8/9/2015 The Times They Ain't A Changin' Pastor Josh Sheldon

Well, I had some time ago gotten the idea that a short series on the prophet

Elisha would be a good and edifying journey for us into the Old Testament.

And as I studied Elisha, it became clear that in order to preach well to you about Elisha, I'd first have to preach about his forerunner and mentor,

Elijah. And then as I read over and over the ministry of Elijah, it became clear that in order to fully grasp and appreciate his ministry, we need to grasp and appreciate his historical context, which was influenced largely, if not primarily, by a man named

Ahab, the king of Israel during Elijah's time. But to really understand

Ahab, then we need to roll back to the initiation of the throne in Israel as a separate and distinct throne from that in Judah, which leads us back to, and leads us back to, and you get the point, and I might just as well say that we'd have to start at in the beginning,

God created the heaven and the earth, which, of course, to preach about Elisha and Elijah, we don't need to do.

But I wanna preach these two prophets to you, Elijah and Elisha.

And this morning is sort of an introductory message about the times in which the first of these,

Elijah, lived. Elijah, Elisha, are prophets who are not recorded as ever having recorded anything.

Their actions, the lives that they led, are recorded of them, primarily in 1 and 2

Kings, which is where we started this morning. We don't know them by their prose or by these succinct statements of their theology, as we have with Jeremiah or Isaiah or any of the other prophets,

Ezekiel, you name them. We know them by what they did. We know them by the times in which they lived and how they responded in them and how

God worked through them in accordance with the times in which they lived. And so this morning,

I don't have an awful lot to say about Elijah. But I have something,

Lord willing, worth saying about the time in which he lived. We will say something about Elijah, though.

For example, his name. His name sets the tone for his ministry. Many of the prophets called

Israel away from worshiping gods other than Yahweh. And their burden was for the people to worship him, worship

God, in accordance with God's law. And to demonstrate the grace of the laws of God that God's author in their daily life.

They contended for the exclusivity demanded by the God of Israel. Elijah's burden was really somewhat more basic than that.

He had to convince the people that God was God. They had abandoned him altogether for them, for Israel in the time of Elijah.

Baal was God. Baal was the God. He was their

God. The prophet's name, Elijah's name, foretold his ministry. Elijah means my

God is Yahweh. The last three letters, the J -A -H, the

Jah, that stands for Yahweh. The first three letters, E -L -I,

Eli. You'll recognize those from the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus Christ on the cross cried out these words.

He said, Eli, Eli, Lama Sochtani. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Eli means my God. So Elijah, my God, is

Yahweh. Sets the tone for everything he's going to stand for. For all the contentions and all the contests that he had that were going to,

Lord willing, in the next few weeks unfold. Elijah, my

God, is Yahweh. His sudden appearance, which

Steve just read to you about in 1 Kings 17, it puts him before the most violent, the most ungodly, the most vicious king known up to that time,

Ahab, Ahab. I mean, that name says something to us, doesn't it?

One of my favorite books ever is Moby Dick. And when that name appears in that book as the name of the captain of the ill -fated

Paquod, the whaling ship that he was in charge of, when his name turns out to be

Ahab, you know something's wrong. You know something's amiss.

And as that fictional captain's wild fixation on the white whale becomes more and more insane and more and more destructive, every reader realizes the name fits the man,

Ahab. I mean, what parent would give their child a name so laden with all that is against God as that name?

I mean, just as when you say the name Josiah, everyone thinks immediately of a good king who spared nothing to bring the people back to God, so with Ahab, we right away think the opposite.

This is the one Elijah had to deal with. This is his great antagonist, and Ahab's great antagonist, of course, being the prophet, worked both ways.

Elijah and Elisha, they both had access to the kings of their time, and much of their ministry was in response to those rulers' faithlessness.

Now, to begin all this, it would be good for us to review just how a man like Ahab, the name should evoke shudders.

This man's a paradigm for wickedness, for selfishness, for forsaking the living God, favoring instead this pagan deity called

Baal. He was violent, murderous. He was brutally successful in politics and war. He was voraciously materialistic.

