The Brook Dried Up, Part 1; 1 Kings 17:4-7

God desires us to hope in Him, not to hope in His means.

Truth that Transforms is the daily podcast of Disciples Fellowship Church.
Pastor Jason Wilkerson

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Transcript

God's saying to Elijah, Elijah, you live by my good pleasure, and I feed you and I water you by my good pleasure by the means that I choose. And so your faith is to be in me not in the things that I used to feed you and to water you.

So here, Elijah comes to this Brooke Cherith. And we remarked last time that the name Cherith means cut off. And I mentioned that that's going to have a triple meaning. But last week, we only talked about one and that was the meaning of Cherith in the sense that the land is now cut off from water. But as you're going to see today, that the meaning of Cherith has, ironically, a threefold a threefold meaning for our story here. The first is, of course, that the land itself is cut off from the water. Secondly, it's also going to mean that the land is also cut off from the word we mentioned that last week, that the famine of the Word comes upon the land as Elijah. And additionally, the other prophets are taken into imposed hiding by God. But then the third meaning is also going to become evident today. And that is the sense that God's prophet himself is going to be cut off from water. So, three cutting offs are taking place here; the people from the water, the people from the Word and the prophet from the water. So, let's take a look at the prophet’s cutting off from the water this morning. From verse four. Let's read, I'm sorry, verse three, God says depart from here and turn eastward, notice in verse two, that the word of the Lord came to him, we get the sense there that the coming of that word was something, in essence, immediate after he proclaimed this word to Ahab and to Jezebel, who was no doubt probably there as well. He proclaims this word, verse two, and the word of the Lord came to him, Elijah didn't have to seek it, didn't have to go looking for it. But instead of came to him, the word of the Lord came to him, verse three, depart from here, turn eastward, hide yourself by the brook Cherith, which is east of the Jordan, so outside of the Land of Israel proper. east of the Jordan, he has to go in verse four, you shall drink from the brook, that I have commanded the ravens to feed you there. So, he went and did according to the Word of the Lord, he went and live by the brook Cherith, that is east of the Jordan. And the ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning, and bread and meat in the evening, and he drank from the brook. And after a while, the brook dried up because there was no rain in the land. So, he obeys immediately throughout the story of Elijah, we're going to hear time and time again, God is going to Command Elijah, and the very next sentence is going to be Elijah did as God told him to do. The obedience of Elijah is immediate, it is constant, it never seems to falter throughout the entire story. So, God commands him to leave to go to the brook Cherith, if he goes and goes east of the Jordan, and he's nearby the book Cherith. And the first thing that I want to call attention to is the fact that God sends Elijah, not to a river, but to a brook. Did you'd make notice of that the God says, go to the brook Cherith, now, wouldn't you think there's a drought coming, all of us can predict what's going to happen, as the drought settles in over the land. And as the water begins to dry up from the land, then what's the first things that are going to dry up, they're gonna be the creeks in the brooks in the waddys, there's not going to be the rivers and the lakes. So, God does not send, Elijah to a lake, he doesn't send Elijah to a river, which would have been a much more stable supply of water, he instead sends him to something that all of us in the room could have predicted is going to happen. The brook is going to dry up and it's going to dry up rather quickly. So, he sends Elijah to a brook and not a river. And that in itself, I think, is a lesson for us. Because God, God's sends, His prophet, he sends his man to a place in which the security, the earthly security that's afforded to him, there is one that is tentative at best that is tenuous, that he will have water to drink by this brook that is, again, the most susceptible to being dried up of all. And I think God plans it this way. This has been his pattern all along, in fact, which we had last Sunday, as we looked at Deuteronomy, chapter 11. God even proclaimed that the land itself is a land that's different from Egypt, in Egypt, you could irrigate, the land was flat, you had this Nile River, and you could in a sense, sort of take your own destiny upon yourself or so you could think. You could fool yourself into thinking that you are in charge of irrigating your crops and bringing water to your house and those sorts of things. Here's not so because this land is hilly, and so therefore I have to care for this land. I have to carry forward by way of rain, by way of dew, and so therefore your dependence upon me is going to be even more visible, even more tangible, in a greater sort of way. The prophet goes to a place where his dependence upon the Lord is even more tangible, because it's not by this wide river Jordan that might get lower and lower and lower as the drought goes along. But it's probably unlikely that it's going to completely dry up by way of the drought. The brook, on the other hand, is something