“If the Lord is God, follow
him; but if Baal, then follow him.”
This sounds so
simple. It should be that simple. Who is the real God? Follow him. Except… most
of us don’t get to run this kind of test. We just don’t. Instead, we get hints
and wonders and little things that make us yearn for something better and a
quiet assurance that such a thing is there. Most of us don’t get to see God
hurling down lightning bolts from the heavens. This is a wonderful story and a
difficult story for that reason.
I mean, I love this story. I expect some of you do, too,
because it is a story that is thoroughly modern (even if it is three thousand
years old). What I mean by calling it a “modern” story is that the grounds that
are established for God’s existence are thoroughly rational. Elijah sets the
premise: Worship a God who actually does something. And then he goes about
constructing a challenge where only the real God could succeed.
He gives Ba’al every advantage. The home field of Mount
Carmel. The weapons of choice: Ba’al being the god of fertility, what better
advantage than lightning? He plays in front of the home crowd—four hundred of Ba’al
worshipers. Elijah makes it so lopsided that the only way Yahweh—his God, our
God—could possibly win is if he is real and Ba’al is not.
I wish we could do a similar demonstration for you today.
Wet down the altar and have a little competition between the God who we know in
the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and all the other gods we have. Wealth,
fame, sports teams, deer season... But this is not how God normally works. This
story with Elijah is the exception and not the rule. Deuteronomy 6:16, which
predates Elijah by hundreds of years, says “Do not put the Lord your God to the
test,” which is exactly what Jesus quotes to Satan when he is tempted in the
wilderness. The honest truth is that Elijah gets a free pass here that the rest
of us do not. He gets to put God to the test in a way we cannot.
This may be unfair, but it is also a reminder that, as
much as we might think otherwise, we are not the heroes of the faith. God tends
to work through nations, telling a big story, crafting a big plan. This is why
that oft-quoted passage from Jeremiah, “For I know the plans I have for you, plans
to proper and a future with hope” (Jer 29:22) is misinterpreted again and
again. It is not an individual promise to you and me but rather it is a
national promise; a promise, we might say, for the whole body of Christ.
Sometimes you won’t prosper. Sometimes you won’t be very hopeful.
Sometimes—probably often—you’ll have a tough time crafting a rational test for
God’s existence. This is not evidence against God; it is simply proof against
your methodology.
That’s not to say that God doesn’t come to us today in
personal, individual ways. He absolutely does. Many of you can tell stories.
Often, it’s not even stories so much as a little voice, inaudible to the rest
of us, that gives us comfort and assurance and hope. It’s more than
coincidence; it directs us to something bigger. I have a tough time talking
about my call story because I imagine that I should have that Martin Luther
praying-to-St. Anne-in-the-storm kind of call, or that Saul
blinded-on-the-road-to-Damascus kind of call. But my story is different and I’m
willing to bet it is the same for many of you. Your experiences of God are deep
and mysterious and difficult to articulate. After all, this is God we are talking about!
This story of Elijah on Mt. Carmel is a fantastic one,
and, ultimately, it is a story that matters because a god who does nothing is
useless. Ba’al is useless. The question is whether Yahweh is the same. This
story satisfies our desires for a God who is active and powerful, but honestly,
this story is less useful to us today than we might imagine because if you’re
waiting on a similar proof of God today you’re misunderstanding what faith is,
and if you’re not waiting on this kind of evidence then you already get the
point. The reason this story matters is not because it is evidence for your
faith, which is in itself a contradiction; instead the reason this story
matters is because it explains something basic that we tend to skim over, which
is that belief in Yahweh—this God of Israel, of David, of Elijah—goes on, while
belief in these other gods did not. There is something about this Yahweh. There
is something that once fed people and continues to do so to this day.
We
imagine that the Bible, being a single collection of books filled with acts of
God, meant that God was awfully active during this time long ago, but we should
remember that the Old Testament exists over thousands and thousands of years.
The vast majority of people, like us, have no Mt. Carmel moment of God sending
down fire from the heavens. This is why we can read one second that God parted
the Red Sea and then a few chapters later the people of Israel are complaining
about how bland the food is in the desert. It’s not only that they are slow and
forgetful; these are, in some sense, not all the same people. God’s dramatic
activity is the exception and not the rule. We are less like Elijah and more
like the unnamed Israelite living down the street who hears all this as legend told
by others.
All this means is that you are unlikely to get a response
if you set up the same test as Elijah. It’s not because you’re less faithful,
but it may be because there’s less on the line. God is working through Elijah
to move nations, to push history inexorably toward one thing and one thing
only, which is the cross. All of history bends in that direction. In ways both
mysterious and opaque all events bring us to Jesus, everything destined for a
single act of salvation brought about through his death and resurrection.
Today, we live after that event. We live after Elijah and
Mt. Carmel. We live in an extremely rational world with a faith that requires
some measure of irrational experience. It can be tough to follow Jesus for that
very reason. If you’re looking for bolts from the sky, look elsewhere. Not that
God can’t; not that God won’t; it’s just that our yearnings for proof are not
as important as we think they are. We are minor characters; not Elijah, not
David, definitely not Jesus. We are followers, not history-makers. Instead of
listening for bangs, we are told to listen in the silence. Instead of trying to
put God to the test, we live by faith. Instead of looking for God in the
miraculous, we experience the face of God in one another. Then, occasionally,
God happens to break through in miraculous ways in spite. Not how we expected.
Not how we would have planned. That’s all the better.
We’re
not Elijah. We can love the story, but we had better do it for the right
reason: Because we love God, who loved us first, and we need no better proof
than that.
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