Elijah: Prayer for Priority
1 Kings 18:17-18:39
“We have a skunk in the basement,” shrieked the caller to the police dispatcher. “How can we get it out?” The Police Dispatcher told her to “Take some bread crumbs, and put down a trail from the basement out to the back yard. Then leave the cellar door open.” Sometime later the resident called back. “Did you get rid of it?” asked the dispatcher. “No,” replied the caller. “Now I have two skunks in there!”
Have you ever found yourself in more trouble than you started? Well, that was certainly the case here, wasn’t it? It’s also the case of the person that we are studying tonight. As we continue on in our series “Prayers that make a Difference” tonight, we will be looking at the prophet Elijah.
As we come to tonight’s story, it seems that Elijah faces a tremendous amount of trouble. Before we get into the prayer of this man, let me give you some background and names you should know Ahab is the king of Israel & Samaria probably reigned during the years of 874-853 BC. With Ahab as king, Israel reached its lowest point of spiritual decay. He was a horrible king even worse than his father Omri. 18:25 says, “Omri did evil in the eyes of the Lord, and did worse than all who were before.” Ahab’s evil consisted of promoting the worship of Baal in the nation of Israel. He turned the nation away from the true God. He was also married to Jezebel who was considered to be an evil woman of that day and time. Elijah a prophet of God. We don’t know much about his life before God called him. We do know that is name means “THE LORD IS GOD”. (Pretty good name.) He was sent by God to confront Baalism and to declare to Israel that the Lord was God and there was no other. (Pretty good message)
Elijah had been sent by God to be the messenger of bad news. God had sent Elijah to the northern kingdom of Israel. Now remember Ahab is the king, and his wife is Jezebel. They were not leaders that were following the ways of the Lord. In fact, they were doing just the opposite. They were leading the people of Israel to worship the other gods of Canaan, specifically Baal and Asherah. So, Elijah comes to announce an impending doom. Because of their disobedience, a drought was coming – no rain and no dew – until he said differently.
Because of this message it made Elijah a marked man. You might think that Ahab would straighten out his act. No, this is not the case. Instead Ahab had blamed and pursued Elijah. Instead of trying to get on Elijah’s good side, he decides that this was Elijah’s fault. And somewhere in his peculiar thinking, he believes that killing Elijah would end the problem. So Elijah is in trouble, because Ahab has put out an APB (All Points Bulletin) out on him. Elijah has become Israel’s most wanted fugitive. Therefore, Lord told Elijah to leave and hide by the Brook Cherith, east of the river Jordan. While there God took care of Elijah by providing Elijah with water to drink from the brook and having the Ravens bring him bread and meat to eat. Eventually the brook dried up but God still provided for Elijah. Read 1 Kings 17:7-16. So the whole time Elijah is on the run God is making sure that he is well rested and properly taken care of. Why? Because God knew that Elijah was fixing to face one of the biggest challenges of his life.
As we can see right away Elijah shouldn’t be on the run and he shouldn’t be in trouble. After all, Ahab had no one to blame but himself. He had followed the poor example of his father. He had married poorly. And he had been a poor spiritual leader for the people, misleading them into an evil idolatry. So through scripture we know that eventually God sends Elijah back to King Ahab and there is going to be a showdown between God’s man, Elijah and the wicked King Ahab, which leads us to our passage of scripture tonight.
Read 1 Kings 18:17-39. Tonight as we look at Elijah we are going to see a man that had a mighty faith in God and who believed in prayer. Tonight we will look at 4 things: the petition, the protest, the preparation and the plea.
I. The Petition.
Read verses 18-19. The severe, three-year drought had not convinced Ahab nor Israel of Baal’s powerlessness. Ahab, rather than seeing himself as responsible, blamed the prophet for the drought. You know it always seems that the wicked always blame the believers for the trouble in the world; they never think to blame their own sins. What we see is that the prophet Elijah was not afraid to meet King Ahab; nor was he afraid to tell the king the truth. Why was he not afraid? It’s because Elijah was commanded, by God, to engineer a direct confrontation.
So Ahab and Elijah meet, and a test was agreed to. The people of Israel were invited to watch a supernatural contest between Elijah, the lone prophet of Jehovah, and some 450 prophets of Baal and 400 prophets of Asherah on Mt. Carmel. We need to understand that the contest was not between Elijah and Ahab. It was between God and Baal. The nation was "limping and tottering between two ways," and it was time to make a decision of which God to follow.
In a sense, Elijah is calling for a prayer meeting, a prayer meeting with the false prophets. Elijah is going to pray to his God and the 850 Prophets were going to pray to their Gods. Now I don’t necessarily agree with his thinking because it was 850 to 1, which in the eyes of a person is not very good odds. But when God is on your side that’s all you need. So in reality the false prophets were out numbered 1 to 850. However, even though Elijah called for 450 of Baal’s prophets as well as 400 of Asherah only the 450 of Baal’s prophets showed up.
