Elijah’s Cameo
Jeremy MacDonald · Tidal Church Moncton · July 5, 2026 · Elijah series
Closing the Elijah series, Jeremy MacDonald looks at the Transfiguration, where Elijah and Moses appear with Jesus and see the rest of the story. God is writing a good story across all time, so we can turn from distracting idols and listen to Jesus.
More from Jeremy MacDonald · The Elijah series
Topics: Hope, Faith, Discipleship
Transcript
[0:00] Last weekend, I'm doing this wedding, officiating in Quebec, and one of my favorite conversation pieces at weddings is just to say, "Hey, how did you meet the bride or the groom?" And so one of the bridesmaids says, "Oh, don't you know? It was six years ago, and you had sent," I had sent, "this message connecting the bride with a person I knew from this church here because they were both going to Mount Allison in Sackville." And so it was just this quick interaction. I looked at it earlier today, actually. And growing up here, and I've been the youth pastor here over the years, and then on the team here now as the teaching pastor, it's just one of my great joys to try to connect Christians, especially when they're launching into a new place or to a new city, or in this case, going to university.
[0:47] And so yeah, it was just a quick Instagram connect from this girl that I had met, when she was a girl, in Ontario. She's at a church that I worked at, and coming out here for school, and then all of a sudden that blossomed into all these fun connections. And it was so cool because so many times you have these light little interactions, and you don't get to hear, as the old radio broadcasters say, the rest of the story. You know what I mean? You offer like, "Hey, you should go check out that place," or, "Hey, if you're in this city, go to this restaurant," or, "Hey, you should meet so and so," or, "When you go here." And again, so often you don't necessarily get a chance to piece together the rest of the story. And sometimes it's personal and it's positive, sometimes it's personal and it's negative, too, right? You've got maybe a kid or a person you've invested in and you watch them go and you're like, "I hope the rest of the story turns out different or turns out better." Maybe you were with somebody at a restaurant or there was a waiter and you prayed with him or her or you just had a moment with them and you're like, "It'd be so interesting to know the rest of the story," because stories go on, and sometimes it's hard to know exactly even those little moments, what they do in the grand scheme of things.
[1:59] Well, the same is true in the biblical narrative. The same is true with the stories of the people that have lived and followed after the Lord that we talk about and sing about here throughout the centuries. And the cool part for us reading now 2,000 years after Jesus is we often can actually read and see and hear the rest of the story. But what's fascinating to me, and maybe to you by the end of this, is that not every biblical character got to hear and catch up with the rest of the story. But over these last four weeks, we've been journeying through the life of Elijah. And Elijah, fascinatingly enough, although last week we kind of got to the end of his life as he was taken up, he actually got a chance to see what the rest of the story would look like.
[2:45] And so we're going to go there as a means of wrapping up this series. And whether or not you have been tracking and following Jesus your whole life or whether you've just recently chosen to follow after Him or you're here because you have to when you come on vacation and you stay with so and so, or whatever the reason is that you've ended up here, I think that today, this text, this message, this story is going to be helpful for every one of us no matter where you're at in your faith journey. And to get there, we go to the Gospel of Matthew in chapter 17, verse 1, and I want to read it to you. "After six days, Jesus..." So we're in the Gospels. This is the biography of Jesus, which is wild because this is hundreds of years after Elijah's life. When Elijah left, he left, and if you tracked with us, you kind of saw, he was trying to champion to his people, "You have to follow after the Lord. This is the one true God.
[3:39] This idol that you've been tempted by, the idol of Baal, is not right, not true, not helpful. Fix your eyes fully on the God of the universe." And when he leaves, you kind of would think, oh, maybe the people have got it. They saw some pretty miraculous things. But then for the next 100, 200, 300 years, the Israelites would wander away from the Lord again and again, and eventually into exile. And so we pick up the story with the life of Jesus and, in a moment, Elijah as well. "Jesus took with Him Peter, James and John," three of the disciples, "and led them up a high mountain by themselves." So He's with His people. Just recently, Peter had kind of declared Jesus is the Messiah, the Lord.
