Is Elijah the enemy of Ahab or is the Lord his enemy? He isn't fighting flesh and blood and after
the showdown on Mount Carmel with the prophets of Baal and Asherah you would
think he surely knew this reality.
Elijah's words regarding both the anger of God and the punishment that
will be meted out are horrific. Even a
man as wicked as Ahab, who was ruled by his wife and followed hard after her
gods, was moved to repentance by this promise.
Somewhere deep down in his soul he knew what he had done and that this
was not only just but also that the Lord was actually going to do what Elijah
spoke, that these words were true.
Amazingly, the Lord accepted Ahab's repentance as true, genuine turning
from sin and delayed this justice and punishment until the next
generation. This repentance is actually
something like what we say in confession when we say that the burden of our
sins is intolerable and the remembrance of them grievous unto us but do we
really mean that? Two unlikely sources
teach us about true repentance, Ahab here and the king and people of Nineveh in
the story of Jonah.
With John's arrest Jesus withdraws from Jerusalem in order
that prophecy may be fulfilled but equally from a sense of timing, His time has
not yet come and so the dust needs to settle in Jerusalem. At that time, however, Jesus began to preach
the same message John had preached, "Repent for the kingdom of God is at
hand." The message of repentance is
more urgent now than even when John preached it, however, the kingdom of God is
here, wherever Jesus is. Do we sense
that same urgency in our message and, even more poignantly, in our lives? The kingdom of God is within us now by the
power of the Holy Spirit, how much more do we need to deal with sin boldly in
our lives and to turn towards righteousness.
We need the Holy Spirit to convict us powerfully of sin in order to see
and deal with it.
The cross turns the world upside down, sets it on its head
and confounds it. We act sometimes as
though we can simply argue someone into the kingdom of God but the foolishness
of the cross gets in the way of wisdom and intellect. The cross is a stumbling block to Jews
because the law says that anyone who dies on a tree is accursed so how can the
accursed man also be righteous and Messiah?
To Greeks the idea of a crucified god makes no sense. The cross and the truth about it should
humble us but the reality is that the fact that all do not believe is only
further evidence of the fall of mankind in sin.
We no longer know the truth of God.
We cannot believe what we do not understand. If it flies in the face of human logic we
reject it. We need the Holy Spirit in
order not only to see our sin but to receive the truth of God. Truth is ultimately revealed not known via
our minds alone, they require an act of God to make the logical leap.
No comments:
Post a Comment