“A Hillside Fight” (1 Kings 18)

 watch here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlE-2F3XoYM

Rob Tennant, Hillside Church, Chapel Hill, NC

Sunday, February 9, 2020

Ahab was one of the kings who ruled in ancient Israel.  His actions as king hurt the people he was responsible to rule and disrespected the God he was supposed to serve.  God saw it all.  Ahab was more wicked than the evil kings who preceded him.  And as if it had been a light thing for him to insult God by repeating the rebellious, disobedient ways of his predecessors, he then took as his wife Jezebel of the Sidonians.  Disrespecting Yahweh, Ahab followed Jezebel’s lead and worshiped the false god Baal. 

For her part, Jezebel attempted to have every prophet of God in Israel killed.  She would have succeed had not Obadiah secreted 100 prophets away in caves, unbeknownst to her.  This was not the later prophet Obadiah for whom Biblical book is named.  This Obadiah was Ahab’s own palace manager.  Jezebel could not murder the prophets he saved.  Nor could she get her hands on the prophet, Elijah who foretold the crippling drought.  His clear spiritual authority infuriated her and confounded Ahab.  Yet Ahab persisted in defying God.   

He erected an altar for Baal in the house of Baal, which he built in Samaria.  He made an Asherah pole, which God had strictly and repeatedly forbidden.  This Ahab, called to lead in God’s name, did more to provoke the anger of the Lord, the God of Israel, than had all the kings of Israel who were before him (1 Kings 16:29-33). 

            In the third year of the drought, God sent Elijah to face the wicked king.  They stood before one another and the king barked at the prophet, “Is it you, you troubler of Israel” (18:17)? 

Elijah would not be cowed.  “I have not troubled Israel” he retorted, “but you have.  You have forsaken the commands of the Lord” (v.18). 

Forsaken God’s commands; disregarded God’s way.  Do we do that?  Read through the Old Testament, and over and over, the tension that afflicts ancient humanity comes when individuals turn away from God and to their own wisdom and their own cravings. Driven by a lust for power and security, they abandon faith. 

In the garden, Eve reached for her own autonomy instead of abiding by God’s boundaries and keeping her hands off the forbidden fruit.  She tried to rewrite the rules, replacing God’s leadership with her own.  Adam dumbly followed.  It repeats over and over; one takes the initiative and disobeys God; others sin by following along. 

Throughout the book of Judges, feeling threatened by powerful neighbors, Israelite tribes turn away from proper worship of Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; instead, they worship idols – statues representing Ancient Near Eastern fertility gods.  Israel does not yet have a king in the book of Judges, but when the story shifts, and the nation becomes a monarchy, the pattern of rejecting God persists. 

We know nothing of worshiping idols.  Were someone to set up a statue, declare it to be god, and call us to worship it, we would mock them as superstitious and pre-scientific.  Yeah, that’s not God.  I know the guy who made it.  Joe.  He’s got a studio in Carrboro.  He’s a great sculptor.  I might pay a lot for one of his pieces and use it to decorate my home.  Yeah that Joe’s a real artist.  But, he’s not a god-maker.  I’m not worshiping something he created.  That would be stupid.

Fine!  But, do we ever, in our lives, put things in the place that should be occupied by God?  Do we relegate God to the seldom visited corners in our lives?  Yes, God has a voice, but do the choices we make show that we have reduced God’s voice?  Do we live as if we think we can decide whether we will ignore God or listen to God?  Would an examination of our lives, an audit of our values, reveal that we see God as being at our disposal instead of us existing to love, worship, and serve Him? 

Idolatry appears silly to 21^st century sensibilities, but Idolatry at its base is simply the willful rejection of God’s authority.  Compartmentalizing our lives, locking God into a closet, we commit modern day idolatry.  When we see God as something we can pull out to decorate the house at Christmas or Easter or someone long ignore we can to turn to when we desperately need to ‘throw up a prayer’, then we willfully reject God’s right to reign over our lives – the entirety of our lives. 

Elijah had something for Ahab.  Each one accused the other of troubling Israel.  Elijah took it beyond just a verbal boxing match. 

Get them all together! He told Ahab.  Assemble your prophets of Baal, the ministers who lead worship around the Asherah poles.  Bring them all to the top of Mount Carmel.  And bring the people too, because, we’re going to rumble on the mountain top.  Bring everyone to see a hillside fight.

Ahab obliged.  The prophets trooped up with Ahab in audience.  The people amassed and Elijah approached them.  He wasn’t impressed with the king or with the religionists of Baal-worship.  Elijah was there for Israel, for God’s chosen people.  He looked right them as he asked, “How long will you go limping with two different opinions?  If the Lord is God, follow him; if Baal, then follow him” (18:22). 

