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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Eric Walsh

Elijah: Part 1 - Where Is Your Fire?

We'll go right into our message for today.

If you'd turn with me in your Bibles to 1 Kings chapter 18 verses 17 and 18.

And the scripture says and it came to pass when Ahab saw Elijah, that Ahab said unto him, art thou he that troubleth Israel?

And he answered, I have not troubled Israel, but you and your father's house, in that you have forsaken the commandments of the Lord and you have followed Balaam.

Our message this Sabbath is entitled Elijah part 1.

We'll do part 2 this afternoon at 4 in the Cutler Amphitheater.

Father God, we thank you for this opportunity to come together, Lord, and to worship you on this your Holy Sabbath day.

We ask now Lord in a special way that you'd fill this place with your Holy Spirit.

I Ask Father God that angels that excel in wisdom and strength would be given charge over this place.

Father God, you would just hide me behind the cross.

Instead, let us hear a word from the throne room of grace.

At this time, the children of Israel are split into 2 halves.

We often don't think about this, but it helps us to really get an understanding of why this Bible story is so important.

The northern kingdom, now called Israel, is the kingdom that we're actually talking about.

Ahab is king, Jezebel, his wife, is queen.

Baal is being worshipped full scale all over the land.

And this is the kingdom that will last a lot longer, but is also having its problems.

The split came many moons earlier when Solomon decided to begin to really take wives from some of the other pagan nations.

And in that intermixing came a situation that caused the nation to split.

So when we look at it we can actually see that there's a time, I put a timeline here to give you an idea, and we our Sabbath school lesson last quarter was about so many prophets, but you see it's Elijah up here in Israel, Elisha, Jonah, Amos, Hosea, and then down here we have Obadiah, Joel, Isaiah, and Micah.

And you can see that after a certain while the northern kingdom is cut off and goes into diaspora and ceases to exist.

In fact, Ahab is a contemporary of Asa, who reigns in the south for 41 years.

And so we see that historically, this is a particular and special time.

And the book of Kings, 1 Kings, really begins to give us the details into this.

In 1 Kings chapter 16 and verse 28, the Bible says, so Omri slept with his fathers and was buried in Samaria.

And in the 38th year of Asa king of Judah began Ahab the son of Omri to reign over Israel.

And Ahab the son of Omri reigned over Israel in Samaria for 22 years.

And Ahab the son of Omri did evil in the sight of the Lord above all that were before him.

Ahab took the evil of Israel to new heights.

He was more wicked than everyone that came before him.

Verse 31 says, and it came to pass as if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, that he took to wife Jezebel, the daughter of Ethbael, king of the Zidonians, and went and served Baal and worshipped him.

The Bible says in verse 32, And he reared up an altar for Baal in the house of Baal, which he had built in Samaria.

And Ahab made a grove, and Ahab did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger, look at this, than all the kings of Israel that were before him.

The wickedness, the evil has reached epidemic proportions.

The whole entire nation is in jeopardy and there is great trouble because the leadership of Israel Has decided to follow bail Now, they're sophisticated in how they do this.

In fact, if you read the Jewish encyclopedia, they say that what they did is they tried to make Jehovah the chief of all of the gods and then put these other gods under him so that they could pretend as if somehow they were still worshiping Jehovah while they established these other gods beneath him.

This is kind of the kind of thing that happens where you have a church, and you might try and do these cinematic themes.

So you take Hollywood themes and use them to try and make points.

And that's dangerous, because You then begin to erect structures and images of what is our new paganism of Hollywood into the house of God.

And you can say, well, there's a good cause for what we're doing.

We're trying to help people deal with their anger, for example.

But what we are also doing is connecting with the worship of the 1 true God, false and alternative gods.

So for example, the idea of superheroes, just to use an example.

It's a dangerous thing to take superheroes and try and make them make points in church.

Because now, what you begin to do is say somehow there is value in the stories of the superheroes.

And if you really understand the scriptures, what the comic books that my mother made me throw away when I was a kid, what these things really are doing is really fulfilling the prophecy of Revelation.

And where the Bible says in Revelation chapter 12 that out of the mouth of the dragon came a flood.

A flood of false information, alternative stories, alternative realities around what is good and what is evil.

And this is what they did with Baal worship.

And the whole point of Baal worship is, in a sense, to find its way into and take over true worship and still have people thinking somehow they're connected back to the real God.

This is exactly what Ahab and Jezebel did.

You can see from the pictures here that the established idol, Baal, is historically a half a bull, half a man.

And in this, there were different types of worship.

1 of the things that stick out is child sacrifice.

And so they would sacrifice children as ways to try and get favor from Baal.

A big part of it was also sexual promiscuity.

And in that was temple prostitutes, male and female, because Baal's temple is often next to Ashtaroth's.

So this idea that kind of being sexy was connected to the worship of Baal.

This was a worship where in order to reach the highest levels of worship, you had to be intoxicated.

Similar to the philosophy around Rastafarianism and the smoking of marijuana, the idea that when you're intoxicated or high, you're in a more spiritual place and you can communicate with the spirits.

There's a reason they call alcohol and liquor stores, and you see under there, spirits.

This is all a part of modern bail worship.

And of course, they even had self-laceration.

They cut themselves to show allegiance to bail and bleed, and by bleeding and cutting themselves.

And it's ironic that even when I was working in the urgent care there at East Campus, that 1 of the things that we began to see initially when I started working, I didn't see much of it.

But over the years, we saw more and more young people come in who cut themselves.

And there's a spiritual element to the idea that you're in so much pain that you're going to cut yourself.

If you're in a lot of pain, it seems you want to cause more pain.

I want you to really get an understanding of who Baal is.

If you understand who Baal is, the story comes alive.

Baal is the god most actively worshipped in Canaan and Phoenicia.

He is the storm god, source of winter rainstorms.

Spring mist, so he gets the dew, so that you get the flowers to grow in the spring, and spring mist and the summer dew, which nourish the crops.

Therefore, he is considered responsible for fecundity, particularly of the earth, for the growth of vegetation, and for the maintenance of life.

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Elijah: Part 1 - Where Is Your Fire?

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