[4:27] He's got this great faith. Jesus' kind of, in some ways, inner circle goes up to the mountain, and then we read, "Jesus was transfigured before them." Now, transfigured is a wild word. It comes from the same word we kind of get metamorphosized. Metamorph. He was changed. And we know He was changed because the way that they use this word in other parts of the New Testament, they connotate that same type of change. You and I actually can change quite a bit, and that's actually where this comes from. In 2 Corinthians, same word being used here, "The Lord, who is the Spirit, makes us," you and me, "more and more like Him as we are changed into His glorious image." And so Jesus goes through a dramatic change, transformation in this scene, and we get a chance to read about what that experience is like.
[5:24] "He was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun," which connects, we actually read in Revelation, images and pictures of what Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah, looks like, and this kind of connects to it as well. Shines like the sun. "And His clothes became as white as the light." There's this brightness to it. And then, "Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah talking with Jesus." And Luke would say, Luke records this as well, so we think as Luke is kind of getting his authentic writing of all of the details that happened, this is naturally a story that the disciples would share all the time. And Luke would actually articulate that the conversation they had, they could hear, and it was about Jesus actually, His death and leaving of this Earth, His exodus from the scene, what was about to happen, His death, burial, and resurrection.
[6:21] He's talking about that with Moses and Elijah. Peter says to Jesus, "Lord, it is good for us to be here." A little bit of like a, yeah, obviously. Peter's like, "These are the heroes of our faith, like Moses and Elijah." They would elevate those guys as like Moses representing the law, Elijah representing all the prophets. These two figures speaking with Jesus, all that's going on, he's like, "Let's stick around for a second. This is really cool. I like this. If You wish, Jesus, I'll put up three shelters. Let's camp out for a bit. One for You, one for Moses, one for Elijah. I'll camp with..." I don't know if they were divvying up who stays with who, but the point is, let's stop here. And while he was still speaking, the text says, "A bright cloud..."
[7:07] And a bright cloud is so interesting. I was talking with Dan, who's playing on the band. He's a PhD in Old Testament. And we know that the motif of the cloud, that's how the presence of the Lord would show up so often in the Old Testament. The Israelites would follow the cloud. Moses goes up to get the Ten Commandments, and there's a cloud that kind of descends. And Dan was saying, he's like, but the uniqueness here is this bright cloud, this bright cloud that comes in and around them. And they can actually see as opposed to just kind of following after it, but it's amongst them. And so this bright cloud covered them and a voice says, and this is the voice of God the Father, the voice of the Lord, "This is My Son whom I love. With Him I am well pleased.
[7:54] Listen to Him." And this is actually hearkening back to some of the expectations about the Messiah and some of the things that even in the Old Testament we have examples of kind of the pointing forward to who and what this Messiah would look like. In Psalm 2 and Isaiah 42, Psalm 2, "He said to me, 'You are My Son.'" In Isaiah 42, "My chosen one in whom I delight," or well-pleased. And so this is going on, and as this is happening, the disciples, we read in the text in verse 6, the disciples heard this, they fell face down to the ground terrified. And this is an aside. This isn't necessarily in the text, and this is just kind of Jeremy, and this is me, but it seems like whenever the Lord shows up amongst human people, it's terrifying because of His goodness and how beautiful and how strong and the powerful and the transcendence of the Lord, it is absolutely terrifying.
[8:55] And so what happens for at least me is sometimes if I'm talking with people and they're like, "Yeah, like I was hanging out and having my breakfast, and then the Lord spoke to me, and He said, 'Da, da, da, da, da, da,'" and I'm like, "Were you terrified?" Because they're always terrified. It's terrifying. It's so shocking when the Lord shows up. And so I'm not saying that's how it has to go, but sometimes I get nervous that we get caught up by just the burrito we had last night and how it makes us feel and miss out that when the Lord is speaking, it carries a level of transcendence and importance and gravitas that we shouldn't lose sight of. The disciples were terrified, and so Jesus comes to them. They're face down. Jesus comes to them. He says, "Get up." He says, "Don't be afraid," which is so often the Jesus way.
[9:48] Don't be afraid. He holds onto them. He's the one that brings comfort. He's the one that brings the peace. He's the one that says it's okay. He says, "Get up. Don't be afraid." And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus. That's wild. What an occurrence. What an event. And I have so many questions when I read that text. So I don't know about you, but here are the questions that I personally am wondering about and wrestling with as I get into that. And maybe for you, wherever you're at in your journey, the question, honestly, when you come to the text should be, what am I thinking? What am I feeling? What is this doing to me? And it's okay to come with questions to the Scriptures because it helps remind us about what we're actually doing when we engage with them.
