When Nature Fails

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger. Bryan Broome has apparently been kidnapped by gnomes. We’ll let you know if he’s safe as soon as we find out.

We’re talking today about Elijah once again. It’s been awhile since we recorded, so Greg, do you want to recap what we talked about last time?

Sure, actually the last couple times, in case people have missed it.

We have this new king on the throne named Ahab and he marries a Phoenician wife who was a daughter of a priest of Baal. Her name is Jezebel. And they decide that introducing Baal worship into Israelite culture is a good thing. It’s a state-sponsored exclusive religion, and Jezebel sets about killing all the prophets of the Lord.

God responds by sending drought, no rain, but first Elijah the prophet comes out of nowhere and says, “As the Lord God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be rain until I say so,” and then vanishes, and apparently no one thinks anything about it until years go by – one year, two years, three years, and there’s still no rain. Everything is turning brown, the animals are dying, the people need water, and it’s really bad. So Ahab is looking all over for Elijah. He happens to be hanging out in Phoenician territory, but that’s another story that we kind of passed over, where God cares for him by the hand of a Gentile woman.

Something that Jesus makes much of later on.

Yes. There were many widows in Israel, but God did not send Elijah to any of them. In other words, when God’s people are faithless, God will turn to the Gentiles to provoke his people to jealousy. The Gentiles then save Israel, a pattern we see throughout scripture.

So Ahab and his steward Obadiah go out to find water, apparently secretly, as you suggested, because they’re alone and maybe you don’t want to give away the fact that all your war machine is about to die. The horses have no water.

Obadiah runs into Elijah who says, “Go show Ahab that I’m here.” And after throwing a bit of a fit of “You’re going to vanish and that will cost me my head because he’s looking for you everywhere,” Elijah calms him down. So Ahab comes and that’s about where we’re picking it up.

God has sent Elijah back to confront Ahab, and the strategy is a contest, a war of the gods. Elijah dictates the terms. He says, “Gather everyone to Mount Carmel,” which is in southern Phoenician territory. It’s a high place. That means it’s up near the sky and the clouds, where lightning strikes are common and it’s theoretically Baal’s territory, because Baal is the god of storms, although he’s been kind of inactive for the last three years. But let’s give him home court advantage.

“You gather all the prophets, because you’ve got a lot of them” – 450 prophets of Baal, and prophets of the grove, of Asherah, the female side, 400 which eat at Jezebel’s table. These are state-sponsored false prophets. “You’re going to gather them there and we’re going to have a contest.” Interestingly enough, Ahab agrees.

Ahab is somewhat pliable and kind of responds to the strongest will in his face at the time. Usually it’s his wife, but when Elijah tells him to do things he generally does because he’s weak. So Ahab summons all of Israel, or presumably their representatives, to come and meet at Mount Carmel, and this is where the story picks up.

Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? If the LORD be God, follow him, but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word.

Smart! Be non-committal. Let’s not get our words in the paper or anything. If anyone is photographing us we’ll not stand, and see what happens.

Then said Elijah unto the people, I, even I only, remain a prophet of the LORD…

Obadiah had just told him that he’s hidden 100 prophets in caves and fed them with water from Jezebel’s table. It’s not clear whether Elijah just kind of missed that or whether he’s just speaking in terms of “as far as you know,” but anyway right now he’s the only one there, so he’s the only representative.

Isn’t he betraying the truth by not saying, “Aha! There are more of us.”

“There are more of us in hiding – waa haa haa.” Some people would think so, I’m sure.

…but Baal's prophets are four hundred and fifty men. Let them therefore give us two bullocks and let them choose one bullock for themselves…

You get first go at it, you false prophets.

…and cut it in pieces, and lay it on wood, and put no fire under, and I will dress the other bullock, and lay it on wood, and put no fire under. And call ye on the name of your gods, and I will call on the name of the LORD, and the God that answereth by fire, let him be God.

Now, he’s not saying, “Your vote will turn God into existence.” He’s talking about covenant commitment. “Pick whom you’re going to serve. You’ve got to serve somebody. It may be the devil, it may be the Lord, but pick somebody and let’s make this official and clear. Pick a side and stay there.

“Here’s the test – which god is able to send fire from heaven? It’s Baal’s specialty and we’re on a mountaintop near the clouds. We’ll give you that. Phoenician territory, it’s Baal’s backyard. You can’t say he's not the god of this particular region because he sure is. And there’s a whole lot more of you than me, so if sheer numbers count with God or the gods, that should win the day for you right there. You’re going to get the sacrifice all set up, but you’re not going to light it with fire. I’m watching for any of those instant-burn sticks under there.”

And all the people answered and said, It is well spoken.

They like a show. They like a circus. They like a contest. They like religious hype, so this sounds good to them. It will be an entertaining day.

And Elijah said unto the prophets of Baal, Choose you one bullock for yourselves, and dress it first, for ye are many, and call on the name of your gods, but put no fire under. And they took the bullock which was given them, and they dressed it, and called on the name of Baal from morning even until noon [about 3 hours], saying, O Baal, hear us.

Apparently, that was all they said all day. Maybe they threw in, “Baal hear us, hear us, Baal, oh hear us Baal, Baal, Baal,” but this is not an attempt to persuade with logical arguments, to offer covenant reasons why Baal should act. It is honestly to be as annoying as anything.

