I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on 2 Kings 1-2.

    Elijah’s confrontation contains two elements. Ahaziah sent messengers to the temple of Baal in Ekron to find out if he would recover (and probably to seek divine intervention in his disability). What is interesting about this is that we know that there were prophets of Baal in Israel. Ahaziah’s father, Ahab, had supported at least 400 of them. It seems probable that Ahaziah continued this practice. So, Ahaziah did not seek a consultation with the prophets of Baal for whom he was paying support, nor did he seek out Elijah, or another prophet of God. Instead, he sought out assistance from the foreign and slightly exotic priests of Baal in Ekron. We see this sort of thing today in many ways. People reject Christianity as too mundane and ordinary, so they seek exotic “foreign” religions. Some of this is our fault as Christians for allowing our faith to appear humdrum and mundane, but some of it is human nature. We see the same thing in medicine. People will seek out exotic treatments with no evidence to support their effectiveness while rejecting more mundane treatments because those mundane treatments are not as effective as they would like. Let us not reject God’s message for us because it is not “sexy” enough.

    In the same story, Ahaziah sends three army captains with a troop of men to arrest Elijah. The first two God strikes down with fire from heaven. The third he does not.So, the question is, what did the first two do wrong? In the first two cases, the captain and his men acknowledged that Elijah was a man of God, but they nevertheless thought that the authority the king had delegated to them gave them authority over Elijah. They thought that they could compel the man of God with their threat of force (the 50 armed men accompanying them). The third captain recognized that he had no ability to compel Elijah to take any action. When that third captain acknowledged that he had no way to compel Elijah, God instructed Elijah to accompany him. Hopefully, we do not need the lesson which the third captain learned. We need to learn the lesson that when we are doing God’s will no one can compel us to act differently unless we let them. When someone shows up with 50 armed men and demands that we accompany them, we need to remember that fire coming down from heaven and striking them is within the realm of possibilities. If it is not God’s will for us to accompany them, He will not allow them to compel us to accompany them.