The Bible Binge: Fire Fall (1 Kings 18:20-39)

Introduction

Trust. Use that word and so many things come to mind. Trust in Congress is at an all-time low. Lawyers have a 16% trust rating. We’re used to hearing these kinds of stats. But trust is down across the board. Trust in God is at an all-time low. 81% of Americans say they believe in God. Only 56% percent believe in the God of the Bible…so there’s a gap between what God people are believing in. But the alternatives aren’t faring much better these days. If people don’t believe in God, they believe in science. Science is king in our culture. But in 2023, trust in science and scientists reached an all-time low.. fueled by all the confusion regarding COVID. Partisan ideology weaponizes science… my science is better than your science, each side parading their favorite scientists out to speak the truth. Trust in science has plummeted as a result. We have a problem with trust. And now with artificial intelligence, increasingly we find we cannot trust even what we hear and see.

Disney, forever, has been telling us to trust ourselves. Trust the person within. With depression and anxiety at an all-time high, it quickly becomes apparent that trusting ourselves doesn’t work either. Trust and faith are what we’re looking at today in the book of Kings.

Who do you trust with your life? When things go bad, on what does your faith land? What do I trust? To what or to whom do I entrust myself? These are questions of identity. Today’s story runs to the very heart of our existence. In fact, this story, like few others in the Bible, encapsulates just what Jesus is after throughout the whole Bible.

The Bible and our trust

We’ve often said that the purpose of the Bible is aimed at our faith and trust in Jesus, and that idea is found in the Bible’s purpose statement. John, one of Jesus’ best friends, writes at the end of his biography of Jesus:

John 20:31 Everything I’ve written has been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

What John says about his biography he believes to be true of the whole Bible.

Purpose statement of the Bible: Everything in the Bible is written so that we would believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

It is all aimed at our faith and our trust. Why? Because from the very beginning, when our first parents decided to do their own thing, there have been competing narratives that offer themselves for our belief. They grab our hearts. They demand our trust AND we do.. we give our trust and our faith to all sorts of things. And so we have a story that is going to challenge our desire to trust something other than our Creator.

We’re in the book of Kings for our Bible Binge this week. The book of Kings is about the Kings of Israel. In this book, we find good kings and bad kings. The good kings help Israel orient their faith toward the God who rescued them from Egypt. The bad kings… well, they find all sorts of other things to have faith in… they lead the nation in idol worship.. competing narratives of reality based on man-made stories complete with idols to worship.

When it comes to competing gods in the Bible, Baal is the Big Bad of the Old Testament. While Baal can be a moniker for all sorts of ancient near east gods, the main one we find in the Bible is purported to be the god of fertility and rain. In fact, Baal worship was all about many gods. This is in contrast to the God of Israel, the God of the Bible, who is One God. That God who rescued Israel from Egypt in fact made his big number one command this:

Exodus 20:3–5 “Do not have other gods besides me. Do not make an idol for yourself...Do not bow in worship to them, and do not serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God;

This is a command, but this is aimed at our fallen hearts. Anything that occupies my faith and trust… that is my god. I’m always serving something…always worshiping something. I always have a god. The question is: which god am I placing my faith in today?

That is the question for Israel in 1 Kings 18. King Ahab and his wife Jezebel have set up Baal-worship. And Jezebel took it upon herself to try and wipe out all the prophets of the true God of Israel. Jezebel is not a popular name for our maternity wards, much like Adolf and Nero. She is that bad.

Things are so bad with worship this Canaanite god named Baal… who controls the weather, by the way, that God shuts the heavens over Israel. There is no rain in Israel for more than 3 years. You want to know who controls the weather? Watch this! No rain. But that doesn’t stop Jezebel and Ahab from continuing their quest to exterminate worship of the God of the Bible.

God’s main prophet at the time was a guy by the name of Elijah, considered one of the all-time greats in Israel’s history. Elijah had been the one who told King Ahab that there would be no rain. And because of God’s protection, Elijah had escaped the sword of Jezebel.

