• Paul Harrison

1 Kings 17:1; 18:1-2a, 17-24, 36-40

Elijah is surely one of the most striking characters to figure in the Bible story. He
strides on to the stage unannounced, a man of solitary grandeur and sensational impact,
stirring up a heap of dramatic action as though he were a whirlwind – and in a whirlwind
he is swept off the stage into heaven. And there is a sort of granite strength in the man.
To quote Alexander Whyte, "There was a great mass of manhood in Elijah."

The man was great because his task was great; he moulded big issues, and to understand
the man and his message, we must understand those issues. A grasp of the background will
help us appreciate the battle he had to fight.

THE ISSUE THEN

It had been brewing a long time – something like 400 years in fact, since the days of
Moses. Those days had been the formative period of Israel’s faith. After their
deliverance from Egypt and during the forty years that followed in the Sinai Peninsula,
they had been cut off from the rest of the world. In those desert years God had had them
to Himself and, through the man Moses, had moulded their faith. The experience had been
intense, like living in a heated crucible (in a spiritual as well as in a physical sense
in the searing heat of that arid region!).

Yahweh, Moses’ God, became their God. His power was limitless, His holiness
awesome, His guidance unerring. He was real; He was tremendous; He was the living God.
With fierce sincerity they entered into a covenant with Yahweh to be His People. When they
stood on the banks of the River Jordan, ready for conquest in the land God had promised
them they were a strong and united people, sure of their God. The loose assembly of
rambling gypsies had become a nation with a confident religion.

But all their experience had been in the desert. Save for Joshua there was not a man,
woman or child among them who had known any sort of life but desert life.

Then they launched into Canaan, and when the campaign of conquest was over they were at
last in possession of a land they could call their own. But in the process they had to
come to grips with the most momentous change in their whole way of life. They had to learn
agriculture … fast; even to remain alive they had to learn to work the soil. Nothing in
their experience had equipped them for this. In the desert their only concern with the
soil had been in what direction to cross it; now they had to cultivate it. It called for a
drastic change in their whole way of life, totally strange and altogether bewildering.

None of that generation had any experience of ploughing, harrowing, sowing or
harvesting; neither had any previous generation during their slavery in Egypt, save
perhaps for small vegetable gardens. To take but one example, the cultivation of the vine
is not learned in a day, or even in a year. The grape vine must be knowledgeably nurtured
for a number of years before it produces its first fruitage. If we can imagine the
bewilderment of an African pygmy transplanted overnight from his tree-house in the forest
into a modern factory producing electronic equipment, say, and told to run it, we can
imagine the sort of bewilderment the Israelites felt as they faced the daunting prospect
of having to make good in these totally new conditions. Their need of knowledge and new
skills was drastic and urgent.

Where to get it? From the residents of the land they had conquered, of course. But that
produced a crisis in their religion. For already there were other gods in residence in
Canaan, in its fields and vineyards – gods whose special line of business was fertility.
These gods were the Baals, who, it was believed, controlled the seasons and the weather
and the productivity of crops and herds. The Canaanites, whom the Hebrews overran, had
survived for centuries here in that working belief. Suddenly it seemed to the Hebrews that
their own God, Yahweh, was irrelevant here. He was a mountain god, a desert god, a war
god, locked up in the desert they had left behind. What use was such a God here?

The great leap of faith required if they were to believe in Him as a soil god also was
too much for them; and they failed to make it. It was the Baals, not Yahweh, who knew the
ropes in this new and demanding situation. And so they shifted their faith in Yahweh to
faith in the Baals … uneasily to be sure, but shift it they did.

And in the process they adopted the rituals that were held to be vital if your
invocation of the Baals’ powers over nature was to be effective. Chief among those
rituals was an annual festival at which a man and a woman were chosen to represent the
Baal and his consort. Their union, publicly consummated, was believed to bring about, by
sympathetic magic, the union of the god and goddess they represented, and so promote
fertility in all the crops and herds – and indeed the human families – throughout the
land. The festival was celebrated with lavish drinking and wild licence. The Bible makes
many references to the temple prostitution which was instituted for the purpose. An orgy
was the religious thing to do.

In turning to the Baals, the Hebrews turned to all this. And with the passage of time
of course, the lofty religion they had received through Moses degenerated. Their
consciences were too troubled to allow them to abandon Yahweh altogether; had He not
delivered them from Egypt and given them the land? So they compromised by persuading
themselves that Yahweh was their special Baal. They ‘baalised’ him so to speak,
and as time passed the differences there had once been between the God of Moses and the
gods they now worshiped under His name had all but disappeared.