[10:39] We hope that we'll be changed and transformed. We hope that we would bring our full selves to them. We hope that we would show up and kind of own and recognize how we're thinking and feeling when we're actually going through them. So I've got some questions. Here are mine. You have yours. What's up with dead people? There are two dead guys. One of them, I mean, Moses, the text says he died before they saw the Promised Land. Elijah, yeah, he got taken up to heaven, so it's kind of like a, I don't know, a catch-22. You're like, maybe he's not really... But what's up with them? Where were they? How can they show up? I kind of am curious on that one. Why Moses and Elijah? There's lots of folks in the Old Testament. Was Abraham just doing something different? Was God like, "Hey, I'm sending some people down to see Jesus." And Noah's like, "Ah, I'm good for now. I got something else going on." I don't know.
[11:29] Why these two in particular? Honest question. Number three, is this time travel? This one's really fun. There is a reel from Wes Huff, if you know Wes. He talks a little bit about this. But man, Moses, Elijah, both experiencing the Lord. You know from Elijah, if you were here when we talked about it, he goes, when Marc Jolicoeur preached that message, he's on the mountain experiencing the Lord. Moses is on a mountain experiencing the Lord. Here they are? I don't know. Anyways, the point is, I tried to convince... The way that this works around here is, we have three locations, and so the other two preachers to this message are Nathan and Sean. Nathan is the one that took the lead on this message, and so when he was looking for help as he was kind of writing out and helping guide us, I'm like, "Should we talk a lot about time travel?" And he's like, "No." So we're not going to talk about that one. But I find it really interesting, so let's talk after. Lastly, and really most importantly, what do we do with this?
[12:29] What do we do with this text? What do we do with this cameo that Elijah has in the New Testament? And props to Nathan, for as he was working through this and we were working through this as a team, kind of highlighting a few of the things that are happening in the midst of the transfiguration. A few things that can actually shape and adjust and help your faith and my faith and our understanding of the Lord. So, a few thoughts. First up, for the disciples, this particular interaction was a beautiful preview of Jesus' resurrected, exalted glory. For the disciples, they would speak about this instance often. We know it because we have it in the Gospels, but we also have it in Peter's letter, in 2 Peter.
[13:15] He speaks and says to people, "Hey, we didn't just tell you random stories. We told you about the actual events when we actually saw the glory of the Lord, when we actually were in the midst of Elijah, Moses, and Jesus." Our faith is shaped not just by ideas. Our faith is shaped by events, by specific things. And we know this even beyond the scope of this conversation, but our faith is built on the resurrection of Jesus. If there's no resurrected Jesus, there is no reason for us to be together. But we're the people that believe, yes, in God, but we believe in the God who was actually on this earth and actually died and was resurrected.
[14:02] And these writers, these people that knew Jesus, are capturing honest, real moments and then understanding and trying to make sense of what God was doing in the midst of it all. It's a beautiful picture. And so they get a chance to see Jesus in His interaction with these two other important figures in our faith, in their faith, bringing to the culmination of what God was doing in and through our world, through what Jesus would do on the cross and in the resurrection. Amazing. For Jesus, this would have been a glimpse of the joy His suffering will produce. There's a beautiful sense of the Father honoring and caring for the Son in these moments. We get this opportunity to see Jesus actually speaking about what He was going to do with Moses and Elijah. And how incredible would it have been to have been somebody that Jesus grew up as an Israelite, as a Jew, hearing the stories and knowing the story of what God was doing over the course of history, and being able to say, "And here I am to bring it to its beautiful, both conclusion and inauguration, and launch of this new covenant that God was working towards." And so it's a wonderful picture of joy for Him.
[15:21] For Moses and for Elijah, and obviously we've been tracking closely with Elijah, this is the rest of the story. It confirms their life mission will be fulfilled. Because Elijah, if he even got a glimpse of 100 years after he left, it was like, man, there was so much heartache and so much of the mission that he came for, it didn't seem to come true. And yet, for them to be able to witness and see the Messiah, oh, over the course of all time, the story that the Lord is writing is a good one. And I think for you and for me, the takeaway from this is that so often we make our decisions and so often we get pressured by the moment. At least for me. Maybe this isn't for you, but I'm so shortsighted to think about what this week would bring or this month or this year.
