Who Has the Power?
Who has the power? This is a very hot topic these days. Political parties obsess over it…it dominates conversation about race, sex, rights, the economy, Elon Musk and Twitter, Ukraine, Russia, NATO, China, etc., etc., etc. Who has the power and who should have the power? It could be argued that our preoccupation with power is the source for all of our problems. After all, wasn’t it power that the serpent promised Adam and Eve in the Garden? “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). His appeal was to their inequality with God as their primary issue. His deception and lies were all about man and woman gaining more power – the ability to know good and evil – to be equal with God. That is what is behind our brokenness, the desire for more power. It is something that we obsess over as people.
It reminds me of the TV show Home Improvement? “Tim the Tool Man Taylor” was obsessed with power. Every tool he laid his hands on had to be modified to have more power. It excited him so much that he would end up grunting in joy. It was very funny, but it said something about us as people too – we love power. There’s even a power race in the automotive world. There are many street-legal cars that you can buy today (if the dealers have any, that is) that have well over 500 hp! Dodge alone has 3 vehicles that make over 700 hp, and the electrification of cars is taking the power race to the ridiculous. There are 13 cars that make over 1000 hp right now, 10 of which are electric or hybrid! Eat your heart out Prius! What road will let you take advantage of such ridiculous power other than the Autobahn? My 33 year old BMW makes a measly 208 hp. That was a lot back in 1990. Automakers and marketing teams know more power is better.
These trivial examples aside, human history is a tale of empire after empire, leader after leader striving and conquering for more power. Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Greece, Rome, France, Spain, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Russia, the U.S.A., China. All have taken serious whacks in their own way at ruling the entire world. We have terms like “Superpowers.” Who is the superpower now? Have we lost the title as the USA? Is it China? Not if Russia has anything to say about it. Our fear of losing power has people building underground bunkers stocked with spam and AR-15 assault rifles.
We worship at the altar of power – idolatry is always the result. We set up false powers to which we give our devotion instead of it being properly placed in God Almighty. The French Swiss Reformer John Calvin famously wrote, “The human heart is a perpetual idol factory.” We just keep pumping out new products every time an old one becomes passé or doesn’t do the trick any more. The former Archbishop of the ACNA and Bishop of Pittsburgh, Bob Duncan, was once asked by a confirmation student which sin he struggled with the most, and replied, “That’s easy, idolatry. I always find something other than God to worship.” It’s part of our fallen nature. We like to create what we worship because we ultimately want to have control over it. We want to have the power. We want to be gods.
We’ve mentioned geopolitics and cars as evidence, but how about food? In his book Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis famously wrote, "Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theater by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?” Doesn’t that sound exactly like the Food Network?! How many shows are on that channel where they accomplish exactly what he describes – theaters filled with people watching other people cook food that they will not ever get to taste. I miss my cable…
Bobby Flay is working that smoulder look!
Idolatry takes lots of shapes and sizes. Basically as many shapes and sizes as there are human interests. But what does the Bible have to say about our idolatrous obsession with power?
1 Kings 18 is one of many, many passages in Scripture that show us very clearly that our idols fail us. They fail us. They do not reciprocate the devotion that we give them. They do not because they cannot. They are not alive; they are made by humans. They are made out of wood or gold or steel or cloth or plastic or vegetables or meat, whatever. Most often our idols are not beings; they are things. Out of all the 20 cars I’ve owned, yes 20…I’m bringing up cars a lot because obviously they are one of my idolatrous weaknesses, not one of them has been problem free. Not one. Every single one of them had a failure at some point or another that required a repair. Our idols always fail and ultimately decay. They cannot stand the test of time. They are a part of this fallen world where death exists. And they cannot stand the test of any real crisis. They will rot and break and crumble revealing that they were nothing to worship in the first place.
Working on my car last summer…my arm had failed me too…but at least I look happy.
This is true even if the idol happens to actually be alive. Maybe it’s another person we have elevated above God. A parent, a spouse, a boyfriend or girlfriend, a sibling, a mentor, a friend, a celebrity. There’s a lot more promise there, right? They can talk, think, smile, feel. If you know them they can hug you and kiss you and make you feel all warm and fuzzy. But the fact remains that they will disappoint you too. They will fail as well because no created thing can replace the Creator. No created thing can carry that load or fill those shoes. It just doesn’t work. And we see that in 1 Kings 18.
The prophets of Baal, all 450 of them, desperately try to get a response out of their false god, Baal. They try for almost the whole day doing everything they can including cutting themselves and shedding their own blood for this god of theirs to burn up their sacrifice…self-destruction is always, always, always the ultimate end of our idol worship. And that’s usually after we have sacrificed everything else dear to us to our false god. We are appalled at stories of ancient cultures that made human sacrifice to their gods, especially ones that sacrificed their children…but we are blind to how we serve up our own kids on the altars of our own success…how our families are often first in the line of fire as we pursue our careers or our fitness goals or our own personal happiness, etc. Easy Sean, you’re hitting too close to home now! We are just like the prophets of Baal desperately trying to get our idols to answer…to show some power. But Baal was silent. Baal failed them.
