Good morning. Though I don't have the right
words, I feel like I really want to say something. When the Lord
calls home one of his sheep, it's difficult on us. But with
those announcements we heard, Aren't we so grateful for what
the Lord has done for His children that we can have a hope and we
can rejoice for them even though we struggle through those things?
If you would, open your Bibles with me to 1 Kings. 1 Kings chapter
18. 1 Kings chapter 18. I'm going to read a portion of
Scripture here of an Old Testament story. And before I do so, I
want to give you the title of my message, Which God is God? Which God, lowercase g, is God? Capital G. And we'll start here
in verse 17 of 1 Kings chapter 18. And it came to pass, when Ahab
saw Elijah, that Ahab said unto him, Art thou he that troubleth
Israel? And he answered, I have not troubled
Israel, but thou, and thy father's house, in that ye have forsaken
the commandments of the Lord, and thou hast followed Balaam. Now therefore send and gather
to me all Israel under Mount Carmel and the prophets of Baal
450 and the prophets of the groves 400, which eat at Jezebel's table.
So Ahab sent unto all the children of Israel and gathered the prophets
together unto Mount Carmel. And Elijah came unto all the
people and said, how long halt ye between two opinions or two
thoughts? If the Lord be God, follow Him. But if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him,
not a word. Then said Elijah unto the people,
I, even I only, remain a prophet of the Lord, but Baal's prophets
are 450 men. Let them, therefore, give us
two bullocks, and let them choose one bullock for themselves, 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. And all the people answered
and said, it is well spoken. 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, saying, O Baal, hear us. But there was no voice nor any
that answered, and they leaped upon the altar which was made.
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 poor adventure, he sleepeth
and must be awaked. And they cried aloud and cut
themselves after the manor with knives and lancets till the blood
gushed out upon them. And it came to pass, when midday
was passed, and they prophesied until the time of the offering
of the evening sacrifice, that there was neither voice nor any
to answer, nor any that regarded. 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. 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. 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 could 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 around about the altar and filled the
trench also 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,
let it be known this day that thou art God in Israel, and that
I am thy servant, and that I have done all these things at thy
word. Hear me, O Lord, hear me, that this people may know that
thou art the Lord God, and that thou hast turned their heart
back again. 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. And when all
the people saw it, they fell on their faces, and they said,
The Lord, He is God. The Lord, He is the God. 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. The question, which God is God,
is answered very clearly in this story. And I wanted to read the
whole story so everyone knew the outcome. In case you hadn't
heard it, as we go through this and look at a few different points
in it, no one can argue which of these two gods was God. In verse 21, the question is
presented to everyone. And Elijah came unto all the
people and said, How long halt ye between two opinions, or two
thoughts? How long are you going to look
at these two things and go back and forth? How long is it going
to take before you actually make a decision, before you figure
this out? He says, If the Lord be God, follow Him. But if Baal,
then follow him. And the people didn't answer
a word. They didn't know the answer. Or they were confused. It needed to be proven to them. And that's what the Lord did
here. Elijah, in verse 23 and 24, set what the Lord had given
him to show these people the answer. Verse 23 says, let them
therefore give us two bullocks. Let the followers of Baal, they're
going to give us the two bullocks. And everything here, he's presenting
it. The prophets of Baal are going to do everything. They
make all the choices. There's no way at the end of this we
can say, well, you tricked us. You did something here. So the
prophets of Baal would choose the two bullocks. Let them choose
which one they want. They can do it how they want.
They can lay on wood. And the only thing, they just
can't have any fire. And I'll dress the other bullock and lay
it under the wood and put no fire. And in verse 24, and you
call on the name of your gods, and I will call the name of the
Lord, and the God that answereth by fire, let him be God. I love this, it says, and the
God, capital G, that answereth by fire. Elijah's here saying,
only a true God can answer by fire here. And all the people
answered and said, it is well spoken. Now, we have a few things
that we need to figure out. When we ask this question, which
God is God? This is a question that the entire
world needs to answer. All of these people that are
here, they call all the people of Israel, and this is in Mount
Carmel where this is in kind of a valley with mountains all
around it, and it said all the people of Israel came about.
