Strange Bible Stories That Make You Stop
This sermon was preached at Sherwood Community Friends Church on Sunday, August 9. You can watch the video of this sermon by clicking below.
Imagine standing in northern ancient Israel on the side of Mount Carmel. It's been three and a half years since a drop of rain has fallen on this land. The ground is cracked and sun scorched. Animals are dying. People are desperate.
On one side stands the prophet Elijah. On the other side stands Israel’s King Ahab with four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal. Baal is known as the storm and fertility god who was supposedly in charge of exactly the kind of rain everyone's been begging for.
Elijah calls the whole nation together (1 Kings 18) and says something like, how long are you going to keep limping back and forth between two choices? If Yahweh is God, follow him. If Baal is God, follow him. But stop trying to have it both ways.
Then he sets up the ultimate showdown. Two separate altars with two separate sacrifices, tribute to two separate gods. Whichever God answers first by fire, that's the real One.
The prophets of Baal go first. They dance. They shout. They scratch and cut themselves until blood runs down their bodies, begging their god to show up. Nothing. Silence. Emptiness. No answer.
Elijah, who’s not exactly known for his gentle pastoral tone, starts mocking them. He says, shout louder, maybe your god is deep in thought, or busy, or on a journey. Maybe he's asleep and you need to wake him up. Or maybe he’s on the can!
That's the nicely polished English translation way of putting it, but in the original language, the context is something much more obscene. What Elijah actually said carried an erotically sharper edge.
You see, Baal, in the mythology of the ancient Canaanites, was supposedly a fertility god locked in an ongoing on-again-off-again relationship with the goddess Asherah. He would chase after her. She would play hard to get. Because of that, he’d get sexually frustrated and in the process, self-gratify. When it rained, worshippers believed that was Baal's way of providing for the earth with his essence.
So in the Biblical text, when Elijah says Baal might be relieving himself, he's not making a bathroom joke. He's mocking their entire theology in the crudest way possible by saying he's probably off gratifying himself somewhere, which would explain why he can't be bothered to show up for you and answer you.
It was intended to make the reader laugh and become uncomfortable. Understanding the context, well yes, that certainly does make us uncomfortable doesn’t it? But that’s the point and it's right there in your Bible— if you understand the context.
Context is everything.
I tell you this not to shock you for the sake of shocking you. I tell you because I want you to see something about Elijah in this specific moment. This man has zero fear. He’s standing alone against four hundred and fifty opposing prophets and an entire nation that has drifted far from God, and he’s having fun mocking their false gods to their faces.
After he gets through with that, and as they’re still shouting, lacerating and ritually mutilating themselves, the real God answers. Fire falls from heaven, so hot it consumes the sacrifice, the wood, the stones, the bull, the hundreds of gallons of water poured around the altar filling the trench— all of it, gone in an instant. The people fall on their faces and cry out in awe, Yahweh, he is God! Elijah then purges the evil by single handedly having the prophets of Baal seized and put to death.
Once justice had been served, he climbed the mountain to pray, and the rain that hadn't fallen in three and a half years finally came.
This is, without question, the highest, most triumphant moment of Elijah's entire ministry.
And then we turn the page into chapter 19, and here's what we find.
1 Kings 19:3 CSB "Then he became afraid and immediately ran for his life. He went to Beer-sheba that belonged to Judah and left his servant there."
One woman, King Ahab’s sinister wife Jezebel, sends a single threatening message to Elijah, and the man who just stood against 450 prophets and called fire down from heaven runs for the hills. Literally.
That's the question one of you sent in, and it's a great one. How does the guy who just did all that amazing God stuff end up hiding out in a cave fearing for his life?
Unfiltered Series Starts Now!
Some of you have wrestled with questions like this and never felt like you had a safe place to ask them out loud. Perhaps, some of you have never even noticed these Biblical tensions before, and today I get to answer a question you didn't know you had.
Our new teaching series, starting now, is called Unfiltered and we’re going to answer your questions. During the month of May we asked you all to submit any and every curious or wrestling question you had on faith, God, the Bible, and our Friends denomination. Those of you who did, we’re going to answer them over the next 5 weeks. Now we cannot get to every question, but we’re going to do our best to address the biggest and most popular ones you asked. We're going to tell you what scripture says, even when it's strange. If we don’t know, we’ll say we don’t know. And we're not going to make any of this political. It's just going to be honest and grounded in scripture because that’s the best place to be.
So let's keep going. Let's finish Elijah's story, and then we’ll hit four more questions for today.
