9/27/2015 God Brings Life In The Face Of Death Pastor Josh Sheldon

I hope you're reading this one. It's going to be found in one of the two passages in the

Old Testament. It's going to be Psalm 36. And that will be on page 381 of your refugee bible.

And I read that it's going to be in Deuteronomy 7, 11 -16. Which would be on page 695 of your refugee bible.

And here is Psalm 36. Please stand and be seated. An oracle within my heart concerning the transgression of the wicked.

There is no fear of God before his eyes, for he flatters himself in his own eyes.

When he finds out his iniquity and when he hates, the words of his mouth are wickedness and deceit.

He has ceased to be wise and to do good. He defines wickedness on his bed.

He sets himself in a way that is not good. He does not abhor evil.

Your mercy, O Lord, is independence. Your faithfulness reaches to the clouds. Your righteousness is like the great mountains.

Your judgments are a great feat. O Lord, you preserve the man beast.

How precious is your loving kindness, O God. Therefore the children of men forget trust under the shadow of your wings.

They are abundantly satisfied with the fullness of your house. And you give them drink from the river of your pleasures.

For with you is the fountain of life. In your life we see life. O continue your loving kindness to those who know you.

And your righteousness to the upright in heart. Let not a foot of pride come against me.

And let not the hand of the wicked drive me away. There are the workers of iniquity who have fallen.

They have been cast down and are not able to rise. Now it happened the day after that, the day after, that he went into a city called

Nain. And many of his disciples went with him in a large crowd. And when he came near the gate of the city, behold, a dead man was being carried out.

The only son of his mother. And she was his widow. And a large crowd from the city was with her.

When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, do not leave.

Then he came and touched the open fountain and those who carried him stood still. And he said, young man,

I say to you, arise. So he who was dead sat up and began to speak.

And he presented him to his mother. Then fear came upon all and they glorified him.

They glorified God, saying, a great prophet has risen up among us.

And God has visited his people. You may be seated. Lord, in the truth you have visited your people.

Lord, we thank you that your mercy is in the heavens and your faithfulness reaches to the clouds.

Lord, you are able not only to raise the physical body, but also our spiritual body.

Lord, we who were wicked and it ceased to be wise to do good.

Lord, we who have taken away our hearts and suffered the different parts of the flesh. I pray that you would feed us with your word today.

That you would answer Josh and you would give him words of truth and words of clarity.

I pray that your spirit would come upon us, Lord, that we would seek your truth.

And not for any sake other than your religion to know you better and to obey you better.

Lord, I pray that you would give us your service and that you would answer

Josh and give him his message. In your name I pray. Amen. Amen. Thank you.

Amen. Open your

Bibles please to the book of 1 Kings. In the chapter 17.

Verses 17 through 24 will be our text this morning. We're in our fifth message on a series we're going through on the prophet

Elijah. And then Lord willing we'll proceed through the prophet Elisha. But this message this morning,

Lord willing, will be a stand -alone. Enough of a message that having missed the first four, this one will still,

I think, have meaning for us. 1

Kings 17. 17 through 24. Now it happened after these things that the son of the woman who owned the house became sick.

And his sickness was so serious that there was no breath left in him. So she said to Elijah, What have

I to do with you, O man of God? Have you come to bring my sin to remembrance and to kill my son?

And he said to her, Give me your son. So he took him out of her arms and carried him to the upper room where he was staying and laid him on his own bed.

Then he cried out to the Lord and said, O Lord my God, have you also brought tragedy on the widow with whom

I lodge by killing her son? And he stretched himself out on the child three times and cried out to the

Lord and said, O Lord my God, I pray, let this child's soul come back to him.

Then the Lord heard the voice of Elijah and the soul of the child came back to him and he revived.

And Elijah took the child and brought him down from the upper room into the house and gave him to his mother. And Elijah said,

See, your son lives. Then the woman said to Elijah, Now by this

I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is the truth.

We've come here to the prophet Elijah, having spent three years in a town called

Zarephath in the Gentile nation of Sidon, where he was sent by the Lord, having first gone to the brook

Cherith after his first confrontation with King Ahab. And he said,

Thus says the Lord God of Israel before whom I stand, There shall be neither dune nor rain for these years except at my word.

And then he ran off to Cherith at the Lord's command. And from Cherith he was sent at a time back to this town where we find him this morning.

And you recall that when he first came to Zarephath he found the widow, the one that God said,

I have commanded a widow to provide for your needs. He found this widow and the Lord miraculously provided for her needs, her son's needs and Elijah's needs as he stayed with her.

