Baalism isn't Dead! 1 Kings 16:29-31
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 Israel was to face in their existence, and it really the core problem that every human being faces, as Moses and Joshua put it: Are you going to choose in your life the path of life or the path of death? The ultimate issue in the angelic conflict is the volition of the individual and whether or not, first of all, they choose to want to know about God and, secondly, whether they want to respond to the gospel when they hear it. The prophets of Israel, both Moses and Joshua, challenged the Israelites—Moses when they were about to go into the land; Joshua after they went into the land—with the choice. Both recognised that this would be the real problem that Israel faced; whether they would be loyal to the God who brought them out of Egypt, loyal to the God who provided freedom for them, or whether they would turn away from Him and put their hope in something else. Whenever Israel was is turning from God it is always defined in Scripture as evil. The way the Bible uses "evil" more than anything else is to focus on man's disloyalty to God, and that is how it is used throughout Kings. It meant that they continued to promote idolatry, a violation of the first commandment that "You shall have no other gods before me." When Israel, God's own nation, turned away from Him, this was really the highest form of treason possible. So that disloyalty for God who is the creator of the heavens and the earth and all that is in them is the root of all evil. The concept of evil starts fundamentally with a rejection of God. It culminates in horrendous acts but those are only the symptoms and not the core cause. The core cause has to do with an orientation towards God, and once God is rejected something else always moves into His place and that is the essence of idolatry—worshipping something other than the creator God of the Bible. To worship anything else as the source of meaning, purpose, and happiness in life is idolatry and that is the starting point of evil. This is what happened in Israel; they replaced God with the god of Jeroboam first, and now the god of the Phoenicians. This is why Elijah has his name which in the Hebrew means "My God is Yahweh." It focuses on the question: Who is your God? If you say that the God of the Bible is your God then what are you doing, how are you thinking, and how are you living that is consistent with that assertion?
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 Israel, and that is always what happens. The God of the Bible is a God of history. He controls history and He works in history so that in history we can see the footprints of God. We can see the evidence of what He has done, unlike every other religious system. Only the Bible claims to have a God who works in history in such a way that history validates the truth claims of the Scripture.
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 Israel and the paganism of Baal worship and the fertility religions don't think that this is just something that these ancient, ignorant people were involved in, it is going on all around us.
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 Mount Carmel were unbelievable in their scope and the demonstration of God's existence and His reality were beyond question there were still many who refused to accept Him.
Illustrations