Elijah
by Norman Grubb

Part Three

In the last segment, Norman discussed the significance of the dramatic moment when Elijah called the Israelites to choose between Baal, the god of their own self-effort, and the Lord. The fire from heaven revealed in an outer way that all the self-effort of the priests had no power because humans are not self-operated–"self-effort can’t deliver." In Part 3 Norman continues to explain the significance of God’s fire in the inner life of a Christian today.

The fire came from God. The fire from God to us today is Jesus Christ. He came as the Son of God, and His death was the fire in which we are cut off from the things that lure us in the ways of the flesh. We become dead to sin and dead in Christ to ourselves and dead to those things which drive us into all these kind of Baal things. He bums up whatever form of self there is as an offering to Him. That fire fell on the Son in our behalf in His crucifixion and, therefore, is to us as a thing that has been done.

We must put this incident of the fire falling on the altar back in human terms because I don’t think we can get much by just seeing it historically. I want to live in the present day, and I don’t think it will do much good talking about something which isn’t happening today. I don’t think I want that kind of demonstration. It is outer and, at best, only babyhood. That’s why Jesus said you are to do greater works. Until He had been through the process of atonement and resurrection and the Spirit came, He couldn’t introduce them to the inner life. A few knew it, as the disciples, but there was no public way in which this could be. So He had to demonstrate Himself outwardly to them. But we are to do greater works.

The revelation of God in Christ is not an outer revelation. It does not come just by outer miracles, outer things. It was the only way He could come at that time because the whole inner life (as Paul said, "The mystery hidden from generations now made manifest, Christ in you") wasn’t available in a total universal sense until Christ had come and taken our place and been made sin, and the Spirit came to confirm. Then we could move into the inner way. I want to stress that outer forms, miracles, rituals can’t do a thing for us unless they happen to be a stepping stone to the inner. Only one leper out of the ten who were healed found it. There are those who have found it this way, but most do not.

From Outer to Inner
In the days of the Old Covenant and on into Pentecost, which includes the days of Jesus, God could only speak, on the whole, by outer symbols. The day of the inner consciousness of what we speak of as the inner union of God in us, Spirit with spirit, was not established in a universal sense until after Pentecost. It was just here and there that folks were coming into the inner relationship as Elijah, himself, had. All through history there were these outer manifestations which would demonstrate to them that God is the Living God, as Jesus did by His outer miracles and healings.

The whole emphasis is changed today to the outgrowth of the Body of Christ, where the relationship is to be the inner one and the manifestation of God is by His people expressing Him and His love nature. By the outer challenge of the sacrifices, which were offered by the priests of Baal and him-self in the presence of all the people, Elijah was demonstrating, for all to see, the helplessness of self to deliver self. For this was really expecting Satan to turn on himself! Baal was a form of Satan-worship because it left man’s belief in being an independent self, Satan’s greatest disguise, intact. So the Baal worshippers c °ied in vain. Elijah showed them that the only way in which there could be true deliverance for man was by a manifestation of the power of God, which was by the fire eating up the sacrifice.

If actual happenings of this kind occurred today, they would take the same form as Satan’s temptations of Jesus. "If you would jump off the temple, everybody would worship you with awe and fear," not because they wanted to know Him as He is and he identified with Him, but merely as some outer symbol which self can cling to and yet remain a self. Jesus came to show us God and what God was like. He walked this earth as a common man. He drew the nation’s attention to Himself by His miracles because the only way at that time that the truth could come was in outer form. But His total aim always was that they should believe on Him as they saw the kind of person He was because that is the kind of person which God is, a person who is motivated by love. He was always saying, "Believe on me," but only a few could see what He meant. When He fed the five thousand, they crowded around Him to make Him king because they wanted more bread. They were interested in the external. He said, "This is the work of God, that you believe on Me." Only a few could see that He who walked the countryside of Palestine with nothing but healing, serving love had no other interest than that people should understand that this is what God is: the God of saving, fulfilling love. Only those who could see something wrong with self loving itself could see it. They could begin to catch that this Person was a different kind of person.

