AP

1 Kings 18:36-38    At the time of sacrifice, the prophet Elijah stepped forward and prayed: “LORD, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command.  Answer me, LORD, answer me, so these people will know that you, LORD, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again.”  Then the fire of the LORD fell and burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the stones and the soil, and also licked up the water in the trench.

As I read the familiar story of Elijah’s challenging the prophets of Baal in front of all the people of Israel, and gaining a quite spectacular victory over them, I find myself asking: “Why doesn’t our God, the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, do something spectacular like that for us today?  After all, the consequent response then was:  “When all the people saw this, they fell prostrate and cried: “The LORD – he is God! The LORD – he is God!” (verse 39).

Would it not be a helpful thing for us today, as we experience vicious, powerful attacks on the Church throughout the world by secular humanism and other man-centred ideologies, for God to reveal HIS hand and put them in their place?

But after a moment’s reflection I repent of such ungodly thinking, and put to myself some other relevant questions:  How long did King Ahab’s and Israel’s allegiance to their Covenant God, Yahweh, the LORD, last?  Barely any time at all, if at all!  And as the Sovereign LORD worked out his purposes in his Plan of Salvation, what did he finally have to do to save sinful man?  Send his own Son to die as the sacrifice for sin!  And what was  the outcome when Jesus conquered death and rose from the dead?

Luke tells us: “Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: ‘People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious.  For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: To an unknown god.  So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship – and this is what I am going to proclaim to you. … … In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.  For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed.  He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.’  When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, …” (Acts 17:22-23, 30-32) – and that same ‘sneering’ has continued for 2,000 years!

No, ‘spectacular proofs’ do not ultimately achieve God’s purposes.  It is the persistent, consistent testimony of changed lives that will do this, so let us just keep making this our focus.  The next big ‘Versus Baal’ event in God’s program will be the return of the Lord Jesus, Paul’s reference to God’s ‘set Day’, so in the meantime let us be concentrating our efforts on prayer and witness, so that more people – our family and friends – will be ready for it! 

– Bruce Christian