"What doest thou here, Elijah" 1 Kings 19:11-13
From time to time God raised up among the Israelite people men of unusual calibre to be leaders and reformers. They were supernaturally endowed to be able to perform the prodigious labours committed to them and without such endowments they would not have achieved anything of significance. They were head and shoulders above their contemporaries and as we look at them on the page of scripture they tower above the people of our generation too. We see them grappling with great dilemmas which all but overwhelm them, but if they stumble it is to rise and take up the struggle once more with their zeal and vigour undiminished. They were not perfect or without flaw for "they were men of like passions with us," but they were chosen instruments of God set apart for a designated purpose.
A distinguished place among them belongs to Elijah, the subject of this record. I would like to focus our thoughts under two main heads; first, The Dejection of the Prophet and second, The Sovereignty of God.
The Dejection of the Prophet
It would seem that Elijah had very definite and distinct expectations concerning the effects of the three and a half years of drought upon the character and conduct of the nation of Israel. There had been given a very clear and visible demonstration of the greatness and power of the living God. That power was evident in the works of nature in withholding the rain and bringing real hardship upon man and beast. On Mount Carmel Baal was shown to be the nonentity that he was, while the people were moved to cry repeatedly, "The Lord he is God." Perhaps Elijah thought that such a visible and awesome display of God's power could not fail to convince the people and bring them to a better mind. This was what he had prayed and striven for, that false religion would receive such a devastating reversal that it would be unable to raise its head again. His expectation was that events would turn out in a particular way.
We too may have our preconceived ideas in relation to the Lord's work and its anticipated development, or may have had such ideas in the past, before maturer years or wisdom shaped us in a different mould. Experience teaches that we dare not anticipate the outworking of God's plan and purpose in our sphere any more than Elijah could.
Elijah soon discovered that events were taking a very unexpected turn, for Jezebel directed a message to him that had a most chilling effect upon him. She threatened to bring upon him the same fate that he had exacted upon the priests and prophets of Baal. One would have expected in the light of all that he had experienced on Mount Carmel that he would not flinch, but in his customary, courageous way, bid defiance to her. That was not, however, the way in which he reacted. He seemed to sense embodied in her threat all the malicious power of false religion about to release itself anew against himself, the sole representative of the living God. So he succumbs to fear and takes refuge in flight. I suppose that the element of surprise in Jezebel's action caught him off guard. But added to that was the fact that the sheer moral, mental, psychological and physical stress of the struggle he was engaged in was telling upon him.
All who are involved in the ministry of the word will experience the tensions and pressures that are peculiar to their employment to a greater or lesser degree, and what may be surprising is not that some crack under the strain but that comparatively few do. The credit does not accrue to them but to the divine grace that upholds and sustains them.
When we consider Elijah's situation there are two important factors that have a significant bearing upon it. The first is that he was the object and victim of a war of nerves being conducted with demonic subtilty and skill. Consider how surprising it is that Jezebel gave any prior warning of what she proposed to do. One would expect that if it was her intention to do what she was threatening to do she would not want to afford him the opportunity to escape. There was another power behind Jezebel - the Devil, using her as his agent and timing her threat to co-incide with the prophet's vulnerable condition. As a result Elijah is thrown into a state of discouragement and dejection. He determines to get away as far as possible from the scene and deserts the post of duty.
The Devil is a master at adapting our circumstances to further his strategies and we have to be aware of how vulnerable we especially are under stress or illness, buffeted or battle weary, dispirited by lack of success and failure. We need to pray not only to be kept strong but to be kept on our guard so that we may be able to stand in the evil day.
The other factor bearing on Elijah's situation at this time, away from the post of duty, is the compassion and care of the Lord for him. Far from being abandoned by the Lord, He sends his angel to minister to his needs, for we read that as he slept under a juniper tree an angel touched him and invited him to eat, not once but twice, on the second occasion giving expression to the Lord's understanding of his difficulties. God had loving concern for him although it was by his own action he had got himself into this predicament. He will not let him famish with hunger. Nor will he send him back the way he had come for he has something important to show him at his destination. How amazing is the grace and forbearance of the Lord. His ways and his thoughts are higher than our ways and our thoughts even as the heavens are above the earth.