He was willing to do anything in order to have his way. How could such a man have ascended to the throne in a land named after the living

God? Well, the answer, we need to actually go back to 1 Kings 12, the start of the reign of a king named

Rehoboam. Rehoboam, Solomon's son, and the last king to rule over a unified kingdom.

It was Rehoboam who would feel the sting of judgment from God earned by his father Solomon. Solomon had married foreign wives for political expediency, which was bad enough.

To make it worse, he allowed them to bring their gods with them, and worse yet, he,

Solomon, eventually served those gods. Now, he didn't abandon the true and living

God entirely, but he mixed his worship with the one from the other.

He incorporated the worship brought in by his foreign wives and the gods that they brought with them.

Never, as Jacob told his wives, put away the foreign gods from among you. Never said anything like that.

But eventually, he incorporated them together. It's a process we call syncretism.

S -Y -N, to bring something together. Syncretism is the idea of allowing one practice to mingle with the other.

It removes that bright line between Yahweh, the true and living God, the one true and only

God, and all other gods. It blurs the distinction, so we take from this, and we kind of mix it in with the other, but we try and hang on to Yahweh because we really know he is

God, but we compromise it. This is syncretism.

This is what Solomon did, and we need to be aware of this because it happens very subtly.

It happens very easily. I remember seeing on television a series about biblical days in the

Old Testament, Solomon's life, not the recent one done by the, touched by an angel lady. I can't think of her name right now.

I have nothing against that series, but before that, and it shows Solomon walking along, and he goes past this shrine, and there's a priestess by the shrine, one of these priestesses who came with one of his foreign wives, and she says to Solomon, well, won't you sacrifice to the

God? And he says, well, no, I serve the true and living God. And he says, oh, it'd be such a simple thing, and it doesn't mean that you don't believe in the other, and she eventually convinces him, and you know what he does?

I thought this was really well -portrayed. He takes a piece of incense, he lights it, and he sets it down in front.

Just that simple. Just that easy to mix the two together, to compromise the true faith.

This is what Solomon did. And I thought that was a good portrayal, because when I think of Solomon, it's hard for me to imagine him actually bowing down and making obeisance to an idol.

I think it was more subtle than that. No less odious to God, but more subtle than sometimes we think.

Syncretism, mixing the worship of the one true God with false practices of other gods.

First Kings chapter 11 verses 11 and 12 say this. Therefore the

Lord said to Solomon, because you have done this and have not kept my covenant and my statutes which I have commanded you,

I will surely tear the kingdom away from you and give it to your servant. Nevertheless, I will not do it in your days for the sake of your father

David. I will tear it out of the hand of your son. You hear a ring of what

I spoke of earlier this morning about King Hezekiah. And the judgment that he brought upon his son.

Rehoboam was that son upon whom this judgment came. When he ascended to the throne, there's a whole incident you can read about there in First Kings beginning in chapter 12.

The citizens came to him and asked him to ease the burden that Solomon had put on them. Solomon made many of them laborers.

He had high taxes, this sort of thing. And they said, ease things up for us. Just make it a little easier for us.

Will you, Rehoboam? Your father made it too hard. And to make a long story short, it's worth reading though.

I commend it to your reading later. He declined the advice of the elder statesman who said, give them a gentle answer and they will be your loyal citizens forever.

Answer them gently. Answer them reasonably. But he followed instead the rash advice of his childhood friends.

Who said, you tell them that your little finger is thicker than Solomon's thigh.

In other words, I'm a bigger, tougher, stronger guy. You think Solomon's hard to deal with? Wait till you deal with me.

This kind of bravado. First Kings 12, 14 tells us, and he spoke to them according to the advice of the young men saying, my father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to your yoke.

My father chastised you with whips. I will chastise you with scourges. Scourges. Now, of course, they rebelled and the kingdom was permanently split north and south.

In the south, centered in Jerusalem, there remained only the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. The Levites were there, but they were not counted.

That's called Judah. And all the other tribes banded together in the north and were known as Israel.

And all this happened under Rehoboam, Solomon's son, as God had said. The king of the north was a man named

Jeroboam. Gets a little confusing. Solomon's son, Rehoboam. You think the

R sound might make you think royalty? The other one, J, Jeroboam, think jobs.

