“The Peril of the Middle Ground”
By Dayle K. Barrett
Sunday, August 9, 2026
Reading: 1 Kings 18:20-40
We're in the presence of Almighty God.
It might be a familiar story for some, maybe not so much for others. This is one of my favourite stories, that's why it goes in a favourite story series. The epic showdown between Elijah and the false prophets of Baal.
Now, Elijah is a very, very important figure in scripture, and he's one that actually came up this week on Thursday, because Thursday was the feast day of the transfiguration of our Lord. The story that's been hailed through history is when Jesus stood upon Mount Tabor, and the Bible says that he was glorified, his face shone like the sun, and on either side of him stood two great prophets of Israel. On his one side, Moses, the prophet to whom God gave the Ten Commandments and the Torah to give to the people of Israel from Mount Sinai. And on his other side, Elijah, the prophet that some say is the greatest prophet who ever lived.
These two had something in common with Jesus. Some say that Moses represents the law, and Elijah represents the prophets. These are the people who gave the words to the people of Israel right up until stood between them the living word in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, therefore, was the living embodiment of everything that had been proclaimed through Moses and Elijah. The teachings that Moses gave to the people of Israel and the promises that were spoken through the prophets were personified in that person of Christ standing atop that mountain. But that's not all they had in common. Moses, Elijah, and Jesus are the only three people in Scripture who all did 40-day fasts. There's a challenge if you want one. Maybe you should speak to your doctor first, though.
There are also people who won great victories on mountains. Moses at Mount Sinai receives the law. Elijah on Mount Carmel defeats the prophets of Baal. And Jesus on Mount Calvary defeats death and sin themselves. And so, Elijah in the text is a very important figure. He's not just another man with some ideas or somebody who thinks he's heard the voice of God. Rather, he's the beginning of a turnaround within the heart of Israel. And that turnaround was very necessary because Israel at this point was in a really bad place.
Their new king, King Ahab, the king of the northern kingdom of Israel was displeasing God left, right, and centre. And believe me, all the kings had done evil in the sight of the Lord. But the Bible tells us in 1 Kings, Chapter 16 that Ahab did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel than all the kings of Israel who were before him. He put wooden images in the holy places. He started the worship of Baal, a false God, within the holy kingdom of Israel. Over time, we start to see Israel and their relationship with God become more and more degraded. So, God raises up the prophet Elijah and during this period, Elijah prophesies that there is going to be a drought. He says that there's not going to be rain on the earth until God says so.
“As the Lord God of Israel lives,” he says, “before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years except at my word.” The text tells us elsewhere that there was no rain in the northern kingdom of Israel for three and a half years. A complete drought. No rain. Which means no fishing. (I would have been really, really upset about that.) That means the crops are failing. That means the people are going through a really difficult time. And you would think that that's when they would have rebelled against the storm god Baal, right? Baal is the storm god; Baal is the one who brings the rain. And God had stopped this storm god from doing what he was supposed to do for three and a half years, and still the people of Israel were going and worshiping this false god.
They were partaking In the worship of a false idol, until Elijah returns with a challenge. He says in verse 21, “How long will you falter between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him. But if Baal, follow him.” But the people answered him not a word.
How many people understand that you don't always have to participate in evil to be complicit? Sometimes all you have to do is sit there with your mouth shut, and evil will take the whole place over. The people in Israel did not rise up at that point and say, Baal, Baal is God, we should be worshipping Baal. No. They sat silently while Ahab gave over the temple to Baal. And Ahab and Jezebel gave over the high places to Asherah.
They sat and were quiet while evil crept into their midst and solely started chipping away at their relationship with God. Until suddenly the prophets of the Lord were being persecuted. God's people were not able to speak. The prophets were in hiding, and God raised up a man called Obadiah to hide the prophets of the Lord so that he wouldn't be killed by the prophets of Baal.
The issue wasn't that Israel was convinced that Baal was the Lord. The issue was that they were trying to take this perilous middle ground. Maybe we can worship the Lord our God and do some of that Baal stuff as well. Maybe we can be fully committed to the God who freed us from Egypt but also have a bit of what we want on the side. It's not that they had completely turned against God, it's that they had added something to Him. It was God plus. It was God and God wasn't having it.