The showdown: Baal vs. God

The drought has made things so bad in Israel, Ahab agrees to a showdown with Elijah. And that’s our story in 1 Kings 18. We don’t know whether Jezebel knew about the showdown, but Ahab and Elijah and the entire nation show up at Mt Carmel for the fight of the century. On one side was Team Baal. On the other, Team Yahweh, the God of Israel who rescued them from Egypt. On this hill, the entire thing is totally one-sided, or so it seems. Team Baal was the entire nation, including the 450 priests of Baal, and King Ahab. And on the other side… just 1 guy. 1. One guy against the world. Elijah with Team Yahweh.

They set up this showdown and the rules are simple.. you sacrifice your bull on your altar. And you don’t light it. No fire is allowed. You call out to Baal and call on him to rain down fire on your sacrifice. And Elijah… Elijah is going to do the same. He’s going to have his own bull on his own altar. And he’s not going to light it. No fire is allowed. And Elijah is going to call on the name of Yahweh. Whoever answers is the winner. Whoever answers is the true God of Israel. Whoever answers will be the worshiped God of Israel. He gets all the trust, he gets all the belief.

This is a remarkable showdown. We can only guess that God had Elijah set it up like this. I mean, the way the writer writes this story, you can almost tell where all this is going. From the beginning you almost know it’s going to end badly for Team Baal. In fact, Elijah provides the bull for Team Baal. They have to know the gig is up. So the showdown starts:

1 Kings 18:26–29 So they took the bull that Elijah gave them, prepared it, and called on the name of Baal from morning until noon, saying, “Baal, answer us!” But there was no sound; no one answered. Then they danced around the altar they had made. At noon Elijah mocked them. He said, “Shout loudly, for he’s a god! Maybe he’s thinking it over; maybe he has wandered away; or maybe he’s on the road. Perhaps he’s sleeping and will wake up!” They shouted loudly, and cut themselves with knives and spears, according to their custom, until blood gushed over them. All afternoon they kept on raving until the offering of the evening sacrifice, but there was no sound; no one answered, no one paid attention.

That’s a lot of noise. And a lot of nothing. There was no sound. No one answered. No one paid attention. That’s an indictment. Baal isn’t just impotent. Baal isn’t even a god. Baal is a nothing. Baal is a myth. Zero. No sound. No answer. No attention. That’s devastating.

The Fire Falls

And you know what’s coming. We read it, but the anticipation in this story is off the charts. You have all the noise from the crowd, but no noise from their god. And if there’s no answer from the god that doesn’t exist, the god that cannot save, well then, there’s really only one answer. And boy does He deliver. This is why this story is in all of our children’s books… what happens next is off the charts spectacular.

Elijah builds an altar of stones. Puts the bull on the altar, and then drenches the entire thing with gallons and gallons of water. You have to wonder what the crowd is thinking… no rain for 3 years and look at all that water being poured on that altar. Elijah is making a point. And then there’s this:

1 Kings 18:36–39 “At the time for offering the evening sacrifice, the prophet Elijah approached the altar and said, “let it be known that you are God in Israel and I am your servant, and that at your word I have done all these things. Answer me, Lord! Answer me so that this people will know that you, the Lord, are God and that you have turned their hearts back.” Then the Lord’s fire fell and consumed the burnt offering, the wood, the stones, and the dust, and it licked up the water that was in the trench.

The Lord’s fire fell. Game over. Team Yahweh in a landslide. Not even close. The Lord’s fire fell. The same fire that led Israel out of Egypt shows up at Mt. Carmel again and leaves nothing of the sacrifice. Nothing. It’s way too easy to read this like a fairy tale where God just shows up and in a divine display of power, shows the unbelievers who is boss. That’s the way we think… God just need to prove himself. Once again, in case anyone noticed: I’m bigger than Baal.

