Sermon Tone Analysis

“Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth.

Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit.”[1]

Flashing like a lightning bolt across dark pagan skies, Elijah burst on the scene suddenly.

And just as suddenly, he disappeared.

Raised up by God to rebuke a wayward nation, Elijah did all that God commanded.

Kings were reduced to searching for water, queens ranted and blustered, false prophets were exposed as fraudulent—all at the word of this singular man.

When we read the account of Elijah the Tishbite, we often become so focused on the powerful demonstration of God’s power that we are prone to ignore the fact that he struggled, and not always successfully, with the same frailties that plague each of us.

James compels us to think soberly about who we are and who God is.

*A Human Being Like Us* — “Elijah was a man with a nature like ours.”

Whenever I read the translation of James’ words, I realise that it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to convey accurately the sense of what James said.

The emphasis is on his frailties, and not on his strengths.

“Elijah was a man,” an */ánthropos/*.

James is directing our thought to the fact that Elijah was not a demigod or a superhero.

He was a human being just like us!

Moreover, James emphatically states that he had “a nature like ours.”

The Greek term is that he was */h/**/omoiopathēs/*.

The only other occurrence of this word in the New Testament is found in *Acts 14:15*.

On the first missionary journey, Paul and Barnabas healed a man in Lystra which in term resulted in a crowd gathering who attempted to honour them as gods.

The missionaries tore their outer garments, ran into the crowd and only barely dissuaded them from offering sacrifice to them by shouting, “We also are men, of */like nature/* with you!”

The term */h/**/omoiopathēs/* sounds like our English word homeopathy, which is the method of treating disease by drugs, given in minute doses, that would produce in a healthy person symptoms similar to those of the disease.

That definition gives us a clue to what James is saying in our text.

Elijah faced the same circumstances and had the same feelings and experiences in life that we encounter.

One scholar provides insight into the meaning of James’ statement by cautioning that “readers are not to attribute the great effect of Elijah’s prayers to any exceptional qualities that were inherent in the person of this prophet himself.

He was … a human being, just as we are.

This fact is intensified by [*/h/**/omoiopathēs hemîn/*], which does not mean “of like passions or of like nature with us.”

The gods were considered [*/apathies/*], unlike human beings.

The verb [] that is found in these adjectives refers to suffering and vicissitudes that are incident to human existence.

Elijah had to endure vicissitudes of all kinds just as we do.

Although he was a great prophet he was a plagued human being and felt pain just as much as we do.”[2]

Elijah was a fellow sufferer.

James has stated that Elijah experienced the same fears and the same frailties and the same pains each of us experiences; he was just as fearful in the face of opposition as we are, and just as prone to failure as we are.

The emphasis is that Elijah was a man of “similar suffering.”

This is such an important point that I believe it will prove beneficial to take some time to review this matter in greater detail.

Let’s review the life of Elijah, to see what sort of man he was.

In order to do this, let’s focus on the events recorded in 1 Kings 17 through 19.

As we review the life of Elijah during this period, note that he was at times bold beyond belief.

For instance, he boldly confronted the king to announce God’s sentence against the land, and then quickly departed to the secret place assigned by the Lord God where he leans upon God’s goodness to provide for his own needs.

Later, God sent him to yet another location, where he boldly confronted the Lord, pleading for the life of a young man who had died.

When the time was right, Elijah boldly confronted the King of Israel, demanding a contest between himself and the entire company of the prophets of Baal.

During that contest, he first challenged them to demonstrate that Baal was a god that could hear and answer prayer.

Then, he mocked them publicly, ridiculing their pathetic efforts to coerce their god to show them favour.

There is precedence for the man of God ridiculing false religion and for exposing evil.

Though the sensitive nature of some of the saints of God will rebel at such forthrightness, the example provided in the Word gives no comfort to those who would mollycoddle wickedness.

Shortly after this demonstration of boldness, the great man ran for his life because Jezebel, the queen, sent word that she intended to kill him.

When we see him next, he is a broken man consumed with self-pity and complaining that God has been unfair in His treatment.

Therefore, the divine record presents Elijah as a man at turns bold and fearful, utterly reliant upon the Lord one moment, and pitiful in his self-absorption at the next.

One moment Elijah is trusting God explicitly, and the next he is incapable of focusing on God’s might and power.

This is what James means for us to see; Elijah experienced the same failures that each of us has experienced, and he faced and was overwhelmed by the same fears that have assailed each of us.

