And it came to pass, when the Lord would take up Elijah by a whirlwind into heaven, that Elijah went with Elisha from Gilgal.
And Elijah said unto Elisha, Tarry here, I pray thee; for the Lord hath sent me as far as Bethel.
And Elisha said, As the Lord liveth, and as thy soul liveth, I will not leave thee. So they went down to Bethel.
And the sons of the prophets that were at Bethel came forth to Elisha, and said unto him, Knowest thou that the Lord will take away thy master from thy head today?
And he said, Yea, I know it; hold ye your peace.
And Elijah said unto him, Tarry here, I pray thee; for the Lord hath sent me to Jericho.
And he said, As the Lord liveth, and as thy soul liveth, I will not leave thee. So they came to Jericho.
And the sons of the prophets that were at Jericho came near to Elisha, and said unto him, Knowest thou that the Lord will take away thy master from thy head today?
And he answered, Yea, I know it; hold ye your peace.
And Elijah said unto him, Tarry, I pray thee; for the Lord hath sent me to Jordan.
And he said, As the Lord liveth, and as thy soul liveth, I will not leave thee.
And they two went on. And fifty men of the sons of the prophets went, and stood to view afar off: and they two stood by Jordan.
And Elijah took his mantle, and wrapped it together, and smote the waters, and they were divided hither and thither, so that they two went over on dry ground.
And it came to pass, when they were gone over, that Elijah said unto Elisha, Ask what I shall do for thee, before I be taken from thee.
And Elisha said, I pray thee, let a double portion of thy spirit be upon me.
And he said, Thou hast asked a hard thing: nevertheless, if thou see me when I am taken from thee, it shall be so unto thee; but if not, it shall not be so.
And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, which parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.
And Elisha saw it, and he cried, My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and the horsemen thereof! And he saw him no more.
And he took hold of his own clothes, and rent them in two pieces. He took up also the mantle of Elijah that fell from him, and went back, and stood by the bank of Jordan.
And he took the mantle of Elijah that fell from him, and smote the waters, and said, Where is the Lord, the God of Elijah? And when he also had smitten the waters, they were divided hither and thither; and Elisha went over.
And when the sons of the prophets which were at Jericho over against him saw him, they said, The spirit of Elijah doth rest on Elisha. And they came to meet him, and bowed themselves to the ground before him.
Now when John heard in the prison the works of the Christ, he sent by his disciples
and said unto Him, Art Thou He that cometh, or look we for another?
And Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and tell John the things which ye hear and see:
the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear,
and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good tidings preached to them.
And blessed is he, whosoever shall find no occasion of stumbling in Me.
Cast not away therefore your boldness, which hath great recompense of reward.
For ye have need of patience, that, having done the will of God, ye may receive the promise.
To revert to the old version of Matthew 11:6:
Blessed is he, who shall not be offended in Me.
You will know that the word offend, or offended, so frequently used in different connections in the New Testament, just means a stumbling block.
Literally, blessed is he who will not find Me to be a stumbling block, or who will not stumble at Me.
Change that into the word boldness in the Revised Version, and we shall see why in a moment or two.
The first thing, then, to take note of is that the Word of God does take account of the possibility of being offended with Him.
It does not say anywhere that that possibility should never arise, and will never arise. The Lord has nowhere said that we shall never have any occasion for being offended with Him.
He has indicated that there will be plenty of opportunity for so stumbling at Him—falling over Him, coming down because of Him, if you like, crashing because of Him. There will be plenty of occasion, or opportunity, for so doing.
He has never said it will never be so, so it is well for us to recognise that temptation is never sin.
We all are tempted in this, as in many other ways. And, as you know, temptation is only another word for trial. So it is translated in some places: “trial.”
There is nothing wrong with trial—with being tried, if you like, with being tempted. And there will always be plenty of opportunity for being tempted to be offended with the Lord.
The Lord sent no word of rebuke to poor John the Baptist in the prison, when he was perilously near to being offended with the Lord because of his situation.
The Lord was not hard on John because of his question. He might, had He been another, have said, “John, did you not point Me out as the Lamb of God? Did you not proclaim Me as the One, the Messiah? Had you not preached about Me to the multitude?”
