THE HOLY PROPHET ELIJAH – ILINDAN

Prophets had nothing in common with sorcerers. They did not live by fortune-telling and fortune-telling. These were sages, people’s teachers, as they would say today — social and political workers. They created and preached a higher religious conception based on the personal moral responsibility of man before God. The prophets emphasized the ethical values of religion, in which ritual and ceremony are not important, and whose essence is that people should be righteous and God-fearing in their souls. Through their work, the prophets paved the way for the birth of Christianity. Seer of God, miracle worker, zealot of the faith of God, St. Ilija was born from the tribe of Aaron from the city of Tesvit, which is why he was nicknamed the Tesvician. When Elijah was born, his father Savach saw the angels of God around the child, how they wrapped the child in fire and gave him the flame to eat. That would be a foreshadowing of Elijah’s fiery character and his divine power of fire. He spent all his youth in meditation and prayer, often retreating to the desert to think and pray in silence. At that time, the Jewish empire was divided into two unequal parts: the kingdom of Judah, including only two tribes, Judah and Benjamin, with the capital in Jerusalem, and the kingdom of Israel, including the other 10 tribes with the capital in Samaria. The first empire was ruled by the descendants of Solomon, and the second by the descendants of Jeroboam, Solomon’s servants. Prophet Elijah had the biggest conflict with Israel’s king Ahab and his wicked wife Jezebel. Because these worshiped idols and turned the people away from serving the only and living God. At the same time, Jezebel, as a Syrian woman, persuaded her husband to build a temple to the Syrian God Baal, and appointed many priests to serve that false god. Elijah proved the power and authority of God with great miracles: he closed the sky, and it did not rain for three years and six months; let down fire from heaven and burn the sacrifice to your God, until the priests of Baal could not do it; brought down rain from the sky with his prayer; he miraculously multiplied flour and oil in the widow’s house in Sarepta, and resurrected her dead son; he prophesied to Ahab that the dogs would lick his blood, and to Jezebel, that the dogs would eat it, which happened; and he performed many other miracles and prophesied events. On Horiv, they talked with God and heard the voice of God in a quiet, bright breeze. Before his death, he took Elisha and designated him as his successor in the prophetic calling; with his cloak he cut the water in the Jordan: and at last he was taken up into heaven in a chariot of fire with horses of fire. On Tabor, together with Moses, he appeared to our Lord Jesus Christ. Before the end of the world, Elijah will appear again, to suppress the power of the Antichrist.

In Serbia, St. Ilija was the glory of airmen, nationalized by decree from 1924. However, after the collapse of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the coming of the communists to power, the glory stopped being respected. In 1992, St. Elijah again became the glory of the airmen. This was also the glory of the Auto-Command, taxi drivers, taxi drivers, carriage drivers and the Association of Electrical Mechanics.