He was Solomon's servant that was in the scripture I read earlier. He became king in the north.

Now, neither kingdom was ever especially faithful to God, though Judah did have periods of revival, something the northern kingdom never did.

But we come to the great question of 1 and 2 Kings, the great question of the ministries of Elijah and Elisha.

It's a very simple question. Who is God? Who is

God? Not a question of identity, a question of sovereignty, a question of power, a question of authority.

Which God is the God of this people who are the subject of these narratives? Is it

Baal, the God of the Sidonians brought in by Ahab's wife, Jezebel? Or is it

Yahweh? To which will they give their hearts, their loyalty? To the God of the Bible who worked great wonders on their behalf, or to dead chunks of stone and metal fashioned into something grotesque made by men's hands?

This is the great question. This is the burden of these prophets. For Israel to fall down before the

God of Israel and forsake all other gods. Who is

God? The question is very basic here for these prophets as we go through these histories.

It's almost not even who is your God, but just who is God at all?

That's how the kingdom split, how Jeroboam became king of the north. But I wanna look back and I wanna see where Ahab came from because we have to start really with Jeroboam to get to Ahab.

No more than our current president, for example, his policies are a sudden innovation, but the signals came long before.

No more than that did Ahab suddenly rise up and just appear the way Elijah did. Ahab comes from a long line of kings before him.

He's the logical extension of what came before. And in him, we admit that evil made swifter progress and was more expansive in its influence, but he didn't arise in a vacuum.

He followed a line of kings who did their best to divest themselves of the true and living God, both for themselves personally and for the people they ruled.

Now Israel's first king, as I said, was Jeroboam. And this was by divine appointment.

A prophet was sent to Jeroboam. We won't go back there right now. A prophet was sent to Jeroboam and he told him to take a piece of cloth and tear it into 12 pieces.

The prophet took two and said, these 10 are yours. These 10 tribes are going to follow you. Jeroboam had been one of Solomon's most able administrators.

When Israel rebelled, it was he who was appointed to rule the north and that by God.

But just as Jeroboam's first act as king was a disaster, the one I told you about where he answered harshly and the kingdom split and this was the judgment promised to Solomon that would come upon that generation, just as Rehoboam's first act was a disaster, so too was

Jeroboam's. He was afraid that when the people went to Jerusalem for the appointed feasts, that that city being then under the rule of his now rival

Judah, that the people wouldn't want to come back. So here's what he did.

First Kings 13, beginning at verse 28. Therefore the king asked advice, made two calves of gold and said to the people, it is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem.

Here are your gods, O Israel, which brought you up from the land of Egypt. And he set up one in Bethel and the other he put in Dan.

Now this thing became a sin, for the people went to worship before the one as far as Dan. He made shrines on the high places and made priests from every class of people who were not of the sons of Levi.

I think that speaks for itself. I don't have time this morning to go into a lot of detail of everything that this implied.

But this was so odious to God that our chroniclers, our historians in the

Bible, have a term they call it the sin of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat. The sin of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat.

Israel did not depart, they say, from the sin of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat. And so they continued in the sin of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat.

And the prophets say, you have not left the sin of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat. That actual term comes up in those words so many times, it became synonymous with apostasy, with faithlessness to God.

Now in a way, what Jeroboam did was a brilliant move, but only in human terms.

Only in human terms. Aaron, the first high priest, as he made a representation of the true and living

God, one that the people could see and touch, one that they could relate to on their own terms, a

God whose glory was, by this manufacture, reduced to the human level, so also

Jeroboam correctly read the human condition and gave them what they wanted. A God who was easy to worship.

A God who was easy to follow. A God who stood for little and demanded less.

What is the attraction of idols? What is the attraction of idols?

Well, it's very simple. If we think just in human terms, it's very simple. You see, you get to make the

God. You get to make it out of wood or stone or silver or gold. You can make it male or female or a mixture of the two.

You can make it an animal or even add some human aspects to the animal. You make it whatever you want. Make it look the way you want.

Put it in your house where you want it. And then you get to tell that God what that God's going to tell you.

You get to tell the God, okay, here are my standards, which you will impose upon me. And also, here are my morals, which you will force me to follow.

