(Elijah #3/6)

• Paul Harrison

1 Kings 18:1, 17-37

In the name of Yahweh, the God of Moses, Elijah had proclaimed a three year drought.
Now the time had come to demonstrate that the power to bring rain again was Yahweh’s,
not the Baals’. Elijah’s hour of crisis is one of the most dramatic in the pages
of the Bible, matched, in the telling, by narrative language the equal of any to be found
in literature.

HOW IT HAPPENED

First, he confronted Ahab the king with an abrupt rebuke, and bade him summon Israel to
a trial of the gods on Mt. Carmel.

Mt. Carmel is the seaward facing bluff at the end of a range of mountains that pushes
up from the plains west of Nazareth and reaches to the Mediterranean coast. The modern
port of Haifa stands at its foot. The spot Elijah chose was a natural amphitheatre just a
little below the mountain’s crest, and hard by there was a spring that flows even
today, and has been known to flow through prolonged periods of drought. So much for those
critics of the Bible who ask scornfully where Elijah got his water from on a mountain top
after three years of drought.

It is worth noting too that from the foot of the mountain to the town of Jezreel the
soil of the plain is a soft loam without any stones in it, so it had been difficult in
those far-off days to build any sort of durable road over it. When the rains came, wheeled
traffic was brought to a standstill in the gummy mud. Hence Elijah’s urgent advice to
Ahab to get his chariots back to Jezreel quickly, lest the rain stop him.

What is of even greater interest is that Mt. Carmel, like Zarephath, did not at that
time lie within the territory of Israel at all, but in the southern tip of Jezebel’s
homeland, Phoenicia. By the Baal-worshipping Phoenicians it was held to be a sacred site,
"sacred," they said "above all mountains, and forbidden of access to the
vulgar." But here too, from former times, lay the ruins of a disused altar to Yahweh.

It was a brilliant inspiration that led Elijah to choose that site for a contest of the
gods. For here surely, if anywhere, Baal could be relied on to do his stuff. There is an
almost calculated recklessness in the way Elijah organised the match. He gave the opposing
team the advantage of playing on its home ground, packed the stands with its supporters,
let them have first innings, and gave them nearly all day to play it!

Picture the scene. On the one side, the ordered ranks of the prophets of Baal and the
mounting drama of their cultic rituals; the watching king with his besplendoured court;
and in the background the hushed crowds covering the slopes like a silent swarm. On the
other side, his only stage-prop the tumbled stones of a neglected altar symbolising
Israel’s derelict faith, the lonely figure of the prophet.

All the appearance of advantage lay with Baal – the prestige of the sacred mountain,
the splendour and pomp of the worldly state, the practised ritual of a prevailing ideology
backed up by vigorous propaganda and ruthless state enforcement, and the sheer weight of
numbers. On Elijah’s side lay nothing visible at all, his only weapon the testimony
to God that was on his lips.

As the day wore on, the frenzy of the prophets of Baal intensified, every savage hour
that passed witnessing to its futility until the afternoon sun shone out of an empty sky,
mocking their exhausted desperation.

Then out of that same empty sky in response to the prophet’s simple, brief and
humble prayer, there flashed the instant, answering stroke. Out of the invisible abode of
God, there came forth the deed, finished almost before it was seen, that witnessed to the
reality and immediacy of His presence. And, known only by His deed and His Word in the
prophet’s mouth, He was unseen still.

How sublime is the contrast between the frenzied futility of the day’s ravings by
the prophets of Baal, and the simple sufficiency of the earnest prayer of the prophet of
Yahweh!

Looking back on it all from our vantage point in the 20th century, we might be pardoned
for thinking that it was, after all, a small thing – a mere tug-of-war between two lords
spiritual for the homage of an insignificant ethnic group.

But the thing went much deeper than that.

WHAT IT MEANT THEN

i. For one thing the issue of one god versus many was at stake.

In all the world of that day the vision of the one God of all the earth was perceived
only by that small ethnic group of Hebrew tribes. Had the light of that knowledge gone out
on Mt. Carmel that day, God alone knows how many dark ages might have passed before it was
relit.

ii. For another thing, the issue that was faced that day was an issue surprisingly
modern. For Ahab represented the power of the state, having in its control the wealth of
the nation’s resources, and (as represented by the Baals) the enormous powers of the
natural world, reinforced by a propaganda machine (Jezebel and her hundreds of prophets)
which fed the energy of the instincts of the masses into an imposed ideology, the Baal
cults.

Over against all these principalities and powers stood the lonely figure of Elijah, the
pitiably weak representative of the God – as pitiably weak as righteousness, justice,
freedom and love appeared to be.

Which of the two inspired the greater confidence?

This was the issue that confronted the German people in the days of Adolf Hitler’s
rise to power. Did you trust the new Chancellor, who had got political and industrial
power into his hands so he could make things happen, or did you trust the protesting
clergymen, like Martin Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer who had no power at all but the
power of the Word of God in their mouths? It was the same issue that confronted the
Russian and United States governments as they wrestled with the decision whether to spend
more millions on their missile systems.

We live in a time when the massing of power has made the state and the multi-national
corporations that control technology all-important, apparently, for our safety. More and
more power over the lives of ordinary citizens is passing into the hands of governments,
our own included. And they in turn are more and more tied in to the huge economic power
blocs of our divided world who control the growth of technology, so that between them they
are masters of the most terrifying forces of nature ever unleashed, both atomic and
biological. And in the control of these awesome principalities and powers lie the means of
mass communication by which the spell of their ideological war cries can be cast. What a
frightening example the 1986 Falklands crisis supplied of the speed and effectiveness with
which that can happen, even in an age of cynicism like ours.