that is very tenuous for Elijah. And so, the way that Elijah is positioned here, is like God takes him to a place in which his dependence upon the Lord has to be almost as day by day sort of thing. His security is going to be very fragile. I should say―his earthly security is going to be very fragile and very tenuous. And isn't that the way of God as God wants to test his people? Isn't it the way of God that he knows that our fallen hearts crave security, your heart craves security, it craves a sense of well-being a sense of resources, and that shows up in your life and all kinds of ways that shows up as you look at your 401 K or your retirement account or your pension account. Because you look to that and you want to see security. It shows up that for some people in how they, maybe, secure their lives or secure their, their homes, maybe through the purchase of firearms or other ways to secure themselves, we crave the need for security and for safety. And there's nothing wrong with it. Because God has made you that way. He has made you in such a way that one of your deepest needs and one of your deepest desires is to feel secure. But God made you that way in order for you to look to him to see that security, to see that the retirement account will not provide it the, the home will not provide it, the career path will not provide it. The job security that you think you have will not provide it. Your relationships, your marriage will not provide the security that your heart craves, because God made you with the deepest possible need to rest in. And so, He sins this, this man Elijah to a place that we all know is going to fail his earthly needs, because God wants him to lean upon Him, and only Him. Back to AW pink, AW Pink says this: he says the way in which temporal losses are born generally makes manifest the difference between real Christians and worldlings. The way in which temporal or earthly losses are born, generally makes manifest the difference between real Christians and worldlings. Why? Because worldlings―I love I like that word there, worldlings look for not only delight and pleasure, but they look for security in temporal things. And a loss of temporal things means a loss of security and safety for worldlings. Real Christians, in Pink’s words, are those who not only don't find ultimate delight, satisfaction and pleasure in earthly things, but they also find security in eternal things. And so therefore, the loss of temporal things means something completely different for those who are of the world and those who are people of God. So that's the first thing we see, that God leads Elijah to a Brook not to a river. Secondly, we see this God’s command. God's command requires Elijah to put aside his pride. God's command to Elijah requires him to put aside his pride, His command is: absent yourself, depart from here, go into hiding. Now, Elijah, I take him to a man of of courage. He doesn't seem to be afraid of Ahab, doesn't seem to be afraid of Jezebel, either. There's gonna come a time, again, when that's going to falter somewhat. But at least for now, he doesn't seem to be a person of fear. He seems to be a person that's courageous. Now, courageous people, people who have sort of a natural courage, also have, shall we say, a distaste for being seen as cowards. So, what might it look like to everybody when Elijah issues this bold command to Elijah's, Ahab's face, and then gets out of town? In fact, nobody knows where he went to. We can even find him. He's on the other side of Jordan, in fact. It might seem that Elijah is quite the coward that, yes, he was bold enough to say this to Ahab's face, but he's not bold enough to stick around. So, can you see how that sort of a blow to his pride, that even obeying the Lord's command is a blow to his pride? Because you see, Ahab, Elijah I keep getting the two mixed up. Elijah may not fear Ahab, but Elijah does fear man. He fears what man thinks of him. He might not fear what man can do to him. But he does fear what man thinks of him. How do we know this? We know this because James chapter five tells us that Elijah was a man of the same nature, the same passions―in the King James―as us. Which means this, I've yet to meet anyone who does not have some degree of a fear of man, everyone, everyone has some level of concern of what other people think of you. I've never met the person who has zero concern of what others think of them. So, everyone struggles to some degree with this fear of man, including Elijah. And so, for Elijah to obey, he has to do this departing of the land that's going to make him look to everybody like the biggest coward there is. So, his pride has got to be put aside in order for him to even obey. And he's isn't that the way of the Lord as well, that when God has a command for us, almost always it involves putting death to our pride. Rarely does God have a command for us, that can live side by side with human pride. It almost always, if not always, needs for pride to die. As John the Baptizer is going to say: He needs to increase, I need to decrease. So that's the second thing we see is the fear of man needs to be put to death in Elijah. Thirdly, we see this, God uses both natural and supernatural means to care for Elijah here. Now this is a really fascinating part of the story is how God is going to care for his prophet. He's going to care for his prophet in two ways. First, he's going to provide food, we're told bread and meat, which by the way, twice a day, was a luxury. In those days, we don't know what the