Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 200 · July 19
Not a Word
“And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? if the LORD be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word.”
This verse has run altar calls for two hundred years, and the complaint deserves to be heard first: a person cornered into a decision has not made one. Get a room hot enough and hands go up, and come down again in the car park.
The text agrees. How long halt ye between two opinions? if the LORD be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word. That is what the ultimatum achieved. Elijah stood in front of a nation with the best line in the Old Testament and moved nobody.
Halt is a limping word, and the chapter picks it up a few verses later for what the prophets of Baal do around their own altar, where it is translated leaped: and they leaped upon the altar which was made. The same hopping motion, done by the people in their heads and the prophets with their bodies.
What moved them arrived from outside the argument. Then the fire of the LORD fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench. Only after that. And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and they said, The LORD, he is the God. God supplied the one thing Elijah could not manufacture, after the question had already failed.
It did not hold either. One chapter on, Elijah arose, and went for his life. He came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die. What he is given at the bottom is food. An angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat. He ate and drank and lay down again, and the angel came back: Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee.
Go back to the question, because it is a good question badly used. How long halt ye between two opinions names a limp, put to people who genuinely had one, by a man limping himself inside a week. The fire is God's to send. The limp is yours to admit, and admitting it is more than the crowd on Carmel managed.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 200 is My Rock and Fortress (Psalm 18:2).