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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Norman McNulty

Elisha, the Prophet of Peace

Father in heaven, thank you for this Sabbath day, and I pray that you would send your spirit to be with us.

I pray that you would send your spirit to speak through me and that the word spoken would be yours, not mine, and bless us throughout the rest of the Sabbath day.

So my message title today is Elisha the Prophet of Peace.

So we're going to be talking about the prophet Elisha, who we know followed Elijah the prophet back in the Old Testament time.

And 1 of the reasons I wanted to take a look at Elijah was because of what kind of a work he represented in the time that he lived.

Now I want us to look first at Malachi chapter 4.

Malachi chapter 4 verses 5 and 6 and this isn't speaking of Elisha it's actually speaking of Elijah and here in Malachi chapter 4 it says, behold I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.

And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.

This is speaking of Elijah, symbolically speaking, coming before the second coming of Christ.

Elijah, when he was here on this earth, had a special ministry filled with great power, And Elisha followed him with a double portion of the Holy Spirit.

So surely if the Lord is going to send someone like Elijah or a group of people like Elijah just before he comes the second time and Elisha had a double portion of the spirit of Elijah there must be some characteristics about Elisha that we should be looking for in our own lives as we prepare to meet Jesus the second time.

So I want us to look at some of those characteristics of Elisha.

And in 1 Kings chapter 19, we have the familiar story of Elijah fleeing out into the wilderness, thinking that he's all by himself.

After the victorious experience on Carmel, he fled for his life.

And at the end of his experience as he's coming back towards God God tells him there's 7, 000 people in Israel who haven't bowed the knee to Bell and among that 7, 000 Were the family of Elisha And so God tells Elijah to go anoint Elisha to be a prophet after him.

But starting in verse 19, Speaking of Elisha, it says, So he departed thence, and found Elisha the son of Shaphat, who was plowing with 12 yoke of oxen before him, and he with the twelfth.

And Elisha passed by him, and cast his mantle upon him.

Of course, this is a very symbolic and significant event.

Elisha is signifying that his work as a prophet will be passed on to Elisha, that the work of Elijah will be carried on.

And Elisha left the ox and ran after Elijah and said, Let me, I pray thee, kiss my father and my mother, and then I will follow thee.

And Elijah said unto him, go back again, for what have I done to thee?

So the very first thing that happens to Elisha when it becomes known to him that God is choosing him to follow after Elijah.

God tests him through Elijah by saying, you know, you don't really have to do this.

If you want to stay with your family, that's okay." And Elisha, if you study the history of the family he came from, actually came from a very wealthy family.

So what he was leaving wasn't just an ordinary family life.

His family was 1 of the wealthy families in Israel that God had blessed greatly because of their faithfulness to him.

And so when God asked him to leave his family to follow Elisha, he was making from a worldly standpoint, a great sacrifice to leave all the worldly goods and possessions that he had.

And sometimes, in our experience today, God asks us to leave things behind when he calls us to move forward.

Maybe he calls us to leave the home we've grown up in with a wealthy family, perhaps.

Maybe some of us haven't come from wealthy families, but some of us perhaps have and God may be calling us to a life of sacrifice to a life that doesn't have All the worldly goods that maybe we've been used to in our growing up life.

So in verse 21, he returned back from him and took a yoke of oxen and slew them and boiled their flesh with the instruments of the oxen and gave them to the people.

Then he arose and went after Elisha and ministered unto him." So Elisha made a decided choice that he would follow God, even though he was given the option to stay with his family if he wanted to.

And I'm very thankful that he made that choice.

And he could have later on throughout his life turned back from that decision.

But as we study his life, as we look at the stories we're going to look at today, Elisha never wavered from that decision he made to follow God and the work that God had appointed for him to do.

And it wasn't necessarily always easy for Elijah after he made that decision.

I'm sure there were times when he was following Elijah around and then after Elijah was translated that he had times where he didn't have much money, maybe he had times where he was hungry, maybe there were times when he felt that there weren't very many people that understood him, and he would think back to how he had it in his family.

Everyone loved him, he was rich, everything was taken care of, and how easy it would be to just go back to that kind of a life.

As we're preparing to get ready for the Lord to come, Once we choose to serve God with all of our hearts, there's gonna come times in our lives when things are gonna be tougher, when things won't be easy, when we will feel like maybe It would just be easier if we went back to what we had before.

