Elijah Announces a Great Drought
17 Now Elijah the Tishbite, from Tishbe in Gilead, 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.” (NIV)
In New Testament times, the region was called the Gerasenes, or the Decapolis. It was the dry country to the east of the Jordan. That side of the Jordan is not well known to most Bible students. It’s divided by four rivers, one emptying into the Sea of Galilee, one into the Jordan (about halfway down), one into the middle of the Dead Sea and one spilling out near (but not quite into) the southeast corner of the Dead Sea. I can never remember their names correctly unless I think of the anagram “Y-Jaz,” since they are, from north to south, the Yarmuk, the Jabbok, the Arnon, and the Zered.
We don’t know exactly where Elijah’s home of Tishbe was located, but Gilead lies more or less between the first or northernmost of those rivers, the Yarmuk and the Jabbok. In fact, if you look closely at the footnote in your Bible at home, you will see that “Tishbite” in Hebrew means “the settlers” or “the sojourners.” It’s probably the name of a a little town in that area, and the brook in the Kerith ravine (we’ll get there in a couple of verses) is also in the same neighborhood.
So in terms of our story, King Ahab was approached by this prophet from out of the blue and across the river—an outsider. Elijah was a prophet of the LORD (his name even means “My God is the LORD”), and the first words we hear from him are not gentle or peaceful or even tactful. Elijah was given a hard message to preach and he preached it.
When Paul wrote his last letter, he told Timothy that God’s workman will be someone who is unashamed, “rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15, KJV). The whole Bible can be divided into the two simple teachings of the Holy Spirit: the Law and the Gospel. The Law proclaims God’s holiness and God’s will, and shows us our sins. The Gospel (an English word meaning “good news”) proclaims God’s mercy and Christ’s sacrifice for our sins, and it shows us our Savior. The whole Bible can be divided up according to these two teachings (when I was a college student, I remember thinking that many of the historical passages didn’t fall into these categories, but over the years I have completely rejected that thought. Every passage: prophecy, history, poetry or parentheses, can be divided into Law and Gospel).
Elijah’s opening shot at King Ahab was to proclaim the Law, and nothing else. “You want to worship your rain God, Ahab? I’m the servant of the Lord,” Elijah said, “the only true God. How about a few years with no rain at all? Will that tell you who really causes the rain to fall?”
God caused nature itself to act against its nature. He would do the same with some birds, with a foreign widow, a jar of flour and a jug of oil, and even with death itself. We’re going to see all of that in this one chapter. Baal on the other hand did… what?
Nothing. A true God who does anything and who has done everything, or a false one who does nothing at all. It isn’t even a choice. But for Ahab, as for so many today, the choice isn’t really Baal or God; it’s God’s will or my will. Baal was just handy because Ahab’s wife put him on their kitchen table, but anything would have done. Anything but God was what Ahab wanted. When Jesus said, “No one comes to the Father except through me,” he showed us Ahab’s real problem. Ahab rejected Christ (the promise of the Messiah and of forgiveness) because he was rejecting God the Father and the idea that God’s will is what matters. No will of God, no reason to worry about sin, and obviously no reason to look ahead to Christ. Ahab wanted to worship Ahab.
What’s in your heart today? Look to the cross of Jesus Christ, love him for wiping away your sins, and live to his glory today, tomorrow and always. We come to the Father only through Jesus, and Jesus came down to us.
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. His wife, Kathryn, attended Chapel from 1987-1990 while studying Secondary Education (Theater and Math) at UW-Madison. Kathryn’s father, John Meyer, was also the first man to serve as a Vicar at Chapel.
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