May the best team win…

If you want to be strategic with your time, there’s a smart way to watch Pro Football. Wait until the first Sunday of February to dial-in; set the whole game to record (so you’ll be able to enjoy all of the commercials)… but wait until the 4th Quarter to get serious and to focus.

Yahoo Sports put it this way: “What happened in the final, furious minutes of Super Bowl LIV here was Patrick Mahomes in full. The confidence that defied sense. The plays that defied belief. The 44-yard flick to Tyreek Hill during a third-and-15 that defied physics. The tour de force that broke the other side.    San Francisco had spent the night curbing and containing the most dangerous man in football until all of a sudden it couldn’t. And the Niners knew it. And that’s when Mahomes pounced the way the great ones do. Ten plays, 83 yards for one touchdown. Seven plays, 65 yards for another. A final two-play, 42-yarder for good measure. It was like some kind of avalanche, everything just rolling downhill on the Niners, No. 15 just eviscerating it all…”

Something happened in the huddle, before the Chiefs broke out from under their deficit. Again, from Yahoo: “The Chiefs were getting the ball back though, less than nine minutes to play, on their own 17, maybe last chance, or at least close to it. If there was sagging confidence or growing nerves, Mahomes didn’t show it. Instead he gathered his offense and offered up a prediction. ‘They are going to talk about this,’ he said, ‘for a long time.’”

Mahomes left the game last night as the MVP. What was his perspective about the win? “We never lost faith, that’s the biggest thing. Everybody on this team, no one had their head down and we believed in each other — that’s what we preached all year long.”

Before the Chiefs left Kansas City for Miami, the hometown press caught Mahomes’ verbal pass: “The 24-year-old said when he’s out on the field, he’s not just putting on a show for Chiefs Kingdom. He’s also playing for God. ‘Obviously I want to win every game, but I’m glorifying him every single time I’m out there,’ he added. Mahomes said his walk with Christ has shaped him into the man he is today and the star player so many around the league admire. ‘As long as I’m doing everything the right way and the way that he would want me to do it, then I can walk off the field with my head held high and be able to be the man that I am. I understand that he’s given me a lot of blessings in my life, and I’m trying to maximize them and glorify him.’”

It was a big win for the Chiefs; it had been 50 years since they had performed in a Super Bowl and come home a winner. There was lots of historic SB coverage surrounding the game last night, but the very first Super Bowl didn’t even come up.

The site for that contest was Mount Carmel, in Israel. The reason for the face-off was clear: the reigning king and queen of Israel – Ahab and Jezebel – had embraced the false gods of the surrounding culture (Baal and Asherah), diverting the Jews’ worship from Jehovah. God had reached his limit, and commissioned Elijah to go up against the pop culture religion sponsored by the Royals.

It wasn’t a fair fight. Baal had 450 prophets; Asherah had 400. Elijah told Ahab to bring ‘em all to Carmel, and he would take them all on. The stands were filled; the crowd was assembled.

The rules were set: each side would construct an altar, put firewood on top of the stones, and an ox would be slaughtered by each to put atop the wood. How would they “score?” Elijah’s ground rules: “Call on the name of your god, and I will call on the name of the Lord. The god who answers by fire: he is God.” (1 Kings 18).

Elijah was outnumbered, 850:1. That didn’t matter; he won MVP, Jehovah scored with fire from heaven… and the clergy for the false gods didn’t make it past the post-game.

There are times when God really is involved in the final score. “When all the people saw this, they fell prostrate and cried, ‘The Lord, He is God…” (v 39).

Bob Shank