“Had you not made the strongest declarations and affirmations as to what you believed about Me? And here you are asking a fundamental question about Me. John, what has gone wrong with you?”
No, nothing like that.
The Lord knows, dear friends, we are thus. The Lord, I am saying, takes account of this ever-present possibility, in our weakness, of being offended with Him.
But He does attach to this matter a particular blessedness if we do not crash over this stumbling block of His ways with us:
And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in Me.
There is the possibility.
Then, as for the reasons for the possibility, I have read that old story of Elijah and Elisha for one purpose only: just to get at one thing which is so common in our experience.
No new thought is being mentioned here, but note it again. It is a strange story there, is it not? Strange behaviour on Elijah’s part.
It did seem that Elijah was trying to put off Elisha—if you like, to reject him.
Again and again he said, “You stay here. The Lord has sent me so far. You stay here.”
On the face of it, it looked as though Elisha was being rejected, put aside, not wanted—just not wanted.
And Elisha, had he been as some of us are, might have said, “Oh, well, You do not want me then. All right, I will stay. I will not go any further. Quite evident, You have no taste for me any more; no room for me. I do not count. All right. Well, sorry.”
But, you see, that is being offended.
Does it not often look like that with the Lord? So often the ways of the Lord with us could be interpreted in that manner. The Lord does not seem to want us. He is no longer interested in us.
Indeed, He is relegating us to the place of the rejected. It seems that He is prepared to go on without us.
We are not wanted. That is what it amounts to: we are not wanted. The Lord does not want us.
Have you ever interpreted His ways like that? That is a form of offendedness, or stumbling at the Lord, is it not? Coming down by the strangeness of the Lord’s seeming willingness to do without us, to go on without us, to set us aside.
But that is not all the story of Elijah and Elisha. We shall look at it again lightly in a moment.
There is one way in which we can be offended with the Lord: His seeming either loss or lack of interest, and concern—real concern—to have us.
If we knew the truth about Elijah, he was far more concerned to have Elisha than he wanted to get rid of him. He wanted him on certain terms: on the terms of a man who had demonstrated that nothing else mattered in life than fellowship with his lord.
From that, he was not going to be put off, even by the Lord Himself.
If you like to translate the thing into relationship with the Lord, it would amount to this: “Lord, You may feel that You can do without me, but I cannot do without You, and I am not going to let go. You started this business, and You have just got to go on with it to the end. I am not going to let go.”
May it not be that that is something of very great importance to the Lord in the relationship—a servant who is going to be useful to Him? He has proved that his Lord is, after all, his life. He cannot be shaken off.
Think about that.
You have John the Baptist. Here he is in prison. How utter John has been for the Lord. How he has poured himself out in the interests of Christ. How devoted!
Behold, the Lamb of God.
Behold, the Lamb of God.
Here is He of whom I said, “There cometh One after me, the latchet of Whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose.”
He must increase, but I must decrease.
Here is devotion—devotion to his own abnegation. And now he is in prison. His ministry is cut off; his popularity suspended, if not ended.
And in prison, the Lord seems to be doing nothing about it. Nothing about it.
I think there is something in this: when the Lord sent reply to John and told him of all the wonderful things that He was doing—in healing all manner of sicknesses, even to the raising of the dead—did He anticipate that if John stopped to think, he would say, “Yes, but why does He not do something for me?”
“He is doing it for everybody but not for me. A lot of people are getting His blessing, and good, but I am left out.”
How easy it is to be offended when we seem to be just the one person who is overlooked.
And just at that point, because perhaps the Lord anticipated that that is how John might have reacted:
And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in Me.
He covered Himself, and perhaps helped John over his difficult stile: the seeming indifference of the Lord, and the seeming favouritism, or selectiveness, of the Lord—His blessing here, there, this one, that one, and He leaves me out, forgets me.
Oh, when you come to the letter to the Hebrews:
Cast not away therefore your boldness, which hath great recompense of reward.
I would stay with that word confidence just for a moment. As you see, it is translated in the Revised Version, boldness, because it is the same word that is used of Peter and John in Acts 4, when they stood before the rulers.