By the time of Elijah this had been going on for almost 400 years. Not uniformly, of
course; religion had reached a notable high point in David’s day. But he was long
since dead; the kingdom had split in two, north and south, since then. The northern
kingdom, whose religion lost its anchorage to Jerusalem in the south, degenerated the
most; and its religion had been compromised even further by political factors. Its kings
had sought to make themselves politically strong by making marriage alliances with their
powerful neighbour nations (a wretched trend that Solomon had established).

It is here that king Ahab and his ‘femme fatale,’ Jezebel, came into the
picture. For this Phoenician Princess, who became Israel’s queen, brought with her
both her worship of the Tyrian Baal, and her drastic ideas of monarchy. She was a
passionate and determined woman, as passionate and determined in her religion as Elijah
was in his. In Jezebel’s mind, a king must be a despot with absolute power over every
citizen’s life, or he was no king at all. And her god must be the people’s god,
or she was not queen in Israel. And to make her position clear, she systematically
slaughtered every priest of Yahweh in the land save for the hundred whom brave Obadiah had
hidden away. The effect on the minds of the people was to feel that if Yahweh was not
strong enough in Israel to protect His priests from this Jezebel and her god, then he was
no god at all.

Gone was the people’s conviction in Yahweh’s power; gone was the strength of
the covenant with Him they had inherited; gone was their awe of him; and gone was the
wholesomeness that had characterised their life in former days. The burning religious
faith that Moses had once lit in the breasts of Hebrew people had guttered like a
windswept candle, and almost it had gone out.

This was the situation into which Elijah swept. Into this apparently hopeless ruin God
flung His champion.

And at once we may see the simply enormous significance of the fact that the first
announcement Elijah made was that for three years there would be neither dew nor rain in
Israel, by order of Yahweh! It was a challenge of the greatest daring, for it meant that
Baal was being challenged in the one area where he was believed to be supreme. If Yahweh,
the God of Moses, controlled the rains, then Baal was finished. Yahweh’s, not
Baal’s, was the power to make fruitful the crops and herds in the land. The
demonstration of Yahweh’s reality and power was not complete of course until it was
in His Name too that the drought was finally broken. It was vital that when this final
demonstration was given it should be thoroughly convincing and unchallengeable.

Hence the spectacular drama of the climax to it all on Mt. Carmel. The care with which
Elijah set the stage, his mockery of the Baals and all the rest did not mean simply that
he had a flare for the theatrical. In its every detail the event was designed to reveal
Yahweh in His true nature, as God of all the earth. It was on Yahweh’s rebuilt altar
the bull must be laid; it was by the same fire that had been the mark of His presence on
Mt. Sinai where the Law was given that He must be known; it must be by the invocation of
His Name that the rain clouds came; and among a people with their frame of mind, it was
only by the slaughter of Baal’s prophets, undefended by their false deity, that the
people could be persuaded that all his vaunted power was an empty thing.

In the sequel to the story, Naboth’s sturdy resistance to King Ahab’s
criminal seizure of his vineyard supplied evidence of a reviving commitment to God in the
land among its ordinary citizens. And when God withheld His threatened judgement in
response to Ahab’s repentance, the faith of Moses that the God of all the earth is a
forgiving God was vindicated.

Elijah’s triumph was resounding, and whilst in the long years that followed the
people fell short of the mark, often, yet never again did the knowledge of God that had
been given through Moses come so near to being lost off the face of the earth. Little
though we may know it, we owe a real measure of the faith in God by which we live to
Elijah, and what God accomplished through his faith and obedience.

That faith was that God is GOD over all the world. "The earth is the Lord’s,
with all its fullness, and all who dwell in it." (Psalm 24:1)

This is God’s earth; land rights in it belong as of right neither to the
aboriginals nor to any white Australian government, but to God. The present land rights
issue in Australia can have no just settlement until both sides to the dispute come humbly
before the face of God and ask: "What wilt Thou have us to do with Thy land?"
This earth was made for the fulfilment of God’s purposes, not ours. And at the end of
the day, no other purpose for the world and our life in it but God’s, will be
fulfilled in it. Inasmuch as our life runs foul of God’s intention for us, we run
toward final ruin.

THE ISSUE NOW

But there is an even more direct relevance to our life in this twentieth century in the
issue with which Elijah confronted Israel, for we face a crisis of faith which is
strikingly similar to theirs. We, like them, have been launched into a new and bewildering
world, and like them, we are faced with a choice of gods.

The anthropologists tell us that the two great turning points in the whole of
mankind’s long history have been first, the rise of agriculture, and second the rise
of industry and technology. These two things in their turn have fundamentally changed the
whole framework of life on this planet.

Agriculture

Agriculture was the first. The first men were nomads. They wandered in tribes from
hunting ground to hunting ground, from watering place to watering place; they gathered
food, so they could never build permanent dwellings. Life never progressed beyond open
fires, and tents or caves.

