Elijah and the Fire From Heaven

Alright folks, this here is perhaps one of the richest stories in the whole Bible. For this essay, we’re going to talk about the events that take place in 1 Kings Chapter 18, starting with Verse 16.

For some context, in the land of Israel, there is a prophet named Elijah. Now Elijah is no paper prophet like some featured in the Old Testament. Instead, the spirit of the Lord is strongly upon him. This makes for some notable fireworks. The drama all starts with Ahab becoming king of Israel. In 1 Kings 16:30, the text says, “Ahab son of Omri did more evil in the eyes of the Lord than any of those before him.” Most of this evil centered around worshiping Baal.

As you’ll recall, God isn’t very chill about his chosen people worshiping other gods. As a matter of fact, in Exodus 20:5-6 God explicitly says, “You shall not bow down to them or serve them [other gods], for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who what me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.” So, naturally, God isn’t thrilled about Ahab, so he sends Elijah to stage an intervention.

This intervention takes the form of a great drought that afflicts the whole land of Israel (1 Kings 17). While that’s going on, Elijah gets out of Dodge and finds a nice ravine to hide in for the time being. There he waits out the drought while being fed by ravens. Eventually, the brook providing him with fresh water dries up, so he relocates to the house of a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. While he’s there, Elijah performs an endless flour and oil miracle to keep himself, the widow, and the widow’s son fed. Some time passes and the woman’s son dies rather unexpectedly. That proves to be a bit of a PR disaster for God so he has Elijah resurrect the boy, returning him to life. The widow is quite pleased with this and declares, “Now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the Lord for your mouth is the truth.”

This finally brings us to the part of the story that I think is most interesting. Three years after the start of the drought, God finally tells Elijah to go present himself to Ahab. He implies that he will then end the drought. So, Elijah marched off to his divine appointment. Along the way, he happened upon Obadiah, Ahab’s palace administrator. Obadiah was a devout believer in the Lord, and he recognized Elijah immediately. Elijah told Obadiah to go tell Ahab that he was here. However, Obadiah was fearful to do this because Ahab was in the habit of killing people who lied about the whereabouts of Elijah. It’s implied that Ahab has been searching for Elijah over the last three years, presumably to make him turn off the drought.

After some back and forth, Obadiah does what Elijah asks him to. Meanwhile, Elijah heads to Mount Carmel, the location he told Obadiah that he would be at. Ahab gets the news and then he also rushes off to Mount Carmel. There Elijah is waiting for him.

As way of greeting, Ahab says, “Is that you, you troubler of Israel?”

Elijah answers, “I have not made trouble for Israel. But you and your father’s family have. You have abandoned the Lord’s commands and have followed the Baals. Now summon the people from all over Israel to meet me on Mount Carmel. And Bring the four hundred and fifty prophets of Ball and the four hundred prophets of Asherah, who eat at Jezebel’s table.”

What follows next is one of the most epic occurrences in the whole Biblical corpus. Ahab assembles all of these people. Then Elijah issues a challenge. They are to get two bulls that are to be sacrificed. The bulls will be cut to pieces and placed on wood but not set on fire. Then the prophets of Baal will call on Baal and he will call on God. Whichever god is more powerful will then answer by fire, lighting his respective bull on fire.

The people gathered agreed that this was a good plan. So, for the next four or five hours, the prophets of Baal tried to get Baal to light his bull on fire. Around noon Elijah started making fun of them. At that point, the prophets of Baal started cutting themselves to try to arouse Baal that way. This went on until evening.

At that point, Elijah went to work himself. He repaired the altar of the Lord, which had been torn down. Once he was finished with that, he put the pieces of his bull on the altar. Satisfied, he then had the people douse the bull and the wood it was resting on with water three times, making it very difficult to set it on fire.

Then he prayed to God, “Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command. Answer me, Lord, answer me, so these people will know that you, Lord, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again.”

Right on cue, the fire of the Lord fell from the heavens and burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the stones, and the soil. It also licked up the water in the trenches surrounding the sacrifice. As an aside, temperatures of up to 2,400 degrees F are required to melt stone. This potentially implies that the fire from heaven was pretty serious stuff. Probably not that far off from an orbital laser strike. After seeing God vaporize the bull and everything around it, the people gathered fell on their faces, praising God. It’s safe to assume they were presumably terrified.