There’s a story that comes out of Egypt, out of their legends or mythology, of a man who wanted the gods to do something so he went up on a mountaintop and threatened the gods with all kinds of horrible things he would do to them if they didn’t answer. And the gods were so frightened by his speech that they gave in.

That is pretty much the pagan attitude. God can be manipulated, frightened, cowed, and enticed. That’s the point of sacrifices. Feed the gods. Give them a good dinner out and they’ll do all kinds of things for you, because there is no love relationship here. We’ll come back and talk about the whole priests of Baal thing in a minute.

But there was no voice, nor any that answered.

We’ll talk about that some more, too.

And they leaped upon the altar which was made.

They’re jumping up and down, jumping toward the altar, over the altar – Jack be nimble, Jack be quick. Elijah is watching this for a few hours. He’s getting bored and he decides this is a good time for mocking. That’s something else that we’re never supposed to do with other religions, right? Never mock them. Elijah does.

Some may say, “Well, this was a slip in his spirituality.” No, this was calling foolishness foolishness. This is completely appropriate under these circumstances. Now, you wouldn’t say this to the sweet old lady who’s conducting you through the Mormon Tabernacle and showing you the organ.

He’s not just being rude here to be rude.

No, he is making a public point before a big audience. This is not a private thing. This is not an insult. He is trying to get the people to see how ridiculous this all is. Here are the things that Elijah says, at least as they come across in the Authorized Version –

And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, Cry aloud for he is a god. Either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth and must be awaked.

“You’ve anthropomorphized this god,” as the pagans generally did, “so doesn’t that bring with it the same limitations that a human being would have? Maybe he’s asleep and you need to wake him up. Maybe he’s on a phone call. Maybe he’s on a journey.”

For ‘pursuing,’ I think this is the part where some of the translations say ‘turned aside in a pursuit’ or something. What it means is he’s turned aside to use the bathroom.

It’s not hunting?

No. Some people are going to be offended. “He talked about a bathroom in the Bible?”

Oh no, God doesn’t know about bathrooms.

“And accused the pagan god, someone else’s religion? He talks about their god going to the bathroom?” Yup, sure did. He is mocking them because it is mock-worthy. Again, this is not a private little jab fest. This is before all Israel, all their rulers looking on, and he is making the point that this religion is ridiculous and it ought to be laughed at.

Bryan is back! The gnomes have released him!

There was a harrowing rescue attempt by a private security team somewhere in Malta. Don’t ask me how the gnomes made it to Malta, but here I am.

I’m glad you found rapid transport at hypersonic speed to get you back in time.

Yes, me too.

We’re in 1 Kings 18 and Elijah is currently mocking the prophets of Baal, and now urged on by his mocking, they decide to up the ante themselves. This is verse 28 –

And they cried aloud, and cut themselves after their manner…

This was not something they invented for this occasion. This is what they really normally did.

…with knives and lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them.

There’s a reference in Leviticus to making cuttings and markings on your skin for the dead, and this is almost certainly the original pattern of what was going on. It’s the one parallel in scripture. It’s a magical process. If you can terrify the gods, if you can do something that is so anti-natural that nature itself is revulsed, then you may get what you want.

It’s no accident in our time that cutting has become such a way of protesting one’s very existence, protesting the nature of reality and saying, “Look at me. I’m suffering. I want out.”

So it’s not about tattoos?

Not really, no. I mean there may be some distant application, but that’s not the primary meaning.

There’s also an interesting parallel as well. This way of trying to get magical influence against the powers that be – it’s an abuser’s mindset. “You should do what I want or else I will hurt myself. Oh, you’re not doing it? Well, I’m hurting myself.”

Yes, exactly, very good observation. That’s exactly what’s going on. We tend to think of abuse as, “I hurt you to get what I want,” but yes, very often it is exactly that. “I will hurt me.”

It’s manipulative.

It is, absolutely. And if you play that game with your gods, then what are you going to do with people? This was a religious system that got people to sacrifice their children. That doesn’t come cheaply and without a lot of emotional manipulation. Well, they kept doing that and they’re bloody all over the place.

And it came to pass, when midday was past, and they prophesied until the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice…

That would be about 3 in the afternoon. We’re in Israel, the northern kingdom. The temple is in Judah, the southern kingdom. That’s where the temple sacrifices would be going on, but a good part of the theme here is that this kingdom should not be divided. It’s been divided because of unbelief, and remains divided because of idolatry, and this new idolatry has taken it even further.

Elijah waits until what he’s going to do will coincide with the evening sacrifice in the temple, pointing out the continuity of his worship. Normally Israel was not to erect altars beyond the one that was in the temple at Jerusalem, but here that is sort of acting as a projection of that altar. It’s cell phoned-in, as it were, because it’s done by God’s prophet at God’s direction at the same time the other is happening, and it’s being done in a pretty personal up-front “God’s in your face” kind of way, and it’s actually an old altar.

…there was neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded.

We’ll come back to that.

And Elijah said unto all the people, Come near unto me. And all the people came near unto him. And he repaired the altar of the LORD that was broken down.

So there was a 12-stoned altar that was there.

And Elijah took twelve stones, according to the number of the tribes of the sons of Jacob, unto whom the word of the LORD came, saying, Israel shall be thy name.

Notice again emphasizing that the problem here is not so much the national disunity, although that’s a side effect, but it’s the religious disunity. “You are one nation covenanted together under God. You could exist as a different political entity and could make that work, but two different religions? No. That’s the whole problem. There’s one covenant and you guys are running away from it. Time to end this now.”