[16:10] And when you shift your perspective to know that the Lord is doing something through all time, it allows for the, I guess maybe opportunity for you and for me to sacrifice for Him or to live for a different outcome, because we can trust that He's the one that works it all together. I can't piece the rest of the story together on my own. If I'm just working off of what I can see, I just see in front of me. But I'm grateful that the Lord can work in ways much beyond that. And what a cool thing for Elijah to catch the rest of the story and see the Messiah to which they had hoped for in front of him. For us, for the readers and for the disciples, the people around that they would share the story to, it shows the communion of the saints in action, which is kind of interesting because I think for the idea that there's these two people that were technically deceased, and then all of a sudden, they're there, what does that mean for us?
[17:11] And what does that mean for even us today? And I want to say just a couple of things that maybe could be helpful, and then punt the conversation if this is something you've been wrestling with or wondering about. But the Scriptures are really clear that for us as Christians, we don't get a chance to have a conversation. We should never try to have a conversation with the dead. In fact, throughout the Scriptures, lots of clear admonitions against that. Do not do that. Because we know that the communion of the saints is only possible through the one mediator, who is Jesus. And so Jesus is here. It's because of Jesus that we get to enter into God's eternal kingdom. It's because of Jesus that we do get a chance to hope for that future where we're together with the Christians from all time around the world and be together for all of eternity.
[18:05] But in this moment, here now, you and I don't get a chance to seek after that conversation. And the hard part is that there are folks in the world today who will sell you on the ability to communicate with the dead, and I would just say that is very dangerous. I had a friend, actually, I got to know her when I was working at a church in Ontario. She was a leader in the occult in our region. She did a lot of readings for people. She would sell people on her ability to have kind of séances. And Nancy was her name. She ended up with a near-death experience that was actually very negative, where she knew that in her current reality, she was going towards a Christless eternity. She was going to hell. And in that moment, she had reached out and cried out to Jesus to save her. And she came to in a hospital room and immediately knew she had to give her life to Christ, and showed up at our church a couple weeks later looking to give her life to Christ and be baptized.
[19:03] And we journeyed with Nancy, and she would say very specifically, "The hope that people are looking for when they came to me before is the hope that I actually now know for sure is in Jesus." So she would have people calling for readings, and she would say, "I'm so sorry I led you astray, but I know what you're looking for and I've found it. And it's in Jesus. You should come to church with me on Sunday." And she would bring, legitimately, we baptized... I want to be clear, it was like three or four different other folks that would come. We'd make sure as soon as they came we knew who they were and why they were there, give them Bibles. But what we have to recognize is if you are wondering about that, communicating with the dead, no, we don't. We can't. And what's happening here is something different because of the mediation of Jesus, and because of who He is, that allows for us to be a part of that beautiful community. Now, the other side of it is there's lots of folks that think, oh, the saints, like there's saints throughout history.
[20:01] And saints in the Scriptures simply means those that are saved, that the Lord has made and kind of cast over this beautiful sainthood on us, that you are, if you follow after Jesus and He's rescued you from your sin. You are technically, in the New Testament sense, a saint, which is like, well, that's a big commitment, and it's like, yeah, you better live it up and figure it out. Yeah, you carry... No, that's from me. That's not the Bible. But you should recognize your position and what Jesus has done for you. And so we do celebrate those that follow after Christ and have been great examples for us. But when we consider the saints throughout history, we should be cautious to recognize that we don't need them to intercede on our behalf, because the Scriptures are so clear. Jesus is the one that intercedes on our behalf.
[20:54] We pray in part because we don't need anybody else, but also we shouldn't go after anybody else. We get to our Heavenly Father through Jesus alone, and so we pray to Him. And so, depending on your upbringing, that might be a bit of a shake-up or that might be a question mark. And to that I would say, let's talk more. Or think about it more, or recognize that what's happening here is much different than allowing for us to look to those that have gone before us as people that we need to access in order to get to our Heavenly Father. Jesus is the one who's there. The other thing that happens is for us, that this actually reveals what's truly real and what truly matters. For Jesus in that moment on that mountain to be the culmination of everything, all of a sudden the disciples were starting in that kind of moment to kind of click and understand, oh, God's been at work, and what He's doing in our world is so dramatic and so important and so impressive. This is worth sacrificing everything for.