Now these people, as we have talked about in past stories
through all these chapters, had seen a lot of evidence of who
the true God was. There are so many stories and
so many examples that had been given them that showed who God
was. Yet it seemed, every time something
came up, or the next generation came along, they would just meander
some direction or be fooled by some other temptation. And we
can't be hard on them. How often do we just, if someone
looked at our thoughts and even our words, our actions, would
they look at us and think, they sure don't look like somebody
who believes in God. We can't be harsh on them. And
they're not our focus of this story. Instead, I want us to
answer this question, us to look at what happens here. And do
we really believe which God is God? Are we worshiping the true
and living God? In verse 19, he says, send and
gather to me all Israel unto Mount Carmel, all of them. The
first point is this, everyone will see the truth. All of Israel
was watching this. And as we read the end of the
story, there was no doubt what the answer was. Every human will
eventually find out the truth. Now if our God, if the Lord determines
to make it clear to us, then we will see it. If not, we just
won't. That's our only hope. We would
be just like all these people. And I'll be honest, I think a
lot of these people believed on the Lord. But they had been
misguided. They had been led astray. And
thankfully, the Lord does what He does here. He gives us an
example. He shows us. He opens our eyes. Now, it may not always be a huge
scene as this one was. But so many times the Lord does
something, and so often it's just this little nudge that we're
kind of crooked and He just nudges us back, and we don't even realize
He's done it to us. But it says, everyone will see
the truth. Now, if He doesn't show us, then
what will happen is what happened to these prophets of Baal. If
we are not in the Lord Jesus Christ, we will perish. But eventually
everyone will see the truth. Everyone will. In verse 22 it
says, Then said Elijah unto the people, I, even I only, one person,
remain a prophet of the Lord, but Baal's prophets are 450 men. The number of people doesn't
matter. It was irrelevant that one person
was worshiping the Lord and 450 were prophets of Baal. It didn't matter. The numbers
don't matter. In our world today, there are billions of people,
billions with a B, who believe on so many different gods. But
the numbers don't matter. Our God is God. And the number
of followers has no bearing on His authority or His power. And
something else that doesn't matter, look at verse 25. And Elijah
said unto the prophets of Baal, Choose you one bullock for yourselves,
dress it, for you are many, and call on the name of your gods,
but put no fire under. And look at this. And they took
the bullock which was given them, they dressed it, and called on
the name of Baal from morning until noon, saying, O Baal, hear
us. But there was no voice, nor any
that answered. And they leaped, or they leaped
up and down on the altar which they had made. Our actions toward
God do not have any bearing on the power of God and His authority.
Just because these people were jumping all over the altar, screaming,
hooping, hollering, doing all these different things, that
had no bearing on the power of their God. Likewise, anything
we do, it has no bearing on the power of God. Look at verse 27,
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.
Elijah here is so confident in the lack of power of their God,
and likewise so confident in the power of the true and living
God that he mocks them here. And what I want us to take from
this is that Elijah's faith in his God had no bearing on the
power of God. Now, hear what I'm saying. Our faith, our belief, or lack
thereof, has no bearing on the power of our God. And that's
important because if our faith mattered, then our lack of faith
would also matter. And that scares me to death,
that my lack of faith or belief would have effect on the ability
or the omniscience of our God. It doesn't. Our God is in control
and in power no matter what we think or what we believe. Look
in verse 28, and these prophets cried aloud and cut themselves
after their manor with knives and lancets till the blood gushed
out upon them. Our devotion, the devotion of
these men had no bearing on the power of their God. It doesn't
matter how strongly you believe in your God, it has no bearing
on the power of God. These men, it seemed, truly believed
that Baal was God. They seemed to believe that he
could do what they asked of him, but he obviously couldn't. and
their devotion had no effect on it. And likewise, and I know
this sounds odd to say things like our faith and our belief
and our devotion and our actions and all that stuff have no bearing
on the power of our God, because we want to believe, we want to
have faith. And the scripture tells us, believe
and thou shalt be saved. But that has no bearing on the
power and authority and salvation that we get in the Lord Jesus
Christ. God is God. The God of this Bible, the God
of Israel, is in control. He does what He will, when He
will, to whom He will. And we're thankful for that.