So, when Elijah comes and gives them a clear choice, it was time for a showdown. “Since you can't decide, O Israel, we're going to show you who the true God is.” Elijah stands alone against four hundred and fifty prophets of the false God Baal.
Here's the challenge. You set up an altar to your God, you put the wood there, you put your bull there, and I'm going to do the same. And whoever's God answers by fire, he is the real deal. He is the true and living God. Now I want you to understand here how heavy the stakes were. Elijah's life was at risk. All the prophets of the Lord had been hunted down. He thought he was the only one still proclaiming the truth of who God was in Israel. And yet he stands against 450 prophets and says, let's have the showdown today. So, what do they do? They both build up their places, they prepare the bull, they lay it on the wood. And you've got to know that this wood has to be dry. There hasn't been any rain for three and a half years.
This stuff should go up like that. If it's sunny enough, it should catch fire all by itself. But when they prepare this altar and they place the bull there, nothing happens. They start crying out to their false God. They start crying out, “Baal, hear us, Baal, do something, storm God, it's time for you to answer by fire.” And absolutely nothing happens. They start moving around, they start leaping about, they start cutting themselves, they start wailing and making all kinds of noise, hoping to make something happen. And absolutely nothing happens. Because it looked like there was a war going on between Elijah and the false prophets, but this wasn't a war between human beings, my friends. This was a showdown between the Lord God of Israel and the false prophet Baal.
God was going to show everyone who he was. The scene was set.
I love Elijah's unmitigated gall. The audacity of this guy while they're all running around with blades and wailing to Baal like, he must be busy. Maybe he's taking a nap, you know? He must have had somewhere to go. He might have gone on a little excursion. He's on holidays. “Why isn't your God answering?”
He mocks them because he's so confident in who God is. He knows where God has taken him from. He's remembered the stories of Israel. They're written on his very heart. He knows nothing is going to happen until God responds to his people. He offers them a choice. He lays it all on the table. And while the people were trying to play nice and figure out where they wanted to be, suddenly a truth entered their midst that made it all abundantly clear.
How was the choice made? How did Elijah demonstrate for the people that the Lord God of Israel was the true and living God? You might think that this was the time that he would start crying out to God, right? When it was his time to prepare the bull, he'd cut up the bull, he'd put it on the wood, and immediately start saying, Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, please answer by fire. But that's not what he does. That's not the first thing on Elijah's mind. The first thing he does, says verse thirty, Elijah said to all the people, “Come near to me.” So, all the people came near to him, and he repaired the altar of the Lord that was broken down.
You see, one thing that we didn't get in this story, and one thing that wasn't written down, but we can tell from this verse, is that Israel's relationship with God had become so degraded that their very place of worship was crumbling. They had so neglected the proper worship of the Lord God of Israel that the very altar they were supposed to make their sacrifices on had been broken down. Not because they'd run in there and torn it to the ground, but maybe because they were paying more attention to the Baal sacrifices and to the Asherah sacrifices than they were the sacrifices to the Lord. So, the first thing that could happen before there could be a restoration of God's relationship with his people is they had to repair their worship relationship with God.
I wonder if we look in our own lives, friends, we'd start to ask the questions where are our broken altars? Where are the places in our lives that we have replaced or allowed to be broken down because we were paying attention to something else?
When we first got into a relationship with God, we were passionate. We were getting up every morning and starting our devotionals and moving on with a sense of the Spirit of the Lord leading us in every way. And now we get up and the first thing we do is start doom scrolling. We used to go to God with our hopes and our fears and our desires and look for wisdom for the Holy Spirit, but now we're asking Chat GPT and Google Gemini instead and grasping for wisdom from TikTok influencers.
Broken altars.
We used to care deeply about what the scriptures said, and allowing God to bring us from faith to faith, allowing God's teachings to move us through our lives. Now instead we're ignoring the hard things of scripture so that we can be in relationship with the world. Broken altars. The first thing that had to happen before God could come and reveal his glory Is the altars had to be repaired. They had to respond; they had to return and build back up the place of worship so that God could be the central thing. So that God could be the important force in their lives.
So, how does the altar get rebuilt?
