Elijah

This week we will meet Elijah, an Old Testament prophet. Elijah lived during a time in which the faith of both the people of God and their leaders had degraded significantly. About 100 years before Elijah came onto the scene, the monarchy that had been ruling over God’s people faced intrafamilial and political squabbling that escalated to the point of a schism, leaving one kingdom in the northern part of the land (the kingdom of Israel) and a separate kingdom in the south (the kingdom of Judah). The kings who led each of the two by and large sought their own ways or to pattern their rule after the style of other earthly kings of neighboring nations, rather than using their rule to guide the people toward being a godly nation that proclaimed the glory of God to all the earth. Elijah’s primary calling from God was to bring a formidable message of grim consequences should the kings of Israel to continue ignoring God’s will. This caused Elijah to make powerful enemies, powerful enough to put him on the run.