And with the stones he built an altar in the name of the LORD, and he made a trench about the altar, as great as would contain two measures of seed. And he put the wood in order, and cut the bullock in pieces, and laid him on the wood, and said, Fill four barrels with water, and pour it on the burnt sacrifice, and on the wood. And he said, Do it the second time. And they did it the second time. And he said, Do it the third time. And they did it the third time. And the water ran round about the altar; and he filled the trench also with water.

That’s 4 x 3, 12. 12 stones, 12 buckets of water. The water is overwhelming. This is what they need – they need water. They need rain from heaven, but more than that they need the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. If this thing is going to be put back together, that’s their most desperate need.

So he’s wasting all this water, some might say.

Yeah, other people have asked, “Where did the water come from? They’re in the middle of a drought.” Well, two possible answers. Supposedly there’s a spring at the bottom of Carmel that never ever runs dry. I don’t know, I’ve just heard that. But the other thing, like the town in California, Carmel was by the sea. There’s seawater down there.

Is that where what’s-his-name was mayor?

Yup, him.

Clint Eastwood.

Yeah, beautiful town.

So the thing is drenched in water. The trench is filled with water.

And it came to pass at the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice, that Elijah the prophet came near, and said, LORD God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Israel…

So he’s appealing to God as the covenant God of all of these people – and he says Israel, not Jacob, because that happens to be the name of this place.

…let it be known this day that thou art God in Israel…

That’s the first point of the covenant. “You are the sovereign God here now, not just in general, you’re not the god behind God, you’re not the wholly other God, you’re not the transcendent God while local nature deities rule the immediate context, you’re not the God behind the Newtonian system of mechanics that actually runs things. You are the covenant-keeping God who is in Israel.”

The second point of the covenant –

I am thy servant…

That is, “I come from the court of heaven with the word of the Lord and they need to listen to me.”

…and that I have done all these things at thy word.

“You have spoken a covenant word” – the third point of the covenant – “and I’m obeying you and they need to obey you. They need to conform to your law.”

Hear me, O LORD, hear me…

That’s the one repetition in his prayer, because he’s earnest. He doesn’t keep on saying, “Hear me, Lord, hear me,” over and over again.

…that this people may know that thou art the LORD God, and that thou hast turned their heart back again.

That’s the fourth point. He’s asking for sanctions – positive sanctions. “This is an opportunity to preach your gospel to them and change their hearts,” and he ends because the next step is God’s – continuity, inheritance. Will God disinherit his people or will he call them back to himself?

Then the fire of the LORD fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench.

God takes it all into his glory.

And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and they said, The LORD, he is the God; the LORD, he is the God.

Which, of course, is what Elijah wanted, a confession that there’s only one God and it’s Yahweh.

And Elijah said unto them, Take the prophets of Baal. Let not one of them escape. And they took them, and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon and slew them there.

So apparently there was some water. If not, the water that’s coming is going to take care of the bodies and wash them out to the ocean, all the way out of the Promised Land.

“Is not this murder?” No. Idolatry commanded the death penalty in Israel. They should have been executed. “But is he the right man to do it?” Yes. He comes from God’s right hand. He can do anything God tells him to. Samuel, you may remember, hewed Agag the king in pieces when he got cocky.

And this is not just people who believed differently. These were the people who were enslaving the people in demon worship.

Yeah. These were the state-hired demon worship prophets. These were the state-employed public education worship-a-demon people.

Also typologically speaking, you mentioned the water even washing their corpses out to sea, which is the depth of Sheol, the depths of the earth. It’s the same place where Jonah goes in the belly of the fish and why Jonah, as flawed as he is, is a Christ figure for one who goes to the depths of Sheol and rises up again. They don’t come back, though.

Yeah, they don’t come back. They never came back.

But the cat came back the very next day.

I don’t get that reference.

Okay, never mind.

Oh, is it a reference? I just thought it was a funny statement.

No, there’s an old bluegrass song – The Cat Came Back.

I was going to go to, “He never returned, he never returned, and his fate is still unlearned.”

Poor old Charlie.

Moving on –

And Elijah said unto Ahab, Get thee up, eat and drink; for there is a sound of abundance of rain.

There’s an old gospel hymn. “There shall be showers of blessing, sound of abundance of rain over the hills of the mountains.” This is a statement of faith. They’re not hearing anything. Maybe by faith he can actually hear it, but we can’t and no one else there could hear it.

So Ahab again does what he’s told. He’s very pliable when confronted with a stronger will. His guys just lost big time and they’re all dead, and all the people seem to be on Elijah’s side, so “He’s telling me to go eat. Okay, I’m going to do that,” and he goes to eat.

Elijah goes up to the top of Carmel, throws himself on the ground, puts his face between his knees, and he’s praying. After a bit he says to his servant, “Go up and look toward the sea.” The servant comes back and says, “There’s nothing.” He says, “Go again,” and he does this seven times. Each time he prays, because God has told him to do all this.

We’re told in James 5 that it was Elijah’s prayers that brought on the rain in the first place. He prayed in terms of God’s law and God withheld rain, but now God has said, “Go show yourself,” so God is ready to send the rain. Elijah understands that, but God is waiting on Elijah’s prayers again.

