I Kings 18:20-46, Kingdoms pp. 212-214
“Dueling Gods”
November 11, 2018 – Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost
As dawn broke over a quiet hill in New Jersey, two men turned swiftly toward each other, raised their pistols, and fired. It was July 11, 1804. Vice-president Aaron Burr’s aim was the better of the two. He fatally wounded Alexander Hamilton, our first Secretary of the Treasury, who died the next day.
Burr had failed to win another nomination for vice-president, so he entered the race for governor of New York. Hamilton bitterly opposed Burr’s political career. He spoke vehemently against his campaign for governor. So Burr invoked a dying custom challenging his antagonist to a duel on the grounds Hamilton had libeled him and maligned his character. Man-to-man, one-on-one, they met to settle their feud. Hamilton ended up dead. Burr became a fugitive. Dueling had just become illegal in New York.
A duel is picturesque and romantic combat. It resolves matters in a straightforward, clear-cut contest from which arises only one victor. Imagine medieval knights riding hard toward each other with lances poised, or swashbuckling adventurers exchanging ringing blows with their blades, or hard-eyed cowboys slapping leather holsters as they draw. There’s an insult, then a challenge, followed by an agreement on terms of battle, and then the duel itself, which leaves one person a winner and one a loser beyond any doubt.
Page 212 in Kingdoms, chapter 18 of I Kings, brings us to the scene of a duel. The challenge arose as Elijah obeyed God and presented himself to king Ahab. Like other national leaders we know, the king insulted the prophet, calling him a “troubler of Israel.” Elijah turned it back on Ahab. “You and your family are the troublemakers.” They worshipping idols and neglected God. Like Burr challenging Hamilton to meet him on the hill, the prophet challenged the king to meet him, with all the spiritual force at his royal command, on a Mt. Carmel, a mountain overlooking the west coast of Israel.
Again like interactions between leaders today, it’s obvious the man of God and the man with the crown did not care for each other. Their meetings were full of rancor and venom. Elijah despised the spineless, self-indulgent ruler. Ahab was constantly irritated by the abrasive, blunt spokesman for the Lord. The prophet was not king Ahab’s favorite person. Given an opportunity to engage him directly, to meet him in a duel, he wasn’t about to pass it by. He accepted the challenge and agreed to the place for a showdown.
And why shouldn’t Ahab agree? The ancient Phoenicians believed that Mount Carmel was the sacred home of Baal. His prophets would not only have the advantage of numbers, 850 to 1, they would be playing on their home field. Here was a golden opportunity to humiliate this annoying cowboy prophet.
No matter how much they disliked each other, it was not really a duel between Elijah and Ahab, Once everyone was assembled, Elijah explained clearly at the bottom of page 212, verse 21, what the real contest was that day. “How much longer will you waver, hobbling between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him! But if Baal is God, then follow him!” It’s not a duel between two men, but between two gods.
“Baal” was the Canaanite name for the Syrian god, Hadad. He was the god of storms and weather. But Elijah had stopped the rain, a particular affront to a weather god for three years now. “Baal” in Hebrew simply means “master.” Jesus Himself said hundreds of years later when He challenged the false god of money, “You cannot serve two masters.” Neither could you serve the Lord and the false god named Baal.
Worship of Baal was characterized by the worst forms of immorality. 400 prophets of the fertility goddess Asherah were there alongside 450 Baal prophets. She was supposed to be Baal’s lover. Acting out those gods’ supposed sexual activity led to prostitution as part of their ritual. Children were sacrificed to Baal, and all sorts of bizarre rites, some of which appear later in this story, were in their religious practice. Baal and Asherah were not sweet, benign images of sky and earth like modern pagans try to worship. They embodied all the darkness which can be found in the human soul. Israel adored them
As Elijah said, people wavered between the Lord and Baal. They prayed to and worshipped one, keeping the other god in reserve in case the first did not give them what they wanted. When Elijah asked them to choose, it says, “But the people were completely silent.” They didn’t want to choose. They wanted both gods.