Humanity took a huge leap forward when it learned to tame the soil, when it ceased to
gather food and learned to grow it. (This transition is noted in the Bible in the story of
Babel, Genesis 11:2.) It ceased to wander then, and learned to settle. Now the possibility
of wealth and trade and building opened up. The birth of agriculture saw the rise of
civilisation. All the great civilisations in the past have risen from the soil.

Now when Israel emerged out of the desert into the land of Canaan, by the call of God,
be it noted, she recapitulated this momentous transition in her own history. She made the
significant change from a nomadic to an agricultural way of life.

We have seen what a huge challenge to the faith of Israel’s people this presented.
Faced with the bewilderment of so great a change, they yielded to the persuasive notion
that they needed new gods to guide them, gods who knew the ropes in this strange new world
of agriculture. So they left behind, where they thought He belonged, their God of
waterholes and manna and fiery mountains, and turned to the gods of corn and oil and wine
– to the agricultural deities, the Baals.

And it took them centuries to realise the magnitude of that dreadful blunder. Hosea had
to tell them, as though it were news, that it was Yahweh, the God of Moses, Who gave them
the grain, the wine and the oil, whose wealth they devoted to the Baals! (Hosea 2:8)
Isaiah cried out to them that all the agricultural know-how they had acquired was not the
Baals’, but Yahweh’s wisdom: "Does he who ploughs for sowing plough
continually? Does he continually open and harrow his ground? When he has levelled its
surface, does he not scatter dill, sow cummin, and put in wheat in rows and barley in its
proper place, and spelt as the border? For he is instructed aright; his God teaches him.
Dill is not threshed with a threshing sledge, nor is a cart wheel rolled over cummin; but
dill is beaten out with a stick, and cummin with a rod. Does one crush bread grain? No, he
does not thresh it for ever; when he drives his cart wheel over it with his horses, he
does not crush it. This also comes from Yahweh of hosts; he is wonderful in counsel, and
excellent in wisdom." (Isaiah 28:23-29)

As a nation they never learned; and as a nation they lost their way.

Industry and Technology

Now we today are in the throes of the second great transition in human history, the
change from agriculture to industry and technology. We are entering a whole new world of
swiftly burgeoning technology, and in the process we are having to come to grips with the
most momentous change in our whole way of life. Released from their age-long servitude to
the soil, the masses are entering upon a strange new world of electronics and
communications and molecular biology and atomic power and computer technology and space
exploration, and all the rest – the technological revolution of our times. It is a world
into which God is leading us as surely as He led the Hebrews out of the desert into
Canaan.

But in the realm of faith we have lost our nerve the same way they did. We are making
the same fundamental blunder they made. Confronted with this new and bewildering world,
calling for knowledge and know-how of which our fathers knew nothing, we have fallen for
the same huge and stupid lie: that the faith of our fathers is no match for this new and
demanding situation, and we must have new gods to guide us. Not God – the God of Moses and
the Father of Jesus – but science has become the guiding authority, the reliable
providence for mankind in the 20th Century. Our world is giving the same stupid answer
Israel gave almost 3,000 years ago. We have learned nothing! Is He not the God of science
as well as of the soil?

We may sum up what we have been saying in the form of an equation:

From the desert, the Israelites came into the country;

From being gypsies, they became farmers;

From the worship of Yahweh, they turned to the Baals.

That was the pattern then. Look at the pattern now.

From the country, we have moved to industry and technology;

From being farmers, we have become manufacturers and technicians;

From the worship of the God of our fathers, we have turned to … what?

We are too clever to worship idols of wood and stone again. So what are we putting in
the place of God?

Some, incredibly, are turning literally to the Baals again, and worshipping sex! Others
are worshipping science and technology – some because they earnestly believe there is no
other source of help, some because they are in honest dread of the destruction it can
unleash upon us. Others worship sheer power so they can gain control of the awesome
future. They worship man himself. "Glory to man in the highest, for man is the Master
of Things!" In fact it is themselves they deify, for it is not into another’s
hands they reckon to give the reigns of history but into their own.

But whose world is this upon whose long hidden secrets we are stumbling? Whose wisdom
can guide us in it, if not His Who made it all? God – the God of Moses, the God of Elijah,
the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ – He it is, and no other, Who is the God of
atomic power and electronics and molecular biology as well as of corn and oil and wine and
water-holes and manna and fiery mountains.

If Elijah were to come to earth again, he would have no other challenge than he gave to
Israel in Canaan: "How long will you go limping between two opinions? If the Lord be
God – then follow Him. But if sex, or science or self be God, then follow it."

Let God be God!

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permission, nor may it be preached without acknowledgment!)