4 Sermons on Elijah at St Margaret’s Church Nedlands
2 Which God is God?
July 6 1 Kings 18. Luke 9.51 – 10.3. Psalm 111.
Choice is the name of the game today. Many of you can still remember when you went to the corner store and asked for flour, and sugar, and salt, and a pound of potatoes, and the shopkeeper weighed them out, and there was no choice and a brown paper bag to take them home. Today you have a dozen brands with fancy packaging. My wife loves shopping: so many things to choose from. I hate it, I don’t like making choices. Today you can even choose your God; growing up in the fifties there was only one, you had to leave the country to be reminded there were others. Today we consider the question which god is the true God, and does it matter?
In 2015 I spent some time teaching at a college in Juba, the capital of South Sudan. I stayed in a “safe-house” with a missionary who was also teaching there. A driver collected us every morning and delivered us home each afternoon. They were very attentive to our safety. By the end of the first week, I was sick of being cooped up; I needed to get out. I pointed to a nearby mountain and told Paul I would like to climb it. We set out early and trekked through several villages before we began climbing. There were no tracks to follow, we had to push our way through elephant grass and some nasty thorn bushes, and in a few places pull ourselves over rocky outcrops. At one place the scrub was flattened, and Paul we afraid we might meet big animals. I was more afraid we would run into soldiers who would not be pleased to find us outside the city. They told us afterwards we should have been worried about landmines, but we made it to the top, where we found a field freshly hoed ready for planting, and, in the middle, sitting on a rock was a young man, I would reckon about eighteen years old. He was reading a book, and Paul went over talk with him. The book was a Bible, in English. We were hardly expecting that. For a while they discussed what he was reading. Then he took us to a higher area where there was a huge steel cross about six meters tall. “We call this ‘Fire of God’,” he said. Then he pointed into the distance where there was another mountain with another faintly visible cross; “We call that, ‘The Lord he is God’.” Elijah’s God is known in what we used to call “deepest darkest Africa.” The story of Elijah’s contest with the prophets of Baal is known and celebrated by a people who have fought for more than a hundred years against a government determined they should bow to Islam’s god. They know about different gods, and most of the country has chosen the Lord, the God of Israel, and Jesus his Son. And Africa is being blessed.
There is something important I omitted from my sermon last week: Jesus in his hometown synagogue drew attention to the fact that Elijah was sent to help a widow in Lebanon, though there were many needy widows in Israel at the time. (Luke 4) He warned them not to turn away from God’s messenger. When a people turns its back on God, the blessings they promise go to others. As the West rejects Jesus, he is embraced by many in Africa, China, South East Asia, and even Iran.
We learned last week how Israel had given up on their God and was flirting with the Canaanite fertility gods. God sent Elijah to call a halt. He announced a drought which would only end when he said, and now, after more than two years in hiding, he reappeared to King Ahab’s assistant. Obadiah was afraid. If he told Ahab Elijah was back, and he disappeared again, Ahab would kill him. We learn that some had remained faithful; Obadiah was protecting a hundred of Yahweh’s prophets from the wrath of Jezebel.
Ahab greeted the returning Elijah: “Is it you, you troubler of Israel?” Those who follow God are often seen as troublers, even of the Church. In the fifties Gabriel Hebert, An Australian Anglican monk, wrote a book in which he accused “fundamentalists,” by which he meant people who took the Bible seriously, of endangering the Church. An answer came from an English Anglican. J.I. Packer. The first chapter of Fundamentalism and the Word of God began with this quote: “Is it you, you troubler of Israel?” The second chapter began with Elijah’s reply, “I have not made trouble for Israel, but you and your father’s family have, abandoning the Lord’s commands and following the Baals.” Reading that book set me on a course I still hold to today. Packer argued that Christians were people who believed in Jesus as the Son of God. This means following his teaching. Jesus taught about many things, including that God is a speaking God, who has revealed himself through the prophetic writings of the Old Testament, and now through himself, and later through his trained apostles. If we follow Jesus, this will be our conviction; I remain convinced by his argument.
