Elijah has come from the destruction of the prophets of Baal and seeing the worship of God restored. In response, Queen Jezebel has threatened his life and he went into hiding and asked for death. This is the end of God's response to him. This passage is generally used to point out God's provision and care for Elijah, to address depression, to encourage those who feel they are failing or alone or hopeless. And all of that is there, and one of them is probably the actual theological point of the passage. But with today's readings, I was really hung up on that last line.

​It can be easy to get so hung up on the great heroes of the Bible and the big name prophets and apostles that we forget that God is using a whole lot of regular people all the time. Elijah believed that he was alone among the remaining servants of God, but not only was that not true, but God was actively working with and could readily identify hundreds of people whose names do not appear in scripture.

One of the most notable churches in the New Testament in the church of Antioch, where the term 'Christian' was first applied and where Paul was accepted and then sent out. We don't know the names of the people who founded that church, though, nor do we have the names of the people who laid hands on Paul and Barnabas and sent them out on the first missionary journey. But we know that Paul never forgot that the body of the church was important, active, and working.

In his final address to leaders in Asia on his way to be arrested in Jerusalem, Paul's focus is turned to the safety of the people in the churches. Let's not overlook the fact that the enemy has reason to attack the people who sit in the pews, the laymen, the people who are not working in pastoral ministry or doing missionary work abroad. It is important that we support, encourage, and pray for our leaders; and it is just as important that we pray for and support and encourage one another. We should see the importance God places on each individual in the church, and seek to be useful to Him and to see how He is working through others. There is no Christian who too lowly or unimportant to be a great servant of Christ.

Are we seeing ourselves and our fellow church members as equal participants in the mission of the church? Are we devoting ourselves to the work with the understanding that God has something great for us, as well? Our leaders will struggle, as Paul and Elijah did, and they will need to be helped. Let us not lose sight of our own service to God and each other as we do so.

I grew up in a church that was officially non-denominational and unofficially Pentecostal. Now, my journey from that to a Baptist understanding of things was complicated and involved a mix of theological examination and personal experience, but if I'm honest it was never the popular Baptist cessationism that appealed to me. I am, to this day, at best something of a 'soft' cessationist; I don't believe certain gifts only existed for the early church or that they have ever stopped*, simply that need for them has decreased and application has followed suit.

Today's reading, which included the story of Elijah and the 450 prophets of Baal as well as the first sixteen verses of both Acts 5 and Acts 20 (it's odd how that one worked out, now that I think about it), involved a lot of miraculous activity. But it also pointed out some of the point of that activity. The thing is, we do not tend to see miracles in scripture as normative daily experiences for God's people. There are times of heightened activity, but these are in the midst of long periods with nothing much going on. Generations of corrupt kings sat on the thrones of Israel and Judah with little, if any, recorded intervention from God aside from His previously-given word. King David experienced the presence and guidance of God throughout his life and reign, yet aside from a handful of prophetic statements I can recall no miracles he ever witnessed off the top of my head.

But miracles, overt divine intervention, and great signs always accompany the work of God to call a people to Himself who were previously far from Him. Abraham and Sarah gave birth to a child they should not have been able to produce in order to begin the line of Israel, God judged Egypt with divine plagues to draw His people out of the land and then used incredible actions to show Himself to them and explain the promises they would receive and act on. Noah had his ark when the world turned against God and Elijah had fire from Heaven when Israel did the same. The coming of Jesus involved angels and a virgin birth, and His ministry was marked by miracles and signs which continued into the formation of the church and the spreading of that church to the gentiles.

I submit that, while it is always possible for God to use such signs wherever and whenever He desires, any drive we have for them may be misplaced. It seems far more likely that there will be miracles in the life of a missionary making first contact with a people who have never heard the name of Jesus than in our cushy little Christian-influenced cultures of the west.  And woe to us if ever we're in dire need of such signs!

Rather than arguing over whether such gifts can and do still exist, we would be much better learning to see God's hand move whether with or without miracles. Let us learn to rejoice when God acts so openly in our lives, and trust His wisdom when we do not.

*The one objection I hear commonly to this idea is that, by believing in a closed canon, I must believe that the gift involved in writing scripture has ceased, so there must be at least one that was only for the early church. This is not the place to go into depth about it, but I would argue in basic terms that the writing of scripture is not itself a spiritual gift, but rather a function of a number of other gifts that can be and are also used in other ways, and as such ceasing that function does not require ceasing the gifts.

In light of God's promises to provide for our needs and the work He has called us to do, greed is a major affront to His character. Greed is not a problem merely because it feeds sinful behaviors, such as theft and manipulation and occasionally murder, but because of what it says of God. To hold, and especially to act on, greed is to declare that you know what you need and how to get it better than God does. This is a denial of the goodness, the faithfulness, and the knowledge of God, and an idolatrous elevation of self.

God consistently thwarts the will of those who seek their own benefit. As noted in James above, and stated multiple times by Jesus, those who put their stock in earthly treasures and power will have the fullness of their reward in this life, and even that may fall away before their very eyes. When the people complained in Numbers 11 that they wanted the fish of Egypt rather than the miraculous food God Himself had provided for them and them alone, He reminded them of His power by delivering prophesy through the elders before letting the greedy among them die of plague as soon as their mouths touched the meat they sought. When Herod planned to kill Peter in order to gain more favor and power with the Jewish leaders of the day in Acts 12, God miraculously led Peter out of the prison in a way that showcased how little power Herod really had against Him. 

It is more important to God that we have what we need to reflect His glory to the world around us than that we be comfortable or have all that we desire. We must never lose sight that God knows what He is doing, that He is not slack on His promise to provide, and that we can never do better for ourselves than He does. Let us seek after His kingdom and righteousness rather than our desires and greed, and trust that Jesus was serious when He promised that all other needs would be handled.