That’s not really the point here. Before any of this starts, Elijah sets the stakes with the people and even with Ahab. As the showdown beings, Elijah asks the mother of all questions for this occasion:

1 Kings 18:21 Elijah approached all the people and said, “How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him. But if Baal, follow him.”

How long are you going to waver between two opinions? You all need to choose one. That has been the way it has always been. There’s always Yahweh… there’s always the true God of Israel who led them out of Egypt and through the Red Sea. And there is the alternative, whoever that happens to be. Who are you going to worship? Where are you going to place for your faith and trust? God is after their hearts. God is after their desires… he’s after their allegiance. We make the mistake of thinking about Israel’s problem being behavior. Yes, they were bowing to an idol, but the bowing is simply a symptom of something darker, something worse… faith and trust in a god that cannot save. Faith and trust in themselves and their own ingenuity. The entire showdown is pushing them to make a choice.

And so the fire falls. The fire doesn’t fall on them. The fire falls on the sacrifice. And when it’s over, their own self-salvation has been consumed. This is how that verse ends after the sacrifice is consumed:

1 Kings 18:39 When all the people saw it, they fell facedown and said, “The Lord, he is God! The Lord, he is God!”

There it is. That’s what God was after the whole time. God’s glorious fire, in consuming the sacrifice, re-orients their hearts and their desires to express the words he longed to hear from a people that he desperately loved: The Lord, he is God! They are saying his name. The name that led them out of Egypt, gave them the land, gave them kings, gave them His presence in the temple… that Presence has showed up outside of the temple and has consumed the sacrifice and that Presence creates their response: Yahweh, our Yahweh, is God.

In one story, we have a picture of what God is after in our identity. We are so much like Israel. It is so easy to forget God and his faithfulness. We’re always running after the false gods of the world. We are such a fickle people. How long will we waver between two opinions? Believing God for who He is in our lives and in our moments or trust myself or trusting science or trusting money or trusting my own ingenuity to win the day, win the relatioships, win the life, win the circumstances. Our faith is constantly chasing that which will not satisfy. Those things are our gods.

Luther said this about those gods:

“Whatever you set your heart on and put your trust in is truly your god.” - Luther

Our spouse can’t save us. Our kids can’t save us. Our jobs can’t save us. Insert anything in that blank. We load up all of our hopes and dreams into all sorts of gods that promise us success and a good life. Why do we waver between two opinions? God wants to be the only one we trust. Whatever we don't have in good things, God wants us to expect it from him. Whenever something bad happens to us, go to Jesus. Whenever something good happens, go to Jesus. Don't expect any of those other things… all those other things that bring us comfort to save us. When we want our money to save us, our family to save us… there will be disappointment, there will be no answer. There is only one answer.

In those moments, of doubt and faithlessness, we are drawn to the altar… the altar of a cross where God’s fire falls and consumes the sacrifice, Jesus on our behalf. We are not consumed. Jesus is. He dies the death that should have been ours. When the Lord’s fire falls, there is salvation for those who are his because the sacrifice has been consumed. The irony here is that Jesus himself is the Presence of God who became the sacrifice himself. He did it for us. So… where is our faith? Where is our trust?

This is why we gather every Sunday. To be told we are forgiven. To be reminded that our faith and our trust that has been in so many other things, needs re-oriented around the only one who can save us. When we sing, when we hear the words of forgiveness, when we hear the word preached, when we receive his body and his blood, our faith is being re-oriented again around the One True Savior, Jesus himself.

Let’s Pray.

The Table

Every Sunday, we meet here at this Table to remind ourselves of the One True God, Jesus Christ, who died for us. Jesus was consumed on God’s altar for you and for me. It’s in this moment we are reminded that all the other stuff we have been chasing cannot satisfy. We are shown what is false. And what is true. It is here that Jesus gives us faith to believe Him all over again. Receive what Christ has done for you in faith… and no longer waver between two opinions.

Benediction

Numbers 6:24–26

May the Lord bless you and protect you;

may the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you;

may the Lord look with favor on you and give you peace.