Elijah Meets The King Series

My mother told me there was a mix up with the babies at the hospital when I was born. She said she got caught and had to take the other one back.

Elijah meets the king I Kings 16:23-17:1

There are times when we have to see the history of an area as well as what’s happening in the culture in order to understand just what it is that influences their thinking. Let me give you a few examples from our world so you can see what I mean.

When we look at the area of politics, we have to ask ourselves what happened in our generation that has laid a foundation for how we view our world today. I look back to November of nineteen sixty-nine when I was coming home from school in grade nine. Another kid on my street came up and told me the president of the United States was shot and killed. And regardless of what we think of John F. Kennedy now, after all the stories of his immorality and loose living have come out. The killing of John F. Kennedy changed the world as we saw it. Before his term in office the president might have been respected or even ignored but all of a sudden the president became important to everyone.

Then we had the Viet Nam war. Every night on the six o’clock news we were exposed to the pictures of body bags coming back home. And everyone had an opinion on the war. You were either for it or against it. No one said, who cares.

Later on, we had the resignation of Richard Nixon and that changed our view of leadership. People started to see politics from a different standpoint. And in a sense no one in a position of responsibility could be trusted anymore. Just look at our own government today. It seems like they’re on a mission to undermine any kind of morality that exists. On top of that they’re having hearings to determine who’s to blame for the millions of dollars that are missing. The most we can hope for is that our government leaves us alone. They say the scariest thing that could ever happen is for someone to knock on your door and say, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.” Now I’m not saying we aren’t to respect them. We just don’t see them as the answer to the world’s problems.

Think of what’s happened to the financial world. When I was a kid we paid thirty-eight cents a gallon for gas. Now that the price of fuel is metric we have no idea what we paying. At nine-nine point nine a litre it works out to about four-fifty a gallon. If we had to read four-fifty a gallon every time we passed a gas station I think we’d all do a lot more walking.

When I was a kid the American dollar was fixed at a dollar seven Canadian. Now it’s worth anywhere from seventy-eight to eighty-five cents. There was a Canadian robbed in the U.S. a few years ago. When the robber saw the Canadian money he gave it back and said it wasn’t worth taking.

Or think about what’s happening in the world of religion. When I went to grade school there used to be twenty minutes of what was called religious instruction or Bible study every morning and that was ended with everyone standing and reciting the Lord’s prayer. Then a few atheists like Madeline Murray O’Hare got the media spotlight and showed the world how bad we had it and how we needed the separation of church and state. Now since the majority don’t go to church they no longer have any idea what the Bible teaches but they think they do. When I was a Youth Pastor in Guelph we took a video camera to the street and asked people what they believed. Several said they believed parts of the Bible like the Ten Commandments. Then we asked them to name the commandments. Most of them could only come up with two or three. So they believed the ten commandments. They just didn’t know what they were. Anyone know what happened to Madeline Murray O’Hare? The last report was that both she and her daughter were murdered and buried in the desert. Maybe if her friends had a little bit of the religion she rejected she’d still be alive today.

Think of the social changes we are seeing. Now we have the whole western world collecting money for the victims of tidal waves. We have no problem with that. But we do wonder what the purpose is in just feeding people if you’re going to let them die and go to hell. We need to feed them and then reach them with the gospel. I was amazed at the news coverage of the people giving to the victims of the floods. They were people who said they never gave a penny to anything like that before.They were just looking to feel good in the sense that they did something.