And now of course we come to this sad history where this widow's son died.

A widow is only able to anticipate poverty in that day.

A widow without even a son, so much the worse. A widow without even a son and in a time of famine.

It's a terrible situation for her. We come here to the prophet

Elijah is going to raise up her son. We've already read that to you so you know the climax of the story already.

This woman is in Sidon. Sidon is the home of Jezebel, Ahab's queen.

Jezebel is a devotee of a pagan god, a demonic god called Baal. And around her everywhere is nothing but death.

People are starving. People are worshiping this dead god. In her home where the prophet

Elijah has brought the word of God, there is food, there is provision, there is life. As we think about this, the situation that she was in, the place that she lived, the paganism all around them, this

Baal worship that was going on, this horrific cult which was really the main adversary of Elijah through his ministry, through his prophetic time there.

God's ways are life. God's ways are life. All else is death.

In God is light. We read in the opening of the book of John, in him in Jesus Christ was life and that life was the light of men.

In God life and light are virtually the same thing. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it.

This woman is beginning to comprehend something about the light. But surrounded by death.

Death because of the famine, death by starvation, death by Baal worship. The thing about death is that it was never in the beginning in God's mind.

God did not designate death, not at the first. The first, do this and you will live.

You will recall way back in Genesis was given in the negative. In other words, if you do this thing, if you eat from this tree, you will die.

A negative command as it were. Avoid that one constraint and life is yours. Man chose death.

Death by disobedience, death by self -determination, death by following what is right in his own eyes. It's death, death, death.

And that's what this woman is surrounded by and has been brought up in. But there's nothing new under the sun.

Ever since that one act of rebellion when God declared that the two seeds, one of the woman, a godly seed, and one of the serpent, the devil's seed, since that day mankind is defined by which ancestry is theirs.

Since that day, death has reigned and fear of it has held us in bondage. Yet all the while, there's been a testimony of God, a seed, a remnant that has found life.

There are those who by God's grace have been transformed from death to life, from darkness to light.

As long as the two peoples, those who are of God by faith in Jesus Christ and those who remain in the natural state to which they were born, and we know we're by nature children of wrath, following the will of their father the devil, as long as they live side by side, which we shall until Christ's return, then one of the defining characteristics of these two peoples is going to be their view of death.

As Christ's children we live, as did Elijah, as representatives of life. Around us, as in Elijah's day, is death.

There is today a culture of death that is so morbid as to be beyond the stuff of horror movies or nightmares.

Baal, back in the day of Elijah, Baal was the god of fertility and had been imported into Israel.

He was thought to be the ruler of the universe, but it was also believed that he had to kneel down to a god called

Mot, very similar to the Hebrew word for death. It's just death, it's darkness, it's blackness all around.

Nothing new under the sun, nothing new in the nature of mankind. The governor of our state is considering a bill labeled

ABX 2 -15, called the End of Life Act, which would allow a doctor to prescribe fatal drugs for terminally ill people.

Now let these words sink down into your ears. Doctors trained to preserve, extend, or improve life.

Doctors able to end it. How long it will take before life termination as required remains to be seen.

But if this bill passes, and I didn't look it up this morning, I don't know if the governor has yet signed it, but I fear we will soon drop into even greater depravity.

I fear this will lead some people to being required to enter into such a process. I fear state -mandated murder will be the next chasm.

As we think about this culture into which God sent a prick of light in Elijah, I want to apply it immediately, before we even pull the text apart, to where we are today.

Because modern Baalists already have their culture of death at the front end. Here our governor has this bill on his desk, which is the back end, if you will, of life.

But they've already got it at the front end. They call it woman's choice. They call it health care.

We call it abortion. In our state, a minor girl cannot be denied an abortion.

Did you know this? If a minor girl goes to a school administrator and says,

I want an abortion, they are required to help her get one. And they are legally barred from telling the parents.

On Tuesday this week, Senate Democrats in Washington showed their loyalty to Ahab's God when they blocked legislation to prevent abortions after 20 weeks.

They call it 20 weeks of gestation. We who belong to Christ call it what it is. No matter what your definition of is is, we call it what it is.

Twenty weeks of life. It's five months of nurture of a child at his most vulnerable and most needy.

And then if all the inconvenient consequences of sexual relations are overcome and a child happens to be born, then they want us to celebrate life as if they think it's something precious.

But just days before birth, that amalgamation of biological fetal tissue can be yanked from the only place where life is possible, or it can be washed in poison, or it can be partially removed and its cranial matter extracted.

Death is all around. We read 1 Kings 17. Let us understand that there's nothing new under the sun.

