WE TURN TONIGHT TO THE BOOK OF MALACHI AND TO THE PASSAGE WHICH SAYS: BEHOLD, I will send you Elijah the Prophet, before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. He shall turn the hearts of the Fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to the Fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse. (Malachi 4:2-6)
Now there is no question why God said: I send you Elijah, or the Spirit of Elijah. We turn back to II Kings and we find that Israel is in a serious plight. The leader of Israel is Ahab the King, and the Queen is Jezebel, an outlander woman brought in from the hills of Belial, where here strange patterns and backgrounds were of idolatry and had all the conspiratorial patterns of later Babylon. In fact they had brought in her Priests and they had planted groves and established her type of religion. Because she was the Queen she exerted all her power and pressed heavily against the Priest and Prophets in the House of God. She put to death hundreds of the Prophets of God.
When Elijah, the man of God, came forth he then pronounced the areas of doom upon them and upon the families and upon that portion of their destiny. Then he of course was made a target of her animosity. Ahab had sought for Elijah through all the Kingdom, there was a warrant out for his arrest where ever he be found.
Elijah said: because of this evil, God will send a drought upon this land and there will be not any dew or any rain at least for 3 years or until there is an end of these things.