Long, long ago, a king named Ahab and a queen named Jezebel worshiped power. They made images of power and called them Baal – Master, Owner, Lord.
They believed the voices that told them: “You should have anything you want. You should be able to do anything you want – no matter how cruel, how reckless, how lawless, how excessive. Worship me, and I will give you whatever you want!”
So Ahab and Jezebel worshiped power – and also, wantonness. They made poles called Asherah, around which the power-hungry reveled in cruel, entitled, lawless excess.
Elijah lived where Ahab and Jezebel ruled. Yet he loved God and rejected the false worship they championed. It wasn’t easy. Sometimes, it felt overwhelming. Three times, Elijah cried, “I am the only one left!”1
And no wonder.
Confrontation on Carmel
Elijah stood on Mt. Carmel, his heart wholly given to the Lord.
Facing him, stood 450 prophets of Baal and 400 prophets of Asherah – 950 hearts given to witchcraft and idolatry.
Surrounding and watching, stood all Israel, a people with divided hearts.2 Three years had passed since Elijah had challenged both false gods by announcing drought on the land. Now desperate for rain, the people had come when summoned.
Elijah cried for all to hear:
How long will you try to have it both ways? If the LORD is God, follow him; if Baal is God, follow him.
In response: “The people didn’t say a word” (1K 18:21 GW).
Two types of worship
Then Elijah told them:
Bring two bulls; let the prophets of Baal take one, kill it, cut it in pieces, and put it on the wood – but don’t light the fire. I will do the same with the other bull. Then let the prophets of Baal pray to their god, and I will pray to the LORD, and the one who answers by sending fire – he is God.
In response: “The people shouted their approval” (1K 18:22-24 GNT).
So the prophets of Baal and Asherah built an altar and prepared a sacrifice. All day, they danced around their altar and cried to their gods to send fire on their sacrifice. At noon, they started shouting louder. All afternoon, they cut themselves with swords and knives, “as was their custom, until their blood flowed.”
They continued their frantic prophesying until the time for the evening sacrifice. But there was no response. (1K 18:28, 29)
As the sun began to sink below the horizon, Elijah built an altar, prepared a sacrifice – and drenched it all with water. Then he prayed with all his heart, three times invoking God’s covenant Name.3
LORD, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command. Answer me, LORD, answer me, so these people will know that you, LORD, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again. (1K 18:36-37)
Two unseen leaders
There on Carmel, throngs of people stand mute, watching. Hundreds of false prophets bleed from self-inflicted wounds. Elijah stands alone, undaunted. With two new altars built, two bloody sacrifices readied, one bold challenge and one short prayer hang in the air.
But wait. Take a closer look. Let God uncover what you otherwise cannot see: Two people not evident in the picture profoundly affect it. Ahab and Jezebel rule the 850 prophets. Ahab and Jezebel rule the ambivalent crowd.
Jezebel is present, by virtue of her pervasive influence. Indeed, she personally supports every prophet Elijah has challenged. Yet she does not deign to come watch her puppets perform. Ahab is present in person. Indeed, he authorizes the encounter and watches it unfold. Yet, he himself manages to remain unseen.
How easy to miss Ahab and Jezebel in this picture! How easy to miss them in our world, too. How dangerous, even deadly, an oversight!
Two ways evil controls
Jezebel was a Sidonian, born into Baal worship. By the time she married the young king of Israel, she had fully embraced a religion God abhorred and expressly forbade. Blatantly, vigorously, she propagated the worship of Baal and Asherah. Thus, Jezebel led people that God called his own to crave instead license, opulence, power.
And Ahab? Oh, he already craved all of that. And he married the queen he wanted.
Ahab son of Omri did what was evil in the Lord’s sight, even more than any of the kings before him. And … he married Jezebel, the daughter of King Ethbaal of the Sidonians, and he began to bow down in worship of Baal. First Ahab built a temple and an altar for Baal in Samaria. Then he set up an Asherah pole. He did more to provoke the anger of the Lord, the God of Israel, than any of the other kings of Israel before him. (1K 16:30-33 NLT)
While Jezebel controlled blatantly, Ahab controlled insidiously. He had his own ways to deal with anyone who embarrassed or thwarted him.
