The Sword Room

God’s response to the problem of Baal worship in Israel introduced by Ahab and Jezebel came in the person of Elijah.

And Elijah the Tishbite, of the inhabitants or Gilead, said to Ahab, “As the LORD God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, except at my word” (1 Kings 17:1).

It looks like Elijah was a well-known and prominent prophet because his pronouncement is made directly to the king, which implies he had access to the palace. He identifies himself as one who stands before the LORD God, a formula which identifies him as a prophet; and apparently God had given him authority stop the rain. We are told the stoppage would be at his pronouncement and would last for years.

When we compare 1 Kings 17:1 with James 5:17-18 we see that the cessation of rain was in response to the prayer of the prophet:

Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain; and it did not rain on the land for three years and six months. And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth produced its fruit.

The main focus of the Old Testament prophets was not predicting the future but rather directing God’s people back to His word and covenant with them. Foretelling was ancillary to forthtelling.The Lord had promised them prosperity in the land if they worshipped Him exclusively and obeyed His commands. He also warned them that he would judge their disobedience with, among other things, the withholding of rain:

Take heed to yourselves, lest your heart be deceived, and you turn aside to serve other gods and worship them, lest the Lord’s anger be aroused against you, and He shut up the heavens so that there be no rain, and the land yield no produce, and you perish quickly from the good land which the LORD is giving you (Deuteronomy 11:16-17).

We are told that Elijah prayed earnestly that it would not rain. I imagine that, like Paul in Athens, his heart was troubled at the sight of all the idols in the land. Being a prophet he was acquainted with the Mosaic Covenant and those passages in the Pentateuch where the blessings and curses were stipulated. It probably seemed like things had reached an all-time low spiritually with Omri, which they had; but just when the prophet thought it could get no worse, along came Ahab and Jezebel. It might be that he wondered why God had not answered such apostasy with judgment and prayed accordingly for the withholding of rain.

In the James passage we are told that Elijah was a man of like passions as ours, and he is cited as an illustration of the principle that the effective fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. My own opinion of this, based on the whole counsel of God, is that Elijah did not bend the will of God or persuade him to do something He had not already planned to do. As we saw in our study of 1 John, God answers prayer in accord with His sovereign will; and in the case of Elijah, the prayer was in harmony with the revealed moral will of God as well. At the end of the day we must conclude that God moved upon the heart of the prophet to pray for the rain stoppage, in accordance with the covenantal warnings. God not only decrees the final outcome but also the entire chain of secondary means leading up to it. And it only makes sense, for what good would it do for the Lord to stop the rain without a representative to declare judgment and urge repentance?

But here is the amazing thing about it all, and we are prone to miss it because the example of Elijah is mentioned in the context or prayer for healing. The prophet is praying for a very disastrous thing to happen. Israel was a pre-technological agrarian culture whose survival depended on rainfall. Modern methods of irrigation did not exist at that time, so that the watering of crops was accomplished solely by rainfall. The only major river in the region was fed by small creeks and streams carrying runoff. The springs and wells depended on a replenishing of groundwater supplied by rain. Stop the rain and you halt everything else. The crops do not grow and people eventually starve or die of thirst. Livestock likewise perish, and their rotting carcasses become the breeding ground for vermin and disease. The rich are able to survive, but common people become desperate. There is anger, looting, murder, cannibalism, insanity, and suicide. Everyone is affected, from newborn infants to the elderly. God is an equal-opportuity judge.

What a terrible thing for anyone to pray for, much less God to bring on His people. But stop and think about this situation for a minute. God’s people had been given the land of Canaan by the Lord. The land and everything it it, including the people, were God’s. Now they are worshipping fertility Gods and giving these false idols the glory for the fruit of the land, herd, and womb. They were engaging in the most lewd and perverted sexual acts imaginable. They were in effect slapping God in the face and walking in open rebellion to Him. In withholding the rain via the prophet’s pronouncement the Lord was sending a statement to His wayward people: Baal is really impotent to help you. The God of heaven is really the source of your life and prosperity. Rebel and be cursed; repent and be restored. It is a sad day when God must resort to such extreme measures to get the attention of sinners, but such is His prerogative–with any wicked nation, not just Israel:

And the word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, when a land sins against me by acting faithlessly, and I stretch out my hand against it and break its supply of bread and send famine upon it, and cut off from it man and beast, even if these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they would deliver but their own lives by their righteousness, declares the Lord God.”