That things today are no less morbid, no less death -celebrating, really, than they were then.

Malcolm Muggeridge said, all news is old news happening to new people.

Israel is Elijah's day. We really just forecast of our times today. And we come to him this morning, continuing his stay in Zarephath with the widow and her son, the three of them having been miraculously sustained by God with this unending flour and oil that they had.

While all around them, Baal helplessly allowed his adherents to starve. After many days, a second disaster struck this widow.

She was already a widow. She's in drought. Now she loses her son.

When Elijah had found her, you recall she was at death's door, gathering sticks, trying to find just a reasonably comfortable way to die.

And she's confronted by life. She's confronted by a pinhole of light against all this darkness.

It's Christ shining through hopelessness. Before her was Israel's one prophet, the prophet of the giver of life, and that's

Elijah, promising her that if she gave him her last, she would be filled with awe. God, of course, was true to his word.

He staved off death, and by the power and certainty of his word, he replenished the bin and the jar with flour and oil.

So God had given her life. Surrounded by this darkness, surrounded by this death,

God had given her life. And then verse 17 tells us her son became sick and he died.

If her status as a widow was one that meant only poverty, as I said before, this is even worse.

We have no idea what sickness led to this death. We don't even know how old the young man was. And you see where I just slipped?

I called him a young man. We don't know if he was a young man. We just know he was her son and he died.

Now there's some who said, who say, some commentators say he was only dying. That he was going into a coma or something like that.

It's the oddity of that expression. There's no breath left in him. They make them, they take it to mean maybe he just passed out or was passing out.

And in verse 22, though in verse 22 it says he revived.

Some take that to mean he passed from sickness to health, not from death to life. These sound to me like theories of Jesus swooning on the cross instead of actually dying.

Verse 18, the widow asks Elijah, why did you kill my son? In verse 20,

Elijah asked God almost the same thing. Have you killed her son? And finally in verse 21, he prays that God will return his soul to him.

So we need to understand as we look at 1 Kings 17, verses 17 to 24, that what we're looking at is the first resurrection recorded in the

Bible. That this lad, this young man, this child, whatever he was, was dead.

He had died. This poor widow has no way to understand this turn of events.

When she goes to Elijah, she betrays a sort of pagan theology. She attributes the death to Elijah.

You've killed my son, she says. And then she takes some of the blame herself by acknowledging her sin.

Now what sin she means, we have no idea. Maybe it's just sin generally. But she lays the charges at Elijah's feet.

Say, you brought my sin to remembrance. And because my sin's now out in the open, therefore this

God of yours is displeased and has struck my son in order to punish me for this thing that has come out in the open because of you.

Very pagan way of looking at things. But here she is laying this charge at Elijah.

Which really means it to whom? To God. Because she knows that he represents the true and living

God. She even says the Lord God or the Lord your God. So she knows.

She's been for three years sustained. She's lived for three years on this jar of oil, this bin of flour that will not go empty.

It simply won't because God said it would not. Three years while all her neighbors have nothing.

They're out gathering sticks as she was three years ago. Trying to find a comfortable way to die. And she has food in her house for three years because of the word of God.

And now she's angry at God by being angry at the prophet. How quickly we forget

God's goodness. We just sort of get used to it, don't we? When things are rolling along, the checks are not bouncing, the car is not breaking, the job is not failing, the relationships are good.

We get sort of comfortable with it, don't we? I'm not saying we feel like we deserve it. No Christian would say,

I deserve this goodness from God. We would not say that but we get used to it. We sort of forget that God's mercies are new each day.

It's as if God thinks a mercy for us each day and gives it to us and perhaps it's the same mercy we had the day before and the day before and the week before and the month before and the year before.

But we just sort of get used to it. Not in an entitlement kind of mentality but how quickly we forget

God's goodness. She and her son were alive because of the word of the

God of Israel. And is it possible that for even one day when she scooped into that bowl to get the flour and it was there for her, is it possible she ever forgot that it was

God who put it there? All around her starvation, in her house, daily food.

How easy it is for us when things go awry, if even for a moment to cry foul and say,

God, you've been unfair. Not here, brethren.

Here we must guard our hearts. I would suggest to us that there's really no more dangerous time for our souls than those times of God's special, regular, day after day after day mercy.

We just get used to it. We forget that God owes us nothing. And everything we have is from his hand.

We forget Job's words. Shall we indeed accept good from God? And shall we not also accept adversity?

When we're in her situation for those last three years before her son died, when we're in a situation like that, let us remember to give thanks to God.