The Exposure of Religion
Of course, that destroyed Him because it exposed their religion as self-loving self. The temple and so on was to elevate themselves as self-sufficient selves. That was because of the Fall. Except in rare cases, miracles only created interest. There must have been some interest all the way through because the first three thousand who came after Pentecost undoubtedly came because of interest in what they had seen and heard of Jesus. Masses were interested and came to hear, but only a few followed. He hadn’t any interest in healings except out of compassion, which was expressed as an outer means of showing that God is love. Breaking through the rituals which were only the self-loving forms of religion, He deliberately healed on the Sabbath. He said that man isn’t made for the Sabbath, the Sabbath is made for man to be used by man, and "If I can use the Sabbath to heal a man, I’ll heal him." This enraged those who had made religion into a form of self-idolatry: "This is our religion, our Sabbath, our rituals, our temple," they said. This is a subtlety that leaves the supposed independent human self (really a Satan-operated human self) intact.

True Personhood
Jesus, who is the final purpose of the existence of the Children of Israel, came to reveal the only true meaning of being a person, which is to be a person who has found what he was created to be: a person in conscious union with the Person who is the expression of love and nothing else, who lives to fulfill and perfect His universe. Our only motivation is to be a person whose being is for others, each for the other in the outer perfection in which we now operate in the Body of Christ.

That is a total revolution, and it destroys the emphasis on the outer, so that in II Corinthians, we find Paul went all the way saying, "I don’t know any man after the flesh. I don’t even know Christ after the flesh. I’m not interested in the historic Christ." That was a very strong thing for him to say. He was saying he was not interested in any Christ who had outer form. He was only interested in the person who is the Person with whom he had died and is now risen. Paul knew that he existed only that the world might find that the only true life is one in union with Christ so that all self would be an expression of His self. The outer doesn’t matter. To some extent, I forget people to whom God has spoken through me. I’m only interested in the fact that these are people who are Christ in human form who, in interaction and love and the moving out, are the reconciling vessel for other people to find what we have.

The fire was only to show that there has to be something which is death to the old adulterous self-for-self, which was Satan living in and as them. And the way in which he presented it to them produced the same kind of awe, fear, and wonder, which would have happened if Jesus had jumped from the temple. They called out, "The Lord, He is God!" and they meant it. Maybe some did find something, some step of faith, some restoration to the Living God, because there turned out to be seven thousand all the time who had never given in to the apostasy.

However, it didn’t turn the nation because nations can’t be turned. There can’t be a Christian nation because only people, not nations, can be expressions of Christ because Christ died and rose for people. What we have is a world nation. That’s the inner nation which we recognize as a holy nation. You don’t recognize it as an American nation, or a British nation, or the African nations, or the Indian nation, or anything else: we’re only one nation. We must get out of our whole sense of nationhood. We may have certain local loyalties, but don’t make too much of them. Be thankful for mercies we get for being in countries where there is something of a Christian morality, a Christian influence in which, by the law of harvest, you get and you reap what you sow. And so as this nation, to some extent, works on Christian principles and cares for the world, there is a flow back to her of blessings. But that’s not what really interests us. We’re not interested in what the outer condition, or language, or custom, or color, or anything else is. The new nation which we don’t know in the flesh, of which by God’s grace we are a part, is what we are interested in. And that can’t be in a nation on a national level.

So we hope and expect that many thousands did come back in their faith, at least in the external form, to what we call saving faith in the Living God, the God of Israel. That was symbolized by the rain because the rain was to demonstrate that God was full of love and grace, not the God of fire. The fire is something which God burns in: "Our God is a consuming Fire" [Hebrews 12:29]. James also says, "Your tongue is a fire … set on fire of hell" [3:6]-the hellish, hating, fearing, selfish self which is our self. That’s why Jesus came and was made sin and quenched that self-for-self fire. The slaying of the priests symbolizes the final destruction of evil in our lives; it’s replaced. And the rain symbolizes the replacement in our lives by the God of endless perfection, completion, fullness, and love. The replaced life comes at the second dedication and is a life which is really God living His life by us. It is a purposeful life.