And here is the way I'm gonna live my life, which you will then impose upon me. And once you've gotten this

God all fixed up the way you want it to look, telling you what you want to hear, then you bow down before it. You get my point.

Well, this is the start of apostasy. Not just for them of old, as though they were somehow different from us or we from them.

Those people then, they knew less of the physical sciences than we do today. So some of their explanations for observable phenomena might strike us as bizarre or superstitious.

But really, they were no different than us. Just give me a

God who is easygoing, one whose demands cause me no inconvenience. Give us a

God who doesn't bother us with things like sexual purity, with loving faithfulness to him and to others, a

God who speaks on our terms, whose standards are the same as our own. What's wrong with that God?

Well, that's the God of this age. And the God of this age is the God of ages past.

It's the same God who whispered doubts in the garden and who blinds eyes today. It's the same

God who offers eternal life without repentance or holiness without effort. It is the same

God who says sin is what you say it is. And whatever you do, all will be saved.

For there's no hell that says sin has no consequence. Jeroboam, like Aaron before him, offered

God to the people, but he did it in such a wrong way as to offer nothing at all. You recall, both of them said, here's your

God of Israel who led you out of Egypt. Well, that's Yahweh, kind of loosely aiming towards the true

God. As I said before, in such a way, they missed the target altogether.

It's not God at all. They both gave the people what they wanted,

God with no demands. Today we call it easy -believism. Today we call it gospel -lite.

All kinds of terms we have for it. Scripture calls it the sin of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat.

Any allegiance to a God, an allegiance is the same as worship. Any following of a

God that is not the God of the Bible, it's false religion, it's apostasy.

Israel never abandoned this false faith. They mixed it with Baal or Asherah or Emoah or Polech or whatever

God de jure happened to be available. But this was it, this was the beginning, the sin of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat.

Giving the people what they wanted, not what they needed, making up a God that is easy to follow, not the

God of the Bible, not the God who worked great works and wonders on their behalf. That's how

Israel started. If you read through to 2 Kings 17, you will see it's also how they ended when they finally succumbed to the

Assyrian Empire. But now we're gonna move through even quicker.

We're gonna fly from Jeroboam to King Ahab and the prophet Elijah. So very, very quickly now.

Jeroboam, he died after he reigned for 22 years. His son

Nadab lasted all of two years. He was assassinated by a man named

Baasha. So Jeroboam's son Nadab after two years is assassinated by Baasha.

Baasha rules for 24 years. Baasha's son Elah made it for two years and he's murdered by one of his servants, a man named

Zimri. And Zimri immediately wipes out the rest of Baasha's family, all the survivors.

Now having played his part in bringing a judgment pronounced against Baasha, Zimri, after being king for seven days, he commits suicide rather than surrender to a man named

Omri who himself wanted to be king. When he found his city attacked and found that there was no way he was going to keep

Omri out, he put himself in a building and burned himself to death. Omri, who took care of him, he consolidated his power after four years of civil war.

It is he who purchased Samaria and built it up as the capital of the northern kingdom. Omri, 1

Kings 16, 25 and 26 tells us, did evil in the eyes of the

Lord and did worse than all who were before him. For he walked in the ways of Jeroboam the son of Nabat and in his sin by which he made

Israel sin, provoking the Lord to anger with their idols. Omri's son was

Ahab who took his father's sins to a new level altogether. You heard

Steve read to you how he brought in Baal worship introduced to him by his wife Jezebel.

Well, if Solomon made this miserable litany to Israel by his example, Omri and Ahab expanded on his sin by commanding the people to worship those false gods.

Micah 6 .16 says, for the statutes of Omri are kept. All the works of Ahab's house are done.

This is the Israel in which Elijah prophesied. Now, were any of you keeping track of the time spans we just flew through a few moments ago?

Did any of you kind of add it up as I went? I speak to a room of engineers and scientists.

Good. 50 years. It was 50 years from the time that Jeroboam offered an easy breezy way to worship a

God who was easy breezy to live with, 50 years from them to Ahab.

To actual statutes, to laws requiring faith, to false worship. Do you know what this means?

