The living Word of God: 1 Kings 18:36–40
"The time has come for the offering. The prophet Elijah approached and said: 'LORD God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel, and I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your word. Answer me, LORD! Answer me so that this people may know that you are, LORD, the true God. Turn their hearts back to you.'"
And 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. When all the people saw it, they fell on their faces and cried, 'The LORD, He is God! The LORD, He is God!' Elijah commanded them, 'Seize the prophets of Baal! Do not let one of them escape!' So they seized them, and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon and executed them there." (18:36–40)
Elijah prays as an individual, using calm, simple words. The others were many and behaved like madmen; they tried everything to influence their god, to sway him with the manner and duration of their dance, their gestures. Elijah shows the power granted to the prayer of a single believer. His prayer is answered. But it is answered because, in the entire attitude of the one praying, faith is visible, a connection with the true God in whose infinite power he believes. Elijah also shows that this faith is in no way a mass phenomenon; a single saint is sufficient to lead an entire nation to conversion. God surely hears the voice of an entire nation, but He also hears the voice of the individual. God cares for His faithful in their hour of suffering, which can also be an hour of His glory.
The fire descends with divine force. It responds to Elijah's prayer, who built God's altar, prepared the sacrifice, the wood, and drenched the whole area with water to receive this divine answer. For what this prayer anticipated was already infinitely more than what a purely human prayer could hope for. God's fire consumes the sacrifice and dries up the water. It proves that the prayer of a believer has the power to let God's miracles act in the world in unheard-of fullness.
Immediately afterward, Elijah has the false prophets seized and executed. He expels unbelief from the midst of faith, punishing in the midst of God's grace. By this, he gives the people the opportunity to begin a new life before God, a life in which everything that is sin and temptation to sin is to be burnt away by the cleansing fire that consumes all that is unclean. Even the stones are to symbolize the purification that must be carried out on the people; they are also consumed; this is to eradicate all unbelief from the twelve tribes, to forever preserve the splendor of the new faith in the power of the true God. The service of two masters is brought to an end. And the people are to learn to pray. Elijah showed them everything: simplicity in his prayer, but also unwavering trust in God, the truth of God’s Word on which that trust relies. Grace laid a new beginning in the history of the nation.
For Elijah, this new beginning represents perseverance in his mission. He may feel the burden more heavily than ever, but with the assurance that his mission is true and hidden in God. God has helped him. His prayer became a simple conversation, and God responded to him divinely simply.
The conversion gained the strength to put an end to the false prophets: this is the first fruit of prophetic prayer. Elijah wanted God's truth to prevail. He asked that the truth which holds between God and himself now also holds between God and the nation. The strength with which he walked his path is to be given to the nation. His prayer was a prayer of surrender: he wanted to pass on what he himself had, and in doing so recognizes the certainty of the truth, its power, its effectiveness. His service is a service of God's will: he wants only what God wants: the conversion of the lost. It will be accompanied by power. This power is suddenly granted to the prophet so that the nation may know God's power. Yet this power, which is revealed in God's fire and even more in the conversion of sinners, is entirely connected to the simple word of prayer. The word of prayer has power over God: it has the power to invoke God's power.
The believers, after witnessing the power and efficacy of prayer, suddenly gained mighty faith and were filled with a strength they had yet to know. They begin to sense what God's truth can be and what the service of this truth can accomplish. They sense something of the mysterious cycle of word and power between God and His messenger. The messenger receives God's power when he uses it in a divine sense. Prayer is no longer some vague, perhaps unattainable request, nor an act of humbling oneself before God, nor a weak expression of some wish, gratitude, or fear; rather it is a conversation in the full sense of the word in which the whole God enters with His truth and power. But since God is a partner in this conversation, His possibilities are infinitely expanded; torrents of heavenly power will pour out onto the earth so violently that they will surpass all earthly limits, throwing overboard all established laws. And concepts that were created in unbelief and lukewarmness now appear pitifully. Unbelief and lukewarmness cannot sustain themselves at the height of this conversation; they fall, remaining bound by human limitations, having nothing to show, nothing that even remotely resembles a miracle.
The miracle on Carmel signifies not so much the visible acceptance of the sacrifice by God, the execution of the false prophets, the conversion of the nation, or the end of lies, but rather the conversation itself, the prayer. That now represents the miracle that God grants to every believer. Not to conceal it, but to use it in its full miraculous power in a divine sense.
Excerpt from the book: Elijah
Author: Adrienne von Speyr
Published by: KNA