Let us remember that God owes nothing and that what he gives is because of his special mercy.

His mercies are new each day and that even if it's the same one we had yesterday, he's no more obligated to give it to us than he is to give us life.

We need to thank him as if it was the first time we ever sat down to breakfast and had bacon and eggs before.

So whatever you like for breakfast. We go home tonight, most of our tables will be filled with some food.

And we need to thank God for that food as if it's the first time we ever had food put on our table so that we don't become like this and become comfortable so as soon as one thing goes wrong, something goes awry, we forget all that and say,

God is just no good to me because he's always good. His mercies are always fresh.

Now she attributes her son's death to Elijah which is to say, to God. Now we know

God is the one who numbers our days but to say he personally killed someone goes too far. That's her paganism.

That's her Baal -driven death culture seeping through. God has reached his finger from heaven and taken life.

He has done that. But only rarely. We do harm to scripture and our souls if we take it as normative.

Let's go through just a few of them. Not a few of them, the few that we have. He killed the wicked sons of Judah.

He consumed Nadab and Abihu for their presumptuous offering. He destroyed a man named

Uzzah for touching the cart that carried the ark when the ox stumbled. Ananias and Sapphira were killed in Acts chapter 5.

Herod for taking the glory for himself instead of giving it to God in Acts 12. He was killed.

Joshua 7, Achan and his family and the rebels against Moses much later in the Exodus or excuse me, earlier in the

Exodus. Only these few. Eons of rebellion and sin and only these divine executions.

What I say is do not blame God for these but wonder that these are rare. That is not the norm.

That for all the rebellion, for all the sin, for all the pugnacious attitude that God has to see before him, that it's not a daily occurrence that his finger actually reaches down and touches a sinner and kills him dramatically.

Jesus' disciples understood this whole concept no better than the widow, really.

In John chapter 9, they come across a beggar, a man who had been born blind and they say to Jesus, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?

The Lord answered, neither this man nor his parents sinned but that the works of God should be revealed in him. Think of John chapter 11 when

Jesus is explaining the reason for Lazarus' death. Did I not say to you that if you would believe, you would see the glory of God?

You see, God did not kill the child for his mother's sin. If he did that, then no child would live because all mothers and all fathers for that matter were all sinners.

And if our children would die for our sin, no child could live. Matter of fact, we all being children of someone, we wouldn't be here either.

Nor would our children be. Nor would our parents have been. See, Elijah goes to her when she asks him this question, when she blames him, when she blames his

God, when she forgets all the three years of goodness, the miraculous provision, and says he took the child.

He says, give me the child, and then says he took the child. The way it is in the Hebrew might imply that his taking was not a single act of taking.

The verb used is in a form which denotes a kind of incomplete and continual action as though she resisted or just held on to him.

Now, none of our better English Bibles translate this way. I'm a bit on my own here. But the form of the verb is what we call imperfect.

A continual, incomplete action. And so I do have the impression that Elijah said, give me the boy.

Now, she's had enough of prophets for right now. Because this prophet, because of what he brought into the house, caused that God to strike down her son, and she's not taking any more chances.

This is the way I see it. And so he's pulling. There's sort of a bit of a tussle going on here. There's some persistence on Elijah's part.

Even as God persists in his grace despite man's resistance against him. Even as Jesus persisted with the disciples who were sometimes so dull of wit that I wonder that Jesus didn't just call 12 others sometimes.

Even as God persists now withholding final judgment by delaying his son's return. Elijah wants the boy.

We'll see why as we go through this. And he's simply not gonna take no for an answer. It's not simply a, well,

God has a wonderful plan for your life. Give me this boy. Okay, you're not with me on this?

I'll go back to my upper room and start studying the scripture again. No, that's not Elijah. That's not our

God that he represented. Whether she gave him over or tried to hold him a little longer, we do know

Elijah ended up with the boy. And he took him to the upper room where he'd been staying. Now, first he prays to God for himself.

As one wrestling with God to understand his ways. He cried out to the Lord and said, Oh Lord, my

God, have you brought tragedy on the widow with whom I lodge by killing her son? He seems to ask, also this?

This on top of all else, Father? She's lost her husband and now lives in poverty.

She lives in poverty stricken as a widow. And now she loses her son. Must she live not just as a widow, but now without children?

Father, God, is that not enough? Do not widows and orphans have a special attention from God's heart?

There's no reproach against God here. It's his heartfelt compassion for his hostess. He's been there for three years.

We don't presume too much to look at the scripture and say, Elijah was attached to this family.