Beth and I are big fans of “both/and” thinking. There are some choices we don’t need to make. Jesus is God and human. Our worship here at Valley Covenant is both traditional and contemporary. You can be opposed to abortion and for gun control. Some choices other believers or the world want to force on us are just bad or false choices. But the choice between gods is not one of those. It’s the ultimate real choice.
Jesus said you cannot love both God and money because one will get the upper hand. “Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other.” Baal had the upper hand in Israel. City after city made a Baal idol the primary spiritual focus. Baal had a corps of 450 prophets in their service, with another 400 serving his consort’s female idols. They were fed and maintained by queen Jezebel herself. It was an “immoral majority.” God challenged that majority through Elijah.
We imagine ourselves living in more enlightened times. There are few idols set up in the community around us, though there are some images of the Buddha down 18th Street at their meeting house. We may think we are not much tempted to give our offerings and our children in sacrifice to a false god. Yet the truth is that there are just as many, if not more, false gods enticing us now then there were then.
When you work a math problem, there are wrong solutions without limit. There is only one correct answer. As G. K. Chesterton says about the truth of Christianity, “It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.”[1] When you consider all the gods you could worship, the possibilities are endless. There are false gods beyond number in our world. At least one of those gods masquerades for us as freedom or tolerance. So good Christians sacrifice their children to the false notion that you should allow little ones to make up their own minds about religion. Do we let them make up their own minds about the answer to 2 + 2 = 4? Why do anything so silly, then, in a matter which is vastly more important?
We can still be as careless about who and what we worship as the Israelites were. We can “waver between two opinions,” keeping our minds and options open to the possibilities. We may not cut up animals beneath a carved image perched on a mountaintop, but we can and do sacrifice to other idols. We may carry in our pocket or purse a little god with a glowing screen that demands all our attention. We may park a god in the garage. Money is still a popular choice for worship. My wife calls the Selco building by Gateway the “temple of finance.” And some gods attract screaming crowds of devotees on holy days, wearing sacred colors, shouting chants in massive sanctuaries no church could ever build.
“Not so,” you might be thinking. “A phone or car or money or team is not my god. It’s just a necessity, a bit of pleasure, some security, a way to relax.” But how much do you sacrifice to them? Compare what you give to the one you want to say is God to the time, money and energy you offer to those other things. By that sort of measure don’t we, in reality, have other gods? Aren’t we in fact wavering between several?
God is still dueling. He wants more than anything to be the only god in our lives. That is why He continually renews the contest He entered here with Baal. It is a divine duel aimed at proving not just that God is better than any other god, but that in reality any other god is a fraud. As He did with an ancient god of weather, the Lord defeats our other gods.
At the top of page 213, Elijah invited the prophets of Baal to have their god demonstrate his best. The odds were in their favor, 450 to 1. They were on Baal’s sacred ground. Even the choice of weapons was slanted in Baal’s favor. Offer a bull in sacrifice and have it burned up by “fire” from heaven. Lightning. That should be simplicity itself for the god of storms. Elijah even let them go first.
They prepared their sacrifice and began to call on Baal. For three hours, from nine in the morning until noon, Elijah stood quietly by and watched them dance around the altar and cry to Baal. At noon, though, the prophet of the Lord could stand it no longer. He began to harass them, “shout louder, for surely he is a god! Perhaps he is daydreaming, or is relieving himself. Or maybe he is away on trip, or is asleep and needs to be awakened!”
Goaded by Elijah’s mockery, Baal’s prophets became more energetic. They shouted louder, and, in the middle of page 213, began to cut their own flesh. Their blood was sacrificed along with the bull’s. They became frantic, keeping it up for another three hours, until 3 p.m., the time of the evening sacrifice. The result of it all is summed up succinctly: “no sound, no reply, no response.” Because there was no on there. Baal wasn’t real.
Elijah allowed worshipers of Baal to discover for themselves the emptiness of their faith. God allows you and I the same sort of idolatrous rope to hang ourselves. He lets us go as far as we like trying to find happiness and peace in the worship of other gods.
I’m not tempted to idolize sports teams, but most of you know I love to fish. It’s pretty tempting to imagine, especially a few years from retirement, a life totally devoted to nothing else. But one of my favorite books, The River Why by David James Duncan, pictures how a young man named Gus tried to actually devote himself completely to fishing. He devised the “Ideal 24-Hour Schedule”:
- sleep: 6 hrs.
