Living in the Face of Paganism; 1 Kings 16:34-17:1

As we look at Elijah one of the key things we need to remember is what the New Testament says in relation to Elijah, that he was a man with a nature like ours. There is such a tendency for us as human beings to get involved in some kind of hero worship where we put spiritual leaders, whether they are pastors or Old Testament prophets or key leaders of any kind, on some form of pedestal and we forget that we are all sinners and that we all have various trends, failings, flaws in our sin natures, and that none of us are able to do anything apart from the grace of God. What makes the difference is their mental attitude toward God and their willingness to radically and completely trust God in the midst of the most difficult situations. We see them fail when they get their eyes off the Lord, just as we do, and that is encouraging for us because we may not be able to pull off the miracles that Elijah did when he was on Mount Carmel (because we are in a different dispensation and have a different role) but the principles that energised his spiritual life are the same ones that energise ours. The focus in James 5 is on his prayer which really isn’t emphasised that much in 1 Kings 17. If we are just reading through 1 Kings we may not realise just how critical prayer was to what Elijah is doing in the chapters related to his life.

We should remember that he is man with a nature like ours, so he is susceptible to all of the same trends of his sin nature that we are—fear, anxiety, worry, mental attitude sins of self-reliance, trying to make things work on our own apart from God—and God has to take him through various testing situations and circumstances in order to teach him and prepare him for where He is taking him down the road in his ministry. 1 Kings 18 happened because of events in 1 Kings 17. Secondly, Elijah lived in a time that is amazingly parallel to our own time period and so we can see principles and pull out some principles on how we should live in the midst of not only a pagan culture, a pagan worldview, and a culture that surrounded him that was antagonistic to God, but one that was radically antagonistic. As we will see in 1 Kings 18 Jezebel has killed a number of prophets and other believers and so there is a high level of persecution against believers to the point of costing them their lives.

A verse that is often overlooked is 1 Kings 16:34 ^NASB “In his days Hiel the Bethelite built Jericho; he laid its foundations with the {loss of} Abiram his firstborn, and set up its gates with the {loss of} his youngest son Segub, according to the word of the LORD, which He spoke by Joshua the son of Nun.” When Hiel started the project to rebuild Jericho God took the life of his firstborn, as God had indicated back in Joshua 6:26, and when he completed the project his youngest son’s life was taken. This reveals something about Hiel’s mentality that is characteristic of the era. He is so concerned about success and completing his project that that the life of his sons are not relevant, they don’t matter to him, he is more concerned about his success than his own sons. It also says something about his attitude toward God, that he really didn’t think this is something that God did. He is ignorant of God’s Word perhaps, ignorant of the curse from Joshua, although curses like that tend not to go away. People remember these things and Heil was probably not completely ignorant of it but he doesn’t care. What we see in this verse and in the context at the end of chapter 16 is a real window into the culture of 9^th century BC Israel in the northern kingdom and its apostasy, and there are a number of parallels between this whole era and our own.

1. Fools live in a fantasy world and make policy based on fallacy. Scripture says that the fool has said in his heart there is no God, and throughout much of Scripture there is the contrast between wisdom and foolishness; the life of the wise and the life of the fool. Wisdom in Scripture is skilful living, how a creature lives skilfully before God so that he creates in his life that which has real beauty and glorifies the creator. In contrast to that there is the fool. The fool is the person who builds his life on completely false assumptions. Jesus talks about the man who builds his house on shifting sand. This is the same idea that a person builds his life, his thinking, his values and whole approach to life on completely fallacious assumptions. The verse that says the fool says there is no God is also saying something more profound, and that is that the person who operates his life as if there is no God is a fool. When people operate on a non-biblical foundation and are not operating on divine viewpoint but human viewpoint, then they are constructing a fantasy view of reality. They are not dealing with life as God has made it and it is but they are going top deal with creation on the basis of their own ideas. This is what is brought out in Romans chapter one which talks about man in negative volition rejecting God, and so he worships the creation rather than the creator. Professing himself to be wise he becomes a fool. There is a lot of technical achievement but the bottom line is that God is rejected and so even though men may make a lot of good decisions and accomplish things and do them well, but both the believer and the unbeliever are living in God’s world and can only create their own fantasies for so long until they bump their head on the ceiling of reality. When there is a culture of people who have rejected God they are going to put something in His place. The absence of God always creates a vacuum and a vacuum sucks in whatever is around that appeals to the desires of the unbeliever. Unbelievers always have to have some sort of origin story; everybody has to know where they came from. Who am I? What am I? Is there a God? These are basic questions people ask as they begin to grow up. Those who deny that there is a God and reject the biblical God and the biblical story of creation have to have a substitute. They can’t just lives as if there is no answer to the question and so they have to generate some kind of answer. That is foundational to all thought, unless one is radically and irrationally inconsistent—which a lot pf people are, they just don’t want to think things through and try to connect the dots. This is typical of any kind of human viewpoint.