That means that many of Ahab's citizens would have been there when

Jeroboam first made his altar. In 1 Kings 13, we read that when

Jeroboam made this altar and he initiated his worship, he did the opening ceremony, as it were.

Bible says, a man of God went from Judah to Bethel by the word of the

Lord, and Jeroboam stood by the altar to burn incense. Then he cried out against the altar by the word of the

Lord and said, O altar, altar! Thus says the Lord, behold, a child, Josiah by name, shall be born to the house of David, and on you he shall sacrifice the priests of the high places who burn incense on you, and men's bones shall be burned on you.

Let me just summarize what comes next. Jeroboam points his right hand at the man and says, arrest him, but when his hand comes out of his robe, he's withered, maybe with leprosy, he's withered.

And he asks the prophet, and the prophet beseeches the Lord and the hand's restored. But then the altar splits open.

They see this judgment, they see the sign of the judgment that's going to come. They see the

God of Israel, the true God of Israel, show him their power and their error.

They are warned right then, do not go here. Do not worship this calf, this thing.

Go back to your tents, O Israel, I could say, and go return to worshiping the true and living

God. Don't do this. I just turned 60 a few months ago.

If I had been there, I would have been 10 years old, and at 60 years old,

I'd remember distinctly what had happened. Do you see my point? These people would have seen what happened to the king's right hand, turning leprous, and then being healed.

They would remember when Ahab came along. They'd remember what had happened with Jeroboam.

It was only 50 years. You know,

I recently read A History of the Pilgrims by Nathaniel Philbrick, and it was startling just how quickly the initial zeal of that first generation of pilgrims was lost by the next.

I didn't keep the book after I read it, so I can't quote him exactly, but everything those first settlers had worked so hard for, religious purity, amicable relations with the native

Indians, moral uprightness, hard work, it all deteriorated very rapidly.

In the histories of our Bibles, it's very much the same. Read the book of Judges, and see how fast

Israel vacated the teachings of God that he gave through Moses. Think of the book of Acts.

It was written in the 60s. If Jesus died around 34 AD, then Acts was written after the events recorded.

Think forward to the church of Ephesus. It was founded maybe in the 40s or 50s. But now think forward to Revelation, generally held to be written in the early 90s.

That would mean that Jesus' rebuke to that Ephesian church came maybe 40 years after its founding, maybe even sooner.

When Jesus says, I know your works, those works might have come just a few years before the events recorded.

How quickly they went from being founded by the Apostle Paul, under the inspired preaching of the word,

I mean directly inspired preaching of the word by the Holy Spirit through Paul, just a few short decades later, receiving this stinging rebuke from Jesus Christ.

You've left your first loved, and the rest of it. Compromise comes so easily.

It comes naturally, it happens quickly. God knows our weaknesses. He knows how frail we are.

He's not the kind of God who just sits back and watches people bring doom on themselves. I mean, when Jeroboam first set on his course, the

Lord sent that prophet that I read of earlier. It's the warning, oh, alter, alter, thus saith the

Lord, this is all for nothing. This is all gonna come undone. Surely, says

Amos 3 .7, the Lord God does nothing unless he reveals his secret to his servants, the prophets.

A loving father first calls his children back. I mean, Jesus' parable of the prodigal son tells us clearly how joyous he is when we do repent, when we do return to him.

Jeroboam heard God's word from the prophet, warning him of the dire consequences of what he was setting in motion.

And the young prophet's words were immediately confirmed when the altar split, and King Jeroboam's hand had leprosy, and then it did not.

What was that? That was the word of God on time and on target. The accompanying signs proving that the word spoken was of the

Lord. God didn't just let this happen. He warned them to stop then and there.

And this is the first call. This is the call of Jesus not to leave the narrow path, to stay on it, to keep struggling against your flesh for righteousness' sake.

Don't abandon the faith. It's so much easier to stay on course than to make the course correction.

No wonder we have so many calls in the Bible like these. Deuteronomy 6, 7. You shall teach

God's laws, is what's in context here. You shall teach them diligently to your children and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.

Diligently, meaning carefully, meaning accurately, sitting, walking, lying, at all times, teaching

God's word, explaining it, applying it, living it out so that the children can see it.

