1. Please pray with me. May the words of my mouth and the meditation
of our hearts be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock, and our
Redeemer. Amen. The message from God’s Word today comes to us
from 1 Kings 17:17-24 and is entitled, “Your
Son Lives!” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2. Joseph Bayly knew what the loss of
a child was like. In fact, he and his wife lost three sons—one at eighteen
days, after surgery; another at five years, with leukemia; the third at
eighteen years, after a sledding accident. So when Joe Bayly wrote about the
death of a child, people listened. Here is part of what he had to say: “Of all
deaths, that of a child is most unnatural and hardest to bear. In Carl Jung’s
words, it is “a period placed before the end of the sentence,” sometimes when
the sentence has hardly begun. We expect the old to die. The separation is
always difficult, but it comes as no surprise. But the child, the youth? Life
lies ahead, with its beauty, its wonder, its potential. Death is a cruel thief
when it strikes down the young. The suffering that usually precedes death is
another reason childhood death is so hard for parents to bear. Children were
made for fun and laughter, for sunshine, not for pain. And they have a child’s
heightened consciousness rather than the ability to cope with suffering that
comes with maturity. They also lack the “kind amnesia of senility.” In a way
that is different from any other human relationship, a child is bone of his
parents’ bone, flesh of their flesh. When a child dies, part of the parents is
buried.… I met a man who was in his seventies. During our first ten minutes
together, he brought the faded photograph of a child out of his wallet—his
child, who had died almost fifty years before.”
3. The death of a child is certainly
one of the greatest agonies possible in this life—a burying of a part of
oneself, a period before the end of a sentence, the death of a future. It’s a
burden that all parents fear. Such pain was the emotional context of Jesus’ ministry
here in Luke 7, with His raising of the Widow of Nain’s son from the dead, and
Elijah raising the Widow of Zerephath’s son from the dead in 1 Kings 17.
4. How can we trust
a God who lets something like the death of a child happen? Such things like
this happen all the time. Something similar occurred in our text from 1 Kings
17. With idolatry running wild in Israel
under King Ahab, the Lord announced through the prophet Elijah that there would
be no rain until further notice. The idolaters may have snickered when they
heard these words, but they wouldn’t have the last laugh. None of their
unbelieving cynicism could change the fact that the Lord remained in charge,
and there was no rain.
5. Elijah was
affected by the drought too. At first he lived by a brook. When it dried up,
the Lord sent him to the region of Sidon. This was the homeland of King Ahab’s
wife Jezebel. There God directed Elijah to the home of a widow. When the
prophet first met her, he asked her for food and drink. She told him that she
was down to her last provisions. After making one more meal for herself and her
son, she didn’t know where the next could possibly come from. She considered
herself as good as dead. Still, when Elijah spoke the Lord’s word of promise to
her, she had faith. She made Elijah a loaf of bread. And for many days after
there was always just enough flour and oil left for another meal, as the Lord
had said.
6. This woman took
Elijah in. The prophet lived through the rest of the drought in the company of
this woman and her son. No doubt, he proclaimed to her the Lord God of Israel.
Things seemed to be working. The jar of flour didn’t run out, nor did the jug
of oil. You might say that this widow was going with the program, playing by
the rules, as it were. Then one day her
son died. Put yourself in the widow’s
shoes. All of a sudden it didn’t look like such a great thing to have the
Lord’s prophet so close by. This God was now costing her. In her grief, she
lashed out at Elijah, saying, “What have
you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to
remembrance and to cause the death of my son!” (1 Kings 17:18). Have
you ever felt this way toward God?
7. New converts to
Christ often find their first few months or years in the faith pretty easy and
trouble-free, but in time the Lord sends them more difficult things to handle. One
of the realizations that comes to all Christians as we mature in the Lord is
the depth of our sin. The widow in the text was feeling her sin as very real.
She knew the Lord must punish sin, and she assumed that the death of her son
was his punishment upon her. How could she trust such a God? If anything, she
wanted to run away from him.