Elijah watches this display and feels no pity for these guys. He mocks them and makes fun of their made up pagan god. Then he continues to stack the deck in their favor by having the people pour tons of water all over his altar to the point where there was standing water around the altar. Then he prays a simple prayer, “O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, and that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your word. Answer me, O Lord, answer me, that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back” (36, 37). Then God sends his fire down onto the altar consuming everything including all of the water. Elijah asks God to reveal himself for who he is, the true God, the true power. In a few seconds God acts and does what the false created god could not do. He answers. Idols fail us because they have no power. Only the Creator God, the God of the Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel has the power.
“The Sacrifice of Elijah Against the Prophets of Baal” - Luca Giordano, 17th century
Christianity is one of, if not the only, religion on earth in which humanity completely abdicates power to God. A lot of religions talk about an almighty god and so on, but their faith is built upon the idea of humans working their way to the god in question. They are still religions focused on human effort and power – humans earning their destiny. But Elijah says very clearly that God’s display of power will show something specific. It will show that God is the one who has turned their hearts back. He is the one that acts and brings people to himself not the other way around.
In Romans 4:4 Paul writes, “Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due.” He is driving home the fact that any faith that is built upon human effort/works cannot include any grace from God. There can be no gifts from God because adherents to a religion built on human effort are simply getting their due in the end. They deserve eternal life or whatever it is. It actually does not involve faith really either because as long as you keep up your end of the bargain – live according to whatever rule system is proposed or do whatever is required of you – then you get what you deserve.
That is what Paul exposes in his letter to the Galatians. They believed in a message that told them they still need to do certain things in order to be accepted by God, namely to be circumcised (not a small thing for grown men). They needed to work and earn His approval. They needed to do whatever they can to get a response from him, just like the prophets of Baal. That’s a nice and tidy religious system really. We like systems that operate this way, in this tit for tat manner, because they are predictable, and you guessed it, controllable. Everything is still in my control. As He-Man cried out in front of the castle Grayskull, “I have the power! I have become He-Man, the most powerful man in the universe.” I loved He-Man when I was a kid.
show logo from dvd
Our own effort and ability is where we place our devotion. Our faith, if you can call that, is in ourselves and not in God. There is no grace here, just deserved results. The problem here is the same: we fail. We cannot reach God through our good deeds because we can never be good enough. We cannot be perfect, which is what the law requires (Matthew 5:48). More than that, we cannot reach God this way because when we live according to our own effort God is not actually our goal. We have deceived ourselves into thinking that we’re doing all of these good things for God, such a noble idea right? The truth is that we are doing these things, trying to be perfect through our own effort, in order to not need God at all. We are just repeating what Adam and Eve did in the Garden, we are trying to be good enough on our own. We are trying to achieve equality with God by being able to stand on our own two feet. How can this type of effort be for God when it is completely self-serving? It is self-elevation. Paul shows us that this is no gospel at all (Galatians 1). This is not good news. This is nothing but slavery to our sin. This is bondage. It is us hitched to the same old ugly thing, but now just dressed up in some fancy, noble looking garb.
The truth that we always reject when left to ourselves is that we are caught in a trap. We are stuck on the hamster wheel with no way off, and we are masters at deceiving ourselves into thinking we’re doing something else other than running in place. We tell ourselves we have free will, but all of our choices seem to only illustrate our bound state. We can’t free ourselves, and any attempt to or belief that we can is evidence to the fact that we have rejected God and his way. Because he is not reachable through human effort (Romans 9:15-16). That is not how he has chosen to be in relationship with humanity.
As Elijah said, God is the one who turns people back to himself. He is the One with all of the power. He is the one in control. He is the only One worthy of worship and devotion. He is the one that gave Paul a message of grace to preach to the Galatians. It is all Him. He is the only one that can save people like Adam and Eve, people like the Israelites worshipping false gods like Baal, people like the Galatians who think that their good deeds and effort are gonna make a difference, people like you and me that put our faith in money, clothes, success, family, friends, and ourselves over and above God.
The Creator God alone has the power to save, and the good news is that he used that power by coming down to earth in the person of Jesus Christ and taking all of our rejection, all of idol worship, and power hungry self-elevation upon himself on the cross. He shed his blood so that we would not have to. He died and then three days later rose from the grave conquering the death we humans brought into the world by trying to stand on our own two feet. He forgives us. He forgives you. He did all of that so that we might be people who are saved by their Creator, people that are saved by his grace. People that need their God, that can depend on their God, that can call out to their God and have Him answer like he answered Elijah. He does the impossible for us. He loves us unconditionally and gives us new hearts that are able to believe in Him and him alone as the one true powerful God. God never fails us because he has already accomplished everything for us in Jesus so that we might be free. And freedom does not look like He-Man. Freedom is not self-reliance or having any power in ourselves. Freedom is being loved by God, being forgiven by God. Freedom is being the creation totally dependent on the good Creator, who has redeemed all things. Freedom is knowing and being known by the One who has all of the power: God Almighty, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.