He took twelve stones according to the tribes of the sons of Jacob to whom the Lord had come, saying, “Israel shall be your name.” The way he rebuilt the altar of the Lord was by returning them to the foundation of their faith. Those twelve stones were the twelve pillars of who they were. It was the thing that had defined them from hundreds of years before that date. And he rebuilt the altar in the name of the God of Israel, by whose name they were called.
Now, if to Israel the number twelve represents twelve tribes, then to the church it represents twelve apostles.
As we think about how we can rebuild our altar, as we think about how we can be ready to receive and to declare the glory of God, it means returning to that apostolic faith, returning to those things upon which we were built, to the teachings of Christ and the apostles that are given to us in the Old and New Testaments. To set those things up in order, in the right way, so that we can be ready to do the next thing, which is to make a sacrifice.
You see, after he had repaired the altar of the Lord, after he had set up the twelve stones, after he had called Israel back to their core focus and who they were, it was time to lay something down. So, he places wood upon it and prepares a bull, and he places that bull upon the altar. Before he starts praying out to God, he does something that seems absolutely ridiculous.
He says, “go get pitchers of water and pour them on the sacrifice.” Let's make this even harder, right? Let's make this even more impossible for God to do something with this. But look at how many times he does it. He fills four water pots and pours them on the burnt sacrifice and the wood three times. Just as we in baptism, we pour the water on the head of a child or on a baptized adult three times. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Can you see it now?
We are supposed to be built into an altar of the Lord. Upon the teachings of Christ and the twelve apostles, upon all that we have begiven over 2,000 years, God is calling us to rebuild a place where we can be gathered in our baptismal faith and allow God to be glorified. But you don't have to hear that from me. You can hear that from the scripture itself. In 1 Peter chapter 2, he writes this.
Coming to him as to a living stone, rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God and precious, you also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. You are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, his own special people.
That you may proclaim the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light, who once were not a people, but are now the people of God, who had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.
God wants to glorify himself in our midst. God wants to show himself strong so that the whole world will know who he is. But first, friends, we have to rebuild the altar. We have to set up the twelve stones of our apostolic faith. Then we have to allow God to build us upon that foundation as living stones, living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, which is our reasonable service.
The water is poured out once, the name of the Father. The water is poured out twice, the name of the Son. The water is poured out three times, the name of the Holy Spirit. And then and only then does Elijah begin to pray. And what is his prayer? He's not praying for God to save him. He's not praying for God to save the prophets.
He's not praying for God to turn things around and tear down all the altars, to tear down all the things that were going wrong in Israel. His prayer is that God would be glorified. This is what he says: “Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel and I am your servant. Hear me, O Lord, that this people may know that you are the Lord God and that you have turned their hearts back to you again.”
How many people know that the thing that moves God's heart the most, the thing that makes God act in miraculous and wonderful ways is his own glory. God will move heaven and earth to be glorified. God will call down fire from heaven that people would know his name. For his glory and our good are all things done. Then with the altar rebuilt, with the water having been poured, with the glory of God having been summoned, God responds and answers by fire.
But isn't that the same thing he does in the New Testament as well? First, he sets up the twelve apostles. Then Jesus comes and lays his life down as a sacrifice. And forty days after his resurrection, fire comes from heaven and alights upon the heads of the disciples at Pentecost. The gospel begins to spread all around the world as God's Holy Spirit fills the room. We want to see the church revived. We want to see God answer by fire. The way we do it is to rebuild the altar, to be joined in our baptismal faith, and then and only then can we cry out to God to answer our prayer and fall from heaven.
He falls and consumes everything. Not just the bull but the wood. Not just the wood but the stones. Not just the stones, but the water around the trenches. God comes and takes everything into himself so that they can all know who he is.
I wonder, friends, if we're really ready at this moment in our lives to be consumed by God. If we're ready to answer those questions that Elijah asked the people, “if God is the true God, then worship him. But if it's Baal, then worship him.” I wonder if we're ready, friends, today, to abandon that middle ground and stop being silent, to build up that altar and to invite the Holy Spirit to come and rule in our lives. I wonder if we would set our focus on God's glory and God's glory alone.
Until everyone around says with us, The Lord, He is God. The Lord He is God. The Lord He is God; the middle ground is a dangerous place.
Here's the question we need to carry with us today. If the Lord is God, follow him. And if Baal, then follow him. Thanks be to God.