You can hear Paul practically pleading here in 1 Timothy 6 .20. Oh, Timothy, guard what was committed to your trust, avoiding the profane and idle babblings and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge.

Guard it, be careful with it, share liberally, but allow no corruption to infiltrate and dilute the word.

Brook no compromise that would lighten our load as did Jeroboam. To the same pastor,

Paul writes, hold fast the pattern of sound words which you have heard from me. In faith, excuse me, in faith and love which are in Christ Jesus, that good thing which was committed to you, keep by the

Holy Spirit who dwells in us. Jude 3 and 4 calls us to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.

For certain men have crept in unnoticed who long ago were marked out for this condemnation.

Ungodly men who turn the grace of our God into lewdness and deny the only God and our

Lord Jesus Christ. If only those who creep in were as obvious as a

Jeroboam or an Ahab. But they're not, they look like us, they look like sheep, but are in fact savage wolves not sparing the flock.

But from the time that Jeroboam began to Ahab's regency, just 50 years, just 50 years from beginning the worship of the calves, this easy believism, this light and easy religion, 50 years until King Ahab shows up and officially institutes

Baal worship. And all these calls in the scripture to us tell us what? Guard what you have, protect the faith, guard your souls, be vigilant for adversary prowls about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.

Compromise just comes too easily. The things that sound so easy and good to the flesh, going against what the

Bible says. We have to be so vigilant about these things. 50 years for that chasm to be fallen completely into.

Let's hold fast what we've received. We know that Elijah was told that God had saved a remnant.

Remember he said there's 7 ,000 who have not bowed the knee to Baal or kissed him, that will come later, Lord willing. It could have been no easier for them, for those 7 ,000 to remain true than it is for us here today.

There are so many who call themselves Christians who actually bow to Baal, bow to Baal, excuse me, kiss him as the scripture says.

And most especially I think of so -called shepherds who condone, approve of, preside over ungodly marriages so recently sanctified by the state statute.

That's only one example, I won't multiply it with more. But it is in essence a false religion.

We do have to stand fast. Jesus told the theaterians, hold fast what you have until I come.

He told them in Sardis, remember therefore what you have received and heard, hold fast and repent.

To the Philadelphians he said, hold fast what you have that no one may take your crown. Hold fast, we are warned.

Hold fast, we are encouraged. Repent and return to the ways of the Lord. Say the prophets, repent, return to his ways, to his truth and follow his righteousness over and over again.

Because the slip is so easy to take. The ditch is so easy to fall into.

How do we avoid what Israel didn't? Well the first answer of course, we can only do it by the

Holy Spirit's enabling power. It is he who comes and reminds us of what Jesus taught.

It is he who stirs our spirits to repentance. It is he, the spirit of Christ, who works in us to will and to do for his good pleasure.

We need to be warned here by this history. Human nature I think is a constant.

What attracted them holds our attention as well. What won them over, the sensuality, the easy acceptance of the pagan gods, which weren't gods at all, that can win us over too if we're not careful.

Peter tells us to be vigilant. He speaks of our adversary, trying to devour us.

He's the one who's behind all these idols. He is these idols. And that's how he devours

God's people. Say Lord Jesus, protect us. Holy Spirit, guard us.

Heavenly Father, keep us by and in your power. 50 years for this plunge.

You know, in the 1880s, Charles Taze Russell founded what we know as Jehovah's Witnesses. Of their many errors, the worst have to do with the person and the nature of Jesus.

They say that Jesus lived in heaven as a spirit person, whatever that means, before the incarnation.

He is the son of God by virtue of being the first one created by God, which is an ancient heresy.

They say Jesus was resurrected as a spirit person again, whatever that means.

This denies more than we have time or I have patience for. This man -made religion denies the personhood of Jesus and his bodily resurrection, which is enough right there to condemn it.

In their publication, Let God Be True, which is abbreviated LGBT, I didn't make that up.

It really is. That's what I read in Kingdom of the Cults. They attribute the doctrine of the trinity to Satan, preferring to believe that there are three gods in one, not one god eternally as three persons of a unified godhead, but three gods, one of whom

Jesus was created. What do we hear when we think of things like this? It's Jeroboam.