God can wait a long time, so Elijah needs to be fervent and diligent in his prayers right now, as James tells us, so he is, but it doesn’t take all that long – seven intercessions, a fullness of intercession, each time sending the servant, because he’s expectant. He doesn’t know how long this is going to take, but he figures God wants to do it so it’s not going to take that long. Finally the servant comes back and says,

Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man's hand.

In other words, really tiny.

And he said, Go up, say unto Ahab, Prepare thy chariot and get thee down, that the rain stop thee not.

And while Ahab is getting his stuff together and packing up the tents and the banners and all of that…

And it came to pass in the meanwhile that the heaven was black with clouds and wind, and there was a great rain. And Ahab rode and went to Jezreel. And the hand of the LORD was on Elijah, and he girded up his loins and ran before Ahab to the entrance of Jezreel.

There’s the story. Next time we’ll look at what it means to come down off a mountaintop victory. Often it’s not that great.

We’ve talked about all of the elements here before, and at the risk of boring our listeners I’d like to go through them again. The original article contained a quote from the Berenstein Bears Nature Guide, just to show you how far down and how delicately this comes to us.

I think the little girl bear asks, “What’s nature?” and she’s told, “Nature is all that is or was or ever will be,” which happens to be a quote from Carl Sagan in his program The Cosmos. “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”

The thing is, materialists and pantheists can both agree on this. For the materialist, the whole universe (nature) is matter – matter in motion in the void. Those are the three things you need. For the pantheist, all things are spirit, whatever spirit is, and when you have no transcendental reference point it’s hard to explain exactly what the difference is.

In the 20th century we began to see an awful lot of physicists wending their way toward Hinduism and eastern philosophies of that sort, because quantum mechanics was beginning to give the appearance of a basic irrationality and a oneness of all things that they could not explain. And rather than try a more classical approach or some other alternate explanation, they kind of were throwing in the towel and saying, “Well, you know, it just sounds a lot like Hinduism where everything is one and not everything has an explanation. It just kind of bubbles up out of some original reality and there you are.”

So when we’re looking at this kind of nature worship, it’s very modern but it’s also very ancient. It’s the universal faith of the ancient world. It is ultimately humanistic, man-centered. It is anti-theistic.

Let me go off on a side thing here to make this perhaps a little clearer. As good Christians living in the west, we hear deism, pantheism, atheism, Christian theism, polytheism, and there’s one or two others that aren’t as common, and we say, “Oh, this means you have one god, many gods, all is god, no god,” and we naively assume that the word ‘god’ means the same thing for each one.

It doesn’t, does it?

It doesn’t remotely, no. “Well, you know, everybody has a god.” Everybody has something that you may call god, because there’s no other available word. Even God speaks of the idols as gods. He speaks of the devil as a god after a fashion. He speaks of human judges as gods and angels as gods. That doesn’t mean a whole lot.

What people tend to think in America is, “Well, we all worship the same God, so the Jehovah of the Jews, the Trinitarian God of scripture, Allah, Brahma, these are all the same God looked at from different angles, the same kind of God. It’s one God who comes in varieties. You want the blue one or the green one? You want the cheap one or the expensive one? You want the one with power steering or without? But God is God.” We need to understand this is not remotely the case.

When Satan in Paradise said, “You shall be as gods, knowing good and evil,” he was not suggesting for a moment that they could be Creators. He had already said, “There’s no Creator.” By saying, “You shall not surely die,” he was saying, “No one is sovereign. No one rules the world; therefore, no one made the world. The world is self-existent, self-sustaining. There are just many powers within the world. Call them gods if you like, if it makes you feel good.”

What he offered them was not even phenomenal cosmic power. It was simply the power to decide right and wrong for yourself and impose it on other people – in a word, Phariseeism, which is Satanism. It’s all the same thing and that’s the point. It is all the same thing. When we get to the New Testament and we see Phariseeism we often think, “Oh, well, this is a brand-new kind of evil.” No, it’s the original evil, and therefore it is of greatest danger to the churches.

It’s in the churches that you may find the things that are most truly Satanic because people set themselves up as gods, making up their own rules and judging other people in terms of them. And because the rules look nice and clean and squeaky, we don’t suspect for a moment that the mere fact of making them and imposing them is a Satanic act, and we do not see how far this is from the gospel of Christ. Paul saw, and John at the end of talking about trying to invent different kinds of Christ says, “Keep yourselves from idols.” These ideological departures from the gospel is idolatry and it is Satanism.

There are a lot of families in our school who come out of a tradition where Halloween is really, really evil and scary and they can’t understand why anyone would celebrate it. If you don’t want to celebrate it that’s fine. That’s your business. But I can guarantee that in all my years trick-or-treating as a child I was never confronted with Satan. I don’t think I even had my candy stolen. There were some weird people wandering around, but usually they were super heroes and princesses and things like that.

I know a local church that I have unfortunately some connections with, where the gospel that’s preached is a gospel of faith plus covenant faithfulness, good works. This is a damning gospel and it grieves me very much because I know people there and love them, but that’s far more Satanic than celebrating Halloween, I’m sorry. We need to get our priorities straight.

In the ancient world and in scripture particularly we see this thing called Baal worship. First of all, there was no god named Baal. Baal is a title. It’s equivalent of calling them gods. It means lord. Every city had its lord, its god. It usually represented some distant ancestor who has died and been buried in the heart of the city and deified, and you build your magic walls around him and everybody who worships that god belongs to that community.

