreams.
And so, Satan sees to it that those
who make gods for themselves eventually become the
slaves of their own gods.
And in nothing more so than the slavery
of their own evil passions, murders, adulteries, wickednesses
of all kinds.
Wickedness sometimes unmentionable and unprintable.
And so down to the present day.
And they're still at it.
I see the form of a denomination of
Sodomites in the United States.
There are so many of them these days
who have invented a form of religion and
they've actually, I believe, applied to the World
Council of Churches to be recognised and taken
in as part of the body so they
can say delegates to the triennial meetings of
the World Council of Churches.
It's what Mr Malcolm Muggeridge said about the
last lot.
And writing in a great journal about it,
he who is a very great journalist, probably
our leading journalist, he attended the meetings of
the World Council of Churches as an observer.
He came back and he said these men
were prepared to agree on almost anything because
they believed practically nothing.
That's why all wise evangelical bodies have kept
out of the World Council of Churches and
have nothing well ever to do with them.
We wait to see whether they'll admit the
church of the homosexuals, the church of the
Sodomites, the worshippers of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Oh yes, men will make a religion out
of their own sins, out of their own
crimes, out of their own shame, in order
to deceive themselves that there's no shame at
all.
What a wicked world it is indeed.
You say why doesn't God intervene and do
something about it?
Well he's doing something about it now.
He's causing his people to preach the word
about it.
And there's all kinds of things happening.
The money that you have in your pocket,
the money in the Bank of England even,
is becoming more and more worthless.
Well hasn't God done something about that?
There never was so much machinery, never so
much science, never so much organisation, never so
much cleverness in the world as there is
today.
And we're going down this steep slope down
into poverty and ruination and bankruptcy.
Not only this nation, but quite a large
number of the nations, if not all of
them.
Isn't that something to make you think?
And all kinds of other things happening.
The violence that's being shown, the urban guerrilla
movement, which the governments of the world have
found no answer yet because they've made easy
laws.
They've their own ideas of morality.
They've abolished the one penalty which can restrict
the power of wicked men, that is to
take their lives from them who wickedly and
wantonly take away the lives of other innocent
people.
And there's no other remedy, no other way
dear friend.
They can't overtake their own errors.
We're in this appalling situation where people are
afraid to venture in civilised England, Christian England
as it once was.
People afraid to venture out into the darkened
streets at night or to open their doors
when there's a knock there.
Wondering what they can do for life and
safety of themselves and their property.
May not these be divine signs to bring
us law and to make people think?
They propose to themselves all kinds of gods
and religions or no religion at all.
Well let them get on with it as
they are getting on with it.
They're not prospering as a consequence.
It's about time then that some of them
began to think and to ask the real
questions which ought to be asked.
No we cannot sit in judgment upon these
Israelites, wicked as they were because the same
tendencies are with all mankind today.
And so God sent the famine through the
word of his servant Elijah, lasted for three
and a half years and the time was
drawing to a close.
Ahab sought in all the countries round about
for Elijah.
If he could only find Elijah, he would
know what to do with him.
He would soon and quickly put him to
death.
Because he was the man who troubled Israel.
He was the man who brought all this
trouble upon them.
God's faithful servant.
They knew who to blame didn't they?
What Elijah hid was hidden by God by
the brook Kerith.
And the ravens came and fed him.
Morning and night they brought his breakfast and
his supper for him.
Day by day in their beaks.
Until the waters of the brook Kerith ran
out and he sent him to a widow
woman in Zarephath.
As we have seen this last two or
three weeks.
There to care for him.
And how wonderfully he was in that household
where a barrel of meal did not waste
nor the crews of oil fail.
My aunt used to tell me of a
modern instance of how the Lord looked after
those who cried unto him in their need.
She told me that there was a Dr.
Robert McDonald, a medical man who used to
ride on his horse in those far off
days, the beginning of last century, out upon
his rounds.
And he was passing on a very, very
lonely road miles from anywhere and way there
in the distance he saw a cottage.
And for no accountable reason he turned aside
and drove his horse across the fields.
And the door was open and he entered
in a woman's voice as he came in,
said in the old Scots, I can't you'd
come.
I can't you'd come.
I knew that you'd come.
There she was on her knees and an
open Bible in front of her, praying for
God to send help.
For her mother was there dying and there
was no means by which either she could
leave her mother and go for help or
find anybody who would help her in her
distress.
Isolated alone she prayed for God to send
help.
Dr. Robert McDonald was a Christian man.
He became a friend of Robert Murray McChane
and he always remembered that circumstance.
I knew you'd come.
