Making God Known

Deep suffering. The road was never smooth for these people. I really encourage you to go and watch the Lincoln movie. And so it's the same with our man, Elijah, the prophet of God. He falls into the same category.

We've been following his journey. We've been reading all the trials and the tests that he went through. Some things that God allowed to happen to him. And as we've worked through it, we also heard about the wilderness experience not being something that happens in vain. There's a purpose to it.

There's a meaning to the wilderness. This morning we're going to be looking at the mission of Elijah, the great task that he was called to, the defining moment in his life. Let's have a look, if you have your Bibles with you, to First Kings. We're going to be reading from chapter 18.

And we're just going to read the first two verses, and then we skip a few verses to verse 16 and onwards. And I'll explain why we do that. Elijah, sorry. First Kings 18, verse one. After a long time, in the third year, the word of the Lord came to Elijah.

Go and present yourself to Ahab and I will send rain on the land. So Elijah went to present himself to Ahab. Verse 16. So Obadiah went to meet Ahab and told him, and Ahab went to meet Elijah. When Ahab saw Elijah, he said to him, is that you, you troubler of Israel?

I have not made trouble for Israel, Elijah replied, but you and your father's family have. You have abandoned the Lord's commands and have followed the Baals. Now summon the people from all over Israel to meet me on Mount Carmel and bring the 450 prophets of Baal and the 400 prophets of the Asherah who eat at Jezebel's table. So Ahab sent word throughout all Israel and assembled the prophets on Mount Carmel. Elijah went before the people and said, how long will you waver between two opinions?

If the Lord is God, follow him. But if Baal is God, follow him. But the people said nothing. Then Elijah said to them, I am the only one of the Lord's prophets left, but Baal has four hundred and fifty prophets. Get two bulls for us.

Let them choose one for themselves, and let them cut it into pieces, and put it on the wood, but do not set fire to it. I will prepare the other bull and put it on the wood, but not set fire to it. Then you call on the name of your God, and I will call on the name of the Lord. The God who answers by fire, he is God. Then all the people said, what you say is good.

Elijah said to the prophets of Baal, choose one of the bulls and prepare it first since there are so many of you. Call on the name of your god, but do not light the fire. So they took the bull given to them and prepared it. Then they called on the name of Baal from morning till noon. Oh, Baal, answer us, they shouted.

But there was no response. No one answered. And they danced around the altar they had made. At noon, Elijah began to taunt them. Shout louder, he said.

Surely he is a god. Perhaps he is deep in thought or busy or travelling. Maybe he's sleeping and must be awakened. So they shouted louder and slashed themselves with swords and spears as was their custom until their blood flowed. Midday passed and they continued their frantic prophesying until the time for the evening sacrifice.

But there was no response. No one answered. No one paid attention. Then Elijah said to all the people, come here to me. They came to him and he repaired the altar of the Lord, which was in ruins.

Elijah took 12 stones, one for each of the tribes descended from Jacob, to whom the word of the Lord had come saying, your name shall be Israel. With the stones, he built an altar in the name of the Lord, and he dug a trench around it, large enough to hold two seahs of seed. He arranged the wood, cut the bull into pieces, and laid it on the wood. Then he said to them, fill four large jars with water and pour it on the offering and on the wood. Do it again, he said, and they did it again.

Do it a third time, he ordered, and they did it a third time. The water ran down around the altar and even filled the trench. At the time of sacrifice, the prophet Elijah stepped forward and prayed, O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel. Let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command. Answer me, O Lord, answer me so that these people will know that you, O Lord, are God and that you are turning their hearts back again.

Then fire of the Lord fell and burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the stones, and the soil, and also licked up the water in the trench. When all the people saw this, they fell prostrate and cried, the Lord, He is God. The Lord, He is God. Then Elijah commanded them, seize the prophets of Baal. Don't let anyone get away.