To be a member of that community you have to worship that god, but that god has now been absorbed into the forces of nature and rules alongside of them, and has taken up a role representing the forces of nature. He is now, represents, is a stand-in for the sun, the lightning, the rain, the winds, the violent masculine side of nature.

The feminine side – Asherah, Ashtaroth, Astarte, Isis in Egypt, Aphrodite in Greece, or Gaia – is the feminine side. It’s Mother Earth, the fertility of the human womb, of the land, the crops, the animals, all of that. So when the male gets it on with the female and does it right, then prosperity happens for everybody.

It then becomes the king’s job to oversee this process and make sure that the gods are being honored in such a way – the forces of nature are being honored in such a way – that this happens. And if the king is doing his job as a cosmic social engineer, a magical social engineer, then the city, the community, the nation prospers. If he fails to do his job, well then he’s up for assassination because we need someone else, but as long as he’s doing his job don’t mess with him. If he tells you to jump, you say “How high?”

It is a statist religion because although the king was not considered a god, he was considered the god’s right-hand man here on earth, and he does on earth what the gods do in the heavens, what the forces of nature do. So these gods are forces of nature. They were anthropomorphized, that is they were spoken of as if they were human, but that’s not the point. They are impersonal forces.

In Baalism it is atheistic. There is no Creator God. It is humanistic. Man can boss the gods around. It is magical. Man can boss the gods around. It is polytheistic. This god has many manifestations, and yet at bottom all reality is one so it’s pantheistic or materialistic, one of the two. All is one, one is all.

So that’s what we’re dealing with here, and because of this there’s never a thought of loving Baal or having an intimate relationship with Baal.

Welcoming Baal into your heart.

Yeah, none of this. Basically you want to keep Baal at bay or you want to bribe him. Magic is for pushing him off. Sacrifice is for inviting his favors. As I said earlier, take him out to dinner, buy him a good lunch, and maybe he’ll do something nice for you.

Failing that, try to intimidate him, and how do you intimidate nature? By doing that which is anti-natural – so cutting yourself, sacrificing your first-born child, ritual prostitution. That’s actually not intimidating, but homosexual prostitution can be, because that’s anti-nature. So you begin to do all of these things to provoke nature to do your thing.

It is magical and yet is thoroughly materialistic in the sense that there is no personal being involved here, except there was, and sometimes they got a hint of that. That’s why coming back to the final resolution it is so important that scripture says that there was neither voice nor any to answer nor any that regarded.

The first response is, “Well, of course not because Baal is not real.” Yes, but Deuteronomy, Psalms, and Paul all tell us that the things that the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons. There were real spiritual dark forces behind these things. To what degree and how that worked we’re not told, nor do we need to know, but demons did pop in and out and do little nifties for these people to awe them, to frighten them, to hold them in terror.

The demons were apparently used to occasionally popping in and making prophecies or responding, and what this is saying is that on this occasion, however badly they wanted to intervene, God had shut their mouths. They were not around. They were kicked out. They were muzzled. They could not do one thing. Not only was Elijah winning the battle on this side of the invisible wall, but God and his angels were rounding up demons and kicking them out on the other side, so there’s no one there.

The prophets who are used to that occasional voice, it’s not there all of the sudden. Sometimes perhaps the voice in their head – it’s suddenly gone silent. No one’s at home. No one’s on the line. No one’s picking up.

“This number is no longer in service.”

Nobody’s knocking on the table.

Yes, there are no knocks on the table. No one’s moving the planchette on the Ouija board. It’s just not happening.

In contrast to what the Baal prophets were doing, which was trying to provoke God, frighten God, entice God, manipulate God, Elijah simply comes forward and recognizes the covenant order that God himself had set up. Remember David got in trouble with moving the ark “because we sought him not according to the due order.” Elijah is not violating that order. He has permission to use this altar.

It is a traditional altar, an altar of 12 stones. He’s doing a traditional peace offering and it’s alright with God. God is going to show it’s alright because God is going to light the fire himself, Elijah isn’t. This is not will worship. He does not step forward and say, “Ha! Look, a Bic lighter. It starts.” He waits for God and to get God to answer.

He simply talks to him. There’s no ranting and raving. There’s no threatening. There’s no vain repetitions as our Lord speaks of. He just talks to him as a man talks to his friend, humbly and passionately. He does slip in one repetition but no more, and there is a logic to his prayers. It’s the logic of covenant thinking. It’s a very short prayer and, when he’s done, fire falls, obliterates everything, and he gets the response.

Then God, who has shut up the heavens so that Baal can’t do anything, now opens them in response to human prayer, conversation with God, words from man to God about specific things in time and space on earth.

Intelligible speech.

Yes. God honors this by sending rain that was not on the horizon before. It comes quickly. It comes out of nowhere.

We’ve talked about this. This is the very kind of prayer that God commends to us. Just because it looks impossible, and maybe is impossible by the reckoning of Newtonian mechanics, that doesn’t mean you can’t pray for it, and it doesn’t mean that God can’t answer because he set up rules he can’t break.

God can do whatever he wants. And although he does not do sign miracles, scripture is complete, he can do anything he wants to “through means, beyond means, without means” I believe is more or less how the Westminster Confession phrases it, and it uses the present tense. It’s not “he could,” but he still can and sometimes still does.

