In Second Kings, chapter one, verse ten, the king and his soldiers, in rebellion against God and His Word, sought to arrest Elijah. In verse twelve, fire came directly by God’s hand as a judgment against Ahaziah, who persists stubbornly opposing God and the prophet. The charge of cruelty against Elijah makes it needful to consider the question: What was Elijah’s motive? And the answer is: Sharply to create a signal example, to vindicate God’s honor strikingly.
Ahaziah had, as it were, challenged Yahweh to a trial of strength by sending a band of fifty to arrest one man. Elijah was not Jesus Christ, able to reconcile mercy with truth, the vindication of God’s honor with the utmost tenderness for erring men, and awe them merely by His presence: compare John eighteen, verse six. In Elijah, the spirit of the Law embodied its full severity. His zeal was fierce; he was not shocked by blood; he had no softness nor relenting. He did not permanently profit from the warning at Horeb as in First Kings nineteen, verse twelve. He continued the uncompromising avenger of sin, the wielder of the terrors of the Lord, such as he had shown himself at Carmel.
He is, consequently, no pattern for Christian men as in Luke nine, verse fifty-five, but his character is the perfection of the purely legal type. No Christian after Pentecost would have done what Elijah did. But what he did, when he did it, was not sinful. It was but executing strict, stern justice. Elijah asked that fire should fall: God made it fall by so doing, vindicated His honor, and justified the prayer of His prophet. “Fire shall come down.” Not to avenge a personal insult of Elijah, but upon God in the person of His prophet; and the punishment was inflicted, not by the prophet, but by the direct hand of God.