“From the Frying Pan to the Fire”

1 Kings 17:17-24

Hebrews 11 is a very unique passage of Scripture.  It contains what many have called “God’s Hall of Faith”.  It gives a list of Old Testament saints along with a brief description of what was accomplished through their lives by faith.  We read about Abel, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and so many others including Rahab, who was involved in the oldest profession in the world.  

But there is something that is striking to me about this Hall of Faith.  It’s especially remarkable in light of our recent study.  Hebrews 11, the Hall of Faith, does not include the name, “Elijah”.  Elijah is considered by many to be the most illustrious and famed prophet of Hebrew history.  But there is no mention of his name. 

But as you read through Hebrews 11 the author stops listing names and starts listing off amazing things that happened in OT history.  As you proceed through that passage, an especially astounding sentence is found.  In verse 35 it says, “Women received back their dead, raised to life again.”  Women lost loved ones, only to have those loved ones revived and brought into the world of the living again.  There’s Elijah. 

This morning we come to one of the most awesome, astounding and breathtaking passages of the OT and the entire Bible.  If you really believe these pages contain literal history, you will tremble with astonishment as we read what happened.  It’s all about the life raising power of God.  Today we see Elijah used of the Lord to bring a dead boy back to his dear mother. 

You’ll recall from last week that God has Elijah in the smelting furnace of Zarephath.  Now God is going to turn up the heat a little bit.  God is taking Elijah from the frying pan into the fire!  Elijah has confronted Ahab and Jezebel because of their worship of Baal.  God is going to use Elijah to confront the prophets of Baal and eradicate presence of this cult.  Before God can use Elijah, he will first have to prepare Elijah.   He is strengthening the faith and the character of the prophet! 

1.     Human pain often precedes God’s power.

We see frustration here.  We see perplexity here.  We see sorrow here.  We see some hostility here.  But all the hardship set the scene for God’s glory to be displayed.  Human pain often precedes God’s power.  So be patient during times of hardship. 

17 After this the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, became ill. And his illness was so severe that there was no breath left in him.

This is a verse that is soaking with tears of sorrow.  This was probably a sudden death.  As we continue through the narrative, we will see Elijah shocked and baffled at the death of this child.  Neither of them saw it coming.  So he might have gotten sick and slipped away from his mother in a matter of a couple days here.  It’s not like the boy had been sick for an extended period of time.  She did not really have time to prepare for it.  It was a stunning turn of events for the family being supernaturally sustained by the flour and the oil.

This is a young child.  We can tell that he was still a small child because he was easily carried and handled by his mother’s arms (v.19).  He was probably under five years old.  He was still at that precious age where you just think about his soft hair and smooth cheeks and soft breath.

This is a young woman.  Younger child most likely means younger mother.  And she is just a young thing experienced tragedy in her own life when her husband recently passed away.  The pain of her husbands’ passing still chokes up her throat and throbs in her heart.  Now her little boy, who reminded her so much of her departed husband, fell sick and is gone.  First it was her husband, now her only son. 

If this verse is soaked with sorrow, then the next verse is seething with venom.  Look how she lashes out and kind of strike at Elijah.

18 And she said to Elijah, "What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance and to cause the death of my son!"

You see the venom?  That was pretty vicious right there.  She said that Elijah is directly responsible for this boy’s death.  You see, she knows at this point who Elijah is and what he is all about.  She knows he is a man of God who confronts sin.  She most likely knows that he confronted Ahab about the worship of Baal.  She knows that his prayers have caused the drought that is upon the land.  Now she seems to believe that Elijah has called a similar curse upon her.  She thinks that Elijah has seen some sin in her past.  And so he called down this curse upon her son in the same way that he called down the curse upon the land. 

That’s what she thinks.  And so she says it!  Look at those devastating verbal missiles.  And she said to Elijah, "What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance and to cause the death of my son!" Very clearly she implicates Elijah as the killer of her son. 