For example, Ahab desperately wanted rain. So he allowed the confrontation on Mt. Carmel. But beforehand, he greeted the prophet he hated – with a false accusation and veiled threat. Instead of cowering, Elijah called him out:
When [Ahab] saw Elijah, he said to him, “Is that you, you troubler of Israel?”
“I have not made trouble for Israel,” Elijah replied. “But you and your father’s family have. You have abandoned the LORD’s commands and have followed the Baals.” (1K 18:17-18)
The fire of the Lord
Now, Elijah has prepared a water-soaked altar. He has prayed to the Lord his God – his cry, fervent and brief.
Then the fire of the Lord fell and burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the stones and the soil, and also licked up the water in the trench. When all the people saw this, they fell prostrate and cried, “The LORD – he is God! The LORD – he is God!” (1K 18:38-39)
Divided hearts and a grieving heart
Elijah prayed for a miracle that would restore God’s uncontested place in his people’s hearts. God sent a miracle. Immediately, the people bowed before him. Together, they obeyed him. But only momentarily.
Then, they remembered Jezebel and Ahab – and what it could cost to give their hearts wholly to the Lord. They remembered the power they craved, and the perks they kept trying to pry, from Asherah and Baal.
That had to be the biggest gut-punch and the greatest grief of Elijah’s life. Passionately, his people had confessed, “The Lord is God!” Instantly, they had returned to the status quo.
How many times had the Lord called them to return to him? He had made the way for them to do so. But even when fire fell from heaven, their hearts remained divided. Even when the soaking rains followed, they refused to choose the Lord.
They wanted to keep their options open. Yes, God had shown his power that day. But another day, Baal’s power might come through for them – power unfettered by righteousness, justice, mercy, self-control or love.
God of power, God of love
Power, O God, belongs to you;
unfailing love, O Lord, is yours.
(Ps. 62:11-12 NLT)
Incomparably great power
How often in this world does evil seem to hold all the power? Yet Scripture repeatedly tells us that’s an illusion. It’s not true. God is the Almighty One. His power is “incomparably great,” “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked” (Eph. 1:19, 21).
Ah, but the Lord relates to power – and he teaches us to relate to power – in ways vastly different from the power-obsessed. For example, God does not use his vast power to tempt or oppress, manipulate or force.
Unfailing love
The Lord may use his power to show who he is, to rightly judge evil, to defend the forsaken, to call us to himself, to warn us when we’re choosing death rather than life. But he does not force himself on anyone.
God is love. He loves people. He seeks a people who will love him too. And he knows: Love does not coerce. It cannot be coerced. Love is only love when it is freely given.
Worship of power, then and now
You may think Baal worship the stuff of ancient history. You may believe Christians cannot commit idolatry. But the Scriptures and all of history make clear how profoundly people who name God’s name can be drawn into false worship.
Scripture and history also testify: The devil is not creative, but he is incredibly deceptive. He puts different names and faces on the same false gods. He reinvents the same temptations, hides them where we least expect to find them and markets them as opposite to what they are.
Even people who want to follow Jesus can get lost in the fog and fall for evil’s same old tricks. I know. I’ve done it.
Seeing the unthinkable
In 2012, as God helped me process the second huge gut-punch to send me reeling in seven years, I wrote an ebook about Elijah and Ahab and Jezebel and Mt. Carmel – and the church I had thought I knew.
A decade later, I was still grieving, learning, growing. And the weight in my spirit indicated God wanted me to keep speaking up. So I began revising the book. It took three years.
The update of The Elijah Blessing: An Undivided Heart went live in October 2025.4 Already, I had begun asking the Lord for wisdom to sort out key insights from Elijah’s story that could stand alone as blog posts. Already, he had answered more than once.
Then, I read a Facebook post by Sam Powell about cruel, entitled, lawless excess in our day – and the cry of distress in the last four paragraphs stopped me cold. It began:
In ancient Israel, Baal was a worship of power and an attempt to manipulate [their god] into opening his stingy, angry hands and pouring out a blessing. Many of them in Israel called this god Yahweh – [1Kings 18] describes it perfectly.5
Then Sam lamented the unthinkable connection he too had seen between the worship of power in Elijah’s day and in our day. Passionately, he called out “revamped Baal worship” in the church.
