James Nisbet's Church Pulpit Commentary
1 Kings 17:1
A STERN MESSAGE
‘And Elijah … said unto Ahab, As the Lord God of Israel liveth, before Whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.’
This miracle of the drought is one of the few which have received the countersign and imprimatur of our Blessed Lord. The statement that ‘the heaven was shut up three years and six months’ ‘in the days of Elias’ (St. Luke 4:25) does not rest on the unsupported authority of the compiler of the Books of Kings, or the unknown writer from whom he derived it. We are told that this history is largely fabulous, but this part of the ‘fable’ at any rate has been accepted by Him Who is ‘the Truth.’ What are the uses of this narrative?
I. Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.—It was in the fullness of time that Moses, the founder of the Law, appeared. It was also in the fullness of time that Elijah, the restorer of the Law, came upon the scene. The darkness is greatest just before the dawn. ‘The greatest prophet is reserved for the worst age. Israel had never such an impious king as Ahab, nor such a miraculous prophet as Elijah. The God of the spirits of all flesh knows how to proportion men to the occasion.’
II. The weak confound the strong.—‘ God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty’ (1 Corinthians 1:27). ‘ Elijah the Tishbite … of Gilead.’ ‘Can any good thing come out of Gilead?’ the men of Israel might contemptuously ask. It was from the wild uplands, not from the Holy City, not from the schools of the prophets, that the greatest of the prophets came. How often are we taught this lesson, ‘that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty are called’! The vessels of God are cast ‘in the clay ground’ (1 Kings 8:46).
III. Those who honour God, He will honour.—For why is he, the Gileadite peasant, chosen to this high distinction? Was it not because he had chosen the Lord to be his God? Surely the name ‘ Elijahu,’ ‘ My God, Jehovah is He,’ is not without significance. His choice was made (cf. 1 Kings 18:21). The cry he would wring from Israel, ‘The Lord, He is the God’ (v. 39) was the echo of his own heart’s cry. He had avouched the Lord to be his God, and the Lord had avouched him to be His prophet.
IV. The dominion over nature belongs to God.—It was claimed for Him by Elijah; it is everywhere claimed for Him in scripture (see e.g. Leviticus 26:4; Deuteronomy 11:17; Psalms 147:8; Jeremiah 5:24; Acts 14:17).
V. National sins are punished by national calamities.—Nations, as such, have no existence except in this world. In the life to come nationalities will be fused into one great brotherhood. Consequently, if national sins are to be punished at all, they must be punished now. And so they are, by famine, and sword, and pestilence (Ezekiel 14:21). Witness the United States in 1860. Witness France in 1870. Witness Turkey in 1880, and in more recent times, witness Russia—the nation which has persecuted God’s ancient people.
—Rev. Joseph Hammond.
Illustrations
(1) ‘The R.V. suggests that Elijah was of a pilgrim race, and certainly he learnt to stand by himself in fellowship with the living God. He was ever standing in His presence chamber, like the archangel Gabriel, who uses the same words of himself in his address to the mother of our Lord. Oh, that we might always stand in the presence of the living God! The God of an undivided Israel, the ideal Israel.’
(2) ‘I must not be all sternness. The “wild north-easter” is one of the winds of God, and it has its necessary and beneficent uses. But garden and field would be blighted if it blew from the outset of January to the close of December. I must allow “the sweet south” to breathe through my heart, my speech, my behaviour. Yet neither must I be all gentleness. “Temper, sir,” said Edmund Burke, once in the House of Commons to Lord Grey, “is the state of mind suited to the occasion.” There are times when I do well to be angry and I must not forget that I read even of the wrath of the Lamb.’