John Hick, a Congregationalist philosopher, writing in the seventies, said the differences between Christians were no longer between different denominations, but that in every denomination there are those who understand being Christian in terms of following the Bible, and those who seek a faith that is relevant to the modern generation. He thought those two movements could only move further and further apart, and so it has been. He placed himself in the “modernist” camp. It raises the question whether people in churches can draw so far apart that they in effect are worshipping different gods.
The question for Israel was an old one: which god is the true God, and it is not much different today. At the beginning there was no problem: Adam and Eve and their descendants knew God. But the time came when people began inventing gods to please themselves, and it did not take long for religions to proliferate. Then God spoke to Abraham, when he was among the moon worshippers of southern Iraq, and moved him to Palestine, where he found himself among the worshippers of various Canaanite deities. One of them interestingly was called “El Elyon,” God Most High, whom Abraham recognized as the same creator God as had spoken to him. Four centuries later, when the Israelites returned from Egypt, Canaanite worship had further degenerated, and we hear no more of El Elyon.
Gods were all around the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. The Hebrews had their own beliefs, but the Egyptian gods must have confused them. Were they just other names for their creator God? If not, were they real; were they other spiritual powers? You know the story: Moses murdered a man and fled to the region of Sinai.[1] Forty years later, God spoke to him from a burning bush and sent him back to Egypt to demand the release of the Hebrew slaves. The question Moses put to God at this time was a sensible one: “Whom shall I say sent me?” After four hundred years in a polytheistic culture, the question was urgent. “I am who I am,” God told Moses, and introduced himself as “Yahweh,” a name which calls to mind his absolute self-existence—he isn’t dependent on any other god or any thing for his existence, he just is.
It is important to understand this name if you want to grasp the meaning of the Bible. It is a personal name. It is as if God said to the Israelites, “You may call me Jack.” It is a significant thing when someone introduces themselves and tells you to call them by their first name. It means personal relationship. This was too much for Jews in later days; they were more comfortable calling him “the Lord.” When we arrived in Africa the first question the students asked me was, “What should we call you?” I told them my name was David; “everyone in my church back home called me David, even the children.” But in South Africa in the early nineties that was unacceptable. Someone suggested “Doc,” and that stuck. Whenever the Bible reads “Yahweh,” Jews say Adonai, “the Lord”. This was the convention in Jesus’ day, and because he accepted it, it is followed by most of our modern English Bibles. The reason Christians don’t call God Yahweh,[2] is because we have a name which is more intimate even than that; Jesus told us to address God as “Father,” as he did himself.
So, Moses returned to Egypt and identified God as “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” whose name is Yahweh, the Lord. Israel’s creed from those days until today says, “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength.” (Deuteronomy 6.4) In the Hebrew Bible the word for “the Lord” is Yahweh, the personal name God gave to Moses.
But God went further than clarifying his name, and whom he knew. Through the events of the Exodus he established his power over the Egyptian gods and left the Israelites in no doubt that he, the God who created the universe, the God who spoke promises to Abraham, was indeed real, and was about to adopt them as his special people. Paul explains that God raised up the obstinate-hearted Pharaoh—he could have promoted a wimp who would fold at the first sign of trouble—but he raised up a tough guy, so he could save his people in a great act of power, so they and the whole world would know that he is God, and there is no other.[3] But now Israel has abandoned him to follow Baal.
At Elijah’s challenge Israel turned out in force to see what would happen. Who wouldn’t? Is the old dinosaur about to fall flat on his face … or what? There is comedy here.
They called on the name of Baal from morning until noon, “Baal answer!” but no voice, no answer, and they limped around the altar they had made. At noon Elijah began to mock them. “Call with a great voice, for he is a god. Perhaps he is meditating, or maybe he has gone to the toilet, or is on a journey. Perhaps he is asleep and needs to be awakened. They called with a loud voice, and cut themselves according to their custom with swords and lances until their blood flowed. And so, noon passed, and they prophesied on until the time of the offering of the Minhah-sacrifice, and no voice, no answer, no one paid attention.