Here are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt. In 1835, the

Latter -day Saints were formed. Joseph Smith received God's word from the angel

Moroni on tablets of gold and founded from that a religion of works, not of faith, but a religion of works.

There, Jesus, like the witnesses, is a being formed in time by God. He's brother to Lucifer and on and on and on it goes.

Here are your gods, O Israel. Mary Baker Eddy founded

Christian science. Our dear brother, Don Penhill, who was a chemist, he used to laugh and say it's neither

Christian nor science. I'll just quote two things from their official doctrines. One, the material blood of Jesus was no more efficacious to cleanse from sin when it was shed upon the accursed tree than when it was flowing in his veins.

Two, the sinner makes his own hell by doing evil and the saint his own heaven by doing right.

Here are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt. But what does the prophet say?

Which are not gods at all. And yet how quickly, how easily mankind can fall into this.

I have more. Roman Catholicism has always denied and still does deny that we have been justified by faith.

They teach instead that justification is not, as the Bible so clearly says, and as Martin Luther finally saw so clearly, is not a declaration by God based on the atoning blood of his son,

Jesus Christ, and the sinner's repentance and faith in that blood, but is earned by us in degrees.

On the last day, we get to find out whether we've done enough. Are we justified by God or not?

He'll take this wine goblet and the works that we've poured into it as we did good works and see if it got full enough.

Here are your gods, O Israel. It's not just these false religions with the veneer of Christianity.

Here's an excerpt from an update from a man named Gareth Franks. He's a fire member and a missionary to India.

This came to me last Wednesday. One of India's biggest

Hindu festivals, Kumbh Mela, began on 14 July here in Nashik. The last

Kumbh Mela in Nashik saw 75 million pilgrims travel to Nashik to take a holy dip in the sacred

Gadavari River. This Kumbh Mela is the most sacred of all Hindu pilgrimages, which lasts for three months every 12 years.

They recognize it to be a golden opportunity to liberate themselves from all the miseries and sufferings of life.

According to mythology, this place is the only time and place where the person can disburden themselves of their sins and achieve nirvana from the vicious cycle of birth and rebirth.

Millions upon millions upon millions. And what do we hear from the scripture being called out?

Here are your gods, O Israel, which are not gods at all.

For all of these, it's the same. They join Jeroboam in denying

God's clear self -revelation. They replace faith with works, a very different thing than works done by and because of faith.

But works are everything. And that's an easy transition to make once you dispense with the

Bible as the Bible. They say you can do what God did in Christ and Christ alone, what

Christ only did do and can do, which is to forgive sin, which is to grant repentance, which is to be a

God worth having faith in at all. But they say you can do it.

Dip in the river, fill your goblet with the good works and be justified. Do, do, do.

Here are your gods, O Israel. The only Jesus can forgive sin, not from dipping in a river, from being dipped in his blood.

Only Jesus can atone for our sins, not by anything we have done, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy, he saves men.

Only Jesus brings us acceptance by God. Not only by him are we accepted in the beloved.

If I say here's your God, O Jim or O Bill, here is your

God, who is that God? Is it the

God of the universe? Is it the God of the Bible who sent his son, Jesus Christ to die for sinners? A God who says don't work towards his salvation because you can't do it, but have faith in Jesus Christ who alone accomplished it.

Really, if it's not him, and actually who is this God, I would answer to you, it is you.

You are your own God, who is your leader? It's the prince of this world, the ruler of the air. It's like I said before, when you make a

God that is a false God, you tell that God what he's allowed to tell you and then you follow it, but you're really just following yourself.

See, Elijah's day was really not so different from ours. Lord willing, next week, we really dig into the acts of Elijah and his contests with the king and the false prophets and the false gods, his representation of Yahweh, the true and living

God. Let's understand that his day was really not so different from ours.

False religions abound. In China, the state follows Jeroboam in using its statutory power to promote the religion that it approves.

How far behind we are here in the United States, God only knows. I fear, as do many, we're not so far away.

The state's religion is a fearfully Orwellian doublespeak. I'm speaking of this one in China. Marriage is what you perceive it to be.

Object and face the wrath of the state. Is that too much to think would happen here?