Joshua, from several generations earlier comes to mind.  When the people had first settled the Promised Land he said to them, “Choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods of your ancestors or the gods of the Amorites.  But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).  The words of the resurrected, glorified Jesus come to mind.  In Revelation 3:15 he told the church at Laodicea, “Because you are lukewarm and neither hot nor cold, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” 

The Lord Jesus demands that we be all in or not at all; he has no use for halfway faith.  Our faith might be imperfect.  We might mess up daily.   Jesus has grace for that.  We are saved and born again because of how much love he gives, not because of how much faith we show.  Our all-in faith doesn’t provide salvation; our all-in faith indicates that we see who Jesus really is, Lord of Lords and King of Kings.

It was on.  Elijah set the terms and the company of Baal prophets accepted.  Atop Mount Carmel they killed a bull and set it on an altar.  That was the easy part.  Next, they had to call on Baal to rain fire from heaven to ignite and consume the offering.  From morning to noon, they cried out, “O Baal, answer us” (18:26).  The thing about false gods is they can’t answer.  They aren’t real.  Baal’s prophets danced around the altar, desperate to show up Elijah and be found acceptable in Ahab’s sight.

At noon, Elijah was really feeling himself, so he taunted.  Think smack talk is vicious from today’s playground court basketball players?  Prophets invented trash talking centuries before anyone knew what basketball was. 

Elijah says, Come on guys, call a little louder.  He is god, right?  Maybe he’s off meditating somewhere.  Maybe he’s wandered off.  Could it have been Taco Tuesday around the Asherah pole and old Baal overdid it and now he’s ‘indisposed?’  Could that be it?  I know, I know, he’s asleep.  Shout louder.  

They did.  The prophets of Baal fell into a frenzy.  They took out swords and blades and began slashing themselves.  I can’t tell you how glad I am that self-mutilation is not part of our worship tradition.  It was part of theirs.  The hours dragged on and the prophets of Baal wailed and raved and their blood flowed and their horse voices dissipated like campfire smoke in the air as the day grew shorter. 

My turn, Elijah said, and he invited the crowd in close, and they stepped forward.  He prepared his bull, laying the carcass on the altar for the Lord.  A trench was dug around the altar and four jars of water were poured over the offering, drenching it.  This was repeated, and again.  Twelve jars of water soaked this offering.  No way was it going to go up in flames. 

Elijah prayed.  O Lord … let it be known that you are God in Israel.  O Lord, answer me, so that these people will know you are God.  God did.  Flames from God don’t worry about how wet the kindling is.  The bull was consumed.  The wood was consumed.  The stones were consumed.  Do you know how hot fire has to be to consume stones?  The dirt was consumed and so was the water in the trench that had been dug around the altar.  The people fell on their faces because that’s what you do. 

Then the dark turn in the story.  We must not ignore or try to rationalize it.  Elijah commanded the people to slaughter all the prophets of Baal.  They did.  For a moment, they literally cut the syncretism and idolatry right out of Israel.  A Bible reader’s only good response is to be horrified and troubled by the violence of Elijah.  Jesus tells us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Mt. 5).  Why did God condone violence in Elijah’s day and promote turn-the-other-cheek peace in Jesus’ day?  I can’t answer that this morning. I just urge you to see the tension and sit with it and not rush to resolve it.   Elijah won the hillside fight of 1 Kings 18.

Another hillside fight concerns us.  This one is fought every time we gather and every time each of us as individuals make the choices that order our lives.  It’s based on a question.  I’ve posed many questions this morning.  This is the one to remember and it doesn’t come from me. 

The words of the true prophets speak beyond their own lifetimes.  This is from Elijah to each one of us.  Imagine yourself sitting with the prophet.  He’s agitated, but also focused.  He wants your full attention.  Forget about what you’re doing right now, thinking about lunch after church.  Put out of your mind the “to-do” you’ve been compiling these last few minutes.  Those of you who’ve been dozing?  Wake up from your catnap.  Elijah has a question you and I need to hear and take serious time to answer. 

“How long will you limp along carrying two different opinions?  If the Lord is God, follow him.  If something else rules your life, give yourself to that.”  Wrestling with the question – that’s the hillside fight we must enter.  We cannot hedge our bets.  Faith is not betting it all on Jesus; or hedging, betting some on Jesus, and some on other things.  Faith is acknowledging Jesus as Lord, realizing our only hope for life comes in receiving forgiveness from him, and then submitting to him everything in our lives; every relationship; every dream and ambition; every penny in the bank account; ev-ery-thing.  He’s Lord over all.

We conclude with an invitation as we do every week.  Don’t try to answer Elijah’s question right now.  If you really want to wrestle with it, if you really want to consider making God Lord of your entire life, all the time, then during this invitation time, come to the steps, kneel, and pray looking to the cross.  Ask the crucified, risen Lord Jesus to begin helping you reorder life so that He alone occupies the center and life flows from who you are in Him.