- food consumption: 30 min. (between casts, if possible)
- school: 0 hrs.!
- bath, toilet, etc.: 15 min. (unavoidable)
- housework and miscellaneous chores: 30 min.
- nonangling conversation: 0 hrs.
- transportation 45 min.: (live by a good fishing river)
- gear maintenance: 1hr., 30 min.
- fishing time: 14½ hrs. per day![2]
The story goes on to tell how Gus tried to live out this bizarre timetable one summer. He ends up sick, depressed, and nearly insane. As a god, fishing proved to be as false and fruitless as worshipping an idol. Duncan then shows us Gus learning to seek for the real God. The phony gods we choose for ourselves are all losers like Baal.
God’s duel with Baal ends the same as every contest the Lord enters. He wins. God does not merely scrape by a point or two ahead with seconds on the clock. No, God had Elijah pour buckets of water on His altar. Then he offers one brief prayer. And the fire comes down, completely, overwhelmingly, burning up everything including the stones and vaporizing every drop of water. Baal is shutout, skunked, flushed down the toilet where he sat supposedly relieving himself.
Elijah had those hundreds of false prophets put to death. The duel was a violent confrontation. The second commandment says, “for the Lord your God is a jealous God,” jealous enough to wreak destruction on those who put someone or something else first. In our Gospel, Jesus warned about religious leaders who love their own honor and position and property more than they love God.
The very symbol of our faith is a reminder that our God prefers a duel to the death over accommodation and falsehood. The Cross is a symbol of confrontation. Its crossing beams are clashing swords in a battle with all that is less than God. Real Christian faith in Jesus is going to find itself at odds with the gods who are popular in this world.
Even good feelings and pursuits become idols when they stand between us and God. I talked about Henry VIII and Thomas More a few weeks ago. In Robert Bolt’s play, “A Man for All Seasons,” More refuses to sign a political and religious document to legitimize Henry’s divorce from his wife Catherine. More believed it wrong in God’s eyes. He was imprisoned and condemned to have his head cut off. At one point Thomas Cromwell and the Duke of Norfolk come to him in prison to offer another opportunity to sign and save his life. The Duke’s final plea is for Thomas to join all the others who have signed, for the sake of “fellowship.” More’s reply is:
And when we stand before God, and you are sent to Paradise for doing according to your conscience and I am damned for not doing according to mine, will you come with me, for fellowship?[3]
It would be very good for Christians to remember Henry VIII and Thomas More in this time. Christians like Cromwell gave their allegiance to Henry because they thought he would do what God wanted for their country. Instead all Henry produced was a divided nation and decades of internal strife following his reign. Allegiance to a mean, tough-talking, bull-headed, selfish, immoral leader looks a lot like idolatry when it runs counter to what Scripture teaches about God’s love and justice. And God will hold us accountable.
Nothing is worth honoring above and before God. No god on earth is worth separating ourselves from God in heaven. God in Jesus Christ confronts all those gods on the other side for one reason only. It is no accident that “jealous” is how God is described in the commandment against making idols. Jealousy is a characteristic of love. God duels with all the other gods because He loves us.
We see that in how the tale of dueling gods ends. The climax is not death. The conclusion is grace. God did not want to send fire to earth as much as he wanted to send refreshing water. The confrontation showed that when the rain finally came after three years it was the gift of the Lord. The real climax is on page 214, when Elijah’s servant looks west toward the sea for the seventh time and a tiny dark cloud appears. The rain is coming. The false gods are gone. God is again going to pour down cool, healing showers of blessing.
I do not know who or what your other gods are. I am all too intimately acquainted with mine. Fishing may be the least. Yet I know that one true Lord loves us. He fought a duel on another lonely hill for us, a duel in which He Himself died in order to win our love. May all our idols melt away in the fire of Jesus’ love. May we be healed and cleansed by showers of His grace.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2018 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] From Orthodoxy, in The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, Vol. 1 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 306.
[2] David James Duncan, The River Why (New York: Bantam, 1983), p. 57f.
[3] (New York: Random House, 1960), p. 77.