A lot of people just functionally reject God. They have a smorgasbord view of religion. This is born out more and more by various surveys that are made today where people just want to have a cafeteria style religion where they go through and pick this out of Buddhism, this out of Hinduism, and this out of Islam, and this out of secular humanism, and this out of Christianity and blend it and mix it up and come up with their own little religious system. They just don’t think that these things need to be thought out an integrated with one another. They live in a fantasy world, but the trouble with living in a fantasy world is that reality always seems to rear its ugly head at some point when something happens. This is what happened with Hiel when he generated in the northern kingdom of Israel a fantasy view related to the existence of Yahweh. It started with the revisionism that was promoted by the government. As Hiel begins to rebuild Jericho he is willing to completely reject the prophesy that Joshua had made. Joshua 6:26 ^NASB “Then Joshua made them take an oath at that time, saying, ‘Cursed before the LORD is the man who rises up and builds this city Jericho; with {the loss of} his firstborn he shall lay its foundation, and with {the loss of} his youngest son he shall set up its gates’.” That is literally and precisely fulfilled in the episode with Hiel. But it is not just a matter of prophesy being stated and fulfilled as mush as it tells us about the foolishness and the fantasy view of reality that characterises not only Hiel but the whole culture in the northern kingdom. They have rejected the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as a real entity who interacts with creation and holds mankind accountable for the decisions they make, and that as the creator He has established within the framework of creation certain standards, certain realities, that when we violate these built-in social laws, economic laws, physical laws, that the result is going to be catastrophic. Within this open universe in which we live God intervenes, and when we get to a point of negative volition beyond a certain point God intervenes and brings about judgment and certain consequences. What we see with this one individual, and the reason he is brought into this, is that it gives us a picture of this whole culture in the northern kingdom that Elijah has to deal with and that he will be confronting in the next few chapters. They don’t believe that Yahweh is really there; they don’t believe that Yahweh really intervenes in life, and they don’t believe that Yahweh is really relevant to day-to-day decisions. That is the essence of being a fool. What has happened in numerous cultures down through the centuries is that when God is removed and we start operating on a false foundation of thought sooner or later the decisions begin to accumulate and things begin to fall apart. We see this in our culture today.

This affects not only economics but it also affects the ethics. All law ultimately is going to be built on some sort of ethical foundation and if you have a system that is based on relativism, upon a god that is just a super-sized human who is always fighting, violent, at war with other gods and involved in all sorts of promiscuous sexual activity, then this is going to be imitated in the culture. This is exactly what we have seen in the northern kingdom.

2. Life is not as important The same thing characterised the thinking of the Jews and the religious Jewish leaders in Israel at the time of Christ. They are coming at it from the opposite side, not from an atheistic side per se but from a religious, legalistic side. But in the episode recorded in the Gospels about the Gadarene demoniac, when He cast the demons out and into the pigs (unclean animals according to the Mosaic Law) in a Gentile area, the people were more concerned about what happened to the pigs than the individual who had just been delivered. This also happens in a pagan culture and we have the same kinds of things happening today—abortion (which is not murder but that does not mean it is the right approach to solving unwanted pregnancies), infanticide, and then that bleeds over into euthanasia. This develops a very utilitarian view of life that a person’s value is not only the fact that they are created in the image and likeness of God, and therefore life itself has value and should be protected, but life only has value in terms of how somebody can contribute to society and if they become more of a hindrance than a help then they are no longer wanted. We see this reflected in Hiel’s attitude that he has by removing God from the scene as not being really involved in day-to-day things, and maybe He didn’t really exist, but for him life wasn’t important and he has a very callous view towards the loss of life of his two sons.

3. Success and the worship of material prosperity becomes foremost with the people. That is an outgrowth in the whole fertility religion cult system. Baal and the Asherah were the gods and goddesses who would provide agricultural fertility and prosperity so that if one was to properly placate or propitiate the gods through various sacrifices, including the sacrifice of infants, then this would motivate the gods to provide success and prosperity. This is reflected in Hiel’s attitude because he wants to rebuild the city, he wants it to be a city of commerce, a city where he could make himself wealthy at the expense of his two sons. Nothing was more important to him than that material success and prosperity. We see the same thing in America today.