They seized them and Elijah had them brought down to the Kishon Valley and slaughtered there. So far the reading. Just to explain why we skip over a few verses, verses 3 to 16, it's just to kind of limit the story. It's a huge story. Please feel free to read it, but just in short, it's a man called Obadiah who meets Elijah on his way to meet Ahab.

Obadiah is a high ranking official in the kingdom of Israel, so he's one of Ahab's palace organisers, but he's also interestingly a believer in God. And he single-handedly saves a hundred prophets that are loyal to God, and he hides them away. So Obadiah meets Elijah, and he hides these Jews away just like people did in Nazi Germany. But the reason we don't deal with it is just for lack of time.

Please feel free to read it. It's got good stuff in there, and feel free to read it this week. Coming to Elijah, in verse one, we are told that he is spoken to by God and God says, go and see Ahab. It had been three years, verse one says. Three years of no rain.

Three years of drought. Verse one says, after a long time, God says to Elijah, go and present yourself to Ahab. Finally, the encounter between Elijah and Ahab was going to happen. Verse 17, Elijah comes before Ahab. And when Ahab sees Elijah, he asked him, is that you, you troubler of Israel?

The word here for troubler can also be used to talk about a snake or a viper. Is that you, you snake in the grass? Have you come here to give us more trouble? All this time, Ahab had been searching high and low for Elijah wanting to put him to death for the calamity he had brought on Israel. It was Elijah's fault that there was no rain.

Now they are face to face, nose to nose. Imagine the courage this would have taken for Elijah to do, to stare Ahab in the face. Ahab with all this power, but he was ready. He had been trained. He had been prepared.

Elijah was no pushover. And he takes Ahab's blame and he pushes it right back on him. Elijah says, I've not been the one making trouble for Israel, but you and your father's family have. You have abandoned the Lord's commands and you have followed the Baals. Elijah severely rebukes Ahab because he had been so shamelessly disobedient.

The first commandment in the Ten Commandments is, you shall have no other gods before me. This was not Elijah's fault that there was no rain. The king had brazenly broken the first commandment. Ahab needed to know that Yahweh, the God of heaven is supreme, and Elijah was to be the vessel by which God was to make Himself known. This was to be not so much a deal between Elijah and Ahab, but between the God of heaven, Yahweh, and Baal.

Elijah tells Ahab to gather all the prophets in the whole nation of Israel, all the prophets of Baal, which number 450, and then also to go and gather up the prophets of Asherah. They were the male and the female fertility gods of that time. So the message gets sent around Israel. And Ahab also invites the whole of Israel to come and visit that. Now I'm sure that wasn't the whole of Israel, probably just an exaggeration, but a lot of people came to Mount Carmel to come and see this.

So this huge audience is gathered on Mount Carmel. And although Elijah's main focus is on the prophets of the false gods, he knew that many Israelites had willingly followed this idolatrous leadership into worshipping the fertility gods. And Elijah wanted to win the people of Israel back to God as well. When all the prophets and the people are gathered, he goes out and shouts, how long are you going to waver between two opinions? If Yahweh is God, follow him.

If Baal is God, follow him. And no one said anything. There was just a silence. They were too scared to choose either one. You know, fertility gods brought them good health and brought them good crops, but they also saw that this Elijah guy, he was pretty serious about Yahweh.

And Yahweh said there was going to be no rain, and there was no rain. So which one do they choose? They look at him blankly. Just like the weak-willed people they were, they were too afraid of choosing one or the other. They remained lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, uncommitted.

You may know of some Christians that look like this. Neither going one way or the other, happy to see how it all pans out. If God is good to them, yep. Fair enough. We'll say we are Christians.

If it goes bad, I'll just do whatever I think is good. Here stood Elijah. 850 to one. 850 prophets to one. Vastly outnumbered.

Watched on by a non-committal, weak-willed, sheep-like crowd. Elijah shows no fear. He knew he was God's man of the hour. This was his mission. His plan is an ingenious one.

