The Story of Elijah, chapter 4 – 08/11/2024

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Morning Talk: chuck smith jr.

And Elijah came near to all the people and said,
“How long will you go limping
between two different opinions?
If the LORD is God, follow him;
but if Baal is God, follow him.”
And the people
did not answer him a word 1 Kings 18:21

There must have been court officials who wished they could restrain King Ahab’s poor decisions and thoughtless actions. But those with enough skill in diplomacy to hold a position in the royal court also had enough sense to value their lives. Ahab was too full of himself to take advise from anyone else, let alone, take orders.
However, there was that one exception.
From the time Elijah first set foot in Israel, the king willingly listened to him and did as he was told. Perhaps Ahab believed there was more that a slight possibility Elijah’s words came straight from the God of Israel. Perhaps he respected Elijah for this reason. Or, maybe Ahab was afraid of Elijah. Anyway, when the prophet told him to assemble all the people of Israel, and summon the 450 prophets of Baal, the king obeyed him.

What was Elijah planning and preparing to do? There was a critical controversy to be settled for the sake of the nation. According to Elijah, King Ahab had abandoned the ways of Yehovah to devote himself and the nation to the religion of Baal. So Yehovah’s prophet proposed a contest between himself and the Baal prophets. Now, right off, those don’t look like good odds–450 to one! However, if someone were to point that out to Elijah, he would have either sneered or smiled, depending on his mood.“I’m not just one,” he’d say. “I’m not alone.” That changes the odds. Now it’s two against hundreds. But Elijah saw the odds through a different lens; One against zero. Yehovah was the one true God, while Baal was a product of pagan imagination.

Gradually the vast crowd gathered at the foot of Mount Carmel or on one of its slopes. It was either Elijah’s brilliance or the hand of God leading him, to choose Mount Carmel as the staging area for the contest. Gently rising from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, the coastal range reaches a height of approximately 1700 feet, and continues southwest for fifteen miles. Other than the steep cliffs on its northeast face, Mount Carmel has always been luxuriant with vegetation. The Kishon River flowed at its base, and up above was a well-known spring. In fact, centuries later King Herod would construct a Roman Aqueduct to carry water from Mount Carmel to the port he created ten miles south in Caesarea.
One other feature of Carmel that deserves attention, is that it had always been considered a sacred site, even long before Israel arrived in the land. At some unknown time, an altar to Yehovah had been constructed there.

Elijah climbed one of the higher slopes to a flat area, where the large crowd could easily see him from below. Once the 450 prophets of Baal were in place opposite Elijah, he faced the people and projecting his voice so all could hear, he asked them, “How long will you go hopping back and forth between two notions? Two different beliefs? If Yehovah is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.” There it was; he laid the challenge out before them. For a moment, Elijah’s question lingered in the air. Then silence. There was no response from the people.
There may have been some folks among the crowd who had been asking the same question. But if that were so, they lived in a time when speaking out about religious controversies was dangerous. Queen Jezebel’s determination to violently eradicate the religion of Yehovah and replace it with her own gods, was common knowledge. Another possible reason for their silence, is they may not have realized they had been jumping from one god to the other. Or maybe it had not occurred to them that they could not have more than one god–every other nation around them had several gods. Then there was the philosophical problem, that they had no criteria for evaluating the authenticity of the gods. Perhaps to them it made sense to choose a deity whose reward for their service was to give them what they wanted.
At any rate, their silence was not empty. Many thoughts and images came to mind. Foremost was their curiosity. What was Elijah’s message? What would he propose?

Raising his voice again, Elijah announced, “I am the last of Yehovah’s prophets, but Baal’s prophets number in the hundreds. So here is what we’ll do. Provide us with two bulls, and I will give them first choice. They will take their bull, cut it in pieces and place it on their altar, but–they cannot set fire to the wood. I’ll take the other bull and do the same, and not set fire to it. Then all of you and your prophets can call on your god, and I will call on the name of Yehovah, and the God that answers by fire–well then, that is the true God.”
This time, the people broke their silence. It was unanimous. They all shouted, “That’s a good plan!”

