Baalism isn't Dead! 1 Kings
It is important to understand the culture of the northern kingdom and
its apostasy and the depth of their rebellion against God and how that has
worked itself out into every aspect of their culture. The people of the
northern kingdom, especially the leadership, have rejected God and in His place
they have substituted not merely the idols that Jeroboam had initiated when he
had taken power some 50 years earlier but they have now degenerated to the
perversion of the fertility religion as expressed in the worship of Baal and
the Asherah, the Phoenician religion that was brought into the northern kingdom
by Jezebel whom Ahab married. With here came 450 prophets of Baal whose mission
was to go through the land and spot all of the believers and to arrest them,
kill them, persecute them and to destroy any evidence of biblical truth in the
land. It is in that context that Elijah is going to suddenly appear in the
court of Ahab the king in Samaria and announce, “As the LORD, the God of Israel
lives, before whom I stand, surely there shall be neither dew nor rain these
years, except by my word.”
To understand this we have to understand the whole biblical context.
Elijah isn’t just saying this because it is something God told him to say, he
is not saying it because it seemed like a fitting judgment, but he is saying
this because it fits within the judicial punishments that God outlined in
Leviticus chapter twenty-six if they turned from the one true God of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob to worship other gods. That is the core problem that
1 Kings 16:29-31 NASB “Now Ahab the son of Omri became
king over Israel in the thirty-eighth year of Asa king of Judah, and Ahab the
son of Omri reigned over Israel in Samaria twenty-two years.
The assumption of modern secular man, his religious assumption, is that
anyone who believes in the supernatural or any belief system that is based on
the supernatural, i.e. something that is not empirically known and seen today,
is defined as being irrational, and that you can’t believe in the Bible or in
Christianity and still really be a rational, thoughtful, intelligent person. We
see that what happens in the northern kingdom is that Ahab has totally rejected
the history of
Ahab continues the rejection of history but he goes a step further. When
he marries Jezebel she is the daughter of Ethbaal—see the name “baal” at the
end of his name—and that indicates his loyalty to the king of Sidon who is
loyal to the god Baal. So Ahab goes and serves Baal and worships him.
What we always see in Scripture is that there is a contrast that works
between the false religious systems which we generally classify as human
viewpoint or paganism and the truth that we have from Scripture. In the
historical situation of that time they worshipped Baal, and Baal was the storm
god, he was also known as Hadad, Molech, and he was the weather god. When you
live in an agricultural environment the weather is very important. But he is
more than the weather god. It is not just the fact that he controls weather and
brings rain, it is that that is at the very core of the entire life cycle and
economic cycle of any of these countries in this part of the world, the that
the worship of Baal becomes central to survival because he is the one who
controls rain, the sun, the weather, and he is going to bring about
productivity of the crops. But whether we are talking about Baal or any of the
other gods and goddesses within the pantheons in the ancient world they are
just one among a group of nature gods that have been generated or invented and
made up by people in order to give them a rationale, a myth, a story to
validate their rejection of God. Once we take God out of the picture we still
have to answer the question: Where did we come from? What is man” What is our
future? What happens when we die? Then there are the issues of right and wrong
and good and evil. We still have to answer these questions and there has to be
some sort of over-arching explanation to human existence and to human society.
There are only two options. One is the biblical story. If the Bible is true
then everything else is just something that has been made up. Then there is the
pagan view in which they ultimately have some sort of infinite, impersonal
universe. They may have personal gods or they may have impersonal gods.
