Sunday 4 August
As new Chairman of New Horizon, Gilbert Lennox is so thrilled to be sharing in the teaching during the Evening Celebrations helping each one of us to “To live intelligently, to witness compassionately, graciously and wisely and to take a courageous stand for Jesus.” Now a retired church leader, Gilbert has been a regular teacher at New Horizon for many years.
Scientists have finally understood why it is that our summer weather is so poor… we are in Ireland. I hope you won’t find yourself sitting beside a big drip. Feel free to move or to put your umbrella up if that becomes a problem!
The challenge this evening is this: have we actually decided to follow Jesus as we’ve been singing and if so, what are the implications of that decision? Let’s read from 1 Kings about the story of Elijah:
1 Kings 17: 1-6 and 1 Kings 18: 1-2 and 1 Kings 18:17 – 21
This is one of those moments that we all dread – when we can no longer hide who we really are and what we are committed to. Jesus did this, He asked, “Who do people say that I am?” And then He made the question personal, “Who do you say that I am?”
It is like this here with Elijah, “If God is God, follow Him. If Baal is god, follow him.” There follows one of the most dramatic encounters of history. Ahab was now king over Israel (after the kingdom was dividied). The key evil that Ahab introduced (influenced by his wife Jezebel) was the worship of Baal – the storm god of Jezabel’s homeland.
If you have ever experienced a violent storm, you might thing that a god was at work (if you didn’t know the real God). They called this god “Baal” which also means lord and master. He was also a fertility god and as such he was often represented by a bull. Baal worship often included shrine prostitutes and uninhibited sex.
Ahab had introduced the worship of another god to rival Jehovah. In 2024, it is easy to dismiss the worship of other gods (e.g. worshipping storms or sex). But if you stop believing in the worship of the one true God, then what controls your destiny? What is the supreme reality of life? When you strip away the idolatry, underneath there is something ultra modern – the belief that powers of nature and materialism control our world.
If we lose our faith in the living God, we will inevitably replace it with some kind of idolatry, even if we don’t call it that.
Into this situation, steps Elijah. His name means Yahweh is my God. There is no ambiguity there. He says, “As the Lord the God of Israel lives who I serve…” Elijah knew God as the living God. He spent his life serving in the presence of the God who lives. He was hugely courageous confronting the prevailing worldview.
Then he went to hide in a ravine from Jezebel’s murderous threats. But there was more to it than mere safety. God was preparing Elijah for the big showdown that was to come. Preparing him by giving him real experience in his private life that God is the living God. A ravine makes a great hiding place but there is one problem (no Tesco’s, no corner store). How would he live? God arranged a daily airlift of food by ravens.
What does it mean to believe in the living God? It means believing that God is interested in our food supply. God provides for His servants so that they can carry out His purposes. Not just the supply of food but the supply of life itself. Isn’t this often what is missing? So many people sense that they lack the reality of the experience of God because they don’t understand that even taking our daily food is meant to be an experience of dependence on God.
Give us this day our daily bread.
How easy to forget. The result of that day upon day is to lose our sense of the reality of the living God. And when we lose it, we have nothing to say to the world.
After this season, it was time for Elijah to step back into the arena. Jezebel had been murdering God’s prophets but thanks to one of the administrators Obadiah (the Oscar Shindler of his day) a genuine believer in God and a civil servant, 100 prophets were rescued. We have this myopic view that it is only preachers and evangelists who experience the living God. But here is a civil servant who was able to use his skills to influence the safety of 100 people and organise their food supply.
We serve God not just from a platform but in our daily work. This is the extraordinary calling that God gives to all of us. Have you enough faith and enough spiritual imagination to see how you might use your position and skills to save some?
Finally, Elijah turns up and tells Ahab to gather together all the prophets of Baal – odds of 850 to 1. Then Elijah challenges the people, “If the Lord is God follow Him. If Baal is god, then follow him.”
This is the issue, who is the real God?
When Elijah put that challenge to the people, they said nothing. What could they say? They had grown up believing in God but they had tried to combine that with the worship of Baal. It is very easy for us to be critical of Israel. The worship of Baal was pervasive and seductive.
Imagine in a home, a child comes in and says their teacher has told them what is in charge of the weather and the crops, etc. is a god called Baal. The teachers told us that we are out of touch. Our neighbours have given up belief in the living God and started to worship Baal.
Maybe the older kids went to a Baal celebration and the music was amazing. There was dancing. Everybody was having fun. And out of the earshot of the their parents, they would talk about free sex that the priest of Baal was promoting. It used to be called immorality but now it is called “being true to yourself”. And so they abandon the living God, the inventor of sex who gave certain restrictions to ensure our flourishing and protect us from damage.
Time to Decide
So Elijah sets up a sacrifice… this is the showdown. Asking God (and Baal) to send down fire on the sacrifice. The God who answers by fire is God. Who is the true God? The true God is the God who speaks and who answers by fire.
The prophets danced around the altar. But there was no response. So Elijah taunted them. Some sins are so foolish that they deserve mockery. It is absurd to worship the processes of the natural world instead of the living God who created them! They became frantic but there was no answer, no response because false gods have no voice.
The sun has no voice. Natural selection has no voice. Science has no voice. Sex has no voice. If you remove God, there is no one there to answer. If you have made all that money can buy your god and you cry out to it, you will get no response either. The sheer tragedy of it… people giving their lives to the pursuit of money, power, sex…calling out at the end of the day for identity, value or meaning but there is no answer. The universe has no voice because it is just a thing.
Elijah got them to soak the altar to make sure it was clear that what happened next would be clearly a work of God. He prays, “Let these people know that you are God.” Then the fire of the Lord fell and burned up the sacrifice, the wood and the stones.
Then the people cried, “The Lord, He is God.”
This isn’t mere theory. This is about following. It is about how we live our lives. Fill your minds with all the philosophy and theology you like but what matters is what you believe and who you are following.
How do you see it? Where are you? If Elijah were here today and point out the contradictions. In your workplace. In your morality. Are you living two separate lives? Are you wavering? Who are you going to follow?
Elijah pours cold water on the sacrifice. Emotions are important. There are times we get excited when we are singing. But when we have difficulties, we find it hard. We need to think through calmly what we believe. The answer does not lie in how we feel, it lies in a sacrifice. Jesus came into the world as that supreme sacrifice. Introduced as the lamb of God who would take away the sin of the world. No one ever has claimed to do that except Jesus. Christ came to deal with our sin.
God cannot say my wrong doing doesn’t matter. Jesus came to tell us that sin matters because we matter. But here is the supreme sign. The fire has fallen on Jesus. He has taken the wrath of God for us.
Let me be personal for a moment as I finish, reading from 2 Corinthians 5:15: “And He died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for Him who died for them and was raised again.”
How long will we waver between two opinions? We cannot serve two masters. We cannot serve God and Mammon…
Idols are the things we serve instead of God. What do our lives say? In case we have been setting up idols in our hearts, why not listen this evening to the witness of the Holy Spirit. In case we have started to give our trust and service to things and people, that only should be given to God.
If Jesus is God’s son, who has given His life for us on the cross, then we would be fools not to serve Him, no matter what we feel on any given day.