And it came to pass after many days, that the word of the LORD came to Elijah in the third year, saying, Go, shew thyself unto Ahab; and I will send rain upon the earth. And Elijah went to shew himself unto Ahab. And there was a sore famine in Samaria. And Ahab called Obadiah, which was the governor of his house. (Now Obadiah feared the LORD greatly: For it was so, when Jezebel cut off the prophets of the LORD, that Obadiah took a hundred prophets, and hid them by fifty in a cave, and fed them with bread and water.
This Jezebel, the wife of Ahab (to whom Elijah was sent), was enabled and controlled by a ruling spirit of terror which struck fear in the hearts of, and disabled the power of many of the Prophets of the Lord in that day. A bewildered group of anointed vessels, once confident and assured as instruments of the one true God, had to be hidden away for fear of losing their lives at the hands of the woman Jezebel.
Where was their God in all of this?
How could the spiritual climate take such a turn for the worse?
God had not left them; they were simply encountering something beyond their frame of reference in the realm of Spiritual Warfare.
When a person is battling the Spirit of Fear, they are encountering high-level spiritual warfare. Fear is a merciless Spirit of Captivity that can be fed and fueled by introducing old and new evidence to the (5) five senses. Our five senses were undoubtedly the second mechanism for awareness and relationship before sin entered into the world. Our uninterrupted connection to God was our first source of awareness, evidence, and security in the earth.
Thus, we were protected from fear, because God was so near. His Glory surrounded us and became the covering for our nakedness. His Love communicated to us, Spirit to spirit, heart to heart, mind to mind, all we needed to know at any given time. It is quite evident in both the Old and New Testaments that there are times of sovereign intervention and rescue, but many of the battles fought on the prophetic front lines have to be contended for through the use of every available spiritual weapon and resource. In this case, a wave of terrorist oppression overwhelmed the prophetic community and brought great distress to the Kingdom of God. Prophetic and Kingdom confrontations are abounding in this day also. Evil has “stepped it up a notch”, and status quo Christianity will not protect the ill-equipped. The Church has everything it needs to overcome evil in our day, but has in a very real way...lost its will to fight, and abandoned the pursuit of “Revelation for the Present Day”.
Tune in for Part 2 where we explore God's remedy for the prophetic community, the Answer is in "His Rest"
