Article May 18, 1998 Issue

Does God still speak to us?

God's spiritual messages come through loud and clear—when we listen.

By Tony Lobl

Elijah, a prophet whose story is related in the Bible, correctly predicted the coming of drought and famine to the land of Israel. When the famine came, Elijah then heard God tell him to go to a widow woman in a town called Zarephath. God had "commanded" the widow to "sustain" him, came the message (see I Kings, chap. 17). Elijah's visit must have come as quite a surprise to the widow. Far from feeling in a position to feed an extra mouth, the woman was mourning her inability to feed even herself and her child with the little oil and meal she still had. But knowing the infallibility of God's direction, Elijah confidently prophesied, "Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, The barrel of meal shall not waste, neither shall the cruse of oil fail, until the day that the Lord sendeth rain upon the earth."

And that's the way it turned out. The little food the widow had at hand proved entirely sufficient. She and her family were fed, and so was the prophet. As First Kings records it, "And the barrel of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil fail, according to the word of the Lord, which he spake by Elijah."

When facing a great lack, or any problem, we might wish that God would direct a twentieth-century Elijah to us, to speak powerful words with the same insight and effectiveness as in the case of the widow. The good news is that such things can and do still happen. The key to their happening is seeing what the Bible means when it says that the marvellous provision occurred "according to the word of the Lord" [italics added] which He "spake by Elijah." It wasn't Elijah's own words in and of themselves that had an impact. So we don't need a human Elijah to be with us to experience that same impact on our lives. What we do need is to discover our own ability to discern "the word of the Lord"—the message of Truth, God—that Elijah was faithfully relating.

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