Question 1: Elijah’s Fear of Jezebel
Elijah wasn't a superhero. He was a common man who said “yes” to God and did a thing for God under God’s power.
Keep in mind, he's been on high alert for years, hiding from Ahab, living off grid with God using ravens to bring him bread and meat and receiving hospitality from a widow's last handful of flour that God kept multiplying. Now he's poured every ounce of spiritual and physical energy he had into the biggest confrontation of his life. Fire from heaven doesn't come from a relaxed, Netflix and chill afternoon. That's total exertion— body, mind, and soul.
After the fire, he runs down the mountain under supernatural strength, outrunning Ahab's majestic horse-drawn chariot the whole way to the town of Jezreel. As he walked into that city, there was Queen Jezebel, and she sent word that by this time tomorrow, Elijah you’re a dead man.
Hearing those words: his adrenaline crashes. Exhaustion sets in. And into that physical, psychological, and spiritually low place, Jezebel's threat lands like a blow from Mike Tyson (in his prime) and he doesn't have anything left in him to absorb it.
1 Kings 19:4 CSB "Then [Elijah] sat down under a broom tree and prayed that he might die. He said, "I have had enough! LORD, take my life, for I'm no better than my fathers.""
What does God do with a prophet in that condition? He doesn't lecture him. He doesn't shame him for the reality of the very human fear he's feeling after the very super-human thing he just did. God lets him sleep and sends an angel to feed him. Twice.
1 Kings 19:9 CSB "He entered a cave there and spent the night. Then the word of the LORD came to him, and he said to him, "Why are you here, Elijah?""
I don’t think there was any judgment from God in that question. It was simply an invitation for Elijah to be honest about where he was physically, psychologically, and spiritually. And when God decides to show up on that mountain, he doesn't come in the wind, the earthquake, or the fire, the exact kind of dramatic display Elijah just experienced at Mount Carmel.
No… God comes— in a gentle whisper.
Contradiction isn't the right word for what's happening in these two chapters— 1 Kings 18 and 19, but this is what it actually looks like to be human and used mightily by God at the same time.
Scripture doesn't sand down or soften Elijah's fear to protect his feelings or reputation. The Bible here is showing us a man of enormous faith who also had a mortal body that could run out of gas and a heart that could still be afraid. If the Bible only gave us spiritual superheroes who never crashed, never doubted, never ran out of gas, it would be a lot less honest, and honestly, a lot less useful or relatable to all of us. Right?!
Question 2: Balaam's Donkey
Why did God use a donkey to speak to Balaam?
Quick setup. This story comes out of the book of Numbers, the fourth book of the Bible in the Old Testament.
Balaam is a pagan diviner (essentially a conduit to the gods and the spiritual realm for hire). He gets hired by a Moabite king named Balak to curse the nation of Israel who's camped nearby and seemingly scaring all the Moabites because they think an attack is imminent. God tells Balaam he can go, but he can only say what God gives him to say. Balaam heads out, and on the road, his donkey suddenly stops, presses into a wall, then just lies down in the middle of the path. Balaam beats the poor animal three times before Scripture drops this line on us.
Numbers 22:28 CSB "Then the LORD opened the donkey's mouth, and it said to Balaam, "What have I done to you that you have beaten me these three times?""
The donkey saw the angel of the Lord standing in the road with a drawn sword. Balaam, the professional spiritual guy for hire, the diviner who talks to gods for a living, saw nothing.
I think that's the punch line God is making here, and it's a good one. Here's a man whose entire career is built on claiming special access to the divine, and his own donkey has clearer spiritual sight than he does. Once God opens Balaam's eyes, he sees the angel too, and he realizes how close he came to being struck down on the path he was walking.
You see, the purpose of the angel appearing was as an adversary blocking the road to test or oppose Balaam over the state of his heart in going to Balak, and once Balaam’s eyes were opened the angel simply reaffirmed the same command God already gave, that Balaam could only speak what God told him (Numbers 22:35).
Okay now, why a donkey? I don’t think we need to overcomplicate this. It seems to be because God can use whatever he wants to get our attention, and sometimes he chooses exactly the thing that would captivate us most into finally listening. He did this through a burning bush for Moses, a super illumined angel for Gideon and several others, a whisper for Elijah, a big fish for Jonah, a bright blinding light for Apostle Paul, and the list goes on, but you get the point.
If God can speak through a donkey, he is not limited by our assumptions about who or what qualifies to carry his voice. And if a donkey can see the angel of the Lord blocking Balaam's path, we probably shouldn't be so confident that we always see what's standing in ours.