Her faith was strong that God would be
as good as his words and would hear
her cry in the time of her utter
and absolute need.
I could tell you many instances of the
same, how God sends deliverance.
It doesn't get into the history books because
it's just all the record of some poor
person whose name we don't know perhaps, who
came here and lived and died and gone
to her or his reward.
It doesn't get into the story books, but
these are the great events in the kingdom
of heaven.
Like the poor widow of Zarathustra, and I
pointed out last week, you remember, how Zarathustra
comes again and again into the scriptures and
it comes in through the tiny little prophets,
the shortest prophet in the Old Testament, the
prophet Obadiah, actually mentions Zarathustra and the tide
of God's mercy reaching as far as to
Zarathustra.
About the only time it's ever mentioned in
prophecy.
I told you this last week, very remarkable,
but here's something else which happens in our
chapter, in the early portion which we didn't
read.
That at the time when God was going
to send rain upon the famished land again,
Elijah, on the instruction of God, went to
show himself to Ahab.
And about that time Ahab called the governor
of his house, that is his principal servant
at the palace, to go and find wherever
there was any water remaining, any springs still
coming up, that they might find some bit
of green pasture in order to keep one
or two of the horses alive till the
end of the famine.
And what do you think the man's name
was?
It was Obadiah.
No, he wasn't the prophet Obadiah who mentions
Zarathustra, for his name was Obadiah, just the
same.
Maybe the prophet was named after him.
He was a godly man in the household
of wicked king Ahab, the wickedest king that
Israel ever had.
Isn't that remarkable?
He had the prophet Obadiah there, a man
named Obadiah there, a man who prayed and
who was known to the king and to
Jezebel, his wicked wife, why the two of
them might have represented Baal and Ashtaroth between
the two of them.
Jezebel came from those regions anyway.
She introduced the worship of Ashtaroth, the worship
of the groves into Israel.
They had slain many of the prophets of
the Lord.
They thought they had extinguished them altogether, all
except Elijah, the great prophetic generation in those
days that sought them out and killed all
the godly men that they could find.
But Obadiah, unknown to his master and mistress,
had hid a hundred of them in caves
at one time and fed them.
If he had been found out, he would
have been put to death by the wicked
king and queen, but they never discovered it.
And he, this godly man, the only thing
we ever know about him.
We wouldn't have heard about him otherwise, but
in the divine record it's put down.
He saved the lives of a hundred men.
You may be only a servant of somebody
else's.
You may be some obscure person.
Your name never gets into the medal list.
You're never decorated for anything that you do.
You just live and die and pass away.
As far as the world's concerned, that's the
end of you.
You're just the number of a grain.
You're just the name upon a stone.
Doesn't mean a thing.
But maybe you saved the lives of a
hundred men by your prayers, and perhaps almost
unknown to you.
You did great things for God and you
never knew that they were great.
And nobody else ever knew about it, but
God heard your prayers.
He honored your little testimony and all your
obscurity.
It was only the event which brought out
what Obadiah had done.
Otherwise, he was only a chief servant, a
kind of a major domo in the palace
of King Ahab.
And so Elijah meets Obadiah and says to
him, Obadiah, and you notice the connection, he'd
just come from Zarephath.
And the man who took the name of
Obadiah, generations afterwards, he's the only prophet who
mentions Zarephath until Christ comes and visits that
same region.
And so it all hangs together.
Those who attend to the scriptures and know
something of the wonder of the Bible will
know that these things are pointers given by
God.
Fingerprints of the Most High upon the sacred
page to show us that everything is under
control and that everything has been arranged from
the beginning to the end.
And so Obadiah meets Elijah.
Elijah says, go and tell Ahab, Elijah is
here.
And poor Obadiah fell at his feet.
He says, you know very well what the
result will be, that if I go and
tell Ahab Elijah is here, the Lord will
take you away somewhere.
And when we come, I look as though
I've been telling lies and Ahab will put
me to death.
And you know, you know, very few others
know, but you know, Elijah, what I did,
how I hid the sons of the prophets
by fifty in caves so that one hundred
men were preserved in their lives and piety
still kept alive in this awful heathen land.
You know that I did these things.
Elijah said to him, it's all right, Obadiah,
calm your fears.
He said, make no mistake about it.
He said, I'm coming to see Ahab.
And he's the man who will be put
to shame, not you, nor the servant of
the Lord Elijah.
And he came forth.
You know, dear friends, we're going to adjourn
the fire coming down from heaven to next
week.
It'll be just as good then as it
is now.
God preserving us.
We never know what is going on in
the kingdom of God, do we?
We don't know what's going on today.