There's a love bond there. They've been together for these three years. According to Kiel and Delitzsch, the meaning of his prayer is more like thou,

O Lord my God, according to thy grace and righteousness, canst not possibly leave the son of this widow in death.

Father, God, you wouldn't do that. It's not a rebuke against God. He's reciting to God his own nature, his own understanding of him.

Elijah was not reminding God of anything. He was declaring his confidence in God's revealed nature.

But then he acted. He had the child in the upper room and he prays to God, said,

God, you wouldn't do this. You would not leave this child in death and his widow with nothing.

Not this woman who I've been with for these three years. And he acted.

He stretched himself out on the child three times and cried out to the Lord and said, O Lord my God, I pray, let this child's soul come back to him.

Three times, over and over, unwilling that God, the God that he knew would remain silent at such a time as this.

Now, you know, emphasis is shown in the scripture with simple repetition. Something repeated twice, well, better stand up and take notice.

Think of Genesis 17. In the day you eat of it, you shall surely die. In the Hebrew, it's mot tamot.

Mot is the word for death and it's sort of like saying, in dying, you shall die. There's this repetition that increases the certainty of it.

Think of Pharaoh's dreams. Pharaoh had these dual dreams. They both meant the same thing, but the duality of the dream, the repetition, meant that it was firmly established by God that he was gonna do this thing.

God will shortly bring it to pass. Threes are even more so.

Think of Isaiah chapter six with the angels calling out this attribute of God. Holy, holy, holy is the

Lord God Almighty. That's how holy God is. Can't just say he's holy. Can't just say it twice.

He's holy, holy, holy. The emphasis on this core attribute of his nature. Think of Jonah in the belly of the well for three days.

That sign that Jesus pointed to as Jonah was in the belly of the well for three days, so the

Son of Man will be in the belly of the earth for three days. Peter's vision in Acts chapter 10 was repeated three times to show him that the gospel was going out to the

Gentiles. That anything God declared clean was now clean, and he better not declare it unclean.

Three times for him to get the point. Paul prayed three times for his thorn in the flesh to be removed.

Peter denied Jesus three times, which was later met with a thrice repeated restoration. Do you love me?

Feed my sheep. Before even that, Jesus prayed three times at Gethsemane for the cup to be removed.

Jesus lay for three days in the grave, and here, Elijah prays three times for the boy, stretching himself out over him each time.

How do you picture Elijah? How do you picture Elijah? Usually, it's very similar to how you see

John the Baptist, except Elijah would be a little older, have a longer beard, and it's got more gray in it, is usually the way it's pictured when we have those drawing books for kids.

A solitary and rugged figure. But what do we see here in the upper room with this dead boy that he's lived with for three years?

And we see compassion. I think we see an emotional involvement, engagement in what's happening here that we normally don't think of with this prophet.

It's like the energetic, the uncompromising Paul who faced down kings and Pharisees alike, who didn't hesitate to dress down Peter.

But like Paul, his sternness is matched by his heart.

Neither of them erred, as we so often do, on one side or the other. Mercy versus being stern.

Elijah is a forerunner of the Baptist, John the Baptist, who is also,

I think, far softer of heart than usually portrayed. He cared deeply for people.

That's why he confronted them with their sin. But he didn't stop there. When they were crushed by their sin, when they saw their hopeless condition before God, after hearing

God's word through him, when people, when tax collectors, when soldiers begged him and said, what shall we do?

He had a ready answer. He said, repent, and henceforth do what is right in God's eyes.

Collect no more than is your due. Do not intimidate people, he told the soldiers. He had an answer.

Repent and do what is right before God, which is a caring, a loving, and a truly gentle answer.

Normally, the way John the Baptist is pictured, much like Elijah, is like this guy is almost frothing at the mouth.

He's got thunderbolts coming out and consuming people because he's so angry at them for their sin. Peter, much the same way at Pentecost.

Same question. At the end of his sermon, this sin -convicting sermon that brought forth

Jesus Christ as the only answer to sin. Repent and believe in him. They said, men and brethren, what shall we do?

They said, we're all condemned because you're lousy sinners. If you weren't as bad as you were, you would not have crucified the

Prince of Peace. Was that his answer? No. Like John the

Baptist, he had a real answer, a compassionate answer, a heartfelt answer like Elijah, laying down three times on the lad.

Peter's answer was repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sin, which is the gentlest, the softest, the most compassionate answer possible.

We are too often too merciful to confront sin or too stern to be heard when we do.

And it's not merciful to fail to confront sin. And yet if we imitate our usual picture of a prophet like Elijah or John the

Baptist, we're so harsh. And we finally go to a brother to show him his fault, to take that little speck out of his eye.

