It was 450 to One that day, the day when Elijah stood before the people of Israel as described in our Scripture passage this morning, and he said to them “How long are you going to sit on the fence?  If God is the real God, follow him; if it’s Baal, follow him.  Make up your minds!”  As he was speaking, there were 450 prophets of Baal lined up on one side, and Elijah, the one and only public prophet of God left in Israel, on the other.  There are times when you and I are in a similar situation, when we have to make up our minds about which of the gods of this world that we are going to choose to follow.  Sometimes it feels like there are 450 different gods in this world, gods like money and power and influence and pornography and injustice – these gods have so many people who want to worship them, and then there is you, and you have to decide for your own life, who are you going to worship?  Who am I going to follow?  Maybe there is some area of your life where you are facing that key question right now, where you just can’t sit on the fence any longer, where you have to make a decision about whose side you are really on. 

We continue my sermon series on the prophet Elijah this morning, and we have seen so far about how Elijah was called by God to confront King Ahab of Israel over all the idols that he and his wife Jezebel were bringing into the country.  Jezebel wasn’t from Israel, so the gods that she worshipped were Baal and Asherah, the gods of the Phoenician people that she was from, and she and Ahab were setting up temples and altars to these gods all over the nation, while the prophets of the one true God of Israel, Jehovah or Yahweh, were being killed or forced to go into hiding.  Elijah risked his own life to tell the king that if the country’s direction did not change, there would be a drought upon the land, but Ahab did not appreciate his advice, and Elijah was forced to flee for his life.  He did survive with the help of a widow and her son, who provided him with food and water during the long drought, and when the son became very sick and eventually died, it was Elijah who rescued him from death through the power of the living God.  It was so meaningful for Elijah to see God use him in such a vivid and exciting way that now, filled with the power of the Holy Spirit that we celebrate on this Pentecost Sunday, Elijah goes looking for Ahab again, and this time he has a challenge for him.

He finally finds him out in the country as Ahab is out looking for any source of water to try to keep his horses alive for his military and now we hear, in our first point,

ELIJAH’S CHALLENGE TO AHAB.

Ahab is of course aware that Elijah’s prophecy about the drought came true – there is hardly any water to be found anywhere, so when the two of them see each other, they at first exchange some pleasantries – let’s read what happens from I Kings 18:17-19 (GN): When Ahab saw him, he said, ‘So there you are – the worst troublemaker in Israel!  ‘I’m not the troublemaker,’ Elijah answered.  ‘You are – you and your father.  You are disobeying the Lord’s commands and worshiping the idols of Baal.  Now order all the people of Israel to meet me at Mount Carmel.  Bring along the 450 prophets of Baal and the 400 prophets of the goddess Asherah who are supported by Queen Jezebel.”   What an audacious challenge to place before a king who has the power to put him to death!  But this same king had been dealing with the drought that Elijah had said would come on the land, so he knew that Elijah had a special power, a special connection to God, so maybe with an eye of bringing this drought to an end, maybe with an eye of getting rid of Elijah with the help of all of these other prophets, Ahab does what Elijah requests: he assembles everyone in Israel, particularly the prophets, the 450 prophets of Baal, the 400 prophets of Asherah, on Mount Carmel.   Now this mountain is located somewhere near the center of Israel, about a little under 2000 feet high, and from the top of it, you can see out to the Mediterranean Sea and also far inland.  This mountain had once had an altar to Yahweh, the one and only living God of Israel, but Queen Jezebel had destroyed that altar and replaced it with one to Baal, which is probably why Elijah chooses it as this dramatic spot for his confrontation with the prophets of Baal, as in our second point, we hear

ELIJAH’S CHALLENGE TO THE PROPHETS OF BAAL.

