Elijah & the Prophets of Baal, Video iReport - 6/23/2010 1:53pm
Three major characters move throughout the Hebrew Scriptures: 1) the Priest, 2) the Prophet and 3) the King. God inaugurates the priesthood in Leviticus 8, with the ordination of Aaron and his sons as Israel’s first priests. A priest, by definition, stands between the people and God, and he speaks to God on behalf of the people. The prophet, in contrast, stands between God and the people, and he speaks to the people on behalf of God. The priest and the prophet have contrasting roles. God appoints the king to lead the people on God’s behalf in the political, economic and military affairs of the world. Ideally, the priest, prophet and king work in harmony under God’s direction to govern a holy nation, a nation that is “a light for the Gentiles” (Isaiah 49: 6).
But it never happens. Upon Solomon’s death in 930 B.C. civil war breaks out and the nation splits in two, the northern ten tribes becoming the nation of Israel with its capital at Samaria, and the two southern tribes becoming the nation of Judah with its capital at Jerusalem. Between the two, 39 kings rule Israel and Judah: 19 kings in the north and 20 kings in the south. The 19 kings in the north are all bad; and 13 of the 20 in the south are bad: of the 7 good southern kings, five initiate revivals.
Typically, when a bad king rules, the priesthood becomes corrupt and the nation spirals downward into apostasy and chaos, leaving the prophet as the lone voice speaking on behalf of God. It is a fundamentally adversarial role.
Quite often, when a particularly bad king reigns, God will raise up a particularly great prophet to counter him. We see this happen in 1 Kings 16-17. In 1 Kings 16: 29-30 we read, “In the thirty-eighth year of Asa king of Judah, Ahab son of Omri became king of Israel, and he reigned in Samaria over Israel twenty-two years. Ahab son of Omri did more evil in the eyes of the Lord than any of those before him.” Ahab reigns in Israel from 874-853 B.C., and he not only continues worshipping the golden calves set up by Jeroboam at Dan and Bethel in 930 B.C., but he also marries that vile, loathsome and despicable woman, Jezebel, he builds a temple to Baal in Samaria, and he and his wife become patrons of the prophets of Baal and Ashtoreth.
To counter Ahab, God raises up the prophet Elijah, who quickly engineers a showdown between himself and 450 prophets of Baal at Mt. Carmel. On our Mediterranean cruise (June 1-18, 2010) we visited Mt. Carmel and Dr. Creasy taught the story of the clash between Elijah and the prophets of Baal on site. Here is a video iReport of lesson. It is hugely entertaining!