“If I cause wild beasts to pass through the land, and they ravage it, and it be made desolate, so that no one may pass through because of the beasts, even if these three men were in it, as I live, declares the Lord God, they would deliver neither sons nor daughters. They alone would be delivered, but the land would be desolate.”

“Or if I bring a sword upon that land and say, Let a sword pass through the land, and I cut off from it man and beast, though these three men were in it, as I live, declares the Lord God, they would deliver neither sons nor daughters, but they alone would be delivered.”

“Or if I send a pestilence into that land and pour out my wrath upon it with blood, to cut off from it man and beast, even if Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, as I live, declares the Lord God, they would deliver neither son nor daughter. They would deliver but their own lives by their righteousness” (Ezekiel 14:12-20).

Let me apply this in a way that might make sense in terms of our own situation here in America. We are in the middle of an election cycle, and in a few months we will have an opportunity to select between two pagan presidential candidates. Our economy is on the decline, the spiritual and moral climate is frightening, and the churches are too busy aping the culture to influence it for good. False prophets abound, urging us to experience our best life now or make God over in the image of an overweight black woman who wouldn’t harm a fly. No one is telling us to repent, except for nut jobs like Fred Phelps and Harold Camping.

But what if some prominent Christian figure publicly rebuked the president and said he had prayed for our oil supply to be totally and immediately cut off? What if he said that God was judging this nation for her departure from her Christian roots and toleration of all manner of blasphemous and idolatous religious practices? That He was bringing her to her knees with chaos and destruction for allowing the moral and spiritual decline we see so evident all around us?

No one would get to work or school. The streets and highways would be littered with abandoned vehicles. The airline and trucking industries would cease operations. Service industries like hospitals would close. Food and other necessary supplies would not be transported to communities. As in ancient Israel people would die–children and the elderly included. Chaos and anarchy would result, and there would be looting, rape, murder, suicide, insanity. Martial law would be declared.

But no one would repent, or at least not very many. Instead, as in the case of Elijah, godly preachers and anyone in league with them would be targeted as the scapegoats. And there would be false prophets outnumbering God’s prophets by a ratio of roughly 450 to 1. They would assure everyone that God is too loving to send such judgment, and that they should persist in rejecting God’s word in favor of the heresy du jour. And, as always, the phonies would be on the king’s payroll and eating well, as the peons starved.

You think this is pretty far-fetched? Maybe so, maybe not. At least it is not without biblical support and precedent. But let me flip the coin and leave you with one final question. What if somehow the federal deficit could be eliminated, oil and gas prices reduced to under a dollar a gallon, the inflation eliminated, outsourced manufacturing jobs all brought back stateside, and everyone enjoyed the chicken in every pot (or whatever it was FDR promised)? What if our material prosperity exceeded that of the post-war baby boom? What would the result be in terms of our spiritual and moral condition? Would we repent? Would there be mass revival? Don’t think too long about it, for the answer ought to be as plain as the nose on your face. 

Becoming a believer in Jesus involves a spiritual awakening called the new birth. Immediately after you trust Christ as your Lord and Savior you begin to notice changes in your thinking. The Holy Spirit living in you gradually transforms your view of life as you grow spiritually in Him. For the first time the Bible makes sense to you, and you crave fellowship with others who share your new-found faith. You begin to notice little changes in your actions and reactions which often surprise you. When I got saved in 1971 I caught myself helping that little old lady at the supermarket load her groceries into the car or letting the kid with the candy bar go ahead of me in the checkout line. These are things I would never have thought to do before I had Jesus in my life.