Question 3: David's Plague Choice
When David was given the choice of three punishments, why did he choose the plague? Did he actually understand what he was choosing when he said he’d rather fall into the hands of God than into the hands of men? And why did God kill 70,000 Israelites because of something David did?
The context here is, Israelite King David sins by taking a census he was never supposed to take, trusting his own military strength instead of God's provision. God sends the prophet Gad to give him three options for judgment: three years of famine, three months of fleeing from enemies, or three days of plague. David answers this way:
2 Samuel 24:14-15 CSB “David said to Gad, "I have great anxiety. Please, let us fall into the LORD's hands because his mercies are great, but don't let me fall into human hands.”
So the Lord sent a plague on Israel from that morning until the appointed time, and from [the cities of] Dan to Beer-sheba seventy thousand men died.
Did David fully understand what he was choosing? I don't think anyone facing three impossible options of judgement from God Almighty fully understands what's coming. What I do think David understood was who he was choosing.
Fleeing from enemies puts you at the mercy of people who hate you. Famine grinds on for years with human systems failing you the whole time. But falling into the Lord's hands, even in judgment, means falling into the hands of the One whose mercy is described as great even in the same breath as the consequence.
Seventy thousand people died in that plague, and it's a sobering reminder that a leader's sin doesn't stay contained to the leader. What happens in the heart of the person or people in charge ripples out to everyone under their care and oversight.
But look at what David does the moment he sees the destruction.
2 Samuel 24:17 CSB “When David saw the angel striking the people, he said to the LORD, "Look, I am the one who has sinned; I am the one who has done wrong. But these sheep, what have they done? Please, let your hand be against me and my father's family.’”
David doesn't hide behind his crown. He steps forward and owns all of it. And then the text tells us he refuses to offer God a sacrifice that costs him nothing.
That's the real lesson underneath this hard story. Repentance that doesn't cost you something isn't true repentance. It's convenience wearing a religious outfit.
Question 4: Ezekiel's Silence
Why did God make Ezekiel unable to speak? What was the purpose of that as a prophetic act?
Here's the scene: the prophet Ezekiel is ministering to the Israelite people in exile, and God is about to give him a word that will leave him speechless, literally.
Ezekiel 3:26 CSB "I will make your tongue stick to the roof of your mouth, so that you will be mute and unable to reprove them, for they are a rebellious house."
Then in the next verse, God tells him...
Ezekiel 3:27 CSB "But when I speak with you, I will open your mouth, and you will say to them, 'This is what the Lord GOD says.' Let the one who listens, listen, and let the one who refuses, refuse, for they are a rebellious house."
Don’t think of Ezekiel's silence as a punishment, but instead as a prophetic sign, which God used in the Old Testament all the time, as a living illustration for his exiled community to not miss.
At another point in his ministry, Ezekiel lay on his side for over a year eating bread baked over dung (Ezekiel 4:4-6, 4:12-15). The prophet Isaiah walked around naked and barefoot for three years (Isaiah 20:2-4). Jeremiah wore a rotting loincloth (Jeremiah 13:1-11), carried a wooden yoke on his neck (Jeremiah 27-28), and bought a field in the middle of a siege (Jeremiah 32). Each one of these prophetic signs was a living, breathing sermon God asked his prophets to act out with their own bodies and lives for the hopeful benefit of Israel’s exiled people who betrayed God and themselves.
These exiled people were a group who had stopped listening to and obeying God for so long that God, in a sense, stopped handing them casual commentary.
When Ezekiel's mouth was shut, it preached a sermon louder than words. When it opened, only for what God specifically gave him to say, it preached the same sermon from a different angle. Every word out of this man's mouth carried weight because it wasn't his own words. It was the Lord's, and only the Lord's.
I think this is something worth meditating on for us too. We live in a culture that never runs out of opinions or things to say. Everywhere we go online has this “influencer” or that reporter saying something that they think is profound all day long. Seems like everyone knows what’s good for us or what we need to hear.
Ezekiel's silence is a refreshing picture of a prophet so submitted to God that he wouldn't even speak until God gave him something worth saying.
What would it look like for us to hold our words that reverently?
Question 5: David Fighting for the Land
Why was David fighting the people who were already living in the Promised Land?
This question connects into a much bigger question many people wrestle with, the violence and warfare woven throughout the Old Testament, specifically about Israel’s military campaigns against people already living in the Promised Land.
