Silent No More!

1 Kings 18:19-21 ESV

19 Now therefore send and gather all Israel to me at Mount Carmel, and the 450 prophets of Baal and the 400 prophets of Asherah, who eat at Jezebel's table.” 20 So Ahab sent to all the people of Israel and gathered the prophets together at Mount Carmel. 21 And Elijah came near to all the people and said, “How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.” And the people did not answer him a word.

About a year ago, I was talking with a man who was having some real trouble in his love life. He told me that he just couldn’t find “the one”, and I listened to him as he told me about his troubles.

But eventually, I noticed that there was a reoccurring trend in all of the relationships that he would be in, in that right after he would break things off with a woman, it would be just a matter of weeks, sometimes days when he would be with someone else.

I asked him how he could go from being in what he described as a serious relationship and then jump so fast into another serious relationship, and he told me that whenever he would get into another relationship, it was always with a woman that he already knew well before he got in a relationship with her. When I pressed him even further, he told me that he would know these women so well because he had already been romantically communicating with them before his previous relationship had ended.

When I asked him why he was doing this, he justified talking romantically to other women while he was in a relationship by saying that he needed to keep his options open just in case his relationship didn’t work out.

I told him that he needed to figure out which team he wanted to be on and then faithfully play only for that team, that if he liked a girl and had committed himself to her, that he needed to leave other girls alone.

So, I told him that he should pick a side and stick to that side. Unfortunately, though, despite my advice, he felt like he needed to “keep his options open” instead, and as far as I know, things still haven’t gotten better for him.

This is the kind of situation that the people of the kingdom of northern Israel had found themselves in the lead up to and at the beginning of the narrative that we are going to be working through this month. But the situation that the people of Israel had found themselves in was infinitely greater and more dire.

As we know, God had chosen Israel as a people, His very own people. He was to be their God and they were to be His peculiar people, but whenever they thought that it was more convenient to do so, the very people whom God had marked out and set aside as His peculiar people would reject God in favor of the gods of the surrounding nations, particularly the storm “god” Baal.

It became all the more convenient for the people in general to worship Baal due to the fact that King Ahab, the most wicked king to ever rule over Israel, along with his wife, the infamous Jezebel, openly worshipped Baal and thus encouraged Baal worshipped and outlawed the worship of the God of Israel.

Well, God finally had enough of this and decided to show His displeasure by withholding rain from Israel. We read of the beginning of this withholding of rain back in the first verse of chapter seventeen of First Kings, where we read:

1 Kings 17:1 ESV

Now Elijah the Tishbite, of Tishbe in Gilead, said to Ahab, “As the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word.”

And so here we see the beginning of what would be a seven-year drought in Israel, and what we find in these words is the declaration that the God of Israel, not Baal the storm god is the One Who controls the rain, both sending it and withholding it as God says through Elijah that rain will be withheld until He says otherwise.

But God was sure to care for His prophet, and so He sent Elijah into exile, first to the wilderness of Israel and then to Zarephath, outside of the bounds of Israel. And in every place that God sent Elijah, He ensured that he was cared for, whether it be by ravens who brought him meat to eat or by the miraculous surplus that God had provided to a poor widow.

And in the process of these seven years, Ahab was obsessed with tracking down and killing Elijah. You see, Ahab believed that Elijah had angered Baal by persistently worshipping the God of Israel and that it was because of Elijah’s faithfulness to the orthodox worship of the God of Israel that Baal had withheld rain from the land.

Because of this, when God had finally commanded Elijah to return to Israel and when Elijah had appeared before Ahab, Ahab called him the “troubler of Israel”. That is what he thought, Ahab thought that the drought was all Elijah’s fault, and so he believed that Elijah is the one who had brought all of this trouble on Israel.

Elijah, though, responded to this accusation of the king by saying that he is the real troubler of Israel, that it is because of his idolatrous worship that has spread to all of the people that has caused God to withhold the rain.

You see, Ahab may have thought that if he killed Elijah, then his god, Baal, would send rain on the land once again. Elijah, though, likely hoped that this dialogue would cause Ahab and the most influential people in Israel to worship God as He actually is.

Well, neither one was able to convince the other that they are correct in their accusations, and thus, Elijah puts forth a challenge to the king, and without giving the king the specific details of the challenge, Elijah proposes the standoff by saying to Ahab what we read in verse nineteen, which reads:

1 Kings 18:19 ESV

19 Now therefore send and gather all Israel to me at Mount Carmel, and the 450 prophets of Baal and the 400 prophets of Asherah, who eat at Jezebel's table.”

Elijah says that because there is no agreement between he and Ahab about who the true troubler of Israel is, and because there is no agreement on whose God truly is God, he proposes that the send for and gather “all Israel”, which is indicative of the political heads and the most influential people in Israel. And that he tell them to come to “Mount Carmel”, the location of the showdown.

He also challenged the king to gather “the 450 prophets of Baal”. These 450 prophets of Baal are indicative of the priests who presided over the idolatrous Baal worship in Israel.

But in addition to these Baal prophets, Elijah also challenged the king to gather to the mountain, “the 400 prophets of Asherah, who eat at Jezebel’s table”. The “prophets” of Asherah, were more likely to be prophetesses, females who served the female goddess “Asherah”. They are said to “eat at Jezebel’s table”, which likely indicates that these would be the queen’s personal chaplains.

