Question:
Will Elijah the prophet come down from heaven and preach the truth in the last days?
Answer:
“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.” (Malachi 4:5-6)
The prophecy of Malachi has two applications. John the Baptist fulfilled the first application. The angel said of John, in Luke 1:17, “And he shall go before him [Christ] in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” In Matthew 11:14, Jesus expressly says of John, “And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come.” Yet John was not the actual Elijah, as he expressly tells us in John 1:21, but he was Elijah in the sense of fulfilling that prophecy at the first advent of our Lord.
But that fulfilled in a single individual has taken a much broader scope in the last days. One individual could go to the Jewish nation and bring God’s message concerning Christ’s first coming before all the people of that nation. But there is to go to the world a message concerning His second coming. (See Revelation 14:6–12). No one man can bear that message to the world, so Elijah and John the Baptist are types of the people whom the Lord calls to deliver His last message to the world. Conditions on the earth will be the same as Elijah and John the Baptist found. For instance, there was the strongest kind of union of church and state, contrary to God and His truth, in the days of Elijah. We have Jezebel, the corrupt, idolatrous, sun-worshiping queen, urging Ahab to the persecution of the Lord’s people. In the days of John the Baptist, Herod was influenced by Herodias, the wicked, adulterous woman he had married. In Elijah’s day, we have the backsliding of Israel and their turning away from the true God to sun worship. So it was in the days of John the Baptist; God’s people had departed from Him and were sunken in cold, dead formalism, making void the commandments of God by their traditions.
Those conditions exist today, and God is asking His faithful people to give the world the great threefold message of Revelation 14:6–12. That message meets all the conditions in the world, and that message will go and is going with “the spirit and power of Elijah,” just as John the Baptist went. Consequently, the antitype of Elijah is not some man who may call himself Elijah; it is not vested in one individual but in the whole people that will carry God’s message to the world.
Another thought: the important thing is not the messenger but the message. That has been true in all ages. The important thing was not Elijah, the mere man; it was the message from Jehovah that he bore to Ahab. John the Baptist, as a man, was not the important thing, and when the Jews asked him who he was, he declared, I am not this, and I am not that; but when they demanded who John was, he said, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness.” (John 1:23). The important thing was to be the voice of God. And so in the last message that shall go to the world, the important thing is the message and not the persons that give it; but it will be delivered by an exclusive people, in the spirit and power of Elijah.