They're not going to hear us because we're playing the part of Elijah, at least as we think we see Elijah or John the

Baptist or even Jesus Christ. All we can do is pound our fist and show you how bad you are.

And we do need to know that we have sin. And even as children of God through faith in Jesus Christ, we need to acknowledge our sin and confess and repent and know

God's forgiveness again. I look at Elijah and I say, well, let's put aside that picture we usually have of him, prophets like him.

And let's start trying to err a little bit on this compassionate side, this side that would not let the widow keep the boy, but insisted on taking him and brought him upstairs and lay on him three times for to show him how important that triple repetition is.

He would not take no for an answer from the widow, neither would he from God. Too compassionate of heart towards his charge.

Elijah lay over the child, which is sort of an odd posture. It's only repeated by his disciple,

Elisha. Now, nothing mystical transpired because of this. Elijah was showing his identification with the boy.

He had lived there with him and his mother for three years, so he had some familial attachment with him. This greatest prophet, this man who is the paradigm for the prophets, was one with his charge.

He knew the same weaknesses of the flesh. Remember what James says in James 5 .16.

Elijah was a man with a nature like ours. Like this lad's. He was prone to the same death the boy now suffered.

His laying on the lad is really to me, it's akin to Jesus taking on human flesh. When the

Word became flesh, his identity with us was complete. When Elijah laid on the lad, he was identifying with him.

You need to understand, nothing in Old Testament Israel, according to the law, nothing was as unclean as a corpse.

It passed its uncleanness to anyone who contacted it. And then they had to go through a ritual purification before they could enter into temple worship.

Elijah, the prophet who demanded Israel return to the law, he knew this better than anyone.

But no matter, no matter the purification laws, no matter the ritual uncleanness of a corpse, as Jesus taught about the

Sabbath, where acts of mercy bring honor to the Lord of the Sabbath, so ritual uncleanness was no barrier to the prophet's cause.

We could say he was no Pharisee, but he knew God's priorities, he knew God's standards.

He prays here for something totally out of bounds, totally out of bounds.

When he prayed for drought three years before, he was asking God to do what

God in his word had already said he would do. Deuteronomy 28, 23, God says this will be his response to Israel's idolatry.

And your heavens, which are over your head, shall be bronze, and the earth, which is under you, shall be iron.

Bronze heavens give no rain, iron earth gives no food. Most commentators, and I agree with them, would say that this is the prayer that Elijah prayed.

James 5, 16 tells us that Elijah prayed for the drought to come. He prayed on this basis, on the basis of God's revealed word.

But for Elijah to pray for the boy's life to return, for him to be resurrected, and that for the sake of mercy to a

Gentile, what scripture can he stand on? You're going to open up to Ezekiel 14, verse 17, or whatever it is.

Where are you going to find this? To say, God, you and your word said that Gentile widow's sons, if that's all they have, will be resurrected.

We can't do that. What does he plead if not

God's word? On what basis does he make his supplication? We know that a righteous man's prayers are fervent, and thrice repeated ministry shows intensity.

But what does he plead to God? Well, his plea is one of the best we can make. He pleads

God's nature. Does she deserve God's favor because she accommodated his prophet with food and lodging?

No. Doing our duty wins us nothing before God. Jesus even says in Luke 17, 10, that when we've done our duty, we should say we're unprofitable servants because we've only done what's required of us.

Should she be relieved of her sorrow because of any inherent righteousness in her? No. Our only hope of righteousness is to have faith in Jesus Christ, by which

God will impute to us his righteousness. See, Elijah's only hope is the same for any prayer, really.

What's his hope? His hope is in God, in his mercy, that he will do that which he is able for the good of others and glorifies him for the honor of his own name.

There might be one precedent for what he's asking for in the scripture, at least one that was written before Elijah came on the scene.

I'm thinking of Genesis 22 with Abraham's son Isaac. Abraham was told to go to a mountain that God would show him and there to sacrifice

Isaac, your only son, and sacrifice him to the Lord, he was told. At that moment,

Isaac was a dead man. Abraham's preparations, though, were immediate, and then on the third day of Isaac's death, he got to the mountain.

And there it was only by God's grace, God being the God of light and life, that God through the angel stopped the sacrifice and provided the substitute.

The best commentary on this is from Hebrews 11, beginning at verse 17.

By faith, Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises, offered up his only begotten son, of whom it was said, in Isaac your seed shall be called, concluding that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead, from which he also received him in a figurative sense.

As soon as Abraham received the command to go to the mountain, Isaac was gone, dead.