Now let’ look at the…
II. The Protest.
Read verses 20-24. As the people gathered on Mount Carmel, Elijah challenged them to choose once and for all between Jehovah and Baal. When they were silent, he proposed a contest to see whose god would provide fire for a sacrifice. Elijah’s purpose was not just to expose the false god Baal but also to bring the compromising people back to the Lord. Because of the evil influence of Ahab and Jezebel, the people were "limping" between two opinions and trying to serve both Jehovah and Baal. Like Moses (Ex 32:26) and Joshua (Josh 24:15) before him, Elijah called for a definite decision on their part, but the people were speechless. Was this because of their guilt (Rom 3:19) or because they first wanted to see what would happen next? They were weak people, without true conviction.
When Elijah said in v. 22 that he was the only prophet of the Lord, he wasn’t forgetting the prophets that Obadiah had hidden and protected. Rather, he was stating that he was the only one openly serving the Lord, and therefore he was outnumbered by the 450 prophets of Baal. But one with God is a majority, so the prophet had no fears.
Elijah tells the people, here’s the challenge. You need to choose which God you will serve. You cannot follow both you have to make a choice. If the Lord is God then follow Him, but if Baal is God then follow him. The challenge is this let’s build two altars, let’s get two bulls cut them up into pieces and lay them on the wood with no fire. Then you call on your God, Baal, to burn the offering and I’ll do the same and whoever’s God sends fire down is the one true God. In other words, Elijah is making this statement, “If your God be God … so be it and if my God be God…so be it!” As we can see to the people this was a fair challenge because they answered in v. 24 “It is well spoken.”
III. The Preparation.
Read V.25-30. Elijah weighted the test in favor of the prophets of Baal. They could build their altar first, select their sacrifice and offer it first, and they could take all the time they needed to pray to Baal.
By noon, Elijah was taunting the prophets of Baal because nothing had happened. The prophets of Baal were dancing frantically around their altar and cutting themselves with swords and spears, but still nothing happened. Elijah suggested that perhaps Baal couldn’t hear them because he was deep in thought, or maybe he’s sleeping, or even traveling. He even stated that maybe your God is relieving himself. We see that through his words it only made them become more fanatical, but nothing happened.
All this time while the prophets of Baal made fools of themselves Elijah was patiently waiting on the Lord to give him the ok. Finally at three o’clock, the time of the evening sacrifice at the temple in Jerusalem, Elijah stepped forward and took charge. This right here was the time that God had prepared Elijah for. When he stepped up Elijah was spiritually ready. God had spiritually prepared Elijah. During his time of being on the run and hiding God had prepared Elijah spiritually by giving him rest and providing him food. Because God had taken care of him during that time when water and food was so hard to come by and I believe all of those things had an effect on Elijah’s faith. I believe Elijah’s faith became stronger because of how God had taken care of him during his hiding. Therefore, Elijah knew that the same God that had provided food, water and rest for him was going to be the same one true God who was going to send fire down from heaven.
Elijah is prepared, now let’s see…
IV. The Plea.
Read V.30-39. We read that he asked the people to come near to him. In my translation Elijah is saying,”Come see what the Lord is a Fixing to do.”
All the people came near to him and Elijah repaired the altar of the Lord that had been torn down. Who originally built the altar that Elijah used? Probably a member of the believing remnant in Israel who privately worshiped the Lord. But the altar had been destroyed, probably by the prophets of Baal (19:10), so Elijah rebuilt it and sanctified it. By using twelve stones, he reaffirmed the spiritual unity of God’s people in spite of their political division.
Elijah had given the prophets of Baal some advantages, so now he gave himself some handicaps. He had a trench dug around the altar and filled it with water. He put the sacrifice on the wood on the altar and had everything drenched with water. He called for the whole sacrifice and it’s wood to be soaked with water three separate times. The excess water... even filled the trench. The water - four large jars filled three times each probably was collected from a spring on the mountain or in the Kishon Valley below (v. 40), or from the Mediterranean Sea. The purpose of this soaking, of course, was to show everyone present that the burning of the sacrifice that was to take place was not a natural phenomenon or a trick but was a miracle. Also the time involved in securing the water would have added to the tension of the hour.
At the time of the Israelites’ evening sacrifice, Elijah stepped forward and prayed. Without any of the theatrics of his adversaries Elijah simply addressed God as one addresses another living person. His words were designed to demonstrate to the onlookers that all he had done as God’s servant had been in obedience to God’s command and not on the prophet’s own initiative. Elijah simply asked God to show the people that He was and still is the true God and to turn the hearts of the people back to Himself. Suddenly, the fire fell from heaven and totally devoured the sacrifice, the altar, and the water in the trench around the altar. There was nothing left that anybody could turn into a relic or a shrine. The altar to Baal still stood as a monument to a lost cause. The prophets of Baal were stunned, and the people of Israel fell on their faces and acknowledged, "The Lord, He is God!!!
In the midst of this story we see Elijah’s “Philosophy of Priority.” We see the principle and the practice if you will. The Principle is: If God Be God … So Be It. And the Practice is: If God Be God… Let Us Follow Him. What is your priority? Is God, God of your life? Does He sit on the throne of your heart? …. If so… So be it Does He take priority? Are you following Him and if not Why not?
Invitation