Experiencing the unfathomable
Has something in your life pierced the fog? The fog that insists, “That cannot, does not happen, here!”
Have you seen obsession with power … in the church? Have you glimpsed:
→ Key leaders, overtly or covertly controlling, entitled, abusing?
→ People, pumped up with pride in “our rightness”? Taught to wield the church’s collective strength to get their way? Led to contort worship into a means “to manipulate a blessing out of God”?
→ All of it, labeled as following God, building his kingdom, doing his will?
If you’ve seen it and dared to question it, has anyone:
→ Called you crazy, troublemaker, Jezebel, or otherwise slandered and threatened you, for speaking up?
→ Accused you of rejecting Jesus, when you were actually rejecting “the priests of Baal using the name of Jesus”?
Our Lord wants us to see when the church “has far more in common with Mt. Carmel than it does Mt. Zion” – when the attitudes, actions, prophecies and prayers done in Jesus’ name look eerily like the ploys of the false prophets Elijah faced.
Our Lord calls us to grieve what he grieves, to reject what he rejects.
But when no one around you shares your distress – when you’re rebuked and punished for expressing it – you may feel gutted. You may wonder if everyone else is right, and you’re the one accusing falsely.
On Mt. Carmel, Elijah prayed: “Let it be known today that you are God … and that I am your servant.” In answer, the Lord did both!
No, it didn’t play out as Elijah had hoped. Yet Elijah experienced his Lord’s delight. And repeatedly, he found:
When we come to Mt. Zion (a figurative expression for the reign of Jesus) – we simply wait and trust. It makes all the difference.6
We still will follow
Elijah lived where Ahab and Jezebel ruled, and where people supposed to be God’s people thought they could have it both ways. Yet Elijah stood before the face of God. He learned to wait and trust. He heard God’s voice, and he walked in God’s power and love.
Elijah lived in the blessing of an undivided heart. Yet he was human, like us. Sometimes, he felt very alone. Very afraid. Very upset with God.
Yet the Lord did not leave him or forsake him. Instead, God ministered to him, strengthened him and assured him: “Seven thousand others still love me too.”
At his lowest, Elijah complained to God. Believed God. Took heart. And kept going. Today, he joins countless other God-followers down through time to urge us:
Wait on the Lord,
whose love conquers death.
Trust in the Lord,
whose power gives life.
Humbly let him show you
where pursuit of power
is posing as pursuit of Christ.
Steadfastly follow Jesus.
All these faithful testify: “We kept going, by grace! You still can follow too – through him who strengthens you!”
Oh dear one,
Since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders [every falsehood, every gut-punch, every threat] and the [obsession with power] that so easily entangles.
And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. (Heb. 12:1-2)
Even where it seems impossible, may our hearts sing, with Elijah’s: “No turning back. No turning back.”
There’s more to this story!
This post is excerpted and adapted (in patchwork-quilt fashion) from my updated ebook, The Elijah Blessing: An Undivided Heart.
Image by Marion Grimm from Pixabay
See also
- Spiritual schizophrenia and the two-headed snake
- Masters of misdirection and mesmerizing fog
- Checklists, idols and loving God
- Witchcraft in the church
- Spirit, power, blessing and an undivided heart
- I AM the one you seek: Search here
- Burned out on religion? I will give you rest
Footnotes
- See 1 Kings 18:22; 19:10, 14; Romans 11:3. I recommend reading all of Romans 11. ↩︎
- “All Israel” in 1 Kings: The Northern Kingdom of 10 tribes that had broken away from the Southern Kingdom of Judah after Solomon ruled the people so harshly. ↩︎
- Where you see the word LORD (all caps) in scriptures in this post, it represents God’s important and enigmatic covenant Name, sometimes rendered Yahweh or Jehovah. ↩︎
- Because the changes to The Elijah Blessing are considered an “update,” rather than a new version, Amazon still shows the publication date as 2012. But the Amazon book description and the ebook copyright page affirm the 2025 renovation. ↩︎
- Sam Powell Facebook post, Nov. 12, 2025, “Epstein files. Will it make a difference?” Text in brackets inserted to clarify. See, The people I quote. ↩︎
- Except for the excerpt from Elijah’s prayer, the quotations under this heading are from Sam Powell’s FB post. ↩︎
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