But let’s be careful not to judge her too harshly.  This is the worse thing that has ever happened in her life.  And there are very few of us who can understand the grief of losing a child.  So often in our fury and confusion we lash out against those who love and care for us the most.  For some reason they are just easy targets.  So the case is here.

And so she says, you’re responsible for the death of this child.  You killed him.  Those are her words.  That most have been a very intense moment.  Let’s look at how Elijah, the man of God in the blazing smelting furnace, responds to her accusation. 

2.     God’s power works in harmony with humble hearts.

19 And he said to her, "Give me your son." And he took him from her arms and carried him up into the upper chamber where he lodged, and laid him on his own bed.

There the woman stands, tears streaming from her furious face, holding the limp lifeless body of her only child.  Her world has come crashing down.    And Elijah simply says, “Give him to me.”

There is nothing impressive about what Elijah says in response.  What’s impressive is what Elijah did not say.  It would have been very easy for Elijah to have pointed out the folly of her remarks.  “How can you say that to me?  Wait a minute!  Had I not come, you food would have run out a long time ago.  I’ve helped you.  Had I not come, he would have starved to death.  And this is the thanks I get?  How dare you accuse me of that!”  Many people might have responded like that.  Instead, he just says, “Give me your son”.

There is a word that we learn in the NT for this character fruit that Elijah displays for us.  The word is gentleness, or meekness.  It is one of the fruit of the Spirit.  It means to be lenient.  It means that you know when to give pity and be easy going with people.  Even when you have the right to be severe, you are merciful.  It’s lenient.   

This is gentleness on display.  When I read this story, I thought of that wonderful Proverb 15:1, “A gentle answer turns away wrath”.  We see the woman’s wrath immediately subside as she hands the child over to Elijah.  I just have the feeling that many of us need to take that piece of Divine wisdom very seriously right now. 

3.     God responds to the prayer of his people

 20 And he cried to the LORD, "O LORD my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I sojourn, by killing her son?"  

Elijah was silent before the woman, and now we see that he cries out to the Lord.  He was silent and calm before the grieving woman.  But now he is passionate and perplexed before the living God.  Elijah is also struggling with God’s design in this! 

“This is from you God?  I don’t get this!  This is from you God?”  Do you ever feel like that?  Of course you do.  And I hope you have the same freedom to express it to God that Elijah did.  The great men of God had transparency before the Lord.  They held nothing back. 

Elijah’s fervent prayer was accompanied with action.

21 Then he stretched himself upon the child three times and cried to the LORD, "O LORD my God, let this child's life come into him again".

Now wait a minute here.  Hold everything. 

Our impulse is to trip out on Elijah’s technique.  We sit here and say, why did Elijah spread himself over the boy like that?  Really, we’re given no explanation of his procedure here.  And, this was an unclean act.  It was bad enough that Elijah took the dead boy from the woman, now he is stretching out his entire body on the dead boy.  According to Numbers 9 he would be considered unclean.   

But wait a minute!  Realize something more profound here.  Up to this point in biblical history, there is not one example of a person being revived from the dead.  You do not have in the OT a single example of a dead person being restored to life. 

Where did Elijah get this idea?  It’s not like he was a lawyer who could look through the annals of case history and say “Aha!  Precedence!  Here’s what I’ll do!” 

He had strong faith.  He believed God can do great things.  He simply believed that God could do mind blowing things!  Why shouldn’t he?  He saw God bring the food with the ravens.  He saw God letting the biscuits flow.  He saw God keep him safe under the nose of Ethbaal.  He says, “Why shouldn’t I ask God for this boy’s life to be brought back!” 

He had great faith in God!  How’s your faith today?  Do you believe God for great God glorifying things in your situation?  Why shouldn’t you!

Now Elijah’s getting close to having the kind of faith God wants.  The kind of faith it’s going to take to confront 450 prophets on the top of a mountain and in front of an entire nation!

This may seem like a lot of faith, but it’s probably about the size of a mustard seed.