AMEN   

How Much is God Really in Control? (1 Kings 17:8-16)

Sunday, November 11, 2018

            Whew!  Big exhale.  Why?  She has looked at me with a solemn face as she asked me to pray for her.  What I say next is really important.

I respond, “Tell me about it.” 

Every single one of us has a story.  Even the seemingly unremarkable daily occurrences move the story of your life.  It might mean nothing to someone else, but this is your story.  You don’t know what’s on the next page until you get to it.

When someone asks for prayer, she (or he) is reeling from what happened on the previous page; agonizing through the page she’s currently on; and, fearing what’s on the next page.  We don’t ask for prayer in the happiest parts of the story.  We’re blissful in those moments.  We ask for prayer when things are tough and we’re worried, afraid.

It’s clear she is a believer in Jesus.  Her thought that prayer might help was an indication of this.  As she tells her story, she says, “I know God is control.”  Why say that?  I think it’s because we absolutely hope that is so.  It’s a veiled desperation heave.  O God, I hope you’re in control. 

God could have stopped the mass shooting in California; and the one in Pittsburgh; and the one in Parkland, Florida; and the one … . God could have stopped it all if God wanted to.  Did God just not want to? 

Telemachus Orfanos was at the Las Vegas concert last year.  He survived that mass shooting.  I wonder if he said a prayer of thanks that included the words, “God is in control.”  He was 27 years old, a U.S. Navy veteran.  We honor veterans today. God is in control.  He who survived Las Vegas was killed at the shooting in California last week.  God is in control?  How much control does God really have? 

The book of First Kings in the Old Testament, after taking us through the golden age of King Solomon, then details the tragic story of God’s chosen people as they, against God’s intentions, split into a Northern Kingdom, Israel, and a Southern Kingdom, Judah.  Both were ruled by a series of kings, many of whom tried to be faithful to God’s ways.  Just as many abused power, disregarded the suffering of the poor, and led the nation into sinful idolatry by mixing worship of God with worship of other peoples’ pagan gods called Baals. 

At the end of chapter 16, we meet the new king of the north, Ahab. It says, “Ahab did more to provoke the anger of the Lord … than had all the kings of Israel before him.”  Ahab married a non-Jewish queen, Jezebel, daughter of the king of Sidon.  Ahab happily followed as she led him into idolatry, an insulting disregard of the God Ahab was supposed to represent and serve and love. 

Flipping the page to chapter 17, without warning or ceremony, we meet Elijah the Tishbite.  No introduction is offered.  He bursts onto the scene, his first recorded words a direct threat to King Ahab.  He tells Ahab there will be a 3-year drought in which rain will only come at his, Elijah’s word. 

Why don’t we receive background on Elijah, the Old Testament’s most prominent prophet?  Prophets only existed to point people to God; often, pointing to God’s displeasure.  Prophets meant to speak and then diminish as the message of God dominated the story. No one believed the idea that God is in control with as much commitment as the prophets.

Implied in his pronouncement of the drought was a condemnation of Ahab and Jezebel.  This drought is God’s punishment for their wickedness.  Immediately God sends Elijah into the wilderness, on the run.  By declaring the environmental disaster and blaming the king, Elijah becomes an enemy of that king.  Ahab kills his enemies.  And Jezebel is more coldblooded than her husband. 

The entire episode displays God’s control.  God tells Elijah to flee to the Wadi Cherith, a barren, dry place of wilderness; and that was true even when there was no drought.  Now, no one survives out there.  It is the perfect place to hide because Ahab will never think to chase Elijah there.  No fool would hide there. 

God makes water flow from the dried up wadi and Elijah drinks.  God instructs ravens to bring Elijah food and they do.  Control!  God controls the rain and the animals and the streams. 

But this begs the question, what about everyone else, besides Ahab and Jezebel.  We know that in natural disasters – floods, droughts, hurricanes, fires – the poor suffer worse than the rich.  Yes the drought punishes the wicked king and queen, but must God punish everyone as a drought clearly does?  We have to look back at the story – Elijah’s story; Ahab and Jezebel’s story; yours and mine.  I meet God in my story, but I do not know what God is doing in others’ stories.  There was a drought.  It does not tells us how God acts in the stories of common people throughout Israel during the drought. 

Then, the next account tells us exactly that; not a king’s story, but the presence of God in a very common person’s story.  Elijah has been in a place where his only hope of survival is God’s ability to command nature – ravens to provide for him.  Also, Elijah depends on his belief that God wants to help him. 