God is personal. That means He is a thoughtful, thinking, rational
being. Therefore because He is rational His thoughts are logical. Though we may
not know them exhaustively but what he reveals to us we can understand, and He
can reveal it to us in a way that is understandable. Therefore, based on His
revelation we can understand the flow of history, the character of God, and in
studying the Scripture we understand that the God of the Bible is a God who is
faithful and dependable and because He is righteous and immutable He is going
to do what he says He will do. In the gods of the Phoenicians, the Greeks, etc.
there was a personal god but because he was not rational, was not omniscient,
he doesn’t know everything, he is also not a rational god; therefore he is
irrational, not dependable. If he is not rational and not dependable that means
that the actions of such a god are completely arbitrary. That means that today
he may be one thing and tomorrow he may be something else, and the next day he
may decide to do something else. He is whimsical and not controlled by a
standard such as the God of the Bible who is righteous—which means that He has
a standard, a character; and He is immutable and absolute truth, so He is
controlled by the laws of His own character. That is not true about the
limited, finite personal gods of the various polytheistic systems. So those
gods are ultimately whimsical in what they do. They are not controlled by
anything other than their own capricious will. Such a god would not provide the
basis for any kind of certainty in life. However things function today would
not help us understand how things would function tomorrow. Some religions have
tried to explain that with a doctrine of fatalism: “It is just Allah’s will.”
Allah can do something different tomorrow because he is this heavenly despot
who does whatever he wants to do; he is completely whimsical. If we have a god
who is capricious and arbitrary then he cannot provide the basis for any kind
of certainty in life. If there is no certainty in life then we can’t predict
anything.
That is why science only developed in western nations. The difference
between technology and science is that science seeks to answer the question why
in order to provide a rational, logical explanation on the basis of which we
can make predictions about how things will be tomorrow, the next year and the
next year. Only Christianity provided a framework within which science could be
born. There was technology. The Chinese developed paper, gunpowder and fire
crackers, but they never developed the rifle or artillery. They couldn’t make
the leap because that means they would have to bring in a philosophical system
that is predicated upon dependability and predictability in the world system,
and that could only come by presupposing a God who is I control and is
immutable and is rational so that He can communicate to man. Science is
technology plus rational explanation and the ability to predict future events.
That is what happens in the scientific model. You develop a theory and test it,
validate it, make predictions; you go into the laboratory evaluate it and then
go on. You don’t have the development of medicine or of science per se and all
of the advances we associate with western civilisation in the east or in Islam,
it just can’t happen. That is why you can’t export democracy to these cultures
either because the idea of a constitutional democracy is predicated again on
the idea of an external unchanging values system. You only get that if you are
presupposing Christianity the God of Christianity and the God of the Bible. So
there is this contrast being set up between the rational finite god systems of
the polytheism of Baal versus God. Everything that Elijah is doing is a direct
attack and a reputation against the claims of the polytheists and the Baalists.
All of the pagan systems have a closed universe. You can’t know anything
that is outside the circle, there is no empirical knowledge of what is outside
of it and what is outside can’t pierce the circle to speak to what is inside
the circle. That is opposed to what is in Scripture where there is the God who
is personal and infinite but He can break through that barrier but man can only
have a direct perception of God if God so chooses. On the other hand, the gods
and energy, matter, man and nature are all within that circle. The gods are not
outside the circle. That is the creator-creature distinction which is unique to
Christianity. There is a line between God and the finite universe; they are
totally separate, totally distinct. God is completely other. But in all of the
philosophical systems that aren’t Christian, in all of the pagan religions, the
god is part of the system, as man is. So if man is inside this linked system
and the gods are part of the linked system then what man has to learn how to do
is manipulate the god to get what he wants. That is true in every one of these
systems. We usually talk it about in simple terms such as “works” but it is
much more sophisticated than that. Man is trying to manipulate the gods through
his obedience, through his religious activity, through his sacrifices, whatever
it is, and he comes up with just a plethora of different ways in which man can
manipulate the god to do what man wants him to do. After all, the god is just a
blown-up version of the man. The pagan model of a god is a god who is within
this closed system, he is not distinct from man, and so he is just as trapped
within the universe as man is; and he is just as subject to fate as man is. But
the Bible in contrast presents a God who is separate and distinct from nature,
from creation, who controls nature, who interferes with nature, who actually
changes and transforms things because He is the creator who is over everything.
So man is entrapped within this closed circle; he has access to God who is
outside of that circle.
