“God wants you to be happy and healthy and wealthy – just put your hand on the TV and send in a donation!” We’ve all heard these sorts of presentations from the peddlers of the prosperity gospel. But today’s passage should be sufficient to silence them all.

In I Kings 17:1, we see God withholding His material blessings from the people of Israel because of their longstanding and widespread unfaithfulness to Him. Fair enough – they had looked to Baal, the Canaanite god of storms to give them life-giving rain, so let them experience the barrenness of their false faith.

But Elijah was a prophet of God. He was a man so close to God that God could speak to him the way any of us speaks to each other. So, why did Elijah have to get caught up in the poverty and misery that all the wicked Israelites had brought on themselves?

Moreover, it was because Elijah announced this judgment of God that he had to go into hiding (I Kings 17:3). Because of the famine God sent to punish everyone else’s sin, Elijah had to live on a diet of water and whatever small scraps of food that ravens could bring Him twice a day (I Kings 17:6). Oh, and by the way, because they ate carrion, ravens were considered unclean (Leviticus 11:15) – and that meant that the meat they brought Elijah to eat was the ancient equivalent of roadkill. Yum.

Sure, we all want to believe that following Jesus means that He’ll make all our problems disappear – there’s a reason those prosperity gospel preachers are so popular. But the fact that we’re following Jesus should prove that Elijah’s experience is the norm, not the exception. After all, Jesus didn’t just get caught up in the consequences of all our wickedness like Elijah did. Jesus took all our sins upon Himself, dying so that we might live, suffering so that we might be blessed. And He calls us to do the same sort of thing Elijah did, to take up our cross (Mark 8:34), to share in the suffering of others so that we might point them to Jesus.

But Elijah’s story gives us a promise as well – just as God provided for all his needs, God will take care of us too. No, God is not promising to satisfy all our selfish desires, but He will make it possible for us to serve Him and bear witness to Him, to live a Christlike life, focused on His glory and on the needs of others. And in the long run, isn’t Jesus worth that kind of devotion?

I Kings 17:1-6 (NASB)

Now Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the settlers of Gilead, said to Ahab, “As the LORD, the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, surely there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word.”
2 And the word of the LORD came to him, saying,
3 “Go away from here and turn eastward, and hide yourself by the brook Cherith, which is east of the Jordan.
4 “And it shall be that you shall drink of the brook, and I have commanded the ravens to provide for you there.”
5 So he went and did according to the word of the LORD, for he went and lived by the brook Cherith, which is east of the Jordan.
6 And the ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening, and he would drink from the brook.