ravens are going to bring him. It might be some rancid piece of buzzard they found somewhere, or it might be some piece of steak that they snatched off or somebody's plate, we don't know. But needless to say, that the prophet is being fed and he seems to be being fed rather well. And that's going to take place in perhaps the most miraculous way we could imagine. An unprecedented type of way. Who has ever heard of birds feeding people like this? We know that God says in His Word, that, that he cares, even for the sparrow so much that he knows every sparrow that falls from the sky. But this is the only time we're told that not only does God care for the birds, but it uses the birds to care for people in a direct sort of way like this. So, this is fascinating. The raven, of course, is one of those animals that God declares to be unclean, that his people are not to touch, they're not to eat. And yet God is going to use this unclean bird or birds in such a miraculous, unprecedented fashion, that it really just sparks the imagination to imagine. Was it two or three ravens? Was it a flock of ravens? Do they just sort of just come down upon Elijah and deposit this mound of food? Or do they come by one by one throughout the day? We don't know. But whatever it is, it is fascinating, is it not, that God is using not just an animal but he's using an unclean animal to feed his clean, so to speak, servant? Now, this reminds us of all the things that God is capable of using in order to bring about his will in his world he uses here ravens. Elsewhere, he uses the jawbone of an ass. He uses the sling of a young servant boy, he uses a fish to bring a shekel to pay the tax. He uses a great fish to hide another prophet for three days and three nights. He uses people in such amazing ways, he will use the daughter of Pharaoh to preserve His prophet, he will use the donkey of a pagan unbeliever named Balam., to pronounce one of the most profound prophecies over His people. His people are the apple of his eye and you better not touch them. And he says that through the pagan, non-believing man, Balam and he got his attention by using his donkey to talk to him. He uses the pagan astrologers known as the magi to proclaim to the world this is the Messiah. He uses the wicked King Cyrus to fund the rebuilding of his temple. God uses, if our attention is pricked, and we watch our Bibles carefully as we read through them, we will see that God is capable of using all kinds of things to bring about His will. So here he uses this miraculous feeding by the ravens what a what a encouraging sort of thing if you were Elijah. And right about the time you're starting to get hungry, started looking across the sky. And guess what, there's little black dots coming. And you know, that's your breakfast. That's your dinner, what an amazing thing that must have been for the Prophet. But in another sense, God also uses something that's not so supernatural, not so miraculous, he's going to use just a regular ordinary brook. Now, of course, God made the brook, God made the water that flows through the brook. So that comes from God's hand as well, as James is gonna tell us in James chapter one, all good things come from the Father of lights above. So, both are equally in a sense from the hand of God, but they're not from the hand of God in the same way. And so, he's going to use the ravens in this miraculous, new, law-of-nature-bending way. And then he's going to just use just the regular old brook to bring in water. Now, God could have created sort of a supernatural spring that just spouted up water when Elijah was thirsty, and then disappeared, when he wasn't thirsty, he could have done something like that. But instead, he uses both of these means together to provide for his prophet. Now, why is that? Well, I think that what that's pointing us to, is that pointing us to that He desires for Elijah to hope in Him and not in His means. God desires for all of us to hope in God, not to hope in His means. Now, by God using this dynamic combination of the miraculous and the ordinary, I think that's a natural discouragement for Elijah to begin to put faith in raven. How easy would it have been for Elijah to begin to put faith and ravens, or how easy it would have been for Elijah to begin to put faith in a supernatural spring or even a natural brook. But by combining the two, it's like God is saying to Elijah, God, or God's saying to Elijah, Elijah, you live by my good pleasure. And I feed you and I water you by my good pleasure by the means that I choose. And so, your faith is to be in Me not in the things that I use to feed you and to water. You remember the story in Numbers where the fiery serpents came, and they were biting the people. And Moses was commanded to make this bronze serpent and the people were to look upon it in faith, and they will be healed. Well, that was all fine. And well, of course, that's pointing to Jesus, who would also be lifted up. But generations later what happened was they didn't throw that thing away. They kept it. And generations later, the people who are now living in the land began to worship that thing, as though that itself was their means of deliverance. And so, it had to be destroyed. I forget which King it was, but God sent word destroy that thing. Because the people are worshipping that, and not the God of that. So, I think this is God's saying to Elijah and to us as well. I don't want you to put your faith in ravens. I don't want you to put your faith even in brooks. Your faith is to be in Me.