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Elijah : The Lord is My God by Rev. Charmaine Braatvedt Sunday 3rd September, 2006 Elijah : the one true God. Elijah lived 2,800 years ago, in Israel’s Dark Ages. The golden years of King David and Solomon were long gone and a series of corrupt kings had steered the nation into a spiritual wilderness. At the time when Elijah lived, one such royal rogue, King Ahab was on the throne. His ineptitude was compounded by his wife Jezebel. She was the daughter of the king of Sidon and as such worshipped the Phoenecian God, Baal. She erected a huge temple in Baal’s honour and had a full time team of 850 priests. Ahab gradually became more and more supportive of this idolatrous Baal worship and the people of Israel seemed to be dancing between the two religions. Perhaps they were wavering between the two in the hope of getting the best of both worlds. This is not too different from what many people do today. Though many people identify themselves as Christians, they nonetheless hedge their bets, dabbling in Astrology; Spiritualism; Scientology; Numerology and the like to find meaning and to get through life. While this is understandable on one level, because life is challenging and confusing, it is a misguided and dangerous modus operandi or way to operate. Syncretism is the cancer of the Christian Faith. Because it dilutes our commitment and faith in God. Yet this was precisely the game that the people of Israel were playing as they sought to worship both Baal and the God of Israel. Elijah was the prophet, God called to draw a line in the sand, to take a stand against the inroads this new religion was making on the people of Israel. So it was that Elijah bravely threw down the gauntlet and challenged the people to choose between Baal and the Lord God. “How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God follow him, but if Baal is God, follow him”. Elijah was demanding that the people should choose between the two religions. How easy it is to gloss over the story, especially when we read it out of context. How easy it is to read it and think “Go Elijah” and yet not fully comprehend the courage involved in what Elijah was doing. In many ways Elijah was the Dietrich Bonhoffer of his time. Bonhoffer the priest who stood up against the Nazi state Church and the Nazi Government and said ‘no’ to compromising the Gospel with the racism of the Nazi regime. Like Bonhoffer Elijah put his life at risk for his faith, now as he had done before, and became a wanted man, a fugitive for many years as a result. When we read on in the narrative we see that his actions though spectacularly successful nearly killed him and left him burnt out, alone and depressed. Self preservation is a very strong drive in human beings and nobody, not even those who give their whole lives over to doing the will of God, enjoys being unpopular and rejected. Elijah was no exception to this rule. His strength and courage came from a source outside of himself, from the Holy Spirit. It is through the strength and power of the Holy Spirit that Elijah finds the courage to challenge the norms of his day, to swim against the proverbial tide of opinion and to speak out for the one true God. He does so with a most impressive degree of commitment. Not with the half baked effort I might have employed as I kept an eye out for my own personal safety, but with a fully committed Bonhoffer style act of faith. Despite his fears he stands tall and strong in his faith and the more he relies on his faith the greater the courage he seems to acquire, to the point that in the face of obvious personal danger he is even able to ridicule the efforts of the desperate priests. Elijah was on a Holy Spirit role and I suspect he was even enjoying the ride! What was Elijah’s motivation for offering to prove to the people once and for all that God is the only true God? Why did he care so much? In modern terms, why did he not let well alone, allow everyone to believe what they wanted to believe? The prevailing world view today, in our post modern era is that there isn’t only one absolute truth and so surely any belief is right and true so long as you personally believe it. This was the view then also. Couldn’t Elijah just go along with that way of thinking? The answer lies in Elijah’s firm belief that there is an absolute truth, that God is that absolute truth and that we refuse to accept the reality of an absolute truth at our peril. Elijah knew in the light of his faith in God as the one true God, that :
Both are exercises in futility because they cannot give us access to a relationship with the one true God. In many ways you and I face a similar choice daily. ·Daily, we face the choice between the religion of consumerism, which focuses on money and acquiring more and more material goods; and the Christian Faith, which calls us to live simply with our eyes focused on our relationship with God through Jesus Christ. ·Daily we face countless opportunities to say ‘yes’ to God and ‘no’ to that which draws us away form God or orientates us away from God. We are the Entertainment Generation, obsessed with T.V. and that which will entertain us. The world offers countless entertainment opportunities which if we do not manage them well, get in the way of our relationship with God and take our focus away from him. · Even in the 21st Century with all its sophisticated thought process we are prone to idolatry. We engage in a form of idol worship through the ways in which we seek security and happiness through materialism, through committing ourselves to making money; climbing the corporate ladder; spending disproportionate amounts of time networking. · The way in which we worship time, hanging on to the hours and grudgingly allocating the minutes to God, clockwatching as we worship. Any of the strategies by which we seek to find meaning in life apart from God is by definition idolatry. Not that any of the above things are in themselves inherently wrong. Only that we place wrong emphasis and priorities on them. As we take stock of our lives it is good and important to seek to discover where God stands on our list of priorities. Elijah was out to prove that it was in the people of Israel’s best interests to commit their lives to God, not only because God is the only true and living God, but also because he knew that in life we encounter many situations which we cannot manage on our own, where we need the help of the one true God not some fanciful look alike. He understood that because there is no problem too big for God, it is in God that we must place our faith and trust. Three times Elijah mentions putting no fire under the sacrifice. He does this to illustrate that God can do anything because he is all powerful. There is never a problem that we encounter that is too big for God. The miracle God performed through him bore witness to God’s power and grace. Elijah’s words speak into our lives today as they spoke into the lives of the wavering Israelites all those years ago,
and to get off the fence and follow God, and him alone. There it is, Elijah’s challenge to his generation; to our generation; to all generations for all time. The question for each of us is this: What must each of us do; What change to our lifestyle, our world view, our values must each of us make today in order to authentically say: “I have decided to follow the One true God and him alone, in the way I choose to live this one life I have been given?” |