They were charged with filling all Jerusalem with their doctrine, and they knew very well what kind of a place Jerusalem was—what they had done in Jerusalem to the Lord Jesus. The spirit was there for their destruction.
But they stood before those selfsame rulers, and it says of the rulers, when they beheld the boldness of Peter and John. That word boldness is the same word here as the Authorised Version’s confidence and the Revised Version’s boldness.
What was it? Their forthrightness, their unreservedness, their absence of uncertainty.
Here they are: they are not wavering. They are not, as we say, speaking with their tongue in their cheek as to what will happen to them if they are not very careful what they say. They are not being politic, diplomatic, carefully choosing their words lest they cause offence, or being very careful because they are not so sure of their ground.
The word here, confidence or boldness, is this: none of that.
They have got their feet solidly down. They are speaking with assurance and confidence. They are forthright; they are not preserving anything.
Unto the Hebrews, the word is: cast not away your downright forthrightness, your certainty, your assurance, your confidence.
Cast it not away. It hath great recompense of reward.
Now, you see, you have to read the whole of this letter to the Hebrews in the light of that phrase alone, that clause alone. The whole context of this letter is over against much that was gnawing at the confidence of these Christians.
There was, as we recently pointed out, persecution. The writer reminds them of their early days when, at their beginnings, they suffered so great a contradiction. They suffered greatly at the beginning for their faith.
Then there was increasing persecution; the activities of the Judaizers, to undermine their confidence and faith in the Lord Jesus; and the long-delayed return of the Lord, Whom they had been taught to expect at any time—all eating at their confidence.
These are some of the reasons for being offended, and you can add what you like to them. You will probably find something in the Word of God which corresponds to anything that you like to add.
There are plenty of grounds and reasons for being offended, if you are going to be.
But the divine recompense:
And blessed is he, that shall not be made to stumble, or who shall not stumble, be offended in Me.
I ask you: was Elisha justified in the end in sticking to it? Forgive me—that sounds vulgar. Was he justified in sticking to it, shall we say, to the bitter end? No bitter end, of course.
Of course, Elisha had somehow a shrewd idea of what was going to happen. “I know it,” he said. “I know it. Hold ye your peace.”
But the point is that Elisha was not going to let go without getting something out of this for God—getting something out of this for God.
He was the Lord’s servant. He was Elijah’s servant. He had got to carry on the testimony. A great weight of responsibility was going to rest upon him.
Because of that, for that very reason, he was taken this testing way. Could he be put off? Could he be put off?
Elisha teaches us a lesson. Oh, that we might learn it and be of the same spirit: to hold on.
Cast not away your confidence, which hath great recompense of reward.
Elisha found that to be true and came into it.
The letter to the Hebrews gives us something very great at the end of the time of testing, does it not?
Receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken.
What you and I perhaps crave for as much as anything in these days is something that is substantial, and unshakeable, and sure, and settled—the Rock.
We are shaken; we are thrown about; everything is like that. We wonder where we are.
But we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken.
Let us hold fast. Let us hold fast the beginning of our confidence firm unto the end. Cast not away your confidence.
Of course, we ought never to speak of things in the letter to the Hebrews without seeing the full context, reminding ourselves of it: the almost infinite difficulty of humans as we are, living a heavenly life and walking a heavenly way on this earth.
It is so utterly contrary to our nature. There is nothing in us, by nature, that helps us to walk a heavenly way, to have everything on a heavenly basis.
Nothing at all. Everything is against that: to have what we can see, what is tangible, what is present. Our whole soul life wants it now, wants it in our hands, wants it where we can see it.
And all this heavenly way—the letter to the Hebrews, the heavenly way, partakers of a heavenly calling—it is unspeakably difficult to nature. It is contrary to nature.
We find all the way along, almost every day, that this difficulty arises in some form or another.
But with all that, we agree in our heart of hearts: the heavenly is the real, and it is the only object worth living for.
We have got enough in our spiritual experience to know that the heavenly is, after all, the only thing worth living for particularly.
Cast not away your confidence, which hath great recompense of reward.
For ye have need of patience, that, having done the will of God, ye may receive the promise.