But when God calls us to his work, he wants us to start what he called us to do all the way to the finish line.

And so that's just something to think about as we study the life of Elisha.

We're going to get into some of the stories of the life of Elisha.

And the first 1 I wanted to look at is when Elijah was still with Elijah.

This was when Elijah was still working with Elijah before he was translated.

And starting in chapter 2, verse 1, And we'll read the first few verses here.

And it came to pass when the Lord would take up Elijah into heaven by a whirlwind, that Elijah went with Elisha from Gilgal.

And Elijah said unto Elisha, Tarry here, I pray thee, for the Lord hath sent me to Bethel.

18 And Elisha said unto him, As the Lord liveth, and as thy soul liveth, I will not leave thee.

Now if you read on down through the rest of the chapter, It's apparent that everyone in the schools of the prophets knows that Elijah is going to be translated to heaven.

Now what Elijah didn't know was that these people knew that.

If you read Prophets and Kings, it's spelled out in that manner.

Elijah doesn't realize that Elisha and all the sons of the prophets realize that he's going to be translated.

So he gives Elisha the opportunity to stay at 1 of the schools and he's going to go on somewhere else.

But Elisha was committed to staying with Elijah all the way until the end.

But what I wanted to focus on here in these first few passages, if you look all the way down through at least verse 6, it talks about how Elijah and Elisha were visiting schools of the prophets.

The first 1 mentioned is here in Bethel and then later on down in verse 5 it talks about a school of the prophets in Jericho.

And so there's at least 2 schools here that Elijah and Elisha were visiting that they had oversight of.

And so that gives us some insight into the role of education in God's people.

Now we hear a lot about the importance of education through the writings of LMY.

I'd never really thought about where the Bible talks about the importance of education and how God would have our education to be instituted.

But it's interesting that Elijah and Elisha placed an important, or had an important place in the work of God with training up young people who would understand God's word and be able to teach it to others.

And These schools had originally been instituted by Samuel.

Samuel was a prophet in, of course, in the nation of Israel back before this time when Saul and David were kings, and he instituted these schools of the prophets.

But by the time that Elijah and Elisha came onto the scene, these schools had really deteriorated.

They had become a skeleton, if you will, of what they had become.

And so 1 of the first things that Elijah and Elisha did was to resurrect the educational system according to how God would have it to be.

And I find that to be very interesting because we know that there will be a type of Elijah just before the Lord comes.

And I believe that God wants us to take seriously how he would have his people to be educated.

And education is important if we think about who our future leaders are going to be, and Elijah and Elisha understood that.

And I wanted to read a quote from the Christian educator from August 1, 1897.

It says, I know that much time and money are spent by students in acquiring a knowledge that is as chaff to them, for it does not enable them to help their fellow men to form characters that will fit them to unite with saints and angels in the higher school.

In the place of crowding youthful minds with a mass of things that are distasteful, and that in many cases will never be of any use to them, a practical education should be given.

Time and money are spent in gaining useless knowledge.

The mind should be carefully and wisely taught to dwell upon Bible truth.

The main object of education should be to gain a knowledge of how we can glorify God, whose we are by creation and by redemption.

The result of education should be to enable us to understand the voice of God.

And so education as we think about it, the main object should be to gain a knowledge of how we can glorify God.

And so as we think about how our young people are being educated today.

What is the main purpose that we are being educated for these days?

Is it to glorify God or is it to find a place in the world that we can take care of ourselves?

And I would challenge all of you out there, as you think about how you can help God's work in this time, think about ways that you can educate young people, or older people, anyone, to gain a knowledge that will help them to glorify God because that's what true education is all about.

And when Elijah and Elisha came onto the scene, 1 of the key roles that they played was helping the young people to be trained to understand the law of God, to understand the character of God, and how to teach that to others.

And so I'm thankful for the work that Elijah and Elisha had when it came to educating people to understand the true God.

Now another interesting thing about Elisha is how he responded to other people around him.

After these experiences of following Elijah around, we know that Elisha was able to see Elijah translated.

I just want to read briefly 2 Kings 2 verse 9.

And Elisha knows that Elijah is about to be translated.

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Elisha, the Prophet of Peace

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