What do You Worship?

In 1 Kings 18:19-40 we are given an account of a very interesting event. I ask you to read these verses as there is not room to reproduce them here. Elijah the prophet of God challenges 450 prophets of Baal to a "contest" on Mt. Carmel for the purpose of deciding who the people should worship as their god: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or the gods of the people of the land of Canaan.

The prophets of Baal erected their altar, prepared their sacrifice and spent the rest of the day calling out to their god. They shouted. They danced. They shouted louder. They cut themselves with swords. They received no response. It was Elijah's turn. He prepared his sacrifice, soaked it with water, prayed a simple prayer, and fire came down from Heaven, consumed the sacrifice, the altar, and even the water in the trench he had dug. It is not a surprise that in this situation the people chose to serve and worship God over Baal.

What is surprising is the behavior of the children of Israel at Mt. Sinai on the way from Egypt to the promised land. In Exodus 32:1, "When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us.”

These people had been delivered out of slavery by God. They had seen the pillar of fire, and the pillar of cloud. They had seen the Red Sea parted, had walked across it, and had seen the Egyptians drowned. They had received manna and quail, and seen water come from a rock. Yet, a few days without Moses, and they turned away from this powerful and miraculous God of the universe and asked Aaron for hand made gods of stone or wood (“which neither see nor hear,” Deut. 4:23) to lead them.

At Mt. Carmel, Elijah successfully called the people back to worshipping the one true God by means of a contrasting display of the power of God vs. the emptiness of the false gods. At Mt. Sinai, the people left the worship of the one true God to worship idols which they crafted from wood or stone by their own hands. How can people who have witnessed the power of God be pulled so easily away from Him? How can a sane individual take a stone, chisel it into a likeness of some kind of creature, and then worship it as if it had power over anything?

Genesis 1:27 tells us, “God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him.” God created man with a spiritual component. It can’t be observed in any physical way, but our soul has needs that must be fulfilled. When someone writes about feeling unfulfilled, they are writing about their soul being unattended. If someone feels they must “find themself” they have left their soul unattended. If someone speaks of “having a hole inside”, that hole is an unfulfilled soul.

Our soul is our spiritual nature that connects us to God. Our physical nature connects us to this physical world. A major problem of mankind is that we attempt to connect to God through means provided by the physical world. “Fulfilling” ourselves, “finding” ourselves, “filling the hole” inside, and however else we might phrase it, require tending to our souls. That can only happen with a spiritual connection with God.

We can’t “tend to our soul” by means of our income, our prestige, our importance, our accomplishments, or our abilities. Ecclesiastes is a book written by a very wise man, inspired by God, that deals with this issue head on. As king of a powerful nation, Solomon had all the tools he needed to seek fulfillment through pleasure, knowledge, power, accomplishment, and wealth. You name it, he tried it. But he realized it was all in vain. He had been trying physical means to fill a spiritual hole and, by nature, it cannot work. At the end of a poignant final chapter he comes to this conclusion; “Fear God, and keep His commandments; for this is the whole [duty] of man,” Ecc. 12:13. In other words, fearing God and keeping His commandments is the entire purpose of man’s existence.

It should not be surprising to us that all this comes together in the cross of Christ. Paul puts it this way in Galatians 2:20-21, “I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me; and the life that I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” Then in Galatians 6:14, “But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.”

Beneath the cross of Jesus is where we will “find ourselves.” It is where we will be fulfilled and have that “hole” inside filled. Thomas Aquinas correctly said if we want to live a happy life, we should love what Jesus loved on the cross and despise what Jesus despised on the cross.

Income, prestige, importance, accomplishments and abilities are all physical metrics for success. They are also objects of earthly worship. But on the cross, Jesus despised all of these, as much as He was despised by them. He was utterly naked in terms of income, prestige, importance, and (earthly) accomplishments while hanging on the cross. That was more or less the point of a crucifixion. Jesus “could have called 10,000 angels” in the words of the song, but He despised even His abilities on the cross. What did He love on the cross? Jesus loved doing the will of His Father.

The contest on Mt. Carmel between Elijah and the prophets of Baal serves as a metaphor for the lives of many searching for meaning today. We can try to “find ourselves’ outside of God, or find meaning in our lives, or find fulfillment, or “fill that hole” that we feel through all the various physical means that have been tried since before Mt. Carmel. The end result will be, as Solomon proved to himself, vanity. It is all vain. We can scream, we can shout, we can dance and cut ourselves, in other words we can go after worldly answers full tilt, nothing holding us back, and no fire will find its way to our “altar.”

Or we can, like Elijah, humbly pray to God. In terms of our metaphor, we seek the instruction of God’s inspired writers found in the Bible and follow it, and our altar will host a consuming fire. Paul is an example of this type of life. His words in Galatians, and really all the inspired words of all the writers in the New Testament show us the way we should go and how and Who we should worship. And how we react to those words will determine our eternal destiny.