That's what gives us hope. This God that is so often preached
in religion that needs help or can't do everything or He goes
all this way but you need to take the last step, all those
kind of things, they give me no hope whatsoever. Because I've
been in a lot of situations in my life where I was just one
little step away from finishing something and I didn't ever do
it. I won't do it. I can't do it, but our God is
able. Look at verse 29. And it came
to pass when midday was passed and they prophesied until the
time of the offering at the evening sacrifice that there was neither
voice nor any answer nor any that regarded. It did not matter
how long these men and women spoke and prayed and asked of
their God. It did not give him power. It
says from From the beginning of the day until the sun went
down, they screamed and they yelled and they hooped and they
hollered and did all this kind of stuff and it had no bearing
and it did not change who their God was. Their God, Baal, had
no power in the authority underneath our God. Even if this God of
theirs, Baal, little G, could do things, When pitted against
our God, capital G, he's helpless. He can't do anything. The definition
of the word God implies there can only be one. It doesn't matter
how many are created, how many pretenders, how many imitators,
because it just keeps coming. Every generation, another methodology,
theology, opinion, something comes up to maybe change something
to where more people would believe it. But nothing ever changes
about our God. Let me give you an illustration
to try to emphasize what I'm saying. If I were to change the
question here and I simply ask something and I said, what is
my middle name? That's a question no one in here
is confused about. There's nobody in here that doesn't
understand what I'm asking. Yet, are we going to, if we took
a vote and everybody said what they thought, is my middle name
the most common answer? Maybe, but it doesn't make it
the answer. If someone stood up and believed
with all their heart they knew what my middle name was, does
that make that the answer? No. If someone started acting
crazy and promising everybody and being the loudest person
in here, saying they knew what it was, does that make that the
answer? Nothing that anyone does can
change that answer to that question. My middle name is what it is.
I was given that name before I was born and that's my name.
And this is the answer to the question. It doesn't matter what
any of us do, what any of us say, what any of us think, God
is God. The Lord Jesus Christ, the God
of this Bible is in control and he does everything. Now, my middle
name is Luke. And everyone in here knew that,
knew the answer to that question, though you didn't know you knew
the answer to the question. A lot of you didn't. Everyone
in this world has heard the name of God. Everyone has heard it. But unless the Lord opens our
eyes, unless He Himself shows it to us, we're just blind. We just can't do it. And thankfully,
in His mercy and His grace, He opens the eyes of His children.
He doesn't have to do that. But because of how wonderful
He is, He chose a people to save. And He did all of it. He did
everything for them. Look here in verse 33. And Elijah put the wood in order,
and cut the bullock in pieces, and laid him on the wood, and
said, fill four barrels with water, 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.
Elijah did something that I'm sure no one could believe he
was doing. He was standing before sacrifice, getting ready to try
to prove to all these people who God was. And instead of doing
something miraculous where he could create fire out of nothing,
he started putting water on top of it. And if you've ever tried
to light a fire on a wet piece of wood, it just doesn't happen.
But he kept putting water on and kept putting water on to
where he filled a trench around the whole thing. And he kept
doing that. And what we need to see from
that is so wonderful. There is nothing that someone
who believes on the Lord Jesus Christ and believes in God can
do to prevent the sacrifice. We can't mess it up. We can't accidentally mess it
up. We can't, as Elijah is doing here, we can't intentionally
mess it up. And we do that. We self-sabotage. It's so embarrassing
sometimes, the things that we do. And I'll say myself, every
once in a while, I'll get sour apples over something, sour grapes.
I don't know if I'm saying the wrong expression, but somebody
irks me a little bit. And my family knows this. And
instead of just saying, you're right, I'm wrong, I'll just turn
around and just do something silly. I'll just cut my nose
off to spot my face. My parents said that when I was
a kid. I used to do that stuff. I would get in trouble, and if
I just said I was sorry, I was fine. And I would sit in my room
grounded for weeks instead of just saying I was sorry. I mean,
it's just a silly and dumb thing to do. But that's what we do.
We self-sabotage. And thankfully, we get so many
examples of the Scripture of this. We cannot have any negative
effect or positive effect on the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus
Christ. And boy, for somebody who believes that He died for
them, that is such wonderful news. The sacrifice of the Lord
Jesus Christ is perfect, complete, and finished. And we can't do
anything about it. Look at verse 36. 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, let it be known this
day that thou art God in Israel and that I am thy servant and
that I have done all these things at thy word. Hear me, O Lord,
hear me, that this people may know that thou art the Lord God
and that thou has turned their heart back again. On multiple
occasions I've already made a comment about nothing we do has any effect
on the power of God. Our God is God and it has nothing
to do with us. But now I'm gonna say this, our
God answers the prayers of His children. Elijah looks at the
Lord, looks to the Lord and just says, Lord God of Abraham, he
said, show these people that you are God. We can learn from
the type of prayer here too. Elijah simply says, Lord, show
them. Show your authority. Show your
power to these people. Because that's all he wants.
