By: Hendrik WielandElijah was not some exceptional piece of humanity.
The key word that distinguishes Elijah's prayer that affected the elements is earnestly.
Other synonyms would be: fervently, intensely and passionately, or to put it in another way, Elijah prayed as God would pray.
He
prayed in the name of the Lord. He prayed in keeping with God's own
constituent make-up and character, and God heard that prayer, for it
was, as it were, His own.
That which makes the prayer earnest is not the man's temperament, but the man's righteousness.
The prayer of a righteous man makes tremendous power available and is dynamic in its working.
There
has, therefore, got to be some conjunction between effectual prayer and
the spiritual standing of the one praying with God.
The
resurrection man is therefore eminently the righteous man. The man who
has such an identification with the Cross and the identification with
the emptying of self in daily relationship is the man who knows the
resurrection.
He is so righteous that he knows and detests that
God should be served out of his own human energy, his own intelligence
or his own ability. What is righteousness but God Himself!
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Elijah means, "He is deity". There is such an union with God that you cannot tell where Elijah ends and God begins.
"...There shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word."
Elijah is a man on the resurrection ground which means that he himself is one with deity.
It is no longer Elijah's righteousness.
The
cry of Elijah is not a piece of human temperament, but God's own cry
through a man who is living in the dimension of very God Himself.
It is God crying unto God.
It
is deep answering unto deep in a man who has gone through and beyond
the religious categories, and is in the realm of God Himself.
That is the key to the last day's activity of God.
Merely to be well-meaning, rightly-intentioned, principled, religious and sincere will not avail.
The child, or ultimately the nation Israel will remain dead.
The Inadequacy of Man
Let
the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; and
let him return to the LORD, and He will have compassion on him; and to
our God, for He will abundantly pardon (Isa. 55:7).
We need to understand God's hatred for that which has its source in our unaided humanity.
Religion
is something that emanates from man, that thinks that it is doing God
service, but it comes from below rather than above.
It seems on the surface to be 'God respecting', but His ways are higher and His thoughts are higher.
How can God call a man unrighteous or wicked if there was not a prospect for obtaining God's thoughts and living in His ways?
That is exactly the crisis that Jesus brought when He came to Israel and revealed Himself before Israel as the Son of God.
The
scandal of Jesus is this scandal, which says to religious men: "However
well-meaning your efforts are, they fall short of the glory of God.
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God
is calling you up and out and away from that which has its origin in
you, and wants to bring you into a dimension in which God is all in
all."
How was that received when Jesus spoke it?
It evoked such a backlash as to bring death to the One who appeared to steal from men the basis for their own righteousness.
If
that is true, how much more must that be demonstrated by the prophet
who by his very call and office is the testimony of Jesus!
He has
got to be eminently the man of the resurrection, and that alone is
righteous, and that prayer alone out of that righteousness obtains the
powerful answer of God.
Only that one who has passed through
death unto life can embrace death (the boy) without the fear that it
will be a loss of life to him.
A man who is still clutching his life and living out of his life, however religiously, will not embrace death.
He will pray respectfully, but from a distance.
The
man, however, who has passed through death and whose life then is not
his own, can and will prostrate himself over that body without fear.
He is already the dead man who has been brought back to life and his cry in not a religious cry but God's very own cry.
It is the cry of a righteous man that effects much
We have got to have some sense of the stubbornness of that which is human that wants to establish its own righteousness.
Of Israel Paul could say,
For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not in accordance with knowledge.
For
not knowing about God's righteousness, and seeking to establish their
own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God (Rom.
10:2-3).
If anyone threatens a righteousness predicated upon one's
own accomplishment and one's rectitude, one will kill him to remove
that threat, and in killing him will reveal and prove that we are not
righteous.
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Elijah's righteousness, his prayers and his obedience’s were not his own.
He is the one prophet perhaps more than any other who mirrors God as God.
The Restoration of the Altar
Then Elijah said to all the people, "Come near to me."
So all the people came near to him.
And he repaired the altar of the LORD which had been torn down.