He doesn’t have to. The answer is lying there right in front of us and we just missed it and suddenly we see it, but he can when he wants to be very impressive and kind of do what the Puritans would call special providences, and that’s what he does here. He pulls rain out of seemingly nowhere. Maybe it was over there just beyond the horizon, but maybe it wasn’t, but it comes, it falls, it soaks the land, and God empowers Elijah through the Holy Spirit to run faster than a chariot – the first superhero, super speed.

Samson had super strength and Elijah had super speed, so you’re just super if you’re a Nazirite.

And I think it’s Elisha who has super vision, because he can see into alternate – anyway, we’re being silly.

Well, the people all applaud, and this is what we talk about next time, I believe. What did this actually accomplish? The people said they believe. They voted right for one election. They voted God in as king this time. But what happens when Jezebel hears, and what’s that going to look like? That waits for next time.

I want to read the conclusion I originally wrote –

If the truth of religion is a matter of personal opinion, then religion is culturally irrelevant. But if God is real, his reality has social, political, and legal implications. The Kingdom of God matters on earth and in history, and this the unbeliever finds intolerable. “You may keep your God in your private thoughts,” he tells us, “but don’t you dare bring him in and his absolute rule out into the public square. We won’t tolerate such bigotry, ignorance, and hatred.” The worship of nature is another matter, of course, because in worshiping nature, man worships himself, and who in his right mind could object to that?

Closing thoughts or illustrations that you see around you?

I was noticing this kind of thinking even on the Babylon Bee podcast today as I was listening. They had a guest on who’s running for office in southern California, also an actor. I can’t recall his name at the moment, but they talked about saying the Lord’s Prayer when you have the sleep paralysis demon. When you have a sleep disorder or depression, apparently it’s a very common thing to see like an old hag at the foot of your bed.

Oh yeah. That’s an old tradition. I’ve heard that before.

Yeah, so the guest on the show is like, “Oh yeah, you start saying the Lord’s Prayer and it goes right away. It works every time,” and the gal was like, “Well, I’m not Catholic.” He said, “Oh, it doesn’t matter. You just say it, and it goes away.” It was like, “Oh, that’s how that works, huh?”

I didn’t know it was so easy to do white magic on demons in the name of Jesus. Bryan, you don’t have anything for us along these lines?

Not really. It’s kind of like you took everything that I would have thought of eventually and said it.

He’s very efficient.

But when it comes down to it, we need to remember that prayer is something that God uses as a means. It’s not magical. When I was growing up – and I don’t want to make the claim that my parents believed this, but other people in that general Word of Faith tradition essentially treated prayer as, “Okay, this is how I do my part in spiritual battle, because without me nothing is going to happen.”

It does end up with a worldview that’s very magical, because Satan has his warriors out in the world and all the Godless heathens that hate the church and hate God, and that’s true to a certain extent, of course, but then we’re the warriors that go out and it’s our prayers, it’s our declaring things, it’s our will that wins the day essentially, and God is just the battery that powers our spiritual laser rifle. I don’t like that.

Do not endorse?

I do not endorse that.

Do either of you remember the Christian novel, This Present Darkness?

I was actually just about to mention that next – yes.

Can you tell us about it?

Emily, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the name Frank Peretti?

I’ve heard that name. I’ve not read any of his books.

He wrote this book called This Present Darkness and it’s a novelization or dramatization of spiritual warfare in the modern day, which for him was 1987-88, something like that, when the book was written.

It’s been so long since I’ve even read it, but the action is like there’s this evil cabal and they are being influenced by demons or knowingly working with demons, and they’re Democrats or they’re public school teachers or public school administrators or something like that. They’re out to do evil nefarious things, and they sit with their backs in large executive recliners with their fingers steepled.

The narrative action is people praying, and then angels get power-ups essentially and they fight the demons, because now they’ve been empowered by prayer. There’s a lot of problems with this.

“We can’t do anything until God’s people pray.” I didn’t fully recognize it for what it was at the time, but looking back on it now it’s like, “Yeah, that’s white magic,” which is to say magic, which is to say wrong. God uses our prayers most certainly, but it is the Spirit who moves us to pray in the first place. All godly prayer is prompted by the Holy Spirit.

There’s a line in Narnia – “Doesn’t Aslan already know?” “Yes, but sometimes he likes to be asked.” God wants to commune with his people. He wants us to ask, and when we ask he may be inclined to move more quickly or in a new direction, not because he hadn’t thought of it or it’s a new idea or we’re energizing him somehow, but because he wants to commune with us.

That’s why it’s important when we look at what Elijah does, prayer is not a ranting and raving. It is simply a conversation with God, presented in intelligible language, intelligent logical reasons based on covenant, based upon God’s prior revelation of himself.

And based on his character.

Yeah. That’s the nature of prayer over against magic. Prayer is not Christian magic. Magic of all sorts, if it’s true magic, is Satanic. It is either a calling on demons or at least an opportunity for demons to poke their heads in. It is an attempt to manipulate heaven or hell or something, and it’s fraught with all kinds of dangers, whether it’s white or black.

I’m suddenly reminded of the story of the schoolboy who needs help on his geometry, so he decides to summon a demon. So he draws the protecting pentagram and summons up the demon, and with shaking voice he says to the demon, “I need a little help with my geometry,” and the demon says, “Yes, you do,” as he walks into the hexagram.