The Sovereignty of God
Elijah arrives at Horeb and there God puts the question to him, "What doest thou here Elijah?" The tone of Elijah's reply indicates his dissatisfaction with the way events have gone in the religious history of Israel. "What had he expected?" asks Krummacher and answers, "Nothing less than an immediate, penitent return of all Israel to the God of their fathers." God's response is to say "Go stand forth upon the Mount." He was going to witness initially successive and differing expressions of the power of God that were to be externally sensed in dramatic and awesome disturbances in the realm of nature and following upon these a disclosure of power not on the natural level but on the supernatural. We remember that it was in the exercise of his power in the natural realm that God had recently visited Israel in answer to the prophet's prayer.
First there comes a wind which in its irresistible ferocity rips great rocks from the mountainside and hurls them to the valley below. But though Elijah is impressed with the strength of the wind yet no awareness of God's presence is borne in upon him in it. Following the wind there erupts an earthquake, causing the mountain to heave with terrifying motion and the rocks to split. But while it is alarming in its effect upon him it does not convey to his consciousness any sense of the nearness of God. Thirdly there comes a fire, which in consonance with the other natural phenomena, we would understand to be lightning. But God was not in the fire.
Finally there follows an expression of the power and presence of God that in its manner and effect contrasts completely with all that has gone before, for after the fire there is "a still small voice" - a gentle whisper. That gentle whisper that came in the stillness when the turbulence had passed, had a most profound effect upon Elijah, for we read that he wrapped his face in his mantle in the humbling realization of the holiness, power, awesomeness and glory of the living God that was borne in upon him. The voice of God that he did not hear in the awe-inspiring upheavals in nature now registers with authority and clarity in heart and mind and conscience.
Elijah is being reminded that what reaches home to the deepest level of human consciousness is not anything merely external like the phenomena he has just now experienced or even the terrible drought upon Israel recently ended, but the mysterious, inward, renewing grace of the Lord - the loving-kindness and tender mercy that are able to soften hardened hearts and renew insensitive consciences. Perhaps Elijah was focusing too narrowly upon the anticipated effects of the drought upon the population, from a moral and spiritual point of view. Is there not also the suggestion that something was owed to his own faithfulness? "I have been very zealous for the Lord God of Israel...." is how he begins his querulous assertion. The Lord, however, is reminding him of his own supreme sovereignty.
May it not be the case that we too in our own thinking may be investing the measures we ourselves have taken with a special potency? Perhaps we have said, "God is bound to bless our labours in this direction or that direction. This cannot fail to produce results." And we too have had cause to be perplexed and despondent. And we have had to learn to bow before the sovereignty of God's will, who alone has power over the whole of human life.
The Lord does not prosecute his work in a way that is spectacularly obvious and visible but through the imperceptible activity of his Spirit, operating in the hidden, inward recesses of the human heart. It is clear enough that God's work in the experience of the seven thousand, whom God had reserved, was not apparent to Elijah, otherwise he would have had a very different refrain from, "I am left alone." It is not always the means that we might predict that he will use. How often have our best-laid plans and most optimistic expectations been disappointed and we have been reminded that he will fulfil his sovereign will and purpose by the means he chooses to use. We live in a religious climate in which many are looking overmuch to human activity, as if they themselves were able to organize how God will work. He makes clear, however, that He is answerable to no-one and that we are totally dependant upon the Spirit's working by his still small voice.
Our part is to serve him humbly and faithfully, remembering that the doctrine of his sovereignty is no excuse for inaction. It is indeed the belief that he is mighty to save that is our great incentive to preach the gospel which is his power unto salvation. Faced as we are in preaching with our own utter powerlessness, together with human apathy and unbelief, what gives us confidence and reassurance is not the power of our arguments or our ability to appeal to the heart, important though these are. Rather is it the knowledge that "the Spirit of God makes the reading but especially the preaching of the word an effectual means for convincing and converting sinners ....."
"In the morning sow thy seed and in the evening withhold not thy hand for thou know'st not whether shall prosper either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good." The results are in his hands not ours.
Rev Neil MacDonald has retired but was formerly minister of Lochalsh and Fearn.
