Tag: Baal

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.

 

 

The Bible in a Year – 18 April

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

18 April. 1 Kings chapters 15-17

The first two of these chapters are grim reading, as we hear of several generations in which the civil war between Judah and the rest of Israel continued under several ‘kings’ on both sides.  These ‘kings’ were not worthy of the name: most of them gained power by force, and nearly all of them, with the exception of Asa of Judah, “did evil in the sight of the Lord” (i.e. acted selfishly with no regard for the common people, and tolerated idolatry).  Finally (in this list) comes Ahab of Israel, who was the worst of them all, for he not only tolerated idolatry in the land but took a foreign and evil wife (Jezebel, whose name would become a byword for a wicked woman) and set up a temple to the arch-idol Baal in his own city of Samaria.

 

Onto this scene suddenly emerges the prophet Elijah, who would become the greatest figure of the whole Old Testament after Abraham and Moses. And with him comes a welcome relief from stories of war, infighting and idolatry.  Elijah may have proclaimed doom to the king and his house for their apostasy, but he was not part of the establishment, nor the army, rather an ascetic prophet who was willing to be humbled by the God who called him to live in the desert on bread and water (and carrion brought to him by ravens) and then come to the aid of an ordinary family caught up in the civil war and in drought.

 

The three years’ drought that Elijah predicted as God’s punishment for Ahab’s sins is apparently recorded in non-Jewish literature so it can be regarded as historical.  But we have to take on faith the story of the miraculous provision of flour and oil that saw the family through the crisis, and Elijah’s resuscitation of the widow’s son.    This story brings us back home to the reality of much of the near east and north-east Africa in our time: war and drought combine to destroy whole populations.  I have recently met a refugee from one of those countries and her son, and can imagine them as I read of the family at Zarephath.  God is never concerned only with whole populations, but passionately cares for the sufferings of each individual.