And God raised him up again by providing a substitute, the ram.

When Abraham lifted up his eyes, he saw the ram and sacrificed that in the place of Isaac.

Perhaps Elijah had this in mind. He lay on the child as if to say, let my life flow to this dead body and bring life.

As Jesus touched eyes and brought sight, as Jesus touched lepers and restored their flesh, as Jesus Christ in Mark 5, verse 41 took the child's hand and said, little girl,

I say to you, arise. As in the passage that Joseph read to you from Luke, young man,

I say to you, arise. Restoring that widow to her son just centuries after Elijah and in the same way.

The difference being, very important, Elijah asked God. Jesus, on his own authority, commanded the dead to rise.

Elijah asked God as if to say, God, will you do this? And Jesus said, I myself command you, arise.

Verse 22 of our passage says, and the Lord heard the voice of Elijah and the soul of the child came back to him and he revived.

There's only one parallel for this. Think about this. The Lord heard the voice of Elijah.

It takes us all the way back to Joshua 10, 14 when he prayed for more time to finish his battle.

You remember that the sun stopped and so he could continue to destroy the Amalekites? Joshua 10, 14 says, and there has been no day like that, before it or after it, that the

Lord heeded the voice of a man, for the Lord fought for Israel. The word in Joshua, heeded, and the word in 1

Kings 17, 22, heard, they're both the same word in the Hebrew.

The word is shema, which means to hear. That word, shema, is in the forward of the greatest command.

What we call in Jewish tradition the great shema. Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad.

Jesus cited this. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, he is one Lord. Shema, hear.

Shema, hear. In Deuteronomy 6, 4, was it all about obedience?

And you do no harm to the text if you say, obey, O Israel, the Lord our God, he is one

Lord. The whole book of Deuteronomy is about obedience. Not just listen to the words, but what you hear, do.

Obey. To hear is to obey.

There's one translation, the ESV, that even says that God obeyed the voice of a man.

Never been a day like this before where God obeyed the voice of a man. A man bent on his, on God's purposes.

A man praying for that which he has no right to even ask for. God heard and obeyed the prayer of a man whose sole purpose in coming to the throne of grace was to find avenues for God's glory to be magnified.

And let's understand, this man, this righteous man, the prayers of a righteous man avail much. But this man whose nature was a nature like ours,

God hears such prayers. God, can we say, obeys such prayers?

Not always. His ways are inscrutable. He gets the glory by answering a prayer for one, yet the same prayer for another is denied.

I'm saying this, I'm thinking about 2 Samuel 12 where we read how King David prayed for his infant son for seven days, but the

Lord would not hear and the child died. And what do we take from this?

We understand that whether God takes life because of sin, as he did with David and Bathsheba's first son, or grants life despite sin, as he did for Elijah, in either case,

God is glorified. In the former case, he's glorified for his justice. In the latter case, for his mercy.

But in all things, God is glorified. There's something we notice about people brought back to life, and we don't have very many of them.

The ones we looked at this morning, the one we're looking at this morning, excuse me, it's the first one recorded.

And after this, Elijah will raise a widow's son, which Lord willing, in some weeks we will get to. 2

Kings 13, a dead man contacts Elijah's bones and he comes back to life. We have

Peter raising up Dorcas. We have Jesus who raised the young girl and the widow's son, and of course, later,

Lazarus. But if you read all those accounts, there's something to me that's a little bit striking.

There's not a single word recorded being spoken by any of the recipients of life.

Before or after they're raised by God's mighty power. I think there's a good reason for this.

I think there's a good reason for this, and it is this, it's this. They're not the point.

They are not the point. God is. I mean, if we could interview those people, imagine if we could talk to them, or if even in history,

I'm sure they were asked some questions. What was like? Were you conscious? I'm sure they were asked some of these questions, but not one of them is recorded for us, because we just go off in a never, never land of speculation.

Our questions have to do with visions. Is there a third heaven? Were there flashes of light? Were there angels escorting them to eternity and then back?

No, the Bible allows no such speculation, even for something as incredible as a resurrection.

The focus, the point, the goal of the whole matter is God's glory.

The widow's only words sort of confirm this. Once her son has safely returned to her, she makes the only declaration that really matters.

Now by this, I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is the truth.

God is glorified when sinners repent. Again, I go along with the mainstream commentators.

I believe this is repentance. I believe this is where she came to God. She thought at first her son had been taken because of some affront she had made to God through Elijah.

Now the whole matter is settled. God took her son so that she might know Him, the one true and living

God, and by faith find life, her own life in His name.

