John Kitto Morning Bible Devotions: November 10

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John Kitto Morning Bible Devotions: November 10

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Elijah

1Ki_17:1-3

God never yet wanted a man for any work He had to be done. He to whom all hearts are open, and all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid, never experiences the embarrassments common among the rulers of the earth in choosing the fittest agent for every task and every work. The world would be rarely governed, if the great ones of the earth possessed the faculties of discovering, and the desire of employing, the best and fittest man in the land for every service. But this is what God does. The spirits of all the men of a whole people lie open as a book before Him; and the man wanted for his day and generation is at once singled out by Him, and called to his work. Such a man never fails to be found; for if the demand be extraordinary—such as the ordinary gifts and attainments of a nation are not likely to supply—the man is appointed for his work from childhood, or even before his birth. He is born for it, trained to it, and, lo, at the appointed time—the time foreseen in the eternal counsels of heaven—he is summoned to his task, and he goes to it—he must go. Willingly or not, he must go. A force greater than the modern enginery of the two worlds impels him—a weight greater than the crush of mountains lies upon him: he must go. What says the prophet, when, craving peace, and weary of his task of confronting a stiffnecked generation, he purposed to abandon it?—“Then I said: I will not make mention of Him, nor speak any more in his name. But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay,” Jer_20:9. Mark the tremendous force of these phrases—“A burning fire shut up in my bones”—“weary with forbearing”—“could not stay”—as indicating the strong compulsions under which the prophets acted, whether they were prophets of utterances or prophets of deeds.

So now, peculiar and hopeless as the exigency in Israel seemed, the Lord found a man fit for it—a man fitted beyond all others, by the force of his character, his grasp of faith, and his fearless spirit, to “stem the torrent of a faithless age.” This man was Elijah the Tishbite, so called from Tishbe, a place in Gilead beyond the Jordan. He was one of the most extraordinary characters in the Bible. Great evils require great remedies; extraordinary diseases, extraordinary physicians; gigantic corruptions, gigantic reformers. And such was Elijah, who, in his gifts and qualities, assumes a figure scarcely human, from its gigantic proportions, and towers aloft like one of the sons of Anak among common men. He was such stuff as the heathen made their gods of; and had be appeared in a heathen country, be would have come down to us as scarcely less than a god, side by side, perchance with Hercules, instead of only something more than a prophet. There are two sorts of prophets: prophets of deeds, prophets of words. Of the latter the greatest is doubtless Isaiah; of the former there has not been among men born of women any greater than Elijah. Moses might be named; but he stood alone. He was “mighty both in words and deeds.”

He is introduced with remarkable and significant abruptness, as appearing before Ahab and declaring—”As the Lord God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew or rain upon the earth these years, but according to my word.” He did not say why this judgment came. It was sufficient to declare whence it came, for too well could Ahab’s conscience supply the cause. The form of the message was also most extraordinary and unexampled. The lack of rain and dew implied the destruction or prevention of all vegetable growth, and therefore famine in the land; and this stay of the life-bestowing waters of heaven, was not to be withdrawn but when the prophet should give the word. The visitation came at his word, and only at his word would it be removed. Note also, that the denunciation has a very peculiar character—referring it again more to the prophet himself than is in such cases customary. Instead of the usual formula—“Thus saith the Lord”—he swears by the Lord God of Israel, that no rain shall come but at his own word! In a matter like this, so godly a man as Elijah could not so much have departed from all precedent—could not have given so autocratic a character to his denunciation, had he not been specially ordered to do so. With what object? The object must be estimated from the result. It tended to fix the attention of the court and nation upon the person and character of the prophet; and such an example of zeal for the Lord, and daring boldness for his cause, could not but be most beneficial in its action upon an age so corrupt, unprincipled, and nerveless—an age so void as this seemed of champions for the truth—so destitute of that martyr-spirit which is the salt of life to a nation.

It was not likely that Elijah would stay long within reach of the royal clutches after he had delivered such a message. Here was a man who said that there should be no rain till he called for it. What so obvious, then, as to clap him into a dungeon, and feed him with the bread and water of affliction, till it were seen whether the timely rains came or not. If they did, he could be punished as a false prophet; if they did not, he might, being in their hands, be compelled to give the word which should bring rain to the thirsty earth. In any case, his movements and proceedings became matters of vast importance—of such importance, as no other form of the message could possibly have imparted to them. This personal importance, in connection with the result, was not of his own seeking. It gave him naught to glory in, nothing for pride to rest upon. It was a duty imposed upon him—a duty which exposed him to persecution and arrest—which made him a fugitive and a vagabond until the appointed day came round, the great day of vindication.

Meanwhile, it was necessary that he should remain in concealment, and therefore he was directed to withdraw from the haunts of men, and fix his abode away upon the solitary banks of the brook Cherith. Where was this brook? We do not know. It is not even known whether it was on the east or west of the Jordan. One would think it most probably on the east, as it would seem obvious to interpose the river between himself and the research of Ahab, especially as the prophet was a native of Gilead. However, there were towards the Jordan many secluded places even in the west; and Dr. Robinson suggests, that what is now called the Wady Kelt, formed by the union of many streams in the mountains west of Jericho, issuing from a deep gorge in which it passes by that village, and crosses the plain to the Jordan, may be the Cherith. This learned traveller rests this conjecture up on the analogy of name. The reader may be at some loss to see the analogy of Cherith and Kelt. But r and l are commutable letters, frequently exchanged for each other; and if the l in Kelt be changed for r, it becomes Kert, or with the softer sounds of the initial and final letters, Cherth. This seems to us hardly sufficient to make out the identity, as the situation of this brook seems less suitable for the purpose in view than many others that could be indicated.