The Bible uses the two-bit word repentance to describe this change in thinking which occurs after we come to the Lord. The concept of repentance and repenting is greatly misunderstood and distorted in the minds of many believers. We sometimes associate repentance with feeling sorry for sin or weeping and promising to change. In fact, one popular definition depicts repentance as a turning from sin, and further maintains that this kind of so-called repentance is necessary to be saved. Now it is true that all of the things I have just mentioned may accompany repentance; but they are not of the essence of genuine repentance. Moreover, John’s Gospel, the one book of the Bible written specifically to instruct us in how to have eternal life (John 20:30-31), mentions faith and believing nearly a hundred times, but does not mention repentance a single time!

The biblical word repentance means literally a change of mind. It speaks of the radical spiritual attitude adjustment that takes place in the heart of the born-again believer in Jesus Christ. I will take a moment and give you three examples of true repentance. If you are a Christian you will probably be able to relate to all three.

First there is a repentance with respect to our view of God. In Acts 17:30 Paul commanded the philosophers of Athens to repent. He had just explained to them that their many Greek gods were not real, but mere idols with no power to save anyone. There are many people today who entertain such false views of God. Some see God as so distant and detached that He could not possibly be concerned or involved with our personal affairs. Others see Him as a big cosmic Santa Claus whose primary reason for existing is to scratch us where we itch and cater to our beck and call. Once we are believers indwelt by the Holy Spirit we change out attitudes about God as we grow in the knowledge of His Word. In other words we start thinking about God rightly and accurately.

Another focus of repentance is sin (Matthew 3:6). Here is an area where much repentance is needed in today’s world. The whole mentality of victim-hood from pop culture has filtered into the churches. Jesus is seen as a healer of our hurts, and people are seen as wounded victims in need of healing. While it is true that we are victimized sometimes as a result of living in a fallen world, it is also true that we are guilty sinners who have rebelled against God in word, thought, and deed, and that what we really need most is cleansing and forgiveness. For without it we are under a condemnation of our own making; and when we die and stand before God He will not ask us about what our parents or the meanies on the playground did to us. He will hold us responsible for our own sins, just as He will them. When a believer in Jesus repents of sin he/she recognizes the magnitude of sin and how terrible it is to God. True, we still have our sinful flesh which loves sin; but the regenerate part of us hates sin and wants to overcome it by the Lord’s power.

Finally, there is a repentance from dead works (Hebrews 6:1). Before I was a Christian I thought that to go to heaven I would have to clean up my language, throw away my rock and roll albums, stop drinking and drugging, and dump my girlfriend. Then I would need to dress up, go to church, get baptized, and toss a wad of cash into the offering plate every week. Oh–and also cut my shoulder-length hair (that was back when I still had some). Listen, I did eventually do all those things, but not because I thought they would earn me an eternal fire insurance policy. Once God showed me that I could not save myself and I accepted His free gift of eternal life in Christ, I was able by His grace to give those things up–not without struggles in some areas, of course. For the first time in my life my thinking became clear on how God makes us acceptable in His sight: He places the guilt of our sins on His Son, and  then he credits the perfect righteousness of Christ to us freely. We do not abstain from sin and do good deeds because we must in order to earn God’s favor–for that is impossible. We serve God out of gratitude for what He has done for us. This too is a form of repentance.

Today if you recognize that some or all of these spiritual attitude adjustments have been and are taking place in your life, rejoice! God’s Spirit is at work in your heart and mind.

The word of the Lord came to Jonah commanding him to go preach to the Assyrian capital of Nineveh. The word of the Lord, as in a direct verbal statement. My first thought upon reading these words yesterday was that the prophet really could not plead ignorance or say the message was in any way unclear. Apparently Jonah was not told exactly what the content of his message would be because when he is re-commissioned later after being vomited from the belly of the great fish God tells him again to go preach to Nineveh a word to be revealed upon arrival.