The devil’s bargain is never a good one. Prayer is not that. It is not a Christianized version of that. It is talking to our Heavenly Father, who happens to be God.

One of the founding thinkers, I guess, of the Word of Faith movement taught that when mankind fell – there’s a whole laundry list of things that are wrong with what I’m about to say. One is that God created the universe and then created man as a little god. We’re already at a problem point here. When mankind fell, God lost his connection point for his authority on earth, and it was ceded to Satan instead, who is the god of this world, of course, because that’s what that means. And the only way that God is able to act in history post-fall is through the will and prayer of people. They are magical conduits, essentially.

Now, they would never put it in that phraseology, but that’s essentially what they’re talking about, and we want to contrast that with what scripture teaches. God is the one who wills. God is the one who sits in the heavens and does all that he pleases, and it’s not just in the heavens that he does all that he pleases. Scripture is full of God taking the first step in history and miraculous steps.

Yeah, Revelation comes first.

If the schema of Word of Faith is correct, then they have to throw out a very large chunk of the Pentateuch alone, because the angel appearing in the burning bush is God acting in the earth and there was no person around to channel him to Moses.

Actually, going back as well to the thing you mentioned about the church in the area that turns the gospel into faith + covenant faithfulness – that’s essentially the boiled down version of every false religion. It’s human effort. It doesn’t matter if you say there’s faith first, because if you stay in by faithfulness then you’re out, you have failed immediately.

Yes. You are not going to be faithful. Only as your works are covered by the blood and righteousness of Christ are they pleasing and acceptable to God. Spiritual sacrifice is acceptable to God through Jesus Christ, not autonomously, not on their own, not because we’ve now turned a corner and can do good things. That’s Pelagianism or semi-Pelagianism, not that there’s any huge difference there.

It again is essentially magical without the magic. It’s not even fun. It’s Phariseeism. Paganism in the ancient world was a lot more exciting than Phariseeism ever was, but then it was the Pharisees and Sadducees who crucified Christ, not the black magis.

We should make some recommendations of things we like instead of talking about all the magic that we don’t like. I have a recommendation. Jordan Peterson, the lobster king himself, gave the commencement address at my alma mater, Hillsdale College, and it’s very worth listening to. He talks about crossroads, which I think is an appropriate image to use for a commencement speech.

It’s always a challenge with the commencement speakers at Hillsdale because often they’re political figures so it’s not really a commencement speech, it’s like a political stump speech or somebody else wrote it and it’s not very good. But when Jordan Peterson goes to speak somewhere, I think he writes it himself, and it’s appropriate to the occasion.

So what’s the basic theme?

The basic theme is that every point in your life where you make a decision, you have the choice to choose the pursuit of Christ or the pursuit of destruction, and that’s clearer at the weightier moments of decision. I chose those words. Jordan Peterson didn’t choose those words.

I was going to say – “He said Christ?”

He actually did. He keeps saying these things and I’m like, “Do you hear the words that you’re saying?”

There’s always this challenge. At Hillsdale they talk about the good, the true, and the beautiful a lot, and it’s kind of like, “Oh yeah, and of course these are all united in Christ.” It’s like, “No, all of these things came from Christ, because Christ is the embodiment of God.” Reading his speech through that lens it was extremely worthwhile.

I always like going back and watching the commencement ceremonies at Hillsdale because they’re very to the point, and it’s not just sort of empty. It’s like, “Here’s why we’re here. We had a goal for these four years. You’ve accomplished something in those four years. Here’s what it is. Good job. This is why we’re going to keep doing what we’re doing.”

They were one of the few colleges who actually had a commencement in 2020, because they said, “Hey, if this is ever worth doing, it’s worth doing in a pandemic,” so they did it – not to the scale they normally do, but they did it with health safety precautions and all that.

It’s on the college’s YouTube channel.

Bryan, you got something?

The best I have is just something I’ve recommended multiple times before, and it’s an anti-recommendation in some sense.

Oh no. No, no, we already anti-recommended magic. You have to recommend something good.

But it’s also a recommendation. Here’s the thing – it’s a recommendation of something fun to do, but it’s recommending you engage in something that is not necessarily good by terms of quality, which is watching bad movies and making fun of them.

I actually think you recommended this, but you can do it again. It’s worth it.

I will absolutely recommend it again.

How can you tell if they’re bad movies, Bryan?

Partially it’s personal taste, but also it’s by how well they adhere to the story, its archetypes, and how much of it is reflected in the story you’re watching. But also I think a large amount does come down to taste.

I even think the movie Tremors with Kevin Bacon is a perfect film, and I do not say that lightly. It is silly and campy and ridiculous, but its plot structure is just <chef’s kiss>. It is perfect. You get inciting moment, and building and rising tension, and there’s a climax, and there’s denouement that makes sense. It’s so well-structured I want to write an essay about it, if I could find the time.

Anyway, it comes down to taste. It comes down to what is true and good and beautiful in it, to tie into your recommendation and Hillsdale.

So what is an example of a bad movie?

Oh, do I ever have an example! My wife and I recently watched through the Twilight saga.

Oh no.

I will tell you, it is painful. It is extremely painful to watch through, because there’s no pacing, there’s no real narrative flow, there’s no logic. My gosh, we had so much fun making fun of that. So I’m not recommending those movies at all, but if for some reason you find yourself watching them, you can at least make the time redeemable by mocking it, in Elijah fashion.

