1 Kings 16:29-34
"29 In the thirty-eighth year of Asa king of Judah, Ahab the son of Omri began to reign over Israel, and Ahab the son of Omri reigned over Israel in Samaria twenty-two years. 30 And Ahab the son of Omri did evil in the sight of the Lord, more than all who were before him. 31 And as if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, he took for his wife Jezebel the daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, and went and served Baal and worshiped him. 32 He erected an altar for Baal in the house of Baal, which he built in Samaria. 33 And Ahab made an Asherah. Ahab did more to provoke the Lord, the God of Israel, to anger than all the kings of Israel who were before him. 34 In his days Hiel of Bethel built Jericho. He laid its foundation at the cost of Abiram his firstborn, and set up its gates at the cost of his youngest son Segub, according to the word of the Lord, which he spoke by Joshua the son of Nun."
If the reign of Omri was dark, that of his son, Ahab, was even worse, for it was in his time that new extremities of evil were reached. It was not enough for Ahab to continue in the pattern of wickedness set by Jeroboam (who first made Israel to sin); he made an unholy alliance it would seem wilfully and deliberately ' with the pagan Jezebel, and through her introduced the worship of Baal into Israel. The frenzied orgy of evil in which he indulged, as if to see how deeply entrenched in it he could become, flying in the face of the warnings of God's Word (34) - the rebuilding of Jericho was forbidden under pain of the most terrible curse (see Joshua 6:26) - makes it clear that Ahab had sold himself to the dark overlord of hell and was acting as his willing vassal. It was into the midst of this gross darkness that the Lord sent his servant Elijah and we shall see in subsequent chapters that if the darkness was great, here was a man great enough to combat it. God had his man to match the hour. This is grace indeed. For there is a greater tragedy than that times should be dark and iniquity abound in the nation, and it is that in such times there should be no word from the Lord. The truly ominous sign in our day is not so much that the world is trembling on the brink of nuclear destruction, but that there is such an absence of any real summons to repentance being thundered out by the Church to the nations of the earth. Where are the Elijah’s of the twentieth century?