He was going to provide undeniable proof that the Lord God, the God of heaven is the true God. He asked for two oxen to be brought, to be slaughtered, to be placed on a pile of wood. And then he says, pray to Baal to send fire, and I will pray to God to send fire, and the one who answers by fire is God. The people say, well, yeah, that sounds good. Sounds like a good plan.

So the prophets follow Elijah's idea. It seems like a good idea, but when they start calling to Baal, nothing happens. There's no answer. They start early in the morning. Everything is prepared.

Start shouting. Start praying. Baal, answer us. Nothing. There's no lightning.

There's no fire coming down from heaven. Not a single stirring in the skies. The heavens are like brass. No one answered. Hours go by.

In desperation, they start leaping around. They start shouting like maniacs. Their voices are hoarse. They're losing their voices. They start cutting themselves as was the practice.

Start cutting themselves for God to see their pain, to see their commitment to him. Their god bowed and nothing happens. At this point, the Bible says that Elijah starts mocking them. You can just imagine he's sort of leaning against a tree or sitting on a rock and just looking at this spectacle happening. He says, shout louder.

Maybe he's not hearing you guys. Maybe he's, you know, deep in thought. He's meditating. Maybe he's busy. Maybe he's travelling.

Maybe he's sleeping and needs to be woken up. Sitting there on the rock looking at this madness. He knows that there's gonna be no answer. He knows that there's only one God. He's sort of sticking the knife in a little bit.

Maybe you're not calling loud enough. Maybe Baal is busy with some other disaster that's happening. He's too busy dealing with a bushfire. Maybe he's occupied. Maybe he's busy.

The word here actually means maybe he's relieving himself. Maybe Baal is in the celestial men's room. Shout a bit louder. He's gone to the outhouse. Maybe he's fallen asleep.

He's just having a bit of a nap after lunch. Elijah would have been so annoying. But I can just imagine it would have been an unforgettable scene. This just madness. 850 people yelling and shouting and jumping and crying and cutting themselves and the blood is flowing, the sweat is flowing and nothing is happening.

Verse 29 says, there was no response. No one answered. No one paid attention. Then at that dramatic moment, Elijah steps onto the stage. Steps onto the top of the mount, this was going to be the moment of truth.

Everything he had been trained for, all the wilderness that he had to go through, all the moments he had to trust God, it was about to come to a head. Elijah gets to the top of the hill. He finds 12 rocks representing the 12 tribes of Israel. He built an altar to God that had been broken down in that time. A place of sacrifice to God had been broken down and been replaced by an altar to Baal.

He then tells the people to fill four jars of water. It could have been as big as barrels. Fill them, four of them. Pour it onto this pile of wood on the altar. Do it again, he says.

Another four jars. He had dug a trench around this. He says, do it again a third time and a third time. Four jugs, barrels of water gets poured onto the thing. It is absolutely soaking.

The water runs into the trench and fills up the trench. While this time, the wood is almost drifting in the water. Then Elijah stepped towards the altar and he prayed and he said this, O Lord God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your command. Answer me, O Lord, answer me, so that these people will know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again. In stark contrast to the wailing and the self-mutilation of the Baal's prophets, a humble man steps out humbly, bows his head and prays a simple prayer.

There's no drama. There's no mighty command. It's just a humble request. Lord, make yourself known. And then it came.

As soon as Elijah finishes his prayer, a bolt of lightning shoots down and consumes the entire offering. It doesn't say lightning here, it says fire came down. But the wood, the stone, the soil, the water is set on fire. An unquenchable fire that couldn't be controlled burns up the entire offering. You can just imagine again, against the stillness, this was, it says, at the time of the sacrifice, the evening sacrifice, which ran about 6pm.

It's quiet. It's still. It's getting dark, and this huge fireball just erupts. Against the stillness of this backdrop, a huge altar to God stands engulfed in flames. It was the final proof.

It was the final proof that Yahweh is the living God. The people saw it and immediately they fall to their knees. They fall on their face and they say the Lord is God. The Lord is God. They repeat it over and over again in astonishment and repentance.