8. There’s no
denying that God lets terrible things happen in this world for which we don’t
know why. In fact, Martin Luther points out, “God must therefore be left to himself in his own majesty, for in this
regard we have nothing to do with him. . . . God hidden in his majesty neither
deplores nor takes away death, but works life, death, and all in all.” Let
the postmodern world mock as much as it wants. God remains in complete charge,
and we remain totally answerable to him.
9. God isn’t answerable
to us. In the text, Elijah made no attempt to apologize for God or explain his
ways. Elijah knew that the only answer to God is God. We can have nothing to do
with God in his own majesty. “But we have
something to do with him insofar as he is clothed and set forth in his Word,
through which he offers himself to us.” Elijah
took the dead boy into his room, laid the body on his own bed, and prayed the
Lord to grant that this child live again. The prophet stretched himself upon
the body three times as he prayed that life come back into it. In death, “the spirit returns to God who gave it”
(Ecclesiastes 12:7), but Elijah knew that this same God can give it back. Elijah was asking the Lord to give the widow
life in a situation of death, comfort in fear, and assurance of his love and
salvation amid all her doubts. No amount of explaining could have been better
than the moment when the prophet went downstairs not carrying a dead corpse but
rather with his arm around a live child. “See,”
Elijah told the widow, “your son lives”
(1 Kings 17:23).
10.
This event forms a little Old Testament “Easter.” The
son was dead, but then he lived. So far as we know, he eventually died again in
this world. God did so much better with his own Son. See, Jesus lives! Yes, God
had punished sin. He punished it
fully when he laid it all upon the back of Christ. Yet he raised Jesus from the
dead and now “death no longer has
dominion over Him” (Romans 6:9). Jesus lives.
11.
And God the Father has planted this new life in you
by giving you the Word of life, the Good News of Christ. “For without God’s sure Word about His will, a person has no power to
claim, especially when terrified by sin, that God ceases to be angry.” (Apology of
the Augsburg Confession V (III) 141 [IV 262] (Concordia, 121). So here’s a sure
Word of God for you, as sure as the resurrection of Christ is sure: God
forgives you. He’s not angry with you. He’s not stringing you along, only to
spring some punishment for sin on you when you least expect it. The Lord God of
the universe forgives you all your sins on account of Jesus who nailed them to
his cross and left them there when he rose from the dead. With this forgiveness
comes assurance, comfort, and life, all through God’s powerful Word.
12.
The woman in the text told Elijah, “Now I know that you are a man of God, and
that the word of the Lord in your
mouth is truth” (1 Kings 17:24). In faith she received God’s
assurance, comfort, and life through Elijah. She was alive. You and I live too. We live by faith. When
tragedy strikes, don’t dwell on how unfair it is. Don’t tell yourself that you
were playing by the rules, or wrack your brain trying to figure out how you
slipped up. Above all, don’t run away from God. Instead, run to the God who has clothed himself in
his Word. Run to the Lord who is more than able to take care of his people
through His Son Jesus Christ.
13.
Like the widow in the text, this Lord has given you
new birth in the faith through his Word. He’s sustained you every step along
life’s way. Beloved, we have no need to
fear death. The poet put it this way, "No longer must the mourners weep, nor call departed children
dead. For death is transformed into sleep, and every grave becomes a
bed."...As a young man, D. L. Moody was called upon to preach a
funeral sermon. He decided that he would search through the Gospels to
try to find one of Christ's funeral sermons, but he searched in vain. He
found that every time Jesus attended a funeral, He broke it up by raising the
person from the dead; and so He never gave a funeral sermon. When the
dead heard His voice, they immediately sprang to life.
14.
Dear friends Jesus will not let you see
corruption. He will show you the path of
life. In His presence is fullness of joy, and at His right hand are
treasures forevermore. Arthur Brisbane captured it for me when I look at
a funeral. Arthur Brisbane wanted to demonstrate what a funeral was like,
so he pictured a crowd of grieving caterpillars, all wearing black suits; and
all these caterpillars are crawling along mourning; and they're carrying the
corpse of a cocoon to its final resting place. The poor distressed
caterpillars, weeping; and above them is fluttering around this incredibly
beautiful butterfly, looking down in utter disbelief...Christ gives us hope. Amen.
