The Bible in a Year – 19 April

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

19 April. 1 Kings chapters 18-20

I have been looking forward to these chapters, for they contain some of my favourite Old Testament stories: the defeat of the prophets of Baal, and Elijah’s subsequent encounter with God in the cave, from which we get the line of a well-known hymn: “speak through the earthquake, wind and fire, O still small voice of calm!”  I have read this many times, and preached on it at least once.

 

But as is so often the case with the Bible, however often you have read a passage, something new strikes you each time.  This time it is chapter 18, verses 33-35. On the top of Mount Carmel, when Elijah builds his altar, he orders twelve jars of water to be poured into the earthen trench around it.  Now, this was the third year of a drought, so severe that the King went out into the countryside personally to look for any remaining bits of grass to feed his animals (18:5).  How, on top of a mountain in a drought, did they find twelve jars full of water? And even if they did, would it not have seemed a terrible waste of a precious resource?

 

It reminds me of one of the stories we have heard read in Holy Week as we do each year, of the anointing of Jesus at Bethany, when a vast amount of costly perfume is poured out.  Judas objects to the waste of money, but Jesus says that the woman (sometimes assumed to be Mary Magdalene) has done the right thing. Likewise, Abraham was willing to sacrifice his only, irreplaceable son when God asked him to do so (bt at the end of the day God provided a ram instead).

 

What these three stories have in common is that sometimes God calls us to lay down in faith what is most valuable to us, even to the point of folly (the water of life in a drought; a lifetime’s savings in liquid form; the only son).  And God will reward that act of faith by providing what is needed:   the ram instead of Isaac, everlasting life instead of worldly goods, and for Elijah an all the people of Israel, abundant rain that started falling within hours of the sacrifice.  The divine fire that fell to consume the sacrificial bull was only a sideshow: the true miracle was Elijah’s obedience and God’s provision of water for his people.