We sometimes get the wrong impression about the Old Testament prophets. We picture them in continual conversation with God. We need not doubt Elijah’s prayer life, but the corresponding communication from God was not constant. The writer says, After many days the word of the Lord came to Elijah.
There is no reason to believe this refers only to messages about the famine. God’s silence is connected to the drought. It is part of the narrative, not an omission. The silence of God is often a sign of his displeasure. 1 Samuel 3:1, for example, tells us that in those days there was no frequent vision.
The intertestamental silence is another example of the same reality.
Does this say something about people in our time who claim to hear audible directions from the Lord nearly every morning? When one of the greatest prophets of the old covenant received only intermittent audible messages from God, should we expect a daily mail delivery
apart from his written Word?
Let us remember that God is under no obligation to speak or to explain himself. Nebuchadnezzar learned this through exceedingly hard circumstances: For he does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say to him, 'What have you done?'
(Daniel 4:3). Fallen mankind always wants God to explain himself, but he will not allow himself to be tested in that fashion.
The famine had continued for three years, but now the times were about to change. God informed Elijah that he would send rain on the earth. Well and good, the reader might say, but why did Elijah need to show himself to Ahab? If God was going to send the rain, why did Elijah have a responsibility in the matter?
If the rain came without this confrontation—and the greater one to follow—Baal worshipers might conclude that Baal was finally reviving from his cyclical struggle with death. It needed to be made known that it was the Lord, not Baal, who had the power both to bring the drought and to end it.
There was every reason for Ahab to be confronted. He embraced Jeroboam’s sin, tolerated Baal worship, and ruled from a capital that suffered severely under the drought. The writer mentions Samaria to shift the focus from Elijah, now leaving the widow’s household, to Ahab and his servant Obadiah as they search for a way not to lose some of the animals
(1 Kings 18:5).
Commentators commonly treat 1 Kings 18:1 and 1 Kings 18:2 as important only as a connective link, but they are immensely important. The guarantee of the end of the drought is not the fire that descends from heaven, but the word of the Lord declaring that he will send rain. When God speaks, his word is as certain as his actions. For the Lord to speak is as sure as for him to act.
1 After many days the word of the LORD came to Elijah, in the third year, saying, “Go, show yourself to Ahab, and I will send rain upon the earth.”