Throughout Kings, various prophets counsel, instruct, warn, and foretell the future to remind the Israelite rulers (and the reader) that God’s Word was the supreme authority and power in Israel. Many named and unnamed prophets play significant roles in the narrative, but Elijah and Elisha take center stage. They were raised up by God during the reign of Ahab’s house (Israel’s deepest period of apostasy) to call the Northern Kingdom in particular to return to God and His word. 

1. The book of Kings was written during the exile to explain why Israel and Judah were in exile.
In the Hebrew Bible, the book of Kings—understood as 1 and 2 Kings together—is the last book in the Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings). These books narrate Israel’s history from her arrival in the land God had promised to her removal from the land during the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles. The earliest that Kings could have been composed in its final form was after King Jehoiachin’s release from prison in 561 BC (2 Kings 25:27), and because it does not mention the return from exile, it likely was written at some point in the second half of the Babylonian exile.
Kings is theological history, explaining why God gave His people over to foreign nations. The answer is oft repeated: from the time of the division of the kingdom after Solomon’s reign, God’s people and their rulers “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, and they provoked him to jealousy with their sins that they committed” (1 Kings 14:22). Even when a godly king occasionally arose, his descendants continued the spiritual decline of Israel/Judah. The extended theological commentary in 2 Kings 17:7–23 summarizes the message of the whole book: “And this [exile] occurred because the people of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and had feared other gods and walked in the customs of the nations whom the Lord drove out before the people of Israel, and in the customs that the kings of Israel had practiced” (vv. 7–8).
There are no explicit promises or prophecies of any return from exile in Kings, yet Jehoiachin’s release at the end of the book foreshadows a happy ending. As we read in Deuteronomy 4:25–31 and throughout the writing prophets, that ending would indeed come, ultimately in the arrival of great David’s greater Son, Jesus Christ, who sits eternally on David’s throne.
2. Kings isn’t just about kings; it’s also about prophets.
The rise of Israel’s monarchy brought in its wake the flowering of the prophetic office, and for good reason: rebellious kings needed to hear God’s words of warning, and faithful kings needed to hear God’s words of encouragement.
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Elijah didn’t get his answer right away, the way God answered his prayer in 1 Kings 18:38. Yet he sticks with it, he doesn’t lose heart or give up when God’s answer is “No.” He keeps praying with patience and with perseverance, sending the servant back and back and back until he sees that little cloud like a man’s hand over the horizon. Like the persistent widow of Luke 18, we are to keep praying until God in His providence makes clear that the time for prayer has ceased.

The story of Elijah running before Ahab in 1 Kings 18:41–46 is a strange and spectacular portrayal of the power and victory of the one true God over Baal and of the humility and gospel ministry of God’s prophet. Yet if we focus our attention solely on Elijah’s girding up his loins and running the seventeen miles from Mount Carmel to Jezreel by the hand of Yahweh, we will miss Elijah’s running first to God in prayer, and thus we will fail to learn what the “man with a nature like ours” (James 5:17) has to teach us about prayer.

Recall that this story takes place immediately on the heels of the contest on Mount Carmel between Elijah and the prophets of Baal. Yahweh had proven in a stunning manner that He is the only God of heaven and earth, and in so doing He had brought repentance to the idolatrous hearts of His rebellious people. The drought that Israel was suffering as a result of its idolatry could finally end, for that idolatry had been dealt with decisively by the execution of the prophets of Baal at the Brook Kishon. Yet the rains did not immediately fall, for God ordinarily sends His blessings through the channel of prayer. Thus Elijah, who had asked God to turn the spigots off three and a half years earlier, asked God to turn them back on. This is almost certainly the passage that James has in view when he says that Elijah prayed, and the sky poured rain and the earth produced its fruit. As we watch Elijah pray, we learn much about how to pray.
We Should Pray with Confident Faith in the Promises of God.
Down at the bottom of Mount Carmel, at the Brook Kishon, Elijah told Ahab to go back up and eat and drink, “for there is a sound of the rushing of rain.” Elijah wasn’t hearing literal thunder in the distance, for as we see in the following verses, there were no clouds in the sky. Rather, Elijah was hearing with the ears of faith in God’s promises. He knew that God had promised in verse 1, “Go, show yourself to Ahab, and I will send rain upon earth”(1 Kings 18:1). In light of God’s promises, he prayed.

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