The gods of the Old Testament cultures are all nature deities and whom
these people were learning to manipulate. That manipulation was often related
to the lust patterns of the sin nature. The primary lust patterns that were
appealed to were sexual lust, material lust and power lust. Materialism lust is
very evident in Baalism because it is a fertility religion. Why do you want to
have fertility? Do you want the crops to be productive? Do you want people to
be productive? Do you want to make money? If you are planting you put that seed
in the ground and several months later it starts putting forth grain, and we
can’t explain it rationally because we have rejected a rational God, and
ultimately a rational explanation for everything, so we have to explain it
through some sort of superstition or some sort of made-up myth. Today the
made-up myths have become much more sophisticated. Now we have Darwinism,
modern science and it modern origin myths, but those origin myths have changed
the way man operates in terms of society and in terms of culture. But religions
in the world really haven’t changed, they still appeal to man’s lust patterns
so that man can get what he wants.
Sexual lust was a strong element in the fertility religions and the
level of sexual perversion was just incredible. What is going on is that man is
down that chain of being under God but he has to manipulate the gods somehow to
make his crops fertile. So the only thing that he can do to produce fertility
is sex, so he is going to engage in massive sex orgies in order to manipulate
the gods to bring rain and to make the crops fertile. There are the same kinds
of examples in modern religions. There are strong elements of sexual perversion
in Mormonism. Mormonism was built by one of the most sexually perverted,
degenerate people in all of American history by the name of Joseph Smith. There
was no counterpart to him until the 20th century. If a comparison is
done between Islam and Mormonism it is amazing how closely they follow one
another.
How one views the gods, the ultimate reality in their system, affects
everything. It also affects one’s view of human life. If man is just a product
of time plus chance and you are just a cosmic accident then there is no real
meaning or value. In paganism human life is all part of its chain of being and
so a human being is basically no different from an oak tree or an amoeba or a
bug or a slug, etc. So if you are going to treat them a certain way you have to
treat man the same way. In the Bible, in contrast to this, all human beings
have equal value because they are all created in the image of God. Man doesn’t
manipulate God by his works and rituals or his actions, in contrast to what we
see in the pagan religions. In Baalism man has to manipulate the god to produce
fertility. There is no certainty of stability so you have to do this all the
time in order to keep the god motivated to bring rain and to produce the crops.
Furthermore, children’s lives had little value. In some of the extreme cases
the children were sacrificed and burned alive in the arms of these idols. The
ritual sex that they engaged in was bi-sexual, homosexual, heterosexual,
however, with whomever in order to stimulate the god. It was as perverse as it
could possibly be and ultimately it makes man responsible for everything in the
environment. The modern counterpart to that is all of the environmentalist
actions in global warming and man’s attempt to change the environment—change
from gasoline-powered automobiles to electric-powered automobiles,
solar-powered, etc. It is just going to be a great fiasco. This is a fiasco and
a farce that is built upon a certain understanding of the universe and that is
a pagan understanding of the universe and not a God-created understanding of
the universe. This fits and works only in a pagan view of reality. So when we
study what is going on in the paganism of northern
Elijah is going to come on the scene and say there is only one hope, one
certainty, and that he was going to show that this is the God who controls
everything and we don’t control Him. He controls the environment; He said what
He would do at the time of the exodus and at the time of the conquest, and now
He is going to do it. He is not going to let it rain again until he (Elijah)
says so. And this is going to domino through the entire system. There is going
to be economic collapse, livestock is going to die, any means of assistance is
going to collapse and the nation in three and a half years is going to be in a
depression. What produced it? What produced it was the rejection of God. But
the hope that we have in Scripture is that God doesn’t walk off and leave us.
He is still in control; He provides for the believer, just as He did for
Elijah. Elijah wasn’t responsible and didn’t believe the way they did but he
still had to live through that discipline from God and in the process God was
glorified by his consistent obedience. He demonstrates the faith-rest drill. He
grows spiritually in the midst of that adversity and in the midst of all of
that trial, and when we come out at the other end God is going to be glorified
in a magnificent way. Does that means that the northern kingdom turned around
and changed their ways? Some did. Some became believers. Many believers came
out of hiding and their faith was strengthened. But even though the events on