4.     God has the power to revive to life.

This was a desperate situation.  It was sad.  It seemed hopeless.  But God says that nothing is too difficult for me.  Nothing is to difficult for me.  Whatever seems dead in your life, God can bring it alive again!  Don’t lose hope.  Have confidence in the Lord

22 And the LORD listened to the voice of Elijah. And the life of the child came into him again, and he revived

The ESV reads, “the life of the child came into him again.”  See that word life?  In the Hebrew, it’s Nephesh.  Most of the time it’s translated ‘soul’ in the English.  That’s the word in Psalm 103, praise the Lord oh my soul.  It refers to the immaterial life of the human being it is the spirit, the soul. 

That verse says that the boy’s soul returned to him.  I like how the NKJV says it.  “The soul of the child came back to him!”  His soul departed from his body and went to a place called Abraham’s Bosom.  We read about it in Luke 16:22.  That’s the place of bliss where the souls of the OT saints went to await the cleansing of the cross.  Elijah prays and the boy’s soul comes back from Abraham’s Bosom to be reunited with his material body.  The boy’s life returned.  His hands began to switch.  His eyelashes flutter.  He gasps for breath.  And he says, “Get this smelly prophet off of me!”

If you want to really trip out, think of this from the child’s perspective.  There he is in a condition of outer body bliss, then he wakes up with Elijah sprawled out over him! 

I’m sure that a moment of astonishment paralyzed Elijah.  Then another moment of praise upwelling from His heart.  But Elijah knew that this was no moment of for delay.  There was a woman downstairs, and the suspense that she experienced must have been enormous.   So I think verse 23 occurred at a furious pace! 

23 And Elijah took the child and brought him down from the upper chamber into the house and delivered him to his mother. And Elijah said, "See, your son lives."  

I imagine that her tears never stopped flowing.  But as they streamed from her eyes, those tears ceased to flow from sorrow and became tears of joy.  She must have been stunned.

24 And the woman said to Elijah, "Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the LORD in your mouth is truth."

There is something that amazes me here.  You’d expect that woman to be running around the room in hysteria, just shrieking with laughter.  But that is not the picture that’s presented in this passage.  The woman is holding her son tight, to be sure.  But the woman seems to be absorbed on the power of God as it rested on his servant Elijah.  She knows for a fact that her life has been touched by the hand of Almighty God.  

Notice something here.  She says, “I know that you are a man of God.”  That makes for an interesting set of bookends on I Kings 17.  They say something about what God has done in Elijah’s life.  In verse one, he is simply Elijah the Tishbite.  Now he has emerged from Cherith Ravine and Zarephath.  And he is Elijah, the man of God.  By the trials, the man has been prepared.  Next stop, a confrontation with Ahab as we approach Mt. Carmel. 

In Bible times God often chose to display His power by raising the dead or healing the sick.  Today it seems that God chooses to display His glory not so much by healing or raising the dead, but by giving the people around the sick and dying a unique strength and joy that cause others to wonder about the hope that we have.  Are you displaying God’s power in the situations that you’re facing?

ALTERNATE OPENING:

This morning we come back to Zeraphath.  The Lord Jesus Christ once preached about the widow of Zarephath.  Jesus himself mentioned this when he was talking to those in the synagogue in Nazareth. "But I tell you truly, in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a great famine throughout the land; but to none of them was Elijah sent except to Zarephath, in the region of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow." (Luke 4:25-26).

When Jesus finished his short lesson to his friends and neighbors, Luke tells us that they "were filled with wrath, and rose up and thrust him out of the city; and they led him to the brow of the hill on which their city was built, that they might throw him down over the cliff." (Luke 4:28-29). That seems to be a mighty strong reaction to a sermon on Elijah and the widow (I’m hoping that this sermon on that topic will not provoke the same reaction).

Why would a simple story about Elijah stir up such animosity from Jesus’ neighbors? Because what Jesus was really saying was that God has sometimes found greater faith among the heathen Gentiles than he found in his own people. And was an insult to the Jews who considered the Gentiles to be nothing more than fuel for the fires of hell.

Author – Pastor Lance Skifter

www.faithchristiansv.org