I mean, we all heard of that Oregon bakery that was fined $135 ,000 by the state for declining to prepare a wedding cake for two women.

The state levied the fine we could say for failure to follow their Jeroboam -ish creed.

I mean, how long will it be before the tenets we hold dear and the traditions by which we understand them, all of which,

Lord willing, have been delivered to us by right understanding of Scripture, how long before our state will need to confirm not just that we are religious and therefore beyond their control, but that we're religious in the right way?

Teaching the right thing. How long before they will want us to say, here are your gods, oh

Israel? Our target was

Ahab. Our target was Ahab. If Jeroboam took

Aaron's sin to a new level with his state -sponsored religion, Ahab outdid them all with his statutory one.

The warning to us, sin, once hatched, just doesn't go away.

It brings a curse, it carries misery in its wake. These religions became what all false religions are, a man -centered, procedure -based life that gives you the confidence that you have done what needs doing in God's eyes.

The problem is that God is not in them. They're false. How so? It's mainly because they are completely disassociated from God's word.

That's the common denominator. Whether it was Jeroboam's calves or Ahab's bales, the misguided

Christology of the Jehovah's Witnesses of the Roman Catholic Church, they all make a supplement of human endeavor to what

God has done in Christ. Whether you add into it the mix with the manufactured spirituality of Islam or Buddhism or Sikhism or any of them, all of them have this in common.

They purport to offer a way to do that which is impossible. To please

God by human effort, to make yourself worthy to Him, to come to Him with a list of accomplishments that will coerce

Him to give you His eternal favor, to go to God on any basis other than your faith in His Son, the

Lord Jesus Christ. All the false religions, all the ones that cry out, hear your

God, oh Israel, do the same thing. They put you in the place that God has put only

His Son. They make you the accomplisher of what only

Jesus Christ on the cross could do. They offer you this hope that you can do it.

It's a false hope. They are all infected with a blasphemous ethos that places man over God and reads to Him what we will or will not accept from Him.

Only Christ can bring us to God. Only His atonement can satisfy God's wrath. Only by faith in Him, in Jesus, and repentance towards God can anyone be saved for there's no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.

Jesus, He only, faith, faith alone, according to God's word and God's word alone.

All else is golden calves. All else is the statues of Baal.

And I exhort us as we prepare ourselves to go into 1 Kings 17 and following and study the life of this prophet, this man

Elijah, to remember how quickly Israel went to where they were when he arrived.

Are you a Christian? Is your faith in Jesus Christ this day, this moment, that His blood atoned for your sins and therefore

God loves you as He loves His Son? That you have been drawn to God by faith in Christ, repentance towards God?

Guard that. It can slip away so easily. We have the power of the

Holy Spirit within us. God will not let go of one who has been placed in His hand or He has placed in His own hand,

I should say. And yet, everywhere in the scripture, we are exhorted to guard, to keep, to cherish, to hold fast to what we've been given.

Daily, hourly, constantly trusting in God and what

He's done in Christ. He and He alone. Let us be warned by scripture.

As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10, these things are written for our admonition. Let us hold fast to the faith.

We have an unseen God. No one has seen God at any time. But He's revealed

Him, Jesus Christ, in His word. And so we have this deposit given to us as we consider these prophets who went into apostate

Israel and preached against false religions and stood before violent, murderous kings and stood for God without turning the scripture into just moralizing and saying be better, be more like Elijah, be like Elisha.

Let us be like them. Let us be a man, women of prayer like Elijah was.

Let us hold fast to the faith by the power of God, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Let us be a man of prayer by faithfulness to His spirit, by learning more about Jesus as we open the scripture.

Let's pass on to the next generation what Jeroboam, even Solomon before, did not.

Amen? Amen. Lord, again, we thank you for bringing us together, for giving us this precious deposit of faith.

Let us pray, Lord, that as we do so, as we carry on, that you would, by your spirit, guard over us, watch us, keep us.

Lord, you have placed us on the right path, the path of righteousness in Jesus Christ. I ask,

Lord, that you would be the one to keep us there. And may we be faithful, may we be vigilant, may we guard this deposit of faith that you have given us, in Christ's name, amen.