Elijah gave the other team two advantages: they had first choice of the bull they would use (perhaps one looked more flammable than the other), and, because there were so many of them, they could go first. “Set up your sacrifice,” he told them, “and call on the name of your god, but don’t put your offering on fire!”
It was still morning when the 450 prophets began crying out to Baal, begging him to answer. But by noon, there was not so much as a whisper in response to their prayers.
Previously, when Elijah asked why the people were “hopping” from one belief to another, he used the word metaphorically. But it was not a metaphor, when by noon the Baal prophets were getting desperate and they began hopping–not back and forth, but round and round, and up and down on their altar.
At this point, it is tempting to think Elijah was enjoying himself, watching the others getting more desperate by the hour. He may have had a mean sense of humor too. But then again, these prophets were enemies of God and brought great harm to God’s people. At any rate, Elijah began to taunt them.
“You need to cry louder,” he teased. “Baal is a god and you must get his attention. Maybe he’s deep in thought, or occupied with something else, or on an epic journey, or maybe he’s just taking a nap. You need to wake him up!”
The Hebrew Scriptures are filled with anthropomorphisms–that is, they frequently refer to God with images that suggest a human form. For instance, they speak of God’s hands, his eyes, or him being seated on a throne. These are ways in which we try to understand something about God using terms that make sense to us. It is understood that God transcends all of these descriptions, but we are only human and human language is the best we have to say anything meaningful about God.
However, Elijah’s jesting at Baal’s prophets goes beyond any human conception that Israel would ever use of their God; suggestions that could be construed as blasphemy. In other words, he could make fun of Baal in ways he would never refer to Yehovah. This is not mere disrespect of their religion, he was making a point. Baal was the invention of religious minds, Yehovah was known by his self-revelation to Israel.
Elijah’s joking triggered them into a frenzy. They cried louder, and resorted to more serious rituals, cutting themselves with weapons until they were covered in blood. They continued into the afternoon, but for all their ranting and raving . . . nothing. No voice from the sky, no response, no one paid any attention.
Their religious frenzy appears bizarre to us, but it was common practice among the pagan religions of that time. Priests and prophets would engage in all sorts of odd rituals to evoke a special state of consciousness. Thousands of years later, a Hebrew scholar would explain, “There are two fundamental types of ecstasy: the wild and fervid type, which is a state of frenzy arising from overstimulation and emotional tension; and the sober or contemplative type, which is a rapture of the soul in a state of complete calmness, enabling a person to rise beyond the confines of consciousness. The motivation for ecstasy lies in the desire for communion with higher being which transcends the grasp of man in his normal condition. It seems that the type of ecstasy one strives for is determined by one’s conception of the character of such a being. If the god is thought of as a sensuous being, fervid ecstasy would be a way of communion.” [Abraham Heschel]

Evening was approaching, and Baal’s prophets had their chance. Now it was Elijah’s turn. He called to the people, “Come closer to me,” and while they were moving toward him, he began repairing the altar of Yehovah that had been vandalized. He rebuilt it with twelve stones–one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel. This was emblematic of returning to Israel’s roots, which were deep in Yehovah their God. It recalled a time when the word of Yehovah came to Jacob and changed his name to “Israel.” So as he repaired the altar, he did it thoughtfully in the name of Yehovah.
The altar was complete, but Elijah wasn’t finished. He dug a small trench around it, then sacrificed the bull, arranging its parts on the wood of the altar. Then he told several bystanders, “Fill four jars with water and bring it here. Now I want you to pour it over the offering, making sure it covers the wood as well.” After they did this, he told them, “Do it again.” He had them pour water over the sacrifice three times in all, so that it ran down the altar and filled the trench. Remember, water was in short supply throughout Israel. Elijah was making a point.