[22:00] And so surely in that moment, they asked the question that you and I should answer and you and I should ask when we kind of come to this story and when we come to this text, is what do we do with all of this? What do we do with all of this kind of example? What do we do with this text? What do we do with this story? And my recommendation is, not my recommendation, is to actually go to the words of our Heavenly Father when He explains to the people in that setting what they're supposed to do. The Father says, "This is My Son, whom I love. With Him I am well pleased. Listen to Him." So the bottom line of the message and the bottom line of really the whole life of Elijah is to listen to Him, to listen to the God that we serve, to listen to the Jesus of the Scriptures, to listen to the one who wants to bring all wisdom and guidance, the one who is the real God, the one who will actually answer when you call out to Him.
[23:14] The problem is this is really simple to say, fits on the screen, isn't really wildly different than what you might have expected a preacher would say on a Sunday in July of 2026. But it's very hard to actually pull off. And maybe very hard is not the way to say it. It's challenging to lots of us, and I don't want to put this on you, but for me, I think about this when I think about this. I think about listening, and that listening can be a challenge sometimes. So you can be in the same room as somebody. So let's just pretend, allegedly, that I'm in the same room as my wife. Her name's Chantelle. She's wonderful. We've been married for 13 years. She could be speaking, and I could be in the same room, and I can kind of hear her. But let's be clear, there's sometimes, and I'm not saying all the time, I'm just saying sometimes she'll say things and she's confident she said them, and I'm just not so sure.
[24:13] And I think the problem is, at least what she has said the problem is, is that I may not be listening. And I'm just saying sometimes, not all the time. But listening is a little bit challenging, only because it requires action. It's not a passive kind of thing. So you're in the space you should be. This is a wonderful thing. You showed up at church on a Sunday in July. It's kind of cold, but it's been a nice weekend. So points to you guys, way to go. If you're listening online, way to go. Good job. Thumbs up. Being in the presence of the Lord, as good as it is, still requires you to take one step to listen to Him, to listen to Him in the same way that when you're in the room with somebody, they could be talking and it's easy, and especially these days, it's easy to be distracted. It's so easy to be distracted.
[25:10] And so to actually listen to Him requires attention and focus, intentionality. To step back and to pause and to recognize, where does Jesus speak? Well, He speaks so clearly from the Scriptures. We have His actual words. So He'll speak to you through that, and then you pause and you let those words wash over you, and as the Jewish folks know throughout the years, you want this text to roll through your life so that it not only speaks out loud to you as it's written, but then it starts to shape your understanding of the world around you. And so you're meditating on it and you're filling yourself with it and you're thinking about it and allowing the Lord to continue to speak to you because you are listening. And what happens now is that the distractions around us are not just challenging, but they're actually...
[25:59] Well, they're quite difficult. So in some of the other work that I do outside of this local church, I get a chance to be a part of training pastors and youth workers in our country. And so we have this project coming up, and I've met a new friend. Her name is Gretchen. And Gretchen, for many years, worked as this lead interviewer, podcaster for Microsoft around AI. And so we're doing this project with her, trying to understand what AI is doing to people and what our response should be as Christians. And she's so fascinating because she's been in this world. She's interviewed, legitimately, some of the most well-known, instrumental people in the world of AI, which is changing our world and our culture in so many ways. But then she's got this strong faith, and so she's this voice kind of in the wilderness.
[26:46] I'm like, "Gretchen, help me understand, what should we be doing as Christians?" And I know not everybody here is a Christian, but I'm just saying, what should we be doing? And she was so fascinating to listen to because for her, she's like, what is happening on our devices and with this technology is some of these folks believe that they're really creating almost like a deity that brings all knowledge and all intelligence to all people. She's like, "But the problem is, you and I both know the beginning of wisdom, the beginning of wisdom isn't in an AI model. The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord." And she's like, "My hope and my prayer is that the Christians today would be the kinds of people that would stand up once again..." And she said this without knowing what we've been preaching on here.
