1 KINGS 18: 17-40 The Message Translation
“Rotten Politicians”
Today we look at the prophet Elijah and his witness to Israel during the reign of King Ahab and his wife Jezebel, both of whom fostered and encouraged the worship of idols throughout Israel. They were rotten politicians, using their God-given powers only to increase their own wealth and social status.
King Ahab definitely should have known better than to tolerate idolatry, but he was a politician more than a man of God. His marriage to Jezebel was a political one, tying together the Phoenicians and Israelites in peace and cooperation. It’s not unlikely that Jezebel herself served as the chief priestess of the Temple of Baal they set up in Samaria, because it was customary that a royal female serve as high priestess.
Ahab and Jezebel established idol worship from one end of Israel to the other. The shrines to Baal and Asherah showed everyone how open and broad-minded Israel had now become. Israel was to be progressive rather than parochial or provincial—open-minded and tolerant rather than rigid and inflexible when it comes to religion. Israel would now become cosmopolitan and multi-cultural, and the popularity of Ahab and Jezebel climbed high. Their approval ratings among their own people and foreigners alike polled at 80%, or something like that.
Baal was the storm god—the god of thunder, wind, rain, and fertility—things very much in demand by all Israelites. They depended upon regular wind and rain for agriculture. Baal was the sky-father-god, and worshipping Baal promised to bring wind, rain, and fertile crops.
Asherah—also known as Ashtarte or Ishtar—was goddess of war and fertility—two more basic values of the people. She was the earth-mother-goddess, and her bodily cycles as earth-mother produced the seasons and cycles of the agricultural year.
All pagan worship has some form of Baal and Asherah working: the sky father and the earth mother, with a variety of names depending on the culture of origin, yet all very similar—all focused on the idea of the gods providing the people with what they most want and need to survive: food, fertility, and protection.
These two pagan gods had their idols set up and worshipped throughout Israel, and the people understood that these two were the providers of everything they needed. For Israel, worshipping Ba’al and Asherah had become the thing to do—led by their King, Ahab, their and pseudo-queen, Jezebel. The people had forgotten about the one, true God—the Lord who provided for them, who delivered them from slavery, and led them through the wilderness—even into the land they now occupied.
So The Lord sends them Elijah.
Elijah
Elijah is not a prophet among prophets; he is the greatest of the Old Testament prophets with the most important message, which, as we said last week, can be boiled down to two lines: 1. Stop it with the idols! and 2. Worship The LORD only.
Elijah works a dozen miracles, including raising a widow’s son from death, and parting the waters of the Jordan River, not unlike Moses, and crosses over on dry ground. It is Elijah who appears with Moses and Jesus at the Transfiguration. As such, the very name Elijah evokes all the prophets—the spirit of all legitimate prophecy.
Elijah doesn’t die, but is taken up to Heaven in a chariot of fire and he drops his mantle down to his successor Elisha on his way up. Jewish literature came to expect Elijah to return prior to the coming of the Messiah as well. The celebration of Passover leaves an empty seat at the table for Elijah—to welcome his arrival prior to the Messiah—and there is an “Elijah’s seat” left vacant at every Bris or Jewish circumcision. And during Jesus’ crucifixion, when he cries out Psalm 22: “Eli, Eli, lema sebachtani!” the people think he’s calling for Elijah—whose name in Hebrew, is pronounced El-lee-yah, which means, “My God is Yah” or Yahweh.
Elijah’s prophecies are all based on a simple theme [I paraphrase]: Oh Israel, remember the Lord your God and return to worshipping Him and Him alone. Turn away from the idols who can do nothing for you and trust in the Lord who does all things for you.
Now Ahab and Jezebel hate Elijah. His weird messages undermine the new society they are trying to build and bring about. Jezebel and Ahab were elites, elitists. They had all the money and political clout, and the people of Israel surrounded and adored them and followed their lead. They were making Israel great again with their grand campaign of progressivist reforms. And here was this Elijah—a nobody, socially-speaking—a commoner, an old, fundamentalist wacko with the nerve to try to turn the masses against their lawful king. Elites always seek to silence the true prophets.
The culmination of Elijah’s constant prophesying against idolatry comes to a head in the great contest on Mt. Carmel. Elijah knew that Israel needed a decisive moment and a clear revelation from God. And through Elijah, Israel gets both.
The Contest
So Elijah calls out Ahab and Jezebel and throws down the gauntlet. We’ll have it out—a contest to see exactly who is God and who can actually provide. Ahab has the nerve to call Elijah the “troubler of Israel.” Yes, truth-tellers are often trouble, especially for deflating the hypocrisies of the elites. “You’re the trouble!” says Elijah to Ahab. The contest is planned, and as the people gather on the sun-drenched slopes of Mt. Carmel, Elijah addresses them as God’s people, whom God loves and wishes to redeem.
“How long will you waffle between two religions? If The Lord be God, then follow Him, but if Baal be God, then follow Him. Choose this day whom you shall serve.”
450 prophets of Baal—all Ivy League graduates and daily commentators on the ancient cable news shows—set up their altar and gored their ox. They beg the skies, “Baal, answer us, please!” but to no avail. What a spectacle it must have been—hundreds of false prophets begging, dancing, pleading, and falling all overthemselves just to get Baal to do so much as clear his throat. But nothing.
And Elijah raises the stakes; he starts making fun of them. “Cry louder, he may hear you yet. Does Baal have call waiting? Perhaps he’s on another call. Ah, don’t start getting tired now! It’s only been 6 hours--come on, wake him up, you slackers! Oh, I know—he must be in the bathroom—give him another 15 minutes or so, but by all means, cry louder!”