Jonah disobeys the clear command of the Lord and goes 180 degrees in the opposite direction of Nineveh. He travels west of Israel to Joppa the seaport on the Philistine coast of the Mediterranean Sea. It seems very foolish of him to have done this, but if you stop to think about it, we have clear commands from God written to us in Scripture, and even though we cannot fall back on ignorance any more than Jonah we brazenly choose to do our own thing.

And not only that: Jonah had two reasons for not wanting to obey the word of the Lord. First, the Assyrians were a brutal bloodthirsty bunch, known for their fierceness. They worshipped false gods and persecuted God’s people. Jonah was undoubtedly afraid for his life at the thought of pronouncing judgment in Nineveh, the capital of the feared Assyrians. As we later learn Jonah also feared that the pagans would repent. He was actually unhappy about this, and cared more about the withering gourd plant God provided for shade but later destroyed through the agency of the worm and scorching wind than for the 120,00 children too young too know their right hand from their left.

Another interesting fact from the narrative is that after boarding the ship in Joppa Jonah was able to sleep soundly through the storm which threatened to destroy the boat. These were small wooden-hulled boats, and it is amazing to think a man could sleep through the tossing to and fro, the noise, and the commotion. One wonders if Jonah was depressed knowing he was in flagrant disobedience to God.

He had told the mariners that he was fleeing from God and realized the calamity was from the Lord. The mariners wanted to bring the ship under control, but eventually had to throw Jonah over the side, whereupon the sea became calm. The crew offered a sacrifice to the God of Israel, while Jonah became fish food.

Even after being in the belly of the fish for three days and so close to death, Jonah still exhibits great selfishness and immaturity. But the lesson here is that if God can speak through a donkey he can speak through a wayward prophet. Jonah’s sermon was a mere eight words–Yet forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown. And yet the whole city repents in sackcloth and ashes.

The lessons? Even as believers we are prone to disobey the clear commands of God’s word. God is able to orchestrate events and use secondary agents in the outworking of His plan. God saves sinners–we do not. Jonah must have looked terrible after a three day bath in the stomach acids of the great fish. His sermon was no masterpiece. But God brought about the result He wanted in His own way.

Finally, it is always best to do what God says the first time. He is a God who gives second chances; but He also chastises us when we are disobedient–the Lord scourges every son whom He receives.

Whenever I discuss anything to do with self-examination or, for that matter, salvation in general, someone asks me about repentance and its importance. So here are a few quick tidbits relative to that topic.

The Gospel of John, a book written expressly to tell us how to be saved (20:31), mentions faith and believing over a hundred times but does not mention repentance a single time. Similarly, the book of Romans–a detailed exposition of the Gospel–highlights faith and does not emphasize repentance.

Here is what repentance is not. It is not feeling sorry for sin. Sorrow can accompany repentance or even lead to it ( 2 Cor. 7:8-12), but ungodly Jimmy-Swaggart crocodile tears do not constitute repentance. Repentance is not turning from sin. This is the most common erroneous definition of repentance. While true repentance can and should result in turning from sin, turning from sin is not repentance per se.

The word repentance comes from the Greek metanoia and simply means to change the mind. Repentance, like saving faith, is a gift of grace and thus a result rather than a means to regeneration (Acts 11:18). Repentance can have various objects, such as who God is, who Christ is, the reality of sin, and the value of dead works (Matt. 3:11; Acts 2:38; Heb. 6:1). If you think Christ is just a good man, you must repent and think of Him as He is–the God-Man. If you think works can save you, you must repent and see that your righteousness is filthy rags. If you think your sin is not worthy of eternal damnation you must repent and see it as the heinous offense that it is.

A great example of what repentance is is found in Acts 17:16-34. Paul points out the error or ignorance of the Athenians with respect to the nature of God. He then finishes up by telling them they need to repent (v. 30). It is as if he had said, “You have been thinking wrongly about God, but you have no excuse any more for your ignorance. God commands you to change your minds and think of Him as He really is.”

That, in a word, is what repentance is.