Chariot of Fire

For the past two weeks we have focused on selected lessons from Elijah's walk of faith, and I want to wrap that short series up this morning with just one more vignette from the biblical account of Elijah's life and ministry. And this morning I want to skip to the very end of Elijah's life, and we're going to see how this remarkable prophet was translated to heaven.

The New Testament stresses the fact that Elijah was an ordinary man-ordinary in the sense that he was not in any way supernatural. He was a fallen human being like you and me. He was beset with all the same temptations and discouragements that besiege us. The familiar expression in James 5:17 of the King James Version says it this way: "[Elijah] was a man subject to like passions as we are." That's a fairly literal translation of the Greek text. The word is homoiopathes ("homoy-opa-THACE"). It's an adjective meaning literally "similarly affected," or "subject to the same feelings." And it has the connotation of "suffering in the same way." What James is saying is that Elijah had a finite, fallen nature just like ours. He was subject to the same melancholy and misery of the human condition that you and I are familiar with. And the biblical account of his life doesn't gloss over any of that. At the low point of his life in 1 Kings 19, he was convinced that he was totally alone and utterly forsaken, and he...

http://www.thegracelifepulpit.com/