#11. The Troubler of Israel

Published by Ben Stahl on April 6, 2020April 6, 2020

I Kings 18:17-19

Seventy-one percent of Rome (10 of 14 districts) burned to the ground in the year 64 AD. The historian Tacitus said that Nero sat outside the city playing a fiddle while Rome burned. After the fire was extinguished, Nero blamed the fire on those he hated the most, Christians.*

When Ahab saw Elijah for the first time after three years of famine, Ahab’s greeting is shocking to read: “Is it you, you troubler of Israel?” (v. 17). The king who did more evil than anyone before him (16:30), who married Jezebel, who hunted the Lord’s prophets and killed them, who built altars to Baal, this Ahab had the audacity to call Elijah the “troubler of Israel.” Do you see the total depravity** of man apart from Christ? Apart from Christ, we are unable to do good, unable to think righteously, full of deceit and guile, and able to shake our fist in anger at the holy, righteous, and almighty God.

Elijah, the prophet of the Lord, corrected Ahab’s backwards mind by telling him, “I have not troubled Israel, but you have…because you have abandoned the commandments of the Lord and followed the Baals” (vs. 18). All who abandon the commandments of God will trouble their own homes and nations.

The text does not give any suggestion that Ahab responded to Elijah’s rebuke. Instead Elijah tells Ahab to gather all Israel at Mt. Carmel along with 450 prophets of Baal and 400 prophets of Asherah for a great event in the history of Israel.

Ahab’s false accusation of Elijah should remind us of another false accusation in Luke 23:1-5 when the elders, the chief priests, and scribes together brought Jesus before Pilate and accused him in this way: “We found this fellow perverting the nation and forbidding to give tribute to Caesar, saying that he himself is Christ, a king” (Luke 23:2). The word in Greek for “perverting“(some translations say “misleading”) means to “distort,” “to oppose,” “plot against,” “corrupt.” This was the word they used to accuse Jesus.

This false accusation of the righteous God-Man Jesus Christ was terrible beyond all else. Yet, as in the days of Ahab and Elijah, the Lord would use the false accusations against Jesus for the glory of His name and the salvation of all His people. Let it be known to us and to all that “Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead…This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:10-12).

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* Even today it is not uncommon for the world to be hostile towards Christians during the troubles that we face. https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/coronavirus-relief-bill-de-blasio-media-criticize-samaritans-purse/

**Total Depravity refers to the state of mankind apart from Christ, flowing from such verses as Romans 3:10-18 (itself quoting several Psalms): “There is none righteous, no, not one: There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one…” The great miracle of redemption and salvation by Christ is on display against the total depravity of men. Jesus Christ took dead men and women and made them alive in Christ Jesus.

(Bold added for emphasis)