Let’s first keep something important in mind. This land, yes promised to the Israelites, was never just real estate up for grabs. From the opening pages of Genesis, the land belongs to God— well because he’s the one who created it and he alone decides who inherits it.
After the Tower of Babel incident in Genesis 11, God set the nations to govern themselves since that’s what they wanted anyway and he chose Abraham's family as his own portion of people who he would focus on to bring about the Messiah. Meanwhile, the peoples in Canaan built entire civilizations, and entire religious systems, in defiance of him and they followed other gods. They exploited people and committed such heinous atrocities it makes the Holocaust look like a nine year old kid stealing a pack of bubble gum from the local mini mart.
Old Testament scholar Dr. John Walton says what was going on when the Israelites came to town in a militaristic way was not merely ethnic genocide, which seems to get misunderstood in our English, Western translated Bibles. Walton's argument is that the Hebrew concept behind what we translate as destruction is closer to removal from use, meaning this is a clearing out of a corrupted system so the land could be restored to what God originally intended.
Dr. Michael Heiser adds another much deeper and more supernaturally sinister layer worth knowing. Some of the fiercest fighting in the Canaanite conquest narratives that started in the book of Joshua and continued through the time of David, centered on regions tied to giant clans. These are known as the Anakim and Rephaim, groups the Biblical text connects back to the spiritual rebellion described in Genesis chapter 6 regarding the Nephilim, right before the flood narrative. Heiser reads this as more than a land dispute or a “get off my lawn” campaign. He reads it as a spiritual conflict playing out on physical ground and, God through the Israelites, is reclaiming territory that had been given over to false gods and corrupted powers.
By the time David was king, generations after Joshua, the job was still partially unfinished. The book of Judges tells us that Israel never fully drove out the nations they were told to remove, and that failure came with real consequences.
So when David fights Goliath, a Rephaim giant like his brothers from the city of Gath, then later takes on the Jebusites to capture Jerusalem, or the Philistines in the wars that follow, he’s not launching a new land grab to expand his urban growth boundaries. He's finishing an ancient assignment that Israel had been putting off for generations, an assignment that was always about God reclaiming what was rightfully his, not about David building an empire for its own sake.
I will say, knowing the context doesn’t make these passages comfortable. They shouldn't be comfortable. War is never a small thing in Scripture, or in any time period of human history for that matter. But context helps to know this warfare sits inside a much bigger spiritual story to see this is not about a God who delights in bloodshed. This is about a God taking back what was corrupted, bringing dignity to humans who had been exploited, and bringing his justice in a restorative way.
God is a God who restores.
Final Question: Zechariah's Silence
One more quick one I want to address before we close.
Why did God shut Zechariah, John the Baptist’s father’s, mouth? (Luke 1:18–20)
Zechariah was a priest who was serving in the temple when the angel Gabriel appears and tells him that he and his wife Elizabeth, both far past childbearing years, are going to have a son who will prepare the way for the Messiah. Here’s Zechariah's response:
Luke 1:18 CSB "How can I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is well along in years."
Zechariah should have said something like: “Oh thank you Lord. Your servant is at your mercy.”
But he didn’t and Gabriel's answer is pretty direct— as are almost all messengers from God. They’re all pretty direct.
He said, “Now listen! You will become silent and unable to speak until the day these things take place, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time.” Luke 1:20 CSB
It seems God, through Gabriel here speaking on his behalf, was extending mercy shaped like discipline.
Zechariah spent his life serving Yahweh’s temple to cultivate sacred space for his presence to come. And then when God’s proxy does come, Zechariah finds himself giving his wife the silent treatment for the next nine months, which meant he had nine months with nothing to do but sit with what God had promised him. When the moment his son arrived he was asked what his name would be. He wrote up on the papyrus whiteboard the name “John” exactly as instructed by Gabriel.
This was countercultural because many men named their sons after themselves or another man in their family. As soon as John was named, Zechariah’s mouth opened immediately. His silence became the space God used to break apart his doubt and replace it with trust— all because of his faithful obedience.
CONCLUSION
Let’s keep in mind, every one of these Bible stories: Elijah's fear, Balam’s talking donkey, David's plague, Ezekiel's silence, the Canaanite conquest, John the Baptist’s dad struck mute, every one of them seems strange on the surface. But underneath every single one is a God who is patient with people in process, who speaks through whatever he chooses, who disciplines out of mercy rather than cruelty, and who is always, always working toward restoration rather than destruction for its own sake.
God is a God who restores.
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