In today's reading in 1 Kings 18, as well as in the alternative reading in Joshua 24, I'm struck by a few dramatic similarities and differences. They prompt me to ask two questions—first, “Who is this God that these people are encountering?,” and second, “Why is he not like the false gods he is telling them to abandon?” Both Elijah and Joshua challenge their audiences to choose whom they will trust—the real God or the man-made one's. Both men appeal to God's actions—Elijah to the events they are about to observe and Joshua to those they have already observed. They are telling the people in both cases that the real God acts and initiates on behalf of his people. This is not to say that God always provides signs and wonders, but does seem to say that God asks for trust in what he has done.

At Elijah's time, God asked for trust through the convincing burning of the sacrifice. At Joshua's time, God asked for trust through the miraculous delivery from Egypt. At present, God asks for trust through what has been done by Jesus. Like then and now, I see this God ask me for trust in what he has done. And unlike the man-made false gods, I see this God not demand appeasement through my own efforts to get his attention. BY trusting in Jesus, who was literally cut to pieces like Elijah's sacrifice, I have found freedom from the crushing demands to appease the false gods of my own making.

A fellow traveler,
Jamie