Fire from Heaven

Elijah was a prophet in the early days of Samaria. The king at the time, Ahab, had married a Phonoecian woman, Jezebel, who promoted the worship of Baal, a popular storm god in the middle east at the time. Elijah confronted the prophets of Baal, successfully, and with some panache.

Essentially he challenged them to a duel. He would set up wood, so would they. Neither would light it. They would call on Baal, then he would call on the Lord. The god who set fire to the wood would be the winner. As was the prophetic tradition in those days, the prophets of Baal “cried aloud and … cut themselves with swords and lances until the blood gushed out over them.” (1 Kings 18:38) Elijah mocked them, suggesting Baal might be busy on the toilet and that might need to shout louder (Many translations substitute a family-friendly vocabulary here. The CJB goes the other way and suggests Baal is “on the potty”.

Elijah won, of course (or rather, his God did). The prophets were unable to call down fire. Elijah took the liberty of dousing his altar with copious amounts of water before calling on the Lord:

“O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your bidding. Answer me, O Lord, answer me, so that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God and that you have turned their hearts back.” Then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt offering, the wood, the stones, and the dust and even licked up the water that was in the trench. (1 Kings 18:36,37)

For Elijah personally, this was in a Pyrrhic victory. Jezebel was not pleased, and Elijah would run for his life into the wilderness, where he found the Lord “not in the earthquake … not in the fire [but] in the sound of a low whisper.” (1 Kings 19:11-13)

He would not, however, be forgotten. The Old Testament closes with the following promise from God:

Remember the law of my servant Moses, the decrees and laws I gave him at Horeb for all Israel. See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction. (Malachi 4:4-6)

400 or so years later, John would appear, the new Elijah: “the voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord.’” (John 1:23).