In First Kings, chapter eighteen, verse thirty-seven, the purpose of Elijah’s confrontation with the prophets of Baal and then his prayer was to reveal the grace of God to His people. He wanted to turn their hearts back to God. The reconciliation is what Elijah desired to display, and applying the name ‘Elohim’ to Baal and idols like him is a folly and a delusion. The heathen, and those who went after them, used this name for the objects of their worship, and Elijah, in his mockery, had employed their phrase as in First Kings eighteen, verse twenty-seven, and said of Baal, ‘He is Elohim.’ In the present verse, as in First Kings eighteen, verse thirty-nine, if we assert that Jehovah is God, it is implied that there is none else.
The admittance that Jehovah is God from the people of Israel expresses not only the object of miracles that followed but also universally. Many people wavered in their judgment and varied in their practice. Elijah called upon them to determine whether Jehovah or Baal was the self-existent, supreme God, the Creator, Governor, and Judge of the world, and to follow him alone. It is dangerous to halt between the service of God and the service of sin, the dominion of Christ, and the dominion of our lusts. If Jesus be the only Saviour, let us cleave to him alone for everything; if the Bible be the world of God, let us reverence and receive the whole of it and submit our understanding to the Divine teaching it contains.
Elijah proposed to bring the matter to a trial. Baal had all the outward advantages, but the event encouraged all God’s witnesses and advocates never to fear the face of man. The God that answers by fire, let him be God: the atonement was to be made by sacrifice before judgment removed in mercy. He alone has the power to pardon sin, and to signify it by consuming the sin-offering, must needs be the God that can relieve from the calamity.