Scripture & Creation
1 Kings 19:9-12
Elijah and Power Over Creation
Orthodox Christians view the story of Elijah the Prophet as the archetypal depiction of a right relationship to creation. This is because Elijah demonstrates dominion first over his own human nature, and this becomes the prerequisite for the restoration of the full power of dominion over created nature.
The Biblical narrative on the Prophet Elijah stretches from I Kings 16 through to
II Kings 2. There at his earthly end we read of his whirlwind ascent into heaven in a blazing chariot of fire. The story of Elijah is significant to recount at length as it contains a wealth of ecological meaning.
The story begins with Ahab, a ruler over Israel. “And Ahab, the son of Omri, did evil in the sight of the Lord above all that were before him” (I Kings 16:30). Not only did Ahab fall away from worship of the God of Israel, he began to worship Baal, an ancient Babylonian fertility god.
Elijah seeks out Ahab and bluntly tells him that because of his wickedness, the rain will cease and even the dew will disappear. Elijah then heads for the hills and lives in a cave where ravens feed him. Saint Basil, in the 4th century, provides this commentary on the ravens feeding Elijah in his cave.
Those birds, whose habitual nature was to steal food, became servants at his table. In the presence of his holiness, their natures were changed so that they became his faithful guardians.
To Saint Basil, this was not a miracle. This is the expected response of nature in the face of holiness and obedience to God (cf. Wisdom 16:24-26).
After several years of severe drought, God again speaks to Elijah and instructs him to return to Ahab. Ahab spots Elijah and speaks first. He asks Elijah if he is the one who is the cause of Israel’s troubles. Elijah responds saying that Ahab is the real troubler because he has “forsaken the commandments of the Lord...” and has “followed after Baalim.” As a proof, Elijah challenges Ahab. He proposes that Ahab bring all of the priests and prophets of Baal together for a great test of the power of their respective allegiances. Ahab accepts and summons over three hundred of his priests. The test is set before two altars, each will be set with a slaughtered bull upon it. Ahab with his priests will call upon Baal; Elijah will call upon the Lord. Whoever brings fire down to consume the offering will reveal which is the true God.
From morning through afternoon, Ahab’s priests of Baal invoke and pray, but nothing happens. Finally Elijah gets up; it’s his turn to pray. Contrary to all human logic, he begins by pouring buckets of water over the wood and the bull. Water is sloshing all around the altar. Then Elijah makes his prayer, not for himself, but “that this people may know that thou art the Lord God....” Fire bursts upon the sacrifice and consumes everything on the altar. Its blistering heat is so intense that it even dries the puddles of leftover water around the altar. The people fall on their faces and acknowledge the God of Israel. Elijah then commands the death of the priests of Baal – of necessity because they are vowed into the false religion and are committed beyond time and conversion. Finally, as a demonstration that the drought is over, Elijah calls upon a cloud, invokes a blessing of rain, and the sky fills with many more clouds. Then rain drops begin to fall. The drought is over. “And the hand of the Lord was clearly upon Elijah.”
The lesson of this passage to early Christians was that the power of God resides in human prerogative when the disciple fully submits to the laws and ways of God. This remains our prerogative today if we will would hear the word of God. The author of this book observes that the power of God was accessible to Elijah, not in the winds or the earthquake or the fire, but in the “still small voice” within (see I Kings 19:11-12). Jesus says a similar thing in a number of different ways, inferring that as he hears, he speaks (see Matt. 10:27, John 5:30, 8:26, 14:24, 15:15, 16:13; also I Pet. 4:11).
To hear the inner voice requires prayer, fasting and purification. The progression into religious study for Christians originally emphasized the acquisition of the virtues. Practice of the virtues initiates a beginning level of transformation which gradually but steadily brings interior cleansing and purification. This allows access first to meditation and then the reflection of contemplation in which the logical processes of reasoning are combined with the inner word of inspiration. These allow the aspirant to progress in holiness. For the most dedicated few, this progression along the Way of Christ culminates in attainment of the final stage of spiritual formation which is "theoria theologia." At this culminating stage of spiritual formation, one actually experiences the Logos, or Word of God. It is this experiential connection to God that was in West considered the “Queen of the sciences,” not the academic mimic of the insights that result from study and learning.
How different is this ancient approach to the Way of Christ from the modern orientation to theology and ministerial training in which theology is treated more as a university discipline separated from virtue and an ability to hear the word of God. Yet education in the qualities that allow apprehension of the “inner word” is precisely what will heal the brokenness in our modern ecological predicament. This is because the ecological crisis represents a lost vision and spirituality as much as a misuse of creation. They go together. Elijah helps us because he demonstrates that the path of restoration in the Old Testament is remarkably similar to what Christ does for us today.
The challenge of Elijah to us with our massive ecological predicament is the same as it was for Ahab on the road: a radical change of heart and behavior. For Ahab his syncretistic theology got in the way of genuine understanding. He thought that his token acknowledgment of Yahweh along with worship of Baal allowed him to be broad-minded and to skim what he considered the best of all religions. For we as modern Orthodox Christians, we are often like Ahab in that we too are captive to false assumptions. In our case however those assumptions deal with how we have fallen into acceptance of concepts about consumption, about the necessity of high levels of energy use, about media and individualism. These concepts scarcely mix with Orthodox assumptions about creation. Just as Elijah demonstrated that the outward understanding of religious concepts do not mix, we must see that the culture that we inherit from the modern secular materialist and consumerist society deaden spiritual sensitivity and dull our awareness of how far we have strayed from a genuinely Orthodox way of life.
To return to a whole faith, Elijah here gives us a valuable lesson. He shows that only a human nature restored by Christ to its full transformed and divinized potential will be able to heal and restore the lost harmony of creation.