Every prophet of God, every preacher, every believer, everybody, what
they just really want is they want the Lord to show other people
who He is and what the Lord Jesus Christ did for His people. That's
all we want. There's a lot of things to be
said and a lot of ways to do it. But I always go back to the
same prayer. Lord, will you save my family?
Will you save my children? Will you save my friends? Will
you save these people? That's what we want. That's all
we want. And that's what Elijah's asking here. Hear me, oh Lord,
hear me, that this people may know that thou art the Lord God. That's such a wonderful thing.
And the Lord answers us. We can take that. When we ask
the Lord, He'll answer prayers. Thankfully, He does what's right
and what's best for us. And sometimes our prayers are
answered in ways we don't get. We ask for so many things and
it seems like the exact opposite happens. But one day, when we
don't see through the glass dimly, our eyes will be open and we
will be able to look and say, I can't, it is so glorious what
the Lord did for me in that moment. I cried, I fretted, I was angry,
and that was the best thing that ever could have happened to me.
It's so wonderful that our Lord does what's best for His children.
Look at verse 38. 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."
There was only one sacrifice that was accepted. There was
only one sacrifice that was consumed. And this is a great picture of
what the Lord Jesus Christ did on Calvary. His sacrifice was
the only one needed, the only one accepted, and the only perfect
sacrifice. In that, we have all that we
need. In the same way that in this
story, that sacrifice being consumed was the only thing that all of
these people needed to believe and to see who was God. And that's
our great evidence that what He did to show how much He loved
us, that He gave His only begotten Son to save a helpless, sinful
group of people, and we rejoice in that. Look at verse 39, and
when all the people saw it, They fell on their faces and they
said, ìThe Lord, He is the God. The Lord, He is the God.î And
in every story in the Scriptures, and in everything that ever happens
on this planet, everything that has ever happened to any man
or woman or anybody, thereís one common denominator every
single time. God will get the glory. It seems often that that's not
what's happening. It seems so often with the religious
world and so many things that happen, but God will get the
glory in all things. This story right here, the only
thing all the people could say was over and over again, the
Lord, He is the God. That's who He is. And let's look
at verse 40 and let's finish. And Elijah said unto them, Take
the prophets of Baal, let not one of them escape. No one that
is outside the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ will survive. They won't escape. The only salvation,
the only hope that anyone has is to be found in the Lord Jesus
Christ. And the only way we'll be there
is if He puts us there. We can't take any credit in the
same way that all these people that were standing around, they'd
been led astray, they'd been misguided, they didn't know what
to think, they were confused, all of this. No one would ever
give any of them any credit in this story. In the same way that
we would never get any credit or anything in our salvation
in the Lord. We look to Him, we believe on
Him because of what the Lord did to us. The examples we have
in the scripture and the things that the Lord and that our God
has done for us is the only reason that we believe. And we pray
that the Lord would continue to show us who He is. We need
reminders. We need what these people needed.
We need the Lord to turn us. We need when we get astray, and
that's only because He allows us, He takes His hand off for
a moment and we just take off running the wrong direction,
for Him to take us and just pull us in close again. We need to
look to the Lord Jesus Christ and we need to realize that in
Him we have everything and that the God of this book, the God
of Israel, the God of Jacob, the God of Abraham, the God of
Isaac, the God of Israel, everything we read in here, He is God. Capital G. And He is the only
God. And what that means is He is
in control. He has everything. The world
is His. He created it. He created us.
And everything is in His hand. And how grateful we are that
in the Lord Jesus Christ we have hope. We have salvation that
we have no part in. And it's so important, finally,
that we find every bit of joy in this world comes from what
we have been taught in Him. Everything we do, we need to
continue to look to this, because that's where we get astray. We
find our happiness, we find our joy in so many things in this
world, whatever it may be, and that's where we get lost and
led away. Look to the Lord, look to the
God of this book, the God of the Bible, and we'll find everything
that we want, that we need, our desires, everything is in the
Lord Jesus Christ. All right.