Do not overlook the details. Elijah rebuilds the broken-down altar of Yahweh that must have stood once in that place. He uses twelves stones, one for each of the tribes that God had chosen as his people. He lays out the parts of a bull for a holocaust, a whole burnt offering, and makes the offering at the time appointed for the evening sacrifice. Everything is in accord with the law of Moses which the people have forsaken. Could it be our task to rebuild the church which in many places has fallen?
And at the time of the offering of the Minhah-sacrifice, Elijah the prophet came near and said, “O Yahweh, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, and that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your word. Answer me, Yahweh, answer me, that this people may know that you, Yahweh, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back.” Then the fire of the LORD fell …
We need to pause here. If God is real and alive, why could we not organize such a contest today? Invite the Muslims, invite the Hindus, invite the Spiritists and ancestor-worshippers, invite the worshippers of Mother Nature, and let’s set up a test to decide whose god is real—or whether any god is real. Would not we Christians be as embarrassed as anyone else? We would, but why? Because such a test would be of our own making. Elijah did as God instructed him; it was God’s will to intervene in Israel’s history at this time and show them he was real, just as he had at the time of the Exodus. But he didn’t so again, though his faithful often wished he would.[4] God decides what he will do, and when he has proved himself once, or twice, that should be enough. We are not to put the Lord to the test. Except, he did do it again, often, most especially when he raised Jesus from death. Listen to Paul addressing a court of Greek philosophers:
The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”[5]
So, does it matter which god is God? Of course, it does. We used to be told there are many religions, and we shouldn’t be so arrogant as to think ours is the only true one. Then we were told all religions are the same: they all teach you to love your neighbour—though they don’t. Then we were told everyone has their own beliefs that are true for them. And often there is the suggestion that there is no god. But God has made himself known, and it matters to serve and worship him, for a start because it is the right thing to do. He made us, he made our world, he made us so we could know him, and love him, and walk with him; we owe it to him to do what we were created for.
And second it is important to know that we are praying to the God created the universe, and spoke to Abraham, and promised him the land of Palestine for his descendants, and rescued them from slavery in Egypt, and rolled back the waters of the Red Sea, and spoke to them from Mt Sinai, and settled them under Joshua, and raised up David to be their king, and Elijah to pull them back when they all but apostatised, and sent them into exile when they did, and, in another impossible act, brought them back to their land, and sent his only-begotten Son to establish his kingdom and to be our saviour, and atoned for his people’s guilt on the cross, and raised Jesus from the dead, and seated him at his right hand in power to rule over everything until his kingdom is complete and he comes again to rule openly and visibly. This is the true God. This is a God who is alive and able to answer his people’s prayers. Show me any other who speaks and acts like this. They are all of them works of human imagination. Their gods neither hear nor answer nor act.
And the third reason that it matters is that the life he wants us to live is different from that of all other religions. The Muslim man I spoke to in Mozambique, who had recently turned to Jesus, when I asked him what had led him to it, said, “Love, I never heard about love in Islam.” His father owns a mosque, and Isaak is now leading a Christian congregation.
And the fourth reason it matters to follow the one true God is that he has set a day when Jesus will come again, to judge those who are alive and those who have died, and to save those who are his people into eternal life. God has become a man, he has lived with us, suffered, died, and been raised. We should expect nothing more. God revealed himself clearly for Israel, and now he has revealed himself for the whole world. This is why the Christian creed begins,
I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ his onlySon, our Lord … who for us humans and for our salvation came down from heaven …”
[1] Exodus 3.
[2] Jehovah’s Witnesses call God “Jehovah,” an incorrect pronunciation of the Old Testament’s YHWH.
[3] Romans 9.14–18.
[4] Isaiah 64.1–2.
[5] Acts 17.31–32.