We look around, we say we wish that
the Lord would do something, wish he'd fill
this house with worshippers.
Thank God for all the worshippers who come.
It doesn't look bad from the platform anyway.
But we could always do with millions more,
couldn't we?
So would all the churches.
It may look like the kind of day
where it doesn't matter how men preach, how
faithful they are, whatever they're doing, there seems
to be no reward, there seems to be
no movement forward.
It doesn't matter what we do, nothing seems
to happen.
Well, you never know what is going on.
You never know.
I know what it is to feel disheartened.
I often feel disheartened myself.
How many times we've thought of handing in
our notice and saying it's alright, find somebody
else, carry on.
Well, when we're at ordinary secular work, there
are times, aren't there, in the life of
every man, when the only ambition he's got
left is to give the boss the sack.
But we're never able to do that, are
we?
We never just get that far.
But life is like that.
But we never know what is going on
in the Kingdom of Heaven.
The ceaseless activity of the Eternal Throne.
The secret working of God in His Church
and through His Church and through the preaching
of His Word.
There were many godly men in the days
before Martin Luther appeared, especially in Northern Europe,
amongst the Germanic peoples.
There were plenty of godly men who were
arising from time to time, but no reformation,
no widespread upheaval such as was necessary in
those times.
And good men looked to God and nothing
was happening.
No answer to their prayers seemed possible.
Everything was going on just the same under
the terrible ecclesiastical tyranny of the times that
were then present.
Then in an obscure part of Germany, God
had His man.
He had a monk in a cell, praying
and putting himself to all kinds of voluntary
tortures of his body, trying to keep his
temptations down and thinking that this was the
way.
Finding his way into the library and coming
across a book of the Holy Scriptures, which
he begins to read.
There was no circulation of the Scriptures at
that time.
And he comes across some great sentence in
the Word of God.
And he stared up to his innermost depths
again and again and the Word comes and
nobody knows about this.
Nobody knows because we never know what is
going on.
Suddenly, suddenly he emerges and it's like a
flash of lightning coming down from a clear
sky and a tremendous peal of thunder and
you never thought that the thunder was so
near.
You never thought that such a change could
take place on such a beautiful summer afternoon.
But there it happened.
And in a few short years the whole
of Europe and the world was ablaze.
Everyone was talking about the one thing, the
one topic of conversation and of study in
all the universities of Europe.
And they were either for or against this
that was happening.
We never know what is going on.
Faithful, persevering in our obscurity.
Don't let us lose heart, dear friend.
Don't you lose heart just for yourself and
your own affairs.
Your own family and everything else that's happened
to you.
Or is happening, will happen to you.
Don't lose heart.
You don't know what is going on.
We didn't know that.
Many people in Israel didn't know anything at
all about Obadiah and the hundred prophets.
They didn't know that God had reserved to
himself 7,000 men in Israel who would
not bow their knee to the image of
Baal and wouldn't do, even if their lives
were at stake.
But they were obscure, they weren't known.
They weren't even known to Elijah.
He thought he was the only one left.
He had good reason for thinking he was
the only one left.
We don't hold it against him that he
thought he was the only one left.
So it wasn't thought at times there aren't
many more besides us that we don't have
the same reason for saying that as Elijah
had.
We easily get down hearted, can't we?
Faithful, persevering, obscure was Obadiah but he saved
the lives of a hundred men.
God knew what he was doing and when
the moment came, in one tremendous day, fire
came down from heaven and consumed the sacrifices.
The prophets of Baal and the prophets of
Ashtaroth were slaughtered to a man down there
by the brook Kishon which flowed red with
their blood and those wicked evil monsters of
cruelty and vice and abomination, those men were
swept in one afternoon from Israel.
And the rain came down in torrents from
heaven following the fire and following Elijah's prayer
and a great shout went up to heaven,
the Lord, he is the God, the Lord,
he is the God.
And for generations afterwards they were unable to
suppress the power of the gospel in Israel
even though they continued to have wicked kings.
Their history was lengthened out by a century
or two before finally God foreclosed upon the
wicked nation.
That is part of a story we have
to tell as time goes on.
May God bless us, may we trust in
our God who sent his own son into
the midst of history.
As I have already said and altered the
whole course of time and he who suffered
upon the cross is now upon the throne
and he is there to reign and to
complete his task.
We never know what is going on in
our time and generation but the Lord, he
is the God, the Lord, he is the
God.
Amen.
Now we are going to sing number 127.
Luke, ye saints, the sight is glorious.
See the man of sorrows now from the
fight he turned victorious.
Every knee to him shall bow.
127.