4. The results of religious decisions ultimately impact policy decisions. These religious decisions shift first to the golden calf and Baalism were decisions that impacted the policy of Ahab and Jezebel, and this in turn brought about judgment from God on the nation in terms of the various stages of the divine institutions. This is why He is bringing drought on the nation and economic collapse. It in the midst of that economic collapse that we see Elijah learning his lessons that related to his spiritual advance. We see that the decisions that are made on the basis of fantasy then become institutionalised in terms of various policies. For example, today we have an origin theory that has been developed from Darwin on, on the theory of evolution, that is considered to be fact. It is functional reality for the vast majority of Americans. Evolutionary theory is the framework for the modern environmentalist movement which really has more affinity with paganism than anything else and an inherent hostility to human beings.

5. Those who stand up for absolutes and objective truth will be demonised, marginalised and criminalised. They are made to be the enemy, and there is more open hostility today that is vocalised in the press, vocalised by various individuals in society, and Christianity is blamed for so many things. The more conservative and biblical one is the more he is demonised. Dispensationalists become demonised by a certain segment of evangelicals because they see our support for Israel to be one of the real stumbling blocks to America having peaceful relations with Muslim countries, etc.

So there was the persecution of opponents. Jezebel had hundreds of believers killed because of their refusal to bow the knee to Baal. This is the culture and the situation into which Elijah is going to come. 1 Kings 17:1 ^NASB “Now Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the settlers of Gilead, said to Ahab, ‘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’.” This is the first time we hear about Elijah. Nobody has ever heard of him before, he hasn’t been mentioned previously in the Scriptures; he just suddenly and dramatically appears before the king of the northern kingdom who is a somewhat powerful king. He fits his name [My God is Yahweh] because he is going to demonstrate the reality of Yahweh over against the fantasies of Baalism which is simply being used by Ahab and Jezebel to have power and control over the people. There is nothing in the text that says God told Elijah to do this but we can extrapolate from what happens from this point on that he doesn’t make a move anywhere in the narrative apart from God telling him what to do. See verses 2, 8, 18:1, etc. The phrase “As the LORD, the God of Israel lives” is a very important phrase because he is emphasising the fact that the God of Israel is a living God as opposed to the idols of Baal and Asherah that are made of wood or stone or metal. The God of Israel is a living God and both a personal God and an infinite God and He is involved in the affairs of men. So he is not simply saying something that is a stock phrase, something that would give a little more impetus to what he is saying; he is making a strong statement about the fact that he represents the living, true God of Israel and that this God intervenes in the affairs of men. Ahab has been violating God’s Word and because of that God is going to initiate judgment against the northern kingdom.

God is a living God and He is a personal God; we can know Him and we can have a relationship with Him. That relationship comes only through faith in Jesus Christ. After we trust Christ as saviour and we are saved the next step is for us to learn the Word so that we can know God. Jesus told Philip in a very important dialogue in John 14 that if he had seen Him he had seen the Father: “Have I been so long with you, and {yet} you have not come to know Me, Philip?” In other words, you are saved but you don’t know me. Knowledge of Jesus, knowledge of God, is the result of years of Bible study, growth, prayer and developing that relationship with God. Paul said this is part of our goal as believers, Philippians 3:10 ^NASB “that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection…” We come to know God only through the process of studying His Word. Resurrection is through the power of the Holy Spirit, it is the Holy Spirit who is the empowerment for the Christian life. The Christian life is a supernatural way of life and we can only live it on the basis of the Word of God and the Spirit of God—walking by the Spirit, the filling of the Spirit, then we can experience the power that raised Jesus from the dead in our own spiritual lives. This principle is also true in the Old Testament. Daniel 11:32 ^NASB “…but the people who know their God will display strength and take action.” Those who don’t know God are weak and the culture falls apart. 2 Chronicles 16:9 “For the eyes of the LORD move to and fro throughout the earth that He may strongly support those whose heart is completely His…” As we want to know God He is the one who provides us with the strength and the power to live the Christian life. It is God who is the real strength and power in Elijah’s life.

“…before whom I stand…” Elijah recognises that he is the representative of God and that his mission is divinely ordained and divinely established, it doesn’t matter what Ahab says at all. For him the presence of God is more real than the presence of Ahab. We never get anywhere in the Christian life until we realise that the truth of God’s Word has to be more real to us than our experience, more real to us than any of the adversities that we face, the problems that we see; we have to see that God has a plan for us, that His plan is perfect and wherever that plan takes us God is going to sustain us and provide for us. That is exactly what Elijah was doing.

The other aspect of this has to do with Elijah’s mission. As a prophet he was representing God to the nation, and he is going to challenge the nation with their lack of obedience to God and the fact that they had violated the Mosaic covenant. This then expressed in the past phrase: “…surely there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word.” He recognises his authority but it doesn’t come from within Elijah, he is not just making this up, it comes from the Word of God—Leviticus 26:18-20, where God had expressed that one of the ways He would punish the nation was to bring a drought. Cf. Deuteronomy 11:16, 17. Of course, this would bring about a tremendous economic collapse in an agricultural society.

Illustrations