This is a challenge because there are some things that are so awful that they are fun to watch, and they present themselves as awful to you. It is self-evident that they are. But then there’s things that could be fun to make fun of if you’re with the right people, and then there’s things that are just bad and unpleasant to watch.

For me, The Librarians TV show falls into this category. It’s just like I was here for a knock-off Dr. Who, but then the main character ran off and we never see him again. I can’t take it.

Keeping with the Dr. Who analogy, it’s The Sarah Jane Adventures. “Why are we here? We watched Dr. Who for Dr. Who, and now we’re stuck with one of his ex-companions and schoolchildren. This doesn’t work.”

Ever watch Mystery Science Theatre 3000?

Oh, yes, absolutely.

If you want to find bad movies, there’s a good place to go. It’s a whole show of two robots and a person mocking movies.

Some of those are so bad!

Isn’t mockery a human action? How did the robot pull that off?

Artificial intelligence.

It’s crazy what they’re doing with microchips these days.

Mine is next, and I’m going to make this recommendation with qualifications, mostly because it’s kind of a downer. It’s Russian literature.

But it’s also beautiful and excellent and dark.

Yeah. It’s Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, which my kids are reading in school right now and I’m reading it with them because it’s been a long time and I actually have to make quiz questions.

Just to interject, that was my favorite reading assignment from high school.

Oh, good. I think it probably is one of the best things we assign. First of all, if you’re not used to reading Russian literature you need to print out a list of the characters with all of their multiple Russian names, because every Russian has three or four or five different names, and the author uses them with wild abandon without reminding you who this is. You can get used to it, but initially it may be a bit confusing.

It's a novel. It’s about a particular crime and the punishment that follows, not primarily the specific punishment or judicial punishment, which wait till the end – I won’t tell you or spoil the ending with what happens there – but a lot of it is just the psychological torture that the killer goes through as he is apprehending apprehension, as he’s waiting to be found out.

Dostoevsky had spent time in the gulags with murderers, so he had talked to and interviewed murderers – not cold-blooded serial murderers, but the guy who killed his girlfriend or his parlor maid or the butcher next door, ordinary people who committed murder – so he came to understand what the human mind does with that.

He brings it across in the lead character whose mind we are in from the beginning. So because we’re in the character’s mind, we are tempted, without even realizing it, to empathize with the character and get to the point of, “Oh no, they’re after him. Oh no, they’re going to discover him! How is he going to escape?” without realizing, “Wait, he’s the bad guy. I’m supposed to want him to get caught.”

My kids today in school when I asked them the question, “Did you notice this happening to you?” some of them said, “No, not at all.” Some said, “Well, for a minute.” I haven’t read all their essays yet. Usually I get, “Yes.”

“And what happened when you realized that you were doing this?”

“Then I got really mad at the writer.”

“Do you understand the writer knew that would happen?”

“I guess.”

“So in other words, he manipulated you to feel one thing, and realizing that that would backfire and you would now be manipulated to feeling something else, so he’s still manipulating you.”

“Oh no.”

It is a superb work of literature on that point. My only stylistic objection is that nobody ever says anything. Everybody cries something. “He cried this,” “She cried that.”

Maybe it’s a translation issue.

It may be, I don’t know.

Two other things. First, it is a Christian novel. I’m going to ask my kids before too long, “Why is this a Christian novel?” and they’re going to say, “It’s not because we’re in the mind of a murderer,” and there is no clear conversion scene in the end. There’s some discussion of Christ and the gospel, but you get it tangentially and it’s unclear and there’s no resolution and you’re left kind of wondering.

But the world that you’re in is a Christian world where sin and guilt are real things, and the conscience is a real thing, and people are sinners. Nobody here is spotless. Everybody has his sins or her sins, so coming to terms with that will shut down a lot of your works religion ideas. It’s a religious book. These people are religious. They are not holy by any means.

The last thing, and in some ways the most minor thing, is that it presents a different style of detection. There is a detective who shows up eventually. He’s not particularly likeable, but we see the murder committed. We follow everything through the eyes of the murderer, and then eventually the detective comes on stage, and by using simple questioning and observation and psychological methods, he tries to get the protagonist to break and to confess himself, without ever really coming out and saying, “You did it.” He just keeps creating these tense situations to get the character to talk too much and to admit things he shouldn’t admit, until finally the hope is he’ll just spill everything and break down.

In this respect this detective is the prototype for Columbo. If our listeners do not know who Columbo is, this is an age that knows not Columbo, go back and watch. It’s available on YouTube for free, at least certain episodes are. It’s Columbophile or something like that, and you can get some of the older original first runs. They are worth watching. Peter Falk is a marvelous actor.

He plays the grandpa in Princess Bride.

Yes, he does. That may be the only place some people know him from.

When Maryellen joined the Sheriff’s Explorers, they introduced her to a dog called McGruff, who wears a trench coat and says, “Let’s take a bite out of crime!” and I had to explain, “This is a rip-off of Columbo.”

“Who?”

“We actually have the set and I showed some of it to you before.”

“Oh, okay. I don’t get it.”

Anyway, it’s not a happy book but it’s a worthwhile book, so that’s my recommendation.

Thank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thank you also to our producer, David Maxson, my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in. Hope you’ve enjoyed the show. You should tell a friend about us if you did, and spread the joy.

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And new microphones.

And new microphones, yeah.

Have a great night. See you next time.