Then Elijah commands the prophets of Baal to be seized immediately. He takes them, 850 of them, down to the Kishon Valley and he orders them to be put to death. According to the laws of Israel, any false prophet would get the death penalty. Anyone who proclaimed something and it didn't come to pass would be put to death. That's how serious God was about idolatry.

Now, some might say this is an extreme response. 850 people is a lot of people to be put to death. But was it? If a doctor came to you and said that you have a cancerous growth on your liver, and it's going to cause you to die and it's growing rapidly, it's consuming your body, would you want it to be cut out? Would you want it to be removed?

Or would you say, well, it's found its way there. It's looking comfortable. No. It's a living thing. It's made a home for itself.

Let it stay. Or, you know, maybe just a little around the edges. Just trim it a little bit. Or would you say cut that thing out? Get rid of it.

It's toxic. It's poison. It's gonna kill me. We need to remove the cancer. And so that's what happened.

These people, these people who had made a great living for themselves, were eating at the queen's table, wealthy people were prophesying all sorts of things for their own sake, getting wealthy off it. You could say they were almost TV evangelists. God says, they have no place. They're leading my people away from the living God. The other thing we have to remember is there would have been three years of drought.

Three years of seeing that God is serious about this. Three years of time to repent when nothing happened. And perhaps there were prophets that had seen this and said, well, I gotta change my ways. But at the end of three years, there were still 850 prophets that were telling simple lies. God said enough.

It's an amazing story, isn't it? It's an amazing story. And the great truth of this story is that God was constantly urging His people back. He didn't say no rain and then do this. He gave them time to turn back to Him.

He gave them time to repent. Elijah prayed that the Lord would act. We read that here. For the reason that they may turn their hearts back to God. The reason that Elijah did this was not to kill the prophets of Baal.

It was not to kill Ahab. It was not to humiliate Ahab. The reason was so that the people may come back to God. God's heart yearns for us. God's heart yearns for lost people.

God is often seen as a harsh god in the Old Testament, but He relented and He relented and He waited and He pleaded. He turned the vice on the people. He made it difficult for them. But for three years, He waited. And then He made His final showdown on Mount Carmel and said, enough is enough.

What we see in Elijah is a man, is a person that is sure that they are in the will of God. They can go through anything, these type of people. They know what God has made them or created them for, what their purpose is. No matter what the circumstances, no matter what the circumstances, we can stand strong if we understand where we fit in God's will. We can be out of a job, but we can know that we are still in the will of God.

We can face a life threatening situation, but know that we are in the will of God. We can have the odds stacked against us, but know that we are in the will of God and we will be invincible. You can have the stacks of 850 to one. 850 prophets to one prophet of Yahweh. And you can be invincible.

Because it's not 850 to one. It's 850 to one plus God. Not once was Elijah intimidated. In the passage, Elijah speaks eight times. And every time he speaks, except for his prayer, it's a command.

Do this. Get the four jugs. Build the altar. Get the wood. When he was doing his job, he didn't shift.

He didn't stutter. He didn't suggest. He levelled a command. He knew where he stood. And it's the same for us.

The gospel bearers that God raises up have the assurance that it's God's unquestionable will that he has made known to us. And if it's one thing that I'm sure of, it is that God is looking for people. God is searching for people to come back to Him. The odds may be against us, but modern day prophets calling people back to repentance and trust in God has the assurance that God is on their side, that they are in the will of God. God wants us to be His vessels of reaching to people and bringing them back.

That is God's ultimate mission. And you can take you can take assurance and comfort from the fact that God wants you to be prophets in your workplaces. God wants you to be vessels of His salvation in His in whatever situation you find yourself in. You're not doing it in your strength. You don't have to worry about that.

You don't have to rely on your good or your bad English, your unsophisticated theology, your holiness or your lack of it, all you have to rely on, all that you have to trust in is the God who answers by fire. The God who has a heart for the lost. When Elijah stepped onto Mount Carmel, he knew what God's will was. God was going to reveal Himself that day, and the rest would just be a footnote.