Let’s read what Elijah had to say to the crowd of people from all over Israel on that historic day:  “Elijah challenged the people: ‘How long are you going to sit on the fence?  If God is the real God, follow him; if it’s Baal, follow him.  Make up your minds!’  Nobody said a word; nobody made a move.”  I Kings 18:21 (The Message)  Elijah was asking the people of Israel and their king to follow God completely, but sometimes it is hard for us to do that, to follow God and God alone in our lives.  I saw a cartoon in a church magazine recently where the pastor and the secretary are in the church office, and the secretary is holding up the phone to the pastor and she says “It’s Monty Williams.  He wants to know if he can audit your discipleship class on ‘Total Commitment’”.  Isn’t that like us as human beings, that we want to audit a class on total commitment, that we want to meet God half-way, that we don’t want to commit ourselves too fully, but to go along and to get along, especially if the odds are too great against us.  So imagine being there that day, in the crowd watching this dramatic moment.  You see this one man, Elijah, standing by himself, and these 450 prophets of Baal, probably smirking as they look over at him, along with all the prophets of Asherah.  Now this would normally be a very scary situation for anyone to be in, to be one prophet against 450, but Elijah was not looking at this situation from a human perspective but from God’s perspective.  He was I’m sure reminding himself as he stood up there about how God had been faithful to him, about how God had kept him safe from Ahab, how God had provided food to eat and water for him to drink during the time of drought, about how God had raised the widow’s son from the dead when all seemed lost.  This is a good lesson for us to remember, that when we are facing some tough choices in our lives, we want to remind ourselves of how God has been faithful to us in the past.

Now, Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal – for some reason, he does not deal directly with the prophets of Asherah on this day – but he challenges the prophets of Baal by saying that I’m the only prophet of God left in Israel; and there are four hundred and fifty prophets of you.  Let the Baal prophets bring up two oxen; let them pick one, butcher it, and lay it out on an altar on firewood – but don’t ignite it.  I’ll take the other ox, cut it up, and lay it on the wood too.  But neither will I light the fire.  Then you pray to your gods and I’ll pray to God.  The god who answers with fire will prove to be, in fact, God.  And all the people agreed with this challenge by saying that it was a good idea. You see, Baal was a god who supposedly held a lightning bolt in his hand that could start fires on the earth, so the priests of Baal were very enthusiastic about asking for fire from Baal they though this looked like a sure thing.  On the other hand, Elijah knew that our God is the God who revealed Himself by fire on many occasions in Israel’s history, such as when God spoke to Moses at the burning bush or when God led the Israelites by fire at night when they left Egypt, so he must have had supreme confidence that God wanted him to do what he was doing, and would back him up.  Of course, today is the day of Pentecost, when we celebrate the birthday of the church and the gift of the Holy Spirit and the symbol of the Spirit is fire, because whenever the Spirit is active in a church’s life or in an individual’s life, it is like a fire that burns inside of them, so it is very appropriate that Elijah asked for fire on this day. 

Well, the 450 prophets of Baal got to go first, and so they prepared their ox for sacrifice to their god but did not set the wood on fire, as Elijah had directed.  They began their various ceremonies, dancing in circles, and cutting their flesh with swords and knives until they were covered in blood, jumping and stomping on the altar they had made, calling out to their god, “O Baal, answer us and send fire from heaven,” to prove to them and all the people once and for all that he was the only god they should worship.  It must have been quite a spectacle to observe.  They went on like this until Noon, for a period of several hours, and yet all of this produced not a whisper, not a flicker of response.

Then comes the really fun part of the passage, where Elijah is so cocky that day, so confident in His God, that he taunts the prophets of Baal as they are going through all of this.  He says to them that they should call a little louder – Baal is a god after all, right?  Maybe he’s off day-dreaming somewhere, or went into the woods to relieve himself, or perhaps he’s on vacation.  I’m sure even our pro athletes can’t trash talk as well as Elijah did that day, and I would guess that the crowd loved it – he obviously had a bit of the showman in him to talk like this in front of the people.

Now next week, we will find out what happened when it was Elijah and God’s turn to light the fire under their wood, so you have to come back then to hear about the rest of the story, but here in our third point is

GOD’S CHALLENGE TO US.

God wants you to know this morning that your life matters, that the decisions you make matter, that one person can have a great impact on this world if they live by faith.  Let’s say together Hebrews 11:1 (The Message): “The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living.  It’s our handle on what we can’t see.” Elijah had this trust in God, this faith that God cared about His people Israel and that God would use his one life to help make a witness to God to them, and even 450 prophets of Baal could not shake his trust.  Maybe you are facing a tough decision in your life today, where it feels like there are 450 people telling you to do one thing, and there is just your conscience telling you to do something else, to honor God in your life.  Maybe you have been a Christian for a long time, maybe you are just starting out in this faith walk today, but no matter how hard it is, I encourage you today to trust that God’s way is the best.  We give Him the thanks and the praise today, Amen.