In First Kings, chapter eighteen, verse twenty-one, Elijah challenged the people to choose between following God or Baal, as in Ezekiel twenty, thirty-one, and thirty-nine. Israel believed they could worship both deities at the same time. They were guilty of a divided heart, as in Deuteronomy six, verses four through five, that tried to serve two masters. Jesus Christ warned against this fatal attitude, as in Matthew six, verse twenty-four, Deuteronomy thirty, verse nineteen, and Joshua twenty-four, verses fourteen through fifteen, respectively.
Elijah addressed the assembled people with a similar question? “How long do ye limp upon both sides? Is Jehovah God, then go after Him: but if Baal, go after him.” The Israelites answered him, not a word. They wanted to combine the worship of Jehovah and Baal and not assume a hostile attitude towards Jehovah by the worship of Baal. However, the Israelites were bound to keep silent under this charge of infatuated halving. Still, they knew very well from the law that Jehovah demanded worship with a whole and undivided heart.
Elijah was not concerned so much with the king as the people of the Lord. His object was not “to prove that Ahab and not he had troubled Israel” but to prove that Jehovah and not Baal was God. The Israelites sometimes inclined to the one and sometimes to the other. As a lame man walking, his body moves sometimes to one side and sometimes to another. The people of Israel were like a bird that leaps or hops from one branch to another and never settles long. They are like branches of trees twisted and implicated, upbraiding them with their inconstancy and fickleness.
The people of Israel answered him, not a word. Through conviction and confusion, his reasoning is unanswerable. The Israelites are unsure which to choose at present. Fearing they should caught into a snare, should they name any. They either incur the displeasure of the king, who was for Baal, or the prophet, who was for the Lord. At whose wor