And
Elijah took twelve stones according to the number of the tribes of the
sons of Jacob, to whom the word of the LORD had come, saying, "Israel
shall be your name."
So with the stones he built an altar in the
name of the LORD, and he made a trench around the altar, large enough to
hold two measures of seed (1 Kings 18:30-32).
Elijah's first step
after mocking the false prophets was the repairing of the altar that
had been broken down. Elijah must first come and restore all things.
If
this is a pattern of things future, then we have to burrow into the
meaning of the restoration of an altar that had been willfully broken
down.
What does that represent and why twelve stones without
which the subsequent sacrifice could not be made nor could the fire have
fallen?
The restoration of the altar is somehow a classic requirement and must be expected in the 'Elijah prophet' of the last days.
First,
we have to identify what it represents, because it is an enormously
significant act that would be revelatory about the heart of the prophet.
Twelve is the statement of God's divine government.
The
work of restoration is monumental; it is backbreaking in hefting those
stones that had been scattered about. The altar did not fall apart. It
was torn down.
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That implies a rebellion, a vindictiveness, a vehemence and anger against God.
It is the utmost impertinence before the Most High, and that is the condition to which Israel had come.
All
Israel, who had participated or had benignly allowed that kind of thing
to take place and had not themselves restored it, is now watching the
prophet do so.
What is the corollary, therefore, to this significant act for the prophetic call in the last days?
That
is to say, could our altars also be knocked down? If there is anything
celebrated charismatically today it is worship and praise.
Is the
altar of God knocked down today when it is being ostensibly celebrated
in such a welter of tapes, videos, musical groups and worship teams?
All this is written for our admonition upon whom the ends of the age have come.
If
we are moving exactly to this kind of final showdown, particularly as
the church is moving towards apostate and does not even know it, then
what does this mean for us who are called to be the 'Elijah band'?
What altar has fallen down in our generation?
I
cannot believe that the Lord is going to come until there is an Elijah
in the earth again in the last days to do this, and if we cannot even
identify what it is that has been torn down, then how shall we restore
it?
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God has said that His house is a place of sacrifice or it is not His house.
Whenever it becomes predictable and convenient, then it is no longer God's house.
The very first time the word worship is used in the Bible is when Abraham was about to offer his son:
And
Abraham said to his young men, "Stay here with the donkey, and I and
the lad will go yonder; and we will worship and return to you" (Gen.
22:5).
When Abraham said 'worship', you can be sure he meant sacrifice.
The very first use of the word worship is in the context of ultimate sacrifice.
Worship is a synonym for sacrifice.
What does that say of the church today?
What does it cost to go to church on Sunday for a few hours?
Is it an utterance toward God, or is it a modest and minimal, religious discharge that frees us for our real pursuits?
Who is letting God's people get away with it?
Who is not laying this to their charge and crying out and confronting them with this superficiality?
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Baptism has become a mechanical,
religious ordinance where people do not know, or they would refrain
from, going into a place of death.
We are teaching them to sing
choruses and to repeat 'Amens' and 'Hallelujahs' and by that to feel
that they have done God service.
The altars are being knocked
down more than we know and, ironically, at the very hour that
Christianity is being most celebrated!
Worship teams are presently vying for what shall be predominant: the worship or the prophetic word.
Men
take all kinds of time to 'do their thing' in worship to 'create' the
mood and the atmosphere, and instead of the people being prepared for
the prophetic word, they are often turned off by it.
The worship is inimical to the prophetic word rather than conducive.
The
thing that is supposed to be calculated to adorn and prepare the way
for the word, ironically, somehow becomes the thing that opposes it and
is in rivalry to it!
There is something that needs to be restored
in truth that is intrinsic to the number twelve and only the prophet
will have the guts to do it.
He may have to knock down before he builds up.
He
may have to destroy what purports to be the altar of worship, but is
really a plastic counterfeit that cannot sustain the true weight of
sacrifice, and induces God's people, as the false prophets of Baal, to a
pseudo-religion of convenience.
Elijah is not gathering up stones that just happen to be around.
He is rebuilding an altar that once was and did have twelve stones.
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