God Restores Elijah / Preparation

INTRODUCTION

We’re now onto the second talk in our series called ‘Bible Stories for Grown-Ups.’ In these talks we’re going back to some of the famous stories in the Old Testament which we may have heard as children, perhaps at home or at Sunday School. The idea is to take a fresh look at them as grown-ups.

This week I’m cheating. The children’s story I should be looking at is ‘Elijah and the Prophets of Baal.’ That is covered in 1 Kings 17 and 18. It’s the story of Elijah achieving an extraordinary victory over the prophets of Baal. I expect you remember it: the 450 prophets of Baal call on Baal to answer them, and nothing happens. Then Elijah calls on God and God sends fire from heaven which consumes the sacrifice. It’s a great story! But I’m not going to look at that story. I’m going to look at the aftermath of the confrontation, in 1 Kings 19.

In 1 Kings 19, Elijah is dejected. He has totally lost his courage, he is no longer seeing the situation correctly or thinking correctly, and he has suicidal thoughts: he asks God to take his life. He appears to remain in a similar mood for five or six weeks. It seems to me that in common English we would describe Elijah as depressed. I’m not a doctor but I think that a psychiatrist would also describe Elijah as depressed. He has a persistent feeling of sadness and unhappiness.

Why is this important to look at? The key reason is that mental health is so much of an issue in western society today. I suppose many of us have become much more aware of the issue over the past five years thanks to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry’s campaign to eliminate stigma in relation to mental health. The NHS, and charities such as MIND and the Mental Health Foundation, give us some fairly shocking statistics about depression. In 2014, the NHS found that ‘around one in six adults … surveyed in England met the criteria for a common mental disorder.’ That’s a lot! I don’t think the NHS figure has been updated. It’s also clear that a lot of treatment of depression at present doesn’t work.

Christians are not immune from depression. Elijah was a great man of faith and he was depressed! Martin Luther and Charles Spurgeon both experienced depression. Perhaps thirty years ago I heard George Verwer, the founder of the mission organization Operation Mobilization, speak in a meeting. At the time, he was travelling all over the world, meeting loads of people serving God in far-flung places. He commented that 80% of the missionaries he met were depressed! At the time, I was preparing to go overseas, and his comment really made an impression. Some years back I got involved with a Christian youth organization called Youthscape. They were carrying out research into the state of youth work in the UK. They titled their report, ‘Losing Heart’. They found that was the typical state of people involved in youth work. Priscilla [my wife] and I have a number of Christian friends who are experiencing depression now or have experienced it recently. The point is that depression is a common and debilitating problem. We can get depressed. We might have friends who are depressed. We need to know how to respond to it.

But Elijah wasn’t only depressed. He asked God to take his life. He felt suicidal. Suicide is also a massive issue in society today. In round numbers, about 600,000 people die every year in the UK and about 6,000 of those deaths are from suicide. So, we may think: one in a hundred deaths are from suicide. Not good, but not SO bad, surely? But suicide is different from other ways of dying. Ruth Sutherland, who is the Chief Executive of Samaritans, wrote: ‘A suicide is like a rock thrown into the water with the ripples spreading outwards, covering family, friends, soaking work colleagues, acquaintances, the wider community.’ It’s something that we are especially sensitive to at Rosebery Park. Last year, four people took their lives at Pokesdown Station. They had an average age of 40. Three of the four were men. That reflects the national average. If you’re a UK male between the age of 5 and 49, suicide is the most likely thing you will die from.

So, we’re going to go to this passage about Elijah and hope to draw some lessons from it about depression and suicide.

I think there’s so much in this story that I’m going to take two weeks over it. In today’s talk I’ll give an introduction (I’m nearly finished with that!), then some background. After that, we’ll move on to the scene where an angel meets Elijah (vv.4-8). In my next talk we’ll look at what happens when God meets Elijah (vv.9-16).