“After a while the brook dried up, because there was no rain in the land.”
There is a video out there circulating in which a Joe Biden
supporter (lawn sign and all) has an unexpected and unpleasant interaction with
some of those “mostly peaceful” protesters we are always hearing about. Let’s
just say it doesn’t go well for him. He is absolutely flabbergasted to discover
that the color of his skin and his gender are of more significance to an angry
mob than his professed political affiliation. They do not want his support, and
they are quite happy to tear up his property and threaten his person as
enthusiastically as they would any Republican’s.
Secularists and leftists make such errors in judgment
because they do not know who they are, and do not understand the times in which
they are living. Christians should not make the same mistake.
Knowing Who We Are
After all, we are called to suffer in this life because of
our affiliation with Christ. “All who desire to live a godly life in
Christ Jesus will
be persecuted,” writes the apostle, who had encountered plenty of what he
was writing about. “If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how
much more will they malign those of his household,” said the Lord Jesus. The
default expectation of the Christian is that he generates hostility simply by
being who he is.
Both the Lord and the apostles warned us about the reaction
our faith would produce in the world, and if they hadn’t mentioned it, we could
probably have sussed it out for ourselves with a quick read about how
Israel responded to the prophets God sent them, or how the
Sodomites reacted to being politely corrected by Lot. The last few
generations of evangelicals have experienced unusual freedom from the perpetual
bristling hostility of the world around us, and I do not necessarily put
all of that down to either the special favor of God or, alternatively, the
carnality of the church and the failure of its testimony in the world. We have also
been the undeserving beneficiaries of the spiritual labors of others. If our
great-grandparents in Christ managed to make the name “Christian” something
other than a curse word for even a few brief years in certain parts of the
globe, well, good on them.
I would strongly suggest we can start forgetting about all that.
Things are about to get back to normal for Christians in the West.
Knowing the Times in Which We Live
But it’s not just the hostility of the world that the godly have
normally had to deal with throughout history. Sometimes believers encounter tough
times that have nothing to do with our relationship to God, and everything to
do with the judgment of God on the sins of others.
For example, when Israel turned to the worship of Baal, God
afflicted the nation with a horrific drought that lasted three and a half years. Even Elijah, God’s prophet, was deeply affected by it. The
brook from which he drank every day — the means by which he stayed alive,
frankly — dried up.
The brook didn’t dry up because Elijah sinned, or because he
had fallen out of favor with his God — far from it. It didn’t dry up to test
his character or his faith, though God was surely working on those things all
the time. No, the brook dried up because there was no rain in the land. The conditions brought about by the sins of others
affected a man who was probably the most consistently faithful individual in
the entire land of Israel.
This is what happens when large groups of people sin. When
God judges nations, everyone feels it, including those who are walking with
God, pleasing him and fulfilling his purposes. So Baruch
and Jeremiah suffered along with the unrepentant men and women of Judah, David’s
wives were taken captive by Amalekite raiders just like the wives and
children of so many other less-godly Israelite men in those days, and the
godly remnant of Israel will run for their lives in the coming tribulation
just like their idolatrous Jewish brethren who are called a synagogue of Satan.
Elijah’s brook dried up because there was no rain in the
land, and there was no rain in the land because Israel was an apostate
nation.
Corporate Apostasy
Now, the nations in which we live today are not especially
chosen and called out to the service of God as Israel once was. In fact, we
might argue that in the West we no longer live in “nations” in the biblical
sense at all, but in multinational states and empires. Nevertheless, from time
to time God still calls people to account in this life corporately, just as he
judged Sodom and Gomorrah, or Egypt or Babylon in times past.
It should also be no breaking news that Christians who have
lived cosily and comfortably in the West for the last fifty years or so
have watched something like 61 million babies sacrificed on the altar of
convenience during our lifetimes. We didn’t vote for it. We didn’t promote it.
We didn’t even all stand idly by and watch it happen. Some of us picket it,
organize resistance to it and write about it, while others just quietly loathe
it and pray about it. But if any initiative a nation might endorse and turn
into policy could call upon itself the direct and urgent judgment of God in
this life, I suspect promoting and funding the murder of children pretty
much tops the list. Why not just paint a target on your forehead instead and
carry a sign that says, “Judgment here please”? God has a
special place in his heart for the innocent, and he does not fail to hear
their cries.
So the brook dries up. If it hasn’t yet for the nations of
the West, it most definitely will.
When the Brook Dries Up
In the story in 1 Kings, when the brook dries up, the Israelite idolaters living upstream
and downstream from Elijah have nothing to drink because they have sinned
against their God. But neither does God’s own prophet.
There is, however, a huge difference between being a servant
of God and being a generic Israelite worshiper of Baal in Elijah’s day (or, for
that matter, a
worshiper of Molech today). The difference is that God has a plan for both Elijah’s
next meal and his next bit of ministry. The dried-up brook is no hindrance to
that. So the word of the Lord comes to the prophet: “Arise, go to Zarephath ... I have
commanded a widow there to feed you.” His servant might live among a
people under judgment and suffer many of the same privations they do, but God
never ceases to care for the servant or fails to meet his physical, emotional
and spiritual needs.
Now, the conditions in Zarephath are not always the fanciest
around. I don’t know if you would find it a humbling experience to depend
on the charity of an impoverished widow. I certainly would. It might be nicer to farm a
little plot of land in Shechem or Hebron. It might be a little more dignified
and self-supporting to be able to keep a job in one of those bigger Israelite
cities. But when brooks are drying up all over the land under the judgment of God,
such things may no longer be on offer for the faithful believer.
It might be a little early for such a parable, but the
bottom line is this: when brooks are drying up all over, it is better to be a thirsty servant of God on the run than to hold the highest of high positions in a nation under
judgment.
For the Israelite, the brook dries up to tell you to repent.
For the servant of God, the brook dries up so that we can share a meal and the
love of God with a Gentile widow. And after the widow, there will surely be
something else again.
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