Basil Matthews has drawn a striking parallel:

"In the old days, among more primitive tribes, the tribal chief would summon his
drummers and, seated among them, direct their drumming. The tribesmen at their various
occupations would hear the slow throb, and begin to gather to their chief. As the tempo of
the drumming quickened, the braves would seize their shields and spears, and as its
rhythms grew more violent and more insistent, the dark instincts of the tribe were
stirred, draining away their separate individuality and merging them into a collective
mass, until at last, dominated by an impulse they were helpless to resist, and leaping
with the lust of battle, the warriors were hurled by their chief against the enemy."

All that now, like the scene on Mt. Carmel too, seems curiously remote to us from our
civilised perch in contemporary history. But is it really so remote? Basil Matthews goes
on:

"The modern tribal chief controls the massed drums of press, radio, television and
mammoth parades – all the machinery of modern propaganda made potent with the ‘hidden
persuaders.’ With these, he can mount a barrage that drowns out truth and justice,
and mould millions to his will. Arming them with every devastating weapon of modern
science, he can launch upon our planet such a conflict as can smash the dykes of
civilisation, and send the floods of barbarism roaring through the darkness.

The primitive tribal chief, the local conflict over, could call back his warriors. The
drummers slowed their tempo to quieter and quieter drum-beats, and won back their braves
to the path of peace. But the modern chief of the huge racial tribes can neither limit the
conflict, nor call back his legions."*

And what stands over against this titanic menace? The same handful of pitiably weak and
despised representatives, apparently, of a mocked and invisible God – the Christians with
their tale of a crucified carpenter.

WHAT IT MEANS NOW

The scene today is immensely vaster. The stage Elijah set on Mt. Carmel is grown to the
size of a planet, and the confrontation is more complex. But the underlying principles are
the same, and just as simple.

We have to decide how State, Science and God relate.

The State is not a god men must serve. It is but a body we create to express our
collective will, for good or evil.

Science is not a god men must serve. It is but an instrument in our hands, like a club
to bash our neighbours’ brains in, or a cup of cold water to slake his thirst,
however sophisticated we make these things.

The state was instituted by God to encourage our communal life in godliness under His
directing hand.

Science is given by God to enhance our dominion over the earth so we may responsibly
serve our fellows in the purpose for which God gave us life.

But when we turn away in our hearts from the living God and His rule over us, we look
to these things instead to keep us safe and make us happy. Having lost God, it is to these
things we look. And when we do that, we confer the status of gods upon them, and so
corrupt their use; we make omnipotent giants of them and lose ourselves to their mindless
control. We lose them, then, to the dimension of the demonic, to the mastery of the devil
and all his hosts. It has happened over and over, even in our own lifetime.

So to whom shall we look to guide our way in the new world into which the rise of
technology has launched us? Shall it be the State, armed by Science, wielding control of
the mass mind? Or shall it be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who shall be our
guide, who reconciles men to Himself by the blood of His Son’s Cross, and renews our
minds in His truth? Do we today, like the Israelites in Elijah’s day, wobble in our
faith between one and the other? When shall we hear the thunderous challenge of the
prophet of the Lord shiver in our divided hearts, "How long will you go limping
between two opinions? If the Lord be God, then follow Him. But if the principalities and
powers of this world be God, then follow them."

Do we believe, as the first Christians did, that all things visible and invisible,
whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers were created through Christ and
for Him?

Do we believe as they did that Christ disarmed the corrupted principalities and powers,
triumphing over them in His Cross?

Do we believe, as they did, that God has exalted His Christ to the highest position of
authority in the created universe, so that all the principalities and powers of this world
are under His dominion?

Do we believe, as they did, that all these things may be wielded in His hand, either as
instruments of a terrible judgement on us for our unbelief, our arrogance and our
defiance, or else as instruments of mercy, if we repent, that shall work for our
deliverance and our healing; but always, whether in judgement or in mercy, under His
control?

Or are we standing where those later Israelites, the disciples, stood: on the other
side, of the Cross and Resurrection, the wrong side … in the shadows of the moonlit
garden, paralysed by fear and unbelief while their Master was taken captive, helpless,
apparently, before the armed might of Rome, the principality and power of this world?

We, like them, have heard His voice calling us, calling for our love, our loyalty and
our trust, at a time when the tide of the world seems to be flowing against Him, when to
stand with Him in the apparent weakness of His suffering love is to invite the scorn and
derision which still He bears.

But we know today, as the disciples that night did not, that through His Cross, our
mighty Christ was moving forward to the triumph of His resurrection and the Crown of this
world and all its kingdoms. We have seen Him, as they had not, travelling in the greatness
of His strength, on the clouds of Heaven, in the strength of His invincible love,
bestowing His Spirit from above on all who will receive Him.

We know that this unseen Christ, Whose Cross is proof of the wisdom, the love and the
power of God to save, is moving through history and above it to His final triumph. We know
that behind all the appearance of things, He must reign until He has put all His enemies
under His feet.

In that last day, when the Captain of our salvation leads out His own in the
celebration of His final triumph, will we be with Him? Will we have believed in Him? Will
we have been in His company, sharing His reproach in the day of His humiliation? Will we
have fought for Him? Will we have spoken for Him, lived for Him, suffered for Him?

Have we made up our mind whose side we are on and nailed our colours to the mast? Never
mind whether we fight well or badly; on whose side shall we fight at all?

There is more power generated by the prayer and obedience of the nameless faithful in
this world than by all the pompous pretensions of its principalities and powers.

*’Supreme Encounter’, S.C.M. Press, Religious Book Club Edition,

pp. 46-7

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Rev Paul T Harrison BD