Fire From Heaven Series

Good morning. I hope you all had a great Easter. I know we did. Today, we are going to continue the series that we call The Story. As you know, the story we are talking about is God’s story that is found in the complete story of the Bible in the people, places, and events of the Bible. Where we are at in the story is we are talking about what is called the Divided Kingdom. You may recall that the nation of Israel, at one time, was a united kingdom under King David and then ultimately under King Solomon, but eventually what happened because of Solomon’s wicked ways, God split that kingdom in two. You had a northern kingdom called Israel and a kingdom in the south called Judah. When you have two kingdoms, you are going to have a number of kings. I think I mentioned there were about 38 kings during the time of the divided monarchy. Most of those kings were bad. A few weeks ago we introduced you to King Ahab, who was really considered the baddest of the bad. He was a bad king. He was an evil king. Even his wife was considered evil. We also introduced you a few weeks ago to this phenomenal prophet named Elijah. He was a very popular prophet. In fact, he was so popular he got a lot of press in both the New and the Old Testament. Sometimes he was actually confused with John the Baptist and Jesus Christ. He looked like John the Baptist, but he did things like Jesus would do. He performed a lot of miracles and that sort of thing. It is believed even in the New Testament that Elijah was considered someone who was going to rise from the dead and come back some day. In fact, the very last verse in the Old Testament actually talks about this. In the book of Malachi he says “I will send you the prophet Elijah before that great and dreadful day of the Lord.” In other words, before the end times the prophet Elijah is going to come back. In this particular case, where we picked it up a couple weeks ago, Elijah was sent to King Ahab to basically call him out for his wicked and terrible behavior. You may recall the thing that he did, where some of the other kings followed other gods but they still had the God of Abraham and Isaac as their main God, King Ahab basically replaced God completely and brought in the storm god called Baal. What God had Elijah do was basically call a three-and-a-half year period of time of drought on the northern kingdom of Israel because of what they did. We know it is three-and-a-half years because in the book of James we read about Elijah. The context is where James is talking about the importance of faith in prayer and the how the power of a righteous man praying avails much. Towards the end of the fifth chapter, he writes “Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain and it did not rain on the land for three-and-a-half years.” A mention in the New Testament about Elijah. He was a man of faith. He was a righteous man. He could pray and things would happen.

As the story goes, we have Elijah calling down this drought on the northern kingdom of Israel. As you suspect, King Ahab was not a happy camper about this. So much so that he was going after Elijah. So God basically told Elijah to go out to the wilderness east of the Jordan and told him to camp out by a stream. While he is at a stream, he would be fed by these ravens, which happened. After about a year or so, he said I want you to go into town and meet this widow lady from Sidonia and I want you to ask her for some food. He didn’t know it at the time, but she was pretty much broke. She was so broke that she was basically ready to die. She had enough bread and oil left to create one more piece of bread. Here is Elijah asking her for this. In obedience, she gave it to him. Through Elijah, God multiplied that flour and that oil so much so that for the remainder of the period of the drought, they had plenty of flour and plenty of oil. As I mentioned before, that was a picture of God’s provision in the midst of this drought but a provision that is really tied to obedience. That is what we talked about a couple weeks ago.

Today, what we are going to do before we step into a different section of kings next week, is finish out another story about the prophet Elijah which is probably one of the most popular stories about Elijah. It is the story of Elijah and the contest up at Mount Carmel with the 450 prophets of Baal. The setting is a place where the drought has been severe. King Ahab is getting nervous about the situation. So nervous that basically he sends out somebody named Obadiah to find some grass or something to feed the animals so the palace animals don’t die. While Obadiah is out there, he finds Elijah and Elijah lets Ahab know that he is in the vicinity. He goes out to meet him and says “Is that you, you troublemaker of Israel?” Elijah gives a great response. He says “I have not made trouble for Israel, but you and your father’s family have. You have abandoned the Lord’s commands and have followed the Baals.” Here is where I will stop and give a little side note. I have been talking about this god Baal, but here it is the plural Baals. That is because we don’t really have a lot of information about this god Baal. Basically, we know that it means master, but we also know that there were these local gods that were kind of offshoots of Baal. If you read the Old Testament you see things like Baal-zebub or Baal-peor or you see Baal-berith. These are basically local manifestations of the god Baal. That is why you see Baals because they were following the local gods as well the main god up there. They were following all these gods. Whatever the case, Ahab could not point a finger at Elijah and blame Elijah for the situation. It was Ahab that was responsible for the fact that they were experiencing not only a physical drought but really a spiritual drought. An economic drought and a spiritual drought. So what does Elijah do? He approaches Ahab and says what I want you to do is take all the people of Israel, take all the prophets of Baal, and all the prophets of Asherah and I want you to go up to this place called Mount Carmel. I want you to assemble up there on the mountain. Ahab brings them up there and Elijah gets in the people’s face and makes a pretty strong comment to them. He says “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.”