1 Kings 18:17-40

Summary: As we saw last week, the heart of Elijah’s ministry is a conflict between God and Baal, because compromise with Baal worship ran rampant among Israel in the days of Elijah. In verse 21 Elijah accuses Israel of ‘limping’ between two different opinions, referring to their lack of dedication to God and willingness to compromise with the culture around them. In this chapter, we have the climactic confrontation between God and Baal on Mt. Carmel in which God humiliatingly triumphs over Baal and his prophets…thus demonstrating the folly and futility of compromising devotion to Him alone. This event points to the day in which God, once again through sacrifice, would definitively defeat the powers of evil–making a “public spectacle of them,” as Paul says in Colossians 2:15, “by triumphing over them in the cross.”