The prophets of Baal have grown hoarse. In their desperation, they jump up and down on the altar and cut themselves with knives, thinking perhaps the sight of their own blood flowing might rouse the deaf god to attention. I wouldn’t put it past Elijah to have said during his taunt, “Maybe if you cut yourselves a little—maybe then Baal will respond—go ahead, I’d try it.” The spectacle of 450 prophets in an orgy of blood, self-abasement, and total desperation reaches the final buzzer with nothing but silence from the skies, not even a whisper of wind. “Okay, my turn,” says Elijah.
He rebuilds the altar with twelve stones representing the twelve tribes of Israel and puts his ox on top. He has a trench dug around the altar and then, like pushing all his chips into the pot, he drenches the sacrifices with water not one but three times, leaving the wood water-logged and the trench around the altar filled like a moat.
Everyone watches Elijah, and this is his greatest moment.
The Answer in Fire
The taunting is over. Elijah has to step up to the plate and put up or shut up. What he does is beautiful. He prays. He prays a very simple, modest, and short prayer. It’s incredibly brief, but very intense:
“O God, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, make it known right now that you are God in Israel, that I am your servant, and that I’m doing what I’m doing under your orders. Answer me, God; O answer me and reveal to this people that you are God, the true God, and that you are giving these people another chance at repentance.”
It’s a beautiful prayer and even a model for how every person should pray. He calls on God as the one who has revealed Himself through Abraham, Issac, and Jacob. Elijah doesn’t exalt himself as prophet, priest, or king, but presents himself humbly, as a servant—“your servant” he says to God. He prays that The Lord would reveal Himself decisively as a way of saving the people. There’s no drama, no crazy dancing, no cutting, and no waiting. For “immediately,” says the text, immediately fire (or lightning: same word) came down and consumed the sacrifice, the altar, and licked up the water in the trench. Five seconds after Elijah prays Amen, the entire scene is a smoking, steaming heap of ashes.
The result is the desired effect: repentance. The people fell on their faces and repented of having ever worshipped Baal or Asherah. They renounce paganism and its popularity and they turn back to the Lord God, who alone provides, who alone hears prayers, and who alone calls, rescues, and redeems His people.
“God is the true God!” they say, “God is the true God!”
Ignorance versus Hatred
There are those who follow false gods because they don’t know any better. They grew up in a land where pagan gods were the only ones proclaimed. This is innocence born of ignorance; the people can’t follow the Lord if they’ve never heard of Him. This is easily forgivable. The merely ignorant, once exposed to the truth of God, tend to turn to Him. Ignorance is good news because it is correctable and forgivable.
But what about Ahab and the people of Israel? They knew about God all along. They had known of God’s mighty acts and deeds and how they themselves benefitted from his providence. They knew who God is, but turned to idols nonetheless. Why? Because of Jezebel, or the popular crowds, or the demands of the ruling elites. To know the truth and not serve it is not ignorance; it is hatred. Hatred of God.
Hatred is knowing the truth but denying it, trading the truth of God for convenience, prestige, popularity, or political power. Those things are false gods every bit as much a Baal and Asherah. Elijah’s question to Israel is God’s question to you and me as well: Whom shall you serve? If the Lord be God, then follow Him, but if something else be God, follow that. To serve the Lord is salvation. To serve anything or anyone else is death and deserves no better.
The prophets of Baal are slaughtered. They chose to serve what is false and dead rather than the living God. You could say that all along, they were worshipping death instead of God.
The really sad thing is that neither Ahab nor Jezebel repented, but having been proven wrong, sought to kill Elijah for making it clear to everyone that they were phonies. Like the political elitists in any era, they vowed to silence those that make them look bad, even if that is the truth. Elijah flees for his life.
The Role of Repentance
If we think the heart of this story is God proving Himself to a handful of spectators, then we miss the bigger truth: which is that The Lord is a merciful God who seeks to redeem His people, even from idolatry and hatred of His name. That is the big message and it is marvelous to know that it is true.
God pursues His beloved sheep, even when they root for the enemy. The key factor for their salvation is God’s self-revelation. The second factor is their repentance. Repentance plays a leading role in this story. People will not believe the truth by seeing a miracle (or else Ahab—who was there—certainly would have repented). The miracle isn’t there to change the minds of non-believers. The miracle is there to call believers back onto the right path through repentance.
We can think of repentance as turning to God, but it is more often a re-turning to God. A pagan may turn to God, which is wonderful—that is conversion. When a believer falls away, or just falls into the service of anyone or anything other than God, that one is called to re-turn to the Lord. As the people of Israel were called to return and remember The Lord, so we—in repentance—are called to renounce every falsehood that may compete with our devotion to God.
When we repent, we return—we come home. Like the Prodigal Son, God sends His word and spirit to us in order that we “come to ourselves” and return home.
When we pray in humility (as Elijah did) and ask God to reveal Himself to us and draw us as His servants, something happens: lightning strikes and we see ourselves as misdirected, or distracted, or spiritually barking up the wrong tree—and we come to ourselves, and know the right thing is to return to the Lord, return to true faith, and to let the rest of the world with its lures and interests be—figuratively speaking—slayed like a bunch of false prophets.
Our loving Lord, through Elijah, calls to you and me this morning. What in our lives needs to be slain, abandoned, left behind? What do we need to turn away from as we return to our one, true home? What thoughts, interests, or desires seek to hold your and my attention and keep our gaze off of service to our Lord?
Well, this is the day to choose. Today—right now—let us invite the Holy Spirit to search our hearts and reveal us to ourselves in order that the Lord’s calling become crystal clear to our hearts. Brothers and sisters, it is right and good that in this season of Lent we ask ourselves whether we may may be serving any false gods. †