Bad News Good News

This past weekend, I had the challenge of teaching Sunday School from a passage in I Kings 18.

It's a fairly familiar story for most of us who grew up around church about Elijah, the prophet of God, who challenges 450 prophets of Ba'al to prove who is the One True God by building altars and seeing whose God ignites it first.

There's a great challenge in the passage where Elijah calls the Israelites together and asks them how long they will limp along between two opinions. (As our pastor put it, it's difficult to run when you're straddling a fence!) Then he calls them out saying, "If the LORD is God, follow Him; if Ba'al is god, follow him." The lesson was all about choices in life and choosing the right God and being fully committed to Him and confident of His faithfulness despite all odds.

You see, from a human standpoint, the prophets of Ba'al definitely had an advantage. There were 450 of them! They had the support of the king and queen. And, in what turned out to be a sudden death match, they won the coin toss. And, they were deeply committed to their false god. They danced and sang and shouted and even cut themselves for hours trying to get his attention and call down fire for their altar. And, just in case all those advantages weren't enough, Elijah went ahead and stacked the odds a little more in their favor (Crazy or Jesus?). He had his altar drenched in water, not one or two, but THREE times before he even began to pray.

But, then he prayed. And his requests were simple. He prayed for four things. 1. Show these people that the LORD is God. 2. Show them that I am your servant. 3. Show these people that You are the One True God. 4. Draw these people back to yourself. (always, always, always a redemptive purpose!)

As soon as the prayer was off his lips, fire fell from heaven and consumed the sacrifice, the altar, the STONES of the altar, and licked up all the water around the altar! God left NO DOUBT about who was in control that day.

And all the people fell on their faces and worshipped.

And Elijah seized all 450 prophets of Ba'al and slew them.

Do you know how badly I wished this story had ended with the people face down in worship? That's what I call some happily ever after. But, it didn't end there. It ends with the slaying of 450 men. Here's where I need to confess that growing up in church, having heard most of the stories of the Bible a number of times, I rarely blink at such a statement. It's always been taught to me in such a way that I would tend to think, "and the good guys won and went out for a milkshake and the bad guys lost," as though they were heading back to their arena to prepare for the next contest, rather than heading into a godless eternity.

So, most of last week I wrestled with this ending. What was it supposed to teach us? What does it say about God? About sin? About worship? About violence? Was it necessary? Why was it necessary? And the questions go on and on and on.

The first thing I determined is that there is a lesson in the slaying of the false prophets. There's a lesson about how much God hates sin. There's a lesson about how seriously He deals with sin. There's a lesson about the necessity of eradicating any hint of impurity from among the people of God. And, ultimately, there's a lesson about good news and bad news.

It is often said that the Gospel is not good news until one understands how bad the bad news really is. Until one understands his desperate need for a Savior, the fact that Christ died for him doesn't truly thrill him as it ought. In much the same way, God's love is not nearly as powerful to us until we understand how severe his hatred of sin is. Once we begin to grasp how much God hates sin, then we can begin to grasp the miracle of His love for sinners.

The same choice that Elijah put forth to the people of Israel is the choice each of us must make. Many of us want Jesus as our Savior, but we haven't even begun to accept Him as Lord in our lives. The reality is, though, that there's not an option to have Him as Savior without making Him Lord. If the LORD is God, choose Him.