Make no mistake, Elijah was a great prophet of the Living God; but Elijah was human, just as we are human, and he was afflicted with all the weaknesses that mark our lives.

Do not doubt that your prayers have great efficacy before God.

Your requests of God are not disqualified simply because you are human and marked by the weaknesses and imperfections that mark each of us as human beings.

When you read the divine account, one truth that stands out immediately is the fact that we find no specific prayer for a drought.

Neither do we witness Elijah praying for the drought to be broken.

Moreover, we are not told the precise length of time the land suffered without rain.

Under the inspiration of the Spirit of God, James here supplies information that the writer of the account in Kings does not supply.

James’ statement about the length of the drought is verified by the words of the Master, who also said that there was no rain for three and one-half years.

In *Luke 4:25*, the Master is recorded as saying, “I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heavens were shut up three years and six months, and a great famine came over all the land.”

The account in 1 Kings simply says that “the Word of the Lord came to Elijah, in the third year” [*1 Kings 18:1*].

I am prepared to take the Word of Jesus on this matter.

After all, it is His Spirit that inspired the Word, and as God He is well aware of all that happened.

There is no reason to think that the land experienced drought for any less than three and one-half years.

Obviously, the event with the subsequent famine made an impression on people.

There is no record of Elijah’s prayer for God to withhold rain in the account in Kings.

However, when we are introduced to him, the Word does record him as saying, “As the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, before whom I stand” [*1 Kings 17:1*].

He here confesses that He stands in the presence of the Lord, referring specifically to the attitude of prayer that was most frequently assumed by those living in that day.

Moreover, he does clearly say, “There shall be neither dew nor rain these years, */except by my word/*” [*1 Kings 17:1b*].

He does not control nature, but he will act as God’s spokesman.

He will speak to God and what he hears the Lord say, he will do.

Consequently, because he is sent by the Lord, there will be no rain until God says it will rain again, and Elijah will then speak and there will be rain.

There is something about Elijah that is important for understanding.

He was a human being, just like us.

But he did pray.

He was obedient to God, sensitive to His will and quick to fulfil what he discovered to be the will of the Living God.

God commanded him to depart and to hide himself [*1 Kings 17:3*].

He went where God directed him, not knowing precisely how God would provide for him, other than the promise of God that He had commanded the ravens to feed him in the place where he was commanded to be.

After a period of time by the brook Cherith, God again directed him to leave, and go to Zarephath [*1 Kings 17:8-10*].

The ravens had indeed brought him bread and meat each day, and the brook had provided him water.

Then, God directed him to go to a location in a Gentile land.

Against all that he might otherwise have felt, Elijah obeyed the command of the Lord.

Many days later, the Lord again directed him to go show himself to Ahab [*1 Kings 18:1, 2*], and Elijah obeyed.

In fact, Elijah did not show himself until directed to do so at the command of the Living God.

Perhaps many of those who advance themselves to preach the Word of God would be well advised to wait until God directs them to show themselves!

Elijah’s internship in prayer extended over a period of three and one-half years and it included an extended course in obedience.

He prayed; and he heard the voice of the Lord speaking as he waited before the Lord.

The text does not say that Elijah prayed for food while staying in Zarephath, but the evidence indicates that he did pray.

He asked a widow in the community to feed him, and when she demurred because there was not enough food, he insisted, indicating that God would provide for her needs.

In fact, he says that it is God who has promised that there will be both flour and oil in the house until the day that the rains again come.

Indeed, “The jar of flour was not spent, neither did the jug of oil become empty, according to the Word of the Lord” [*1 Kings 17:16*]

While in Zarephath, there was an incidence that speaks of Elijah’s intimacy with the Lord.

The son of the widow with whom Elijah stayed died.

The widow thought that Elijah was the cause of the death of her son; she thought that the presence of a man of God exposed her sin and that God had executed delayed justice by killing her son.

Elijah, however, took the boy, and carrying him to the upper chamber where he lodged, he laid him on his own bed.

Then, he cried out to the Lord.

“O Lord my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I sojourn, by killing her son?”

Then, stretching himself out on the child, he cried to the Lord, “O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again” [see *1 Kings 17:18-21*].

This is bold praying.

This is not some pathetic, timid circuitous inquiry of what God might do; this is the bold plea of one who is on intimate terms with the Living God.

Now, you take your pencil and mark the twenty-second verse of the seventeenth chapter: “And the Lord listened to the voice of Elijah.”

This is phenomenal!

God listened to the man who had obeyed Him because that man had stood in the presence of the Lord God.