Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 3110
“And he arose, and did eat and drink, and went in the strength of that meat forty days and forty nights unto Horeb the mount of God.” 1 Kings 19:8.
[An Exposition of the greater part of the chapter from which the text is taken is given with Sermon #2828, Volume 49.]
I. My first observation upon this passage is that THE GREATEST BELIEVERS ARE SOMETIMES SUBJECT TO FAINTING FITS.
The Apostle James tells us that “Elijah was a man subject to like passions as we are.” And this fact was very clearly manifest on the occasion to which our text refers. Otherwise he seemed, in most things, to be superior to the ordinary run of men, a sort of iron Prophet—what if I call him THE PROPHET OF FIRE—the man whose whole life seemed to be a flash of flame—a mighty, burning, ecstatic love and zeal towards the cause of God? But Elijah had his flaws, even as the sun has its spots. Strong man though he was, he was sometimes obliged to faint, even as the sun sometimes suffers an eclipse. His fainting, too, took a form which is very common among the saints of God. He cried, “O Lord, take away my
life; for I am not better than my fathers.” [See Sermon #2725, Volume 46—ELIJAH FAINTING] A desire to depart, when it arises from wisdom and knowledge, and from a general survey of things below, is very proper. But when a wish to die is merely the result of passion, a sort of quarreling with God as a child sometimes quarrels with its parents, it has more of folly in it than of wisdom and much more of petulance than of piety! It was a remarkable thing that the man who was never to die, for whom God had ordained an infinitely better lot, the man who was to be carried to Heaven by a whirlwind in a chariot of fire drawn by horses of fire—the man who, like Enoch, was “translated that he should not see death”—should thus pray to die!
We have here a memorable proof that God does not always literally answer prayer, though He always does in effect. He gave Elijah something better than that for which he asked, so He really did hear and answer his prayer. But it was strange that Elijah should have asked to die—and blessedly kind was it on the part of our Heavenly Father that He did not take His servant at his word and snatch him away at once, but spared him, that he might escape the sharpness of death. There is, Beloved, a limit to the Doctrine of the Prayer of Faith. We are not to expect that God will give us everything for which we choose to ask. We know that we sometimes ask and do not receive because we “ask amiss.” If we ask contrary to the promises of God—if we run counter to the spirit which the Lord would have us cultivate—if we ask anything contrary to His will, or to the decrees of His Providence—if we ask merely for the gratification of our own ease and without an eye to His Glory, we must not expect that we shall receive. Yet, when we ask in faith, nothing doubting—if we receive not the precise thing asked for, we shall receive an equivalent and more than an equivalent for it! As one remarks, “If the Lord does not pay in silver, He will in gold. And if He does not pay in gold, He will in diamonds. If He does not give you precisely what you ask for, He will give you that which is more than tantamount to it and that which you will greatly rejoice to receive in lieu thereof.”
However, Elijah’s faintness took this particular form of a desire to die—nor is this very uncommon, especially among the hard-worked and most eminent servants of God.
This fainting fit is easily to be accounted for. It was the most rational thing in the worldior Elijah to be sick at heart and to desire to die. Can you not see him standing alone upon Mount Carmel? There are the priests of Baal surrounding the altar. They wax warm with excitement. They cut themselves with knives and lancets, but all in vain. Then, with
laughter and irony, the Prophet bids them cry aloud to their absent or sleeping god, Baal, and by-and-by the solemn testing-time comes. He bids them pour water on his altar and into the trench around it—and over the bullock and the wood on which it was laid. There he stands, a lonely man believing in the invisible God—and believing that the invisible God can do what the visible Baal cannot do! He puts the whole matter to this one test, “The god that answers by fire, let Him be God.” Great must have been the excitement of his flaming soul. If one could have felt his mighty heart beating just then, one might have wondered that his ribs could hold so marvelous an enigma! When “the fire of the Lord fell,” conceive, if you can, his holy rapture, his delirious joy! And think of him in the fury of the moment, when he cried, “Take
the Prophets of Baal! Let not one of them escape.” [See Sermon #1058, Volume 18—NO QUARTER] And think of him as he took them down to the Brook Kishon and, with his own hands, began the slaughter of the men condemned by the Mosaic Law to die because they had perverted the people of Israel from the worship of the Most High God!