[27:40] But she said, "I wonder if the Christians of this day would stand up to the prophets of Baal and be the kinds of people that would point out where the true life and wisdom comes from. Because the control that people think that they can have with our current technology is going to lead them to the same destination that Baal led the people of Israel so many thousands of years ago." And so she says, she's like, "Listen, if we could just be the kinds of people that hear from the Lord, that we go to Him for wisdom, we go to Him for knowledge, we go to Him first before other things." You do a Google search, do an AI search of things, but when you're actually starting the process of wisdom and knowledge, would you start first and foremost by hearing from the Lord?
[28:28] Because whatever you feed will grow, and you should feed yourself with Him so that your love and knowledge and wisdom from Him would grow. So for you and for me, I don't know where your distraction comes from. I don't know what will steer you away from listening to Jesus. But I do know that if you would take time and ask the Lord to reveal it to you, He might show it. Before we pray for that, though, as we kind of do wrap up this series on the life of Elijah, the timing was wild, actually. So I launched the series with us, I preached from here four weeks ago, and then went on vacation and ended up in a museum.
[29:14] And we're almost out of the museum with our family, and I saw this book at the gift shop, "The Biblical Story" or something like that, in this museum. And so I was flipping through it and, God's providence, I guess, flipped to this page and was like, "Oh, Baal is in the building." They actually had a display of the idol that we've been talking about in this series. The Baal that Elijah, the prophets, Baal came up and they did, if you were here when Sam preached it, and Elijah's like, "Let's build two altars," and all the prophets of Baal created this big thing and nobody could light a match. And so then they prayed to Baal, and nothing happened, and then Elijah prayed to the Lord, and the whole thing caught. I'm like, "Baal is in the building." So I'm like, "Chantel, stay with the kids for a second. I got to go see it." And so I got a picture.
[30:02] So I want to show you what Baal looks like from the museum, legitimately. That's it. That's what somebody would have had in their home, an idol that they would put their hope and their trust and their faith in, that it would give them direction and control over their life. That's Baal. So I'm in there and I'm like, "Are you kind of disappointed in your showing on Mount Carmel? Are you kind of frustrated that it didn't really turn out the way you thought? And what did Baal say?" Nothing, because he's just a clay figurine. He's nothing. He's worthless. But the point is, as crazy as it is that somebody would put their hope, and their faith, and their trust, and their confidence in something like that, is that you and I are easily distracted, too.
[30:54] And before we would listen from the Lord, we would put our attention, and our time, and our trust, and our confidence in other things, and our souls hang in the balance. Friends, if we would honestly allow the Lord to speak and reveal to us where we have been distracted, we could be the kinds of people that will actually hear from Him. And that's the hope from this whole conversation about Elijah. That's Elijah's message. It's the living God. Don't give your life to the dead idols that aren't actually real and won't actually lead you to life. Don't put your faith and your hope in the things that will lead you astray. Put your faith, and your hope, and your trust in the Lord. But that message is challenging for all time and at all moments of your week and your day because we are easily distracted people. We're not any different than those of old that would easily be wanderers.
[31:57] You and I wander really, really easy. And so I want to pray for you, and I want to pray for me, that when we look for wisdom, that we would look to the source that actually will provide it, the words of Jesus. That we would actually look to the place that can provide us the answers, and the direction, and the wisdom that we so desperately need for all things, and that He would provide it for us. Let me pray. Heavenly Father, easy words to say out loud, incredibly difficult to actually live, because I know that in this room, the distractions are immense, and the distractions are conniving, and in these days, the distractions have billions and even trillions of dollars attached to them trying to pull us away and pull us into places and spaces that don't even seem awful or bad. And I'm sure even in the moments in Elijah's life where he was convincing people to turn their eyes back to the Lord, it didn't seem so bad to set up a clay figurine just in case.
[33:03] And Lord, in these moments, would You be the one with Your Spirit's power that would reveal to us where we so easily get distracted? And would we listen to You before we listen to any other voice? Would Your word be the place that we go to? Because You've preserved these words for us, Lord, would we go to them? Would we go to them first, and will we go to them often? Will we go to them so that You could speak? Because, Lord, Your servants, we're listening. I pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.