God is a God of light and life. Elijah, representing that God, he was the forerunner of Him who raises all the dead to life, which is

Jesus Christ. Our Lord Jesus said in chapter 5 of John, Most assuredly

I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the

Son of God, and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in Himself, so He has granted the

Son to have life in Himself, and has given Him authority to execute judgment also, because He is the

Son of Man. Do not marvel in this, for the hour is coming, in which all who are in the graves will hear

His voice and come forth, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of condemnation.

Jesus says do not marvel at this. Our history tells us that God is a

God of life, that God can overpower death, that even in a land surrounded by death and darkness and blackness,

God's light, His life, comes through at His word and by His power.

Paul asked Agrippa in chapters 26, verse 8 of Acts, Why should it be thought incredible by you that God raises the dead?

Do you think it's incredible? Do you treat that as a myth?

Does it make you just sort of shrug your shoulders? God raises the dead. Our history records it.

A few years ago, I was trying to evangelize a Muslim I had a bit of a relationship with. And when

I was showing him these sorts of things, he finally said, Well, your whole scripture has been changed. I said, What?

He said, No, it's not true. None of it's true. It's what Muhammad said it was. I said,

Which part of it? From the second century forward, it's all been quoted. We have it. I was just flabbergasted.

And so the whole history, the record written by witnesses of prophets raising the dead, of Jesus Christ touching a coffin said,

I say to you, Arise. Gone. Life ignored.

Death taken in favor of it. Incredible. Why should it be thought incredible by you that God raises the dead?

He's done it before. Not a lot, but he's done it. And when he does it, it's incredible.

But only incredible because of its rarity. The fact that he did and does and will raise the dead, this is simply a fact.

We spoke last week about not taking the incredible miracles as normative.

Not taking promises like the unending flower and oil that the widow had and say, well,

God will do that for me as long as I am prophesying in his will or something like that. And I spoke then about how

God is always doing good. And even though the resurrections of corpses is incredible and rare in the scripture, they point us to something that is equally incredible, but Lord willing, not rare.

And that's raising the dead to life as we live now. You he made alive who are dead in trespasses and sins.

The apostle speaking in chapter two of Ephesians of being raised to true life by faith in Jesus Christ.

Repentance for sins and faith in him as the only answer for our sins. Believing in him brings us from death to life.

No less incredible than what Elijah did, but in God's grace quite a bit more common.

If you will but believe in him, then this life we're speaking of, this life that is light, is yours.

In him, in Jesus Christ, was life and the life was the light of men and the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it.

It's closed by telling you. Sometimes this is hard to believe because it just seems so old and archaic.

This scripture's been preserved for centuries. We'll go into a long lecture on the textual validity of what we have.

Why is it hard to believe in Jesus Christ? Why is it incredible to think that God raises the dead? I think one of the things that holds us back the most is that if I believe that God raises the dead, he did it physically in the cases that we spoke of and that tells us that he does it spiritually now and will do it physically again when the

Lord returns. That's not something that God does willy -nilly.

It's by his grace, by his regenerating power, meaning regenerating our hearts, regenerating our souls, making us able to believe in the

Lord Jesus Christ and acknowledging our sin. The light shines in the darkness. That life was the light of men.

What's the darkness? It's the sin. It's the death that's all around us which must be confessed, acknowledged, repented of and then placed towards Jesus Christ as our only hope.

What's hard too is this culture where we live today, as I said at the beginning, is a culture of death and darkness and we just sort of get used to it.

As the terms get changed, abortion is called right to choose, choice, women's health care.

No. It's murder. It's simply murder.

It's death. It's blackness. It's bale worship and we get those terms in our head and we lose sight of the difference between God and all else.

In the face of death though, there is life. Surrounded by morbidity, there is hope.

I tell you today, the culture that we live in is as committed to death as were the bale worshipers in Elijah's day and as committed as they are to death, more so must we be to life, to true life, to life in Jesus Christ by repentance for sin and faith in him.

Why are we so against abortion and this idea of euthanasia that may get signed by our governor?

In the end, it's not because of the scientific arguments about when life begins. I said scientific.

Biblically, there's no argument at all. These are not the reasons we stand against such things in today's culture.

I think the answer is simply that our God is a God of life, both now and forever.

Amen? Lord God, thank you for this day. Thank you Father that you are the fountain of life and that life is to be had in Jesus Christ and him alone.

Let's pray Lord that we would stay close to the life that we have because of his death on the cross where he went on behalf of sinners.

So for these things we give you thanks. I pray that we would bask in the glory of your light.