Now, we will notice that these 400 prophets of Asherah are not mentioned in the narrative that follows, so it could be that the author just doesn’t bother to mention them there, or it could be that they did not show up when they were requested to do so, or it could even be possible that these 400 prophets survived to serve Ahab in the days to come.

And so, here we have the participants in the challenge: the king himself, all of the most influential people in Israel, 450 Baal prophets, and 400 Asherah prophetesses on one side, and on the other side, Elijah… and the God of Elijah!

And thus, we see the response of the king to Elijah’s challenge in verse twenty, where we read:

1 Kings 18:20 ESV

20 So Ahab sent to all the people of Israel and gathered the prophets together at Mount Carmel.

The king responds by accepting the challenge and doing as Elijah had requested, sending for the people and gathering the prophets together at Mount Carmel.

Now, we may wonder why Ahab agreed to this challenge offered to him by Elijah, and I believe that there are at least three reasons why he agreed to it.

The first reason why I think he accepted it is because the challenge was so much in his favor. It was literally a challenge of 850 Baal prophets to one prophet of the Lord. And so, in his mind, if there was ever a time to silence Elijah and any other practitioner of the orthodox faith, this was it. And plus, if he wouldn’t have accepted the challenge with having such great odds, it would have made him look incredibly weak to his subjects.

The second reason why I think the king accepted Elijah’s challenge is because the effects of the drought were severe, more severe than anything that they could have expected. So, Ahab probably thought that now was the opportunity for Baal to show his glory in a magnificent way by defeating Elijah and making it rain in Israel.

But the third, most logical reason why I believe that king accepted Elijah’s challenge is because the God of Elijah had inclined the heart of the king to accept this challenge.

And so, having issued the challenge, and having the challenge accepted, we read what happens next in the final verse of our reading, verse twenty, which reads:

1 Kings 18:20 ESV

21 And Elijah came near to all the people and said, “How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.” And the people did not answer him a word.

So, we read here that after those requested for were gathered on Mount Carmel that Elijah “came near to all the people”, those influential people in Israel, and he came near them with care and affection, not to show them that Ahab and not he was at fault for the drought, but to show the people that the Lord is indeed God.

When coming near the people, Elijah asks them, “How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow Him; but is Baal, then follow him.”

Now, when someone walks, they typically walk directly forward with no movement to the side, but if someone walks with a limp, they too walk forward, but they do so moving side to side. Well, this is how “all the people” had been behaving for a very long time in terms of religious matters, they had been attempting to serve two deities which they believed were both supreme.

They would claim that they believed that God was supreme while simultaneously claiming and believing that Baal is supreme, almost identifying Baal as the God of heaven and earth.

But there cannot be two Who are infinite, eternal, omnipotent. And the God of heaven and earth, Elijah says, has declared that He most certainly is not Baal, so what he tells the people here is that what they are doing makes no sense, they know that there can only be one true God and He is not Baal, yet they are attempting to recognize Baal as the one true God.

And so, Elijah says, if you want to follow a god who is not truly God, then do that knowing that you are following a god that you have been commanded not to follow. But if you recognize the utter foolishness and madness in this, then follow and worship the God of heaven and earth and He alone!

Again, what Elijah wants here is for the people to recognize their error and return to the orthodox worship of the God of Israel, a pure worship that they had abandoned long ago.

But what is their response to this? Well, their king, Ahab, he had responded in hostility when Elijah had told him that he troubled Israel by worshipping Baal, but not so with the people; they didn’t respond with hostility, but rather, they responded with silence. As we read, “the people did not answer him a word”.

It’s almost as though they hoped that their silence in this matter would prevail and that they really could worship the Lord and Baal without offending either.

Such is the state of so many, even in the church! So many in the world that we live in attempt to have a God made in their image. They know, deep down, they know that the “god” that they have manufactured is not really God. Their consciences tell me so, the scriptures tell them so, and the faithful religious community tells them so. Yet, they determine to block out all sensibility in hopes that if they do so, in the end, their “god” will truly be proven to be God.

And even in the church, so many attempt to deal with the hostility of the world with silence. So many say, “Oh! I don’t want to be put in an uncomfortable situation. I don’t want the world and the people in the world to be opposed to me, so I will be silent.”

We’re guilty of this. Indeed, I am guilty of this! But when we are guilty of this, we commit the very serious error that Peter, one of the great apostles of the church committed, in that, we deny the very One Who purchased us with His blood!

Beloved, may we be silent no more! May we offer the bold prayers of the apostles. The prayers in which they pleaded with God to give them utterance and great courage to stand firm in their faith while they made the great confession that Jesus is Lord to a world that didn’t want to hear that Jesus in Lord.

And may we unashamedly make our allegiance to Him known to all. May we make it known to our neighbors, to our ungodly family members, alas! we often don’t even make it known to our fellow church family! So, may we make it known to each other!

And as we go to this table, the table in which the Lord of glory calls us to sup with Him, we profess to one another Who it is that we belong to, and God graciously strengthens us through our participation in His Supper. But brethren, you must know that this is a serious matter! You must know that if you profess Him here, He expects and indeed commands us to profess Him there!