To Elijah in his Cherith wilderness hideout we read that “the word of the Lord came to him.”  “Go now to Zarephath and live there.”  Zarephath is in the coastal region to the west of Israel.  Sidon is the capital city of the region.  Remember Sidon?  That’s Jezebel’s hometown.   It’s like telling a runaway slave in 1860 to hide in the home of a poor white farmer in Mississippi. 

God tells Elijah, “I have commanded a widow there to feed you.”  The narrator of 1^st Kings does not let us in on Elijah’s, thoughts, not yet, anyway.  Elijah goes and meets the woman at the Zarephath town gate.  She doesn’t look very good as she gathers kindling.  She’s dangerously thin, with sunken cheeks and sallow complexion.  Elijah asks her to stop what she’s doing and fetch him a drink of water.  Without protest, she moves at his word and as she does, he asks her to bring him bread. 

This is too much.  She replies, “As the Lord your God lives” – she knows who Elijah is, that he is the prophet of the God who’s caused the misery of this drought – “As the Lord your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering sticks so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son so that we may eat it and die.”  She is preparing for her own last supper. 

First, God sent Elijah to survive in the wilderness around the Wadi Cherith.  He lived in a place of death.  Now, God has sent Elijah into enemy territory to get sustenance from a woman who is planning to starve to death in the midst of the drought God has sent. 

Elijah’s next words show how utterly idiotic we can sound when we say exactly what God tells us to say.  “Fear not,” he tells her.  Then he tells her to go ahead with plans, a last supper followed by death by starvation.  Yeah, go ahead with that, but first bring me a little something to eat.  It’s so ludicrous, it defies description.  And that’s the point. 

We heard the telltale phrase of Old Testament prophets when Elijah was sent to Jezebel’s stomping grounds.  “The Word of the Lord came to him.”  Now we hear a similar phrase that signals God is in the midst of this inexplicable contradiction in Elijah’s words.  “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel.”  We know something profound is coming.  Your jar of meal from which you make bread and your jug of cooking oil you use to prepare it will not empty until the rain comes.  So, go ahead and prepare for your death, but know this.  God is preparing life for you.  Not only that, but you will be a part of the story of God’s word convicting and then redeeming Israel. 

We say “God is in control” as a desperate hope that God will do something to rescue us from the darkness we’re in; we cling to the hope that God will heal us from the trauma we have suffered.  God did not cause the shooting in California or Pittsburgh or Florida.  God did not spare Telemachus Orfanos in Las Vegas just to have him die this past week.  These shootings happen because God allows us to have free will.  When we human beings have free will, often, we choose evil.  These shootings and deaths are evil.  Evil is present in the world.  I don’t know why this young navy veteran died.  His story is not my story.  What I believe is God was in his story.  I know God is in mine. 

God is first in control of God’s self in a way that I cannot control myself.  I overreact to things.  I get emotional.  I lose my temper.  I can be selfish and, sometimes, shortsighted.  I lose control.  I believe we all do.  God is steadfast.  God doesn’t direct every movement of my life or course correct every time I make a bad decision.  God lets me live with the consequence of my mistakes.  God lets me suffer the natural outcomes of my sins.

When I turn back to God in repentance and faith, God forgives.  God creates a new future.  When, from the darkest parts of myself, I turn to God, God shines His light in the darkness.  God draws me to it.  We see this in the Apostle Peter.  He denied knowing Jesus three times as Jesus was being tried and flogged.  A week after the resurrection, Jesus restored Peter, three times allowing him to pledge his love.  Peter bore scars on his soul from his sin, but those scars were signs of healing restoration, not shame. 

The widow in Zarephath “went and did” according to Elijah’s word (v.15).  She doesn’t question.  She keeps scooping ground meal, pouring oil, baking bread, and feeding God’s prophet, her son, and herself.  With each meal, with the restoration of her health, with each moment of feeling full and satisfied, she discovers what it means to live according to the word of the Lord. 

When the pages of your story tell of that part when you have to walk, as Psalm 23 says, through “the valley of the shadow of death,” and your only recourse is to ask a friend to pray for you; there’s no other solution.  I don’t know that God promises to make the next page in your story instantly easier or to immediately solve all problems. 

Here’s what I am sure of.  God promises to be there.  Life is out of control.  You and I feel out of control.  So we pray.  And when we do, we meet a God who gives hope to starving widows who have lost it.  We meet the God who confronts wicked kings with truth and power.  We come face to face with the God who loves us so much, he let his only son take our place in death. 

Maybe in your story right now, the next line is, someone, please, pray for me.   Maybe that’s how things are.  Of course, you have people to pray for you and with you.  God is here.  He loves you.  Whatever you have going on, in this very moment, turn to Him.  Ask him to help you.  Turn to Him and see what it looks in your life when he fills your cup and blesses you with His love.

AMEN