There have been many reports of God working miracles in answer to prayer, which is, of course, wonderful. However, in some of those stories it sounds like those praying for a miracle made it rather easy for God. For instance, the miracle took place at night, so no one was certain about what they saw. Or a group of twenty Christians ordered a box of chicken that usually comes with only ten pieces, but fed the entire group. Only a few years ago, an Israeli tour guide made Elijah’s miracle incredibly easy. He pointed out that much of Mount Carmel consists of limestone. So, clever as Elijah was, when he poured water on the altar, it raised a cloud of limestone dust, which the people mistook for smoke. I suppose the miracle was finding a lot of people dumb enough they couldn’t distinguish smoke from dust.
God doesn’t need us covering for him. When Paul gave testimony at his trial, he outlined the message he had delivered in many different cities. When he came to Jesus’ resurrection, one of the judges interrupted him, and told him that he was out of his mind, that all of his study and research had driven him mad. Paul answered him, “I am not out of my mind, what I’m saying is true and rational. King Agrippa can confirm this, for I’m certain that none of these things has escaped his notice, for this has not been done in a corner”. What a wonderful line! No honest Christian service for God has to be hidden in some corner where it cannot be observed and proven true or false.

Elijah didn’t make this miracle “easy”–although, for God nothing is difficult. But there was no need for Elijah to make the miracle more complicated either. He felt it necessary to demonstrate Yahweh’s superiority over all counterfeits.
Standing in the sacred space around the altar, approaching a sacred time of day, when the evening offering was to be made, Elijah prayed.
“O Yehovah, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, prove now that you are the God of Israel and that I am your servant and have done all this at your command. Answer me, Yehovah, answer me, so that this people will know that you, Yehovah, are God and that you are bringing them back to yourself.”
And then, fire fell from the sky. The heat was so intense it consumed the offering, the wood, the stones–even the dust–, and vaporized the water in the trench. Immediately the people went to their knees chanting, “Yehovah, he is God! Yehovah, he is God!” Elijah then commanded the people, “Don’t let these false prophets escape!” So the crowd chased them down, and by the Kishon brook they were executed.

What do we hear, when Elijah asks,
“How long will you put off making your most important decision regarding God?”
– Do we realize we are given a responsibility,
• and at the same time, a powerful gift?
• the gift of choice
– We’ve made many choices in our lives,
• but not always with the awareness that we were making a choice,
• or the awareness that we’re now living with the results of the choices we’ve made
– We only experience the power of choosing–rather than acting out of habit–
• when we’re conscious of making a choice
• and that the choice we make will affect what happens next or later on

We always have a choice
– that doesn’t mean we choose everything that happens to us
• but when unexpected and unwanted things come our way,
◦ we can choose our response to them
• I’m learning, I can choose what kind of attitude I’ll have whenever,
◦ I must do chores I don’t want to do, or fix things I don’t feel like fixing

There will always be a variety of gods competing for our service
– like Israel, we can get stuck jumping from one god to another
• so the call comes repeatedly:
◦ Moses, “I’ve set before you life and death, blessing . . . . Therefore choose life . . . (De. 30:19-20)
◦ Joshua, “. . . choose today whom you will serve . . .” (Jos. 24:14-16)
• wanting to spare us from wrong choices,
◦ Jesus warned us,
“No one can serve two master, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money” (Mt. 6:24)
– near the end of our lives, as we approach death
• is the wrong time, to realize that we have made the wrong choice

I put off a lot of things, thinking, “Well, there’s always tomorrow”
– but some decisions are too big to put off
• and a day comes when there isn’t a tomorrow
◦ and then it’s too late to choose
◦ then I can only regret the choices I didn’t make when I had the chance

This story reports the miracle that made Elijah famous
The heart of it is not that Yahweh proved himself to be Israel’s true God,
that’s the plot
The heart of the story, is the people of Israel had to make a choice
And where they went from there, and where they would finally wind up,
depended on the choices they made
That’s the central message – and it is our lesson for today