After that, Elijah rounded up all the prophets of Baal. He marched them off to the Kishon Valley. Then he proceeded to slaughter them all there. After he was done with that gristly business, he told Ahab to go get lunch. Then he climbed back up to the top of Mount Carmel. There he prayed seven times for rain. After that God sent the rain, ending the three-year drought. Once he saw the sky darkening, Elijah tucked his cloak into his belt. Then he ran on ahead of Ahab to Jezreel. The text seems to indicate that Elijah outran a chariot on foot.

So, there you have it. I encourage you to read the full story because my paraphrase doesn’t do it much justice. Now having discussed it, there are a few interesting things I want to point out. The first thing that comes to mind is how the fire from heaven is a miracle of the first order. The sort of event that irrefutably provides proof of God. A case where God himself directly intercedes in the course of history. Other first-order miracles include the parting of the Red Sea or the acts of Christ in the New Testament. In each case, the situation is set up such that all other causal explanations are eliminated. In this example here, Elijah goes out of his way to drench the bull and wood with water, effectively making it impossible for them to be lit on fire using normal means.

The interesting thing about first-order miracles is their ability to remove all doubt. I’m confident in my Christian beliefs. Enough so to die for them. I’m willing to bet the whole farm on them. Yet despite that confidence, my faith is not to the point of someone who’s seen a miracle of the first order. I personally have seen what I’d call third-order miracles. Events of providence that are exceedingly statistically unlikely to happen. Yet these events still have other explanations. Now the fact that I’ve seen so many of them, especially in response to prayers adds credibility to them but they’re still not the same as a “touch my hands and see” moment.

When you’ve been in the same room as the resurrected Jesus, you can’t really not believe in him. He’s there, you can reach out and touch him. You can talk to him. You can see him. The same goes for the parting of the Red Sea, the pillar of fire from heaven, or God speaking from the burning bush. After an event like that, disbelief is nearly impossible. It can only be done in the same sense that a person can be delusional about reality.

Or at least that’s what one would like to think. However, if you should happen to turn the page in your Bible to 1 Kings 19:1 and continue reading, something nearly unbelievable occurs.

When Ahab returns from the events that took place at Mount Carmel, he tells his wonderful wife Jezebel that Elijah killed all her Baal prophets. That pissed her off, so she sent a messenger to Elijah saying, “May the gods deal with me, be it ever so severely, if by this time tomorrow, I do not make your life like that of them [the dead Baal prophets].”

The text says, “Elijah was afraid, and he ran for his life. When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his servant there while he himself went on a day’s journey into the wilderness. He came to a broom bush, sat down under it, and prayed that he might die.” Now God, in his typical fashion, sent the angel of the Lord to help Elijah. The angel of the Lord gave him food. Then he sent Elijah on his way to Horeb, the mountain of God. There, God himself met with Elijah. Not in the sense that a meeting with God usually entails either. In this case, God actually showed up himself. However, that’s a story for another time.

The point that I’m getting at here is that Elijah just called down fire from heaven. He watched God send fire from the sky to consume a bull. After seeing something like that, how exactly does one run off when being threatened by a moronic woman? A woman who is as misaligned with God as possible. Obviously, if Elijah were to have not run away and instead stayed to face Jezebel, God would have defended him. Perhaps we would have seen even more fire from heaven. Elijah just witnessed one of the greatest miracles in all of history, yet he still ran away. How can this be?

I think the answer is found in Luke Chapter 16 Verses 19-31. I’ll include the whole story here, so you don’t have to go look it up:

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores. “The time came when the beggar died, and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So, he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue because I am in agony in this fire.’ “But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’ “He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’ “Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’” ‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’ “He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

The takeaway here is that there were people who saw the miracles of Jesus and still decided not to believe. This illustrates an important element of faith. At some point, each and every one of us needs to take a leap. For some, the leap will be smaller than others. Miracles of the first order certainly help to close the gap but no matter what, it’s always going to be there. This doesn’t just apply to faith in God either. It can be seen in every domain of life. However, it is most important with respect to God because the God domain of life is the most important domain. After all, God is the foundation upon which it is all built.

So that’s why I find this story interesting. A man far greater than me can call down the fire of God from the heavens and still feel fear after something like that. This is a fact that I take great comfort in as I muck my way through my own life.