Protecting the Promises
For the last few years the Lord has blessed Rita and I with being able to vacation each Spring in Phoenix. Our first time here in 2015 was at a particularly low time in my life.
I was deeply discouraged.
I felt like I was at a dead end in ministry and was ready to do anything else but ministry.
Turns out, there is a place on the back porch, down here, where the Lord speaks to me so clearly. My “thin place” overlooks a tree-lined grassy commons area that fills up each Spring with the aroma of blooming citrus trees and song birds…especially the doves, that always take me back to my growing up years in South Africa.
Over the last five years of coming down here, the Lord has been so faithful to speak to me in this setting.
Especially last year.
My scheduled readings, in that “thin place” last spring had me in 1 Kings,…and one morning, sitting out here in the sun, listening to the doves, I was in chapter 21, where King Ahab is asking Naboth for his vineyard, outside the walls of Jezreel.
Naboth’s answer to Ahab stopped me dead in my tracks. Naboth says, “The Lord forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my fathers.”
Without going into a lot of my family history, suffice it to say that in my discouragement, I had been tempted to lay down the treasured spiritual inheritance of my father…namely, a determined focus and preoccupation with the presence and power of God to alone change lives forever (See 1 Corinthians 2:4).
I had been willing to lay down my inheritance, simply because I was feeling sorry for myself…while God’s expectation of me was that I would steward that inheritance faithfully into the next generation, without giving up the determined hope that I would see its fulfillment in my day.
That’s not easy.
A Biblical example for what I am describing here is the stewarding and fulfillment of God’s promises to Elijah and, subsequently, into Elisha’s ministry and generation.
At the lowest point in Elijah’s life, sitting alone in a cave on the Mountain of God and wanting to die, God shows up in a still small voice. And, without wasting any time consoling the prophet, God simply instructs Elijah to do four things…
1. Go back the way you came. You can’t spend the rest of your life in this cave.
2. Anoint Hazael to be king of Aram.
3. Anoint Jehu to be king of Israel.
4. Anoint Elisha to take your place.
It has always been curious to me that two of the four prophetic actions actually weren’t actually fulfilled until Elisha’s ministry…long after Elijah was gone (2 Kings 8 and 9).
Was that disobedience on the part of Elijah?
I don’t think so.
I believe three things are in play in this story:
1. I know the text is silent on this, but I am convinced, given everything else we know about Elijah, that he held onto those four commands, watching and waiting for the perfect timing of the Lord re: their fulfillment in his day. He did not give up on them. They were his inheritance, spoken by the Lord to him on Sinai.
2. Elijah must have stewarded well those promises of God, given on Sinai, over the fourteen years that he was mentoring Elisha…in prayer and in many conversations with Elisha, personally embodying all four of the promises of God.
3. At some point in the fourteen years that they were together, those promises became Elisha’s inheritance also. He began praying them back to the Lord as if they were his own…listening and watching for God’s perfect timing re: their fulfillment.
And when the time came to anoint Jehu and Hazael, Elisha was stewarding God’s promises and ready to act.
Both generations have a responsibility re: the promises and commands of God if the inheritance is to be faithfully passed on from the fathers to the sons.