I Kings 18:1 And it came to pass after many days, that the word of the LORD came to Elijah in the third year, saying, Go, shew thyself unto Ahab; and I will send rain upon the earth.
We just finished approximately two and a half months of living on the road in an RV. Now if you have lived in an RV, you know that means you have problems every week. The plumbing doesn’t work. The electrical doesn’t work. The refrigerator doesn’t work. There is always something that doesn’t work, and we have had a number of issues. I love our RV and I’m not complaining because we have it really good, but as a non-fix-it kind of a guy, I have had a lot of fixing to do over the last two and a half months.
A lot of what I do is called trouble shooting. I’ve got a problem where I’m not sure what the issue is so I just keep shooting at the problem. If that doesn’t work, I am tempted to shoot my trailer. Sometimes our problem is that we don’t know what our problem is. As someone has said, “A problem well stated is half solved.”
In I Kings 18 there was a problem. Verse 2 tells us there was a sore famine in Samaria. Well, from whence came this sore famine? The Bible tells us that it came from a drought. So, the famine wasn’t the problem; the drought was the problem. Truthfully, the drought wasn’t the problem either. The problem was Ahab!
Elijah, God’s man, confronted Ahab to tell him that God would send rain upon the earth after this long drought. So we learn here that the problem was not the famine, it was the drought. But, it wasn’t the drought, it was Ahab and his serving idols instead of Jehovah. We learn that we cannot solve a problem until we acknowledge its source and its answer.
As to the source of the problem, Ahab never got help because he never acknowledged that he was the problem. The problem was not the famine or the drought, it was him. When Ahab met Elijah he said, “Art thou he that troubleth Israel?” He thought that Elijah was the problem. Elijah answered, “I have not troubled Israel; but thou, and thy father’s house, in that ye have forsaken the commandments of the LORD, and thou hast followed Baalim.”
So, we must acknowledge the source. If I am the problem, I cannot solve the problem until I acknowledge my part of it. Our tendency is to shift blame. Ahab tried to blame the prophet, to blame the drought, to blame the famine when the problem was Ahab’s own idolatry.
Next, we need to acknowledge the answer. I can’t get the right answer if I don’t acknowledge the right problem. When Elijah challenged the prophets of Baal to test who the real God was, the Bible says that when the prophets of Baal prayed to their god “there was no voice, nor any that answered.” Why? It was because Baal wasn’t the answer to the problem; Baal was the problem. Elijah had said, “The God that answereth by fire, let him be God.” Baal couldn’t answer by fire because Baal couldn’t answer at all.
Today, when we have problems it is easy to blame others, to ignore our own heart, and to double down on things that are not going to solve the problem but are the problem. There is always hope for those who acknowledge the problem, and there is always hope for those who acknowledge the answer. In this case, the problem was rejecting God and the answer was coming back to that God for His help.