Out of the Silence

Text:  1 Kings 19:1-18

            Lock the door.  Draw the curtains.  Pull the plug on the phone.  Stay in bed.  Sleep all the time.  Eat too much.  Don’t eat at all.  Can’t be bothered to have a wash.  Read the same page twenty times and finally give up.  Watch the TV but it’s all a blur.  Nothing holds an interest.  The world used to be full of laughter and colour.  Now everything feels sad and grey.  Thinking of ending it all.  Depressed. 

Depression ranges from mild feelings of ‘being a bit down’ to a dark black cloud that blocks out the light of happiness.  Depression happens for all sorts of different reasons and to all kinds of different people.  Depression leaves us feeling we have no control over our lives.  When we’re depressed we don’t feel good about ourselves.  We convince ourselves that we’re not good enough.  Depression robs us of our ability to see ourselves and the world around us in a positive way. 

            Elijah was depressed.  In fact he was suicidal.  And it’s all rather surprising really.  He had just experienced the high point of his prophetic career.  The LORD had demonstrated that he was the God of Israel and that Elijah was his prophet by sending fire on soaked wood and sacrifices.  He had defeated the prophets of Baal and brought an end to a three year drought.  Despite this triumph he was a burnt out prophet.

Ahab reported back to Jezebel all that Elijah had done on Mount Carmel.  His main concern is not the fire from heaven or the deluge of rain.  Instead the massacre of the prophets by the sword was all that mattered.  Elijah had struck at the heart of Ahab and Jezebel’s power by decimating the religious cult and putting a big question mark over their power as king and queen.

            Jezebel sends Elijah a death threat via a messenger.  She’s a typical bully.  She’s furious with him but hasn’t the guts to face Elijah and deliver her message in person.  She calls down death from the gods on herself if she isn’t successful in cutting Elijah down. 

Elijah’s courageous standoff with Ahab and the prophet of Baal contrasts with his cowardice over Jezebel’s death warrant.  He’s running for his life.  This great prophet wobbles in the face of adversity.  Yet his cowardice does not cancel his courage.  The LORD does not abandon him to his fear.

            Now if the prophet Elijah had his weaknesses and God didn’t abandon him, what does that say to us?  Is this not assurance that God is with us when our faith is on top form and when it bottoms out?

Elijah comes to Beer-sheba in Judah.  He leaves his servant there.  Elijah is isolates himself.  Isn’t it amazing that when we’re down we push people away.  We retract into seclusion.  Being on our own feels like the best way to deal with things and yet it’s the worst thing we can do.

            Elijah goes a day’s journey into the wilderness and sits down under a solitary broom tree.  Frightened. Alone.  What was he thinking?  How was he feeling? 

            Elijah pleads for death from the Lord.  He’d rather the LORD took him than to be slaughtered by Jezebel’s henchmen.  Elijah has slipped into the abyss.  He’s had enough.  He wants to die. 

            He lies down.  Does he curl up in the foetal position as he falls asleep under the broom tree?   An angel touches him and invites him to get up and eat.  At his head he sees a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water.  He ate and drank and lay down again.  Elijah was exhausted after all that running in front of Ahab’s chariot – after all the praying and battling and bloodshed.  He needed to get his strength back.  The LORD comes a second time and touches him and tells him to eat.

When we exhausted emotionally sometimes people forget to eat.  They may have no appetite or they simply may not have the energy to prepare food.  The LORD wants Elijah to eat so that he has strength for the journey ahead.  Twice touched by the LORD, Elijah’s spiritual and physical exhaustion is met with sleep and food. 

            Elijah went in the strength of that food for forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mount of God.  It’s significant that Sinai is referred to as Horeb in three places in Exodus.  First in 3:1, the fire that burns but does not consume.  Second in 17:6, the water coming out of the rock when the people tested the LORD.  Last, in 33:6, when the golden calf is moulded out of jewellery.  Elijah battle with idolatry on Carmel by bringing down fire from heaven establishes that the God who reveals himself in the flaming is “I AM WHO I AM/I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE”.  Following the pattern of Moses, Elijah’s forty day/night journey brings him to Mount Horeb.  He spends the night in a cave.

            Elijah is touched twice by the angel of the Lord and now he is twice asked, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”  This is an important question for us to answer on the pilgrimage of faith.  What are we doing in the place that we are?  Elijah honestly answers.  He believes his zealous commitment to the LORD, the God of hosts has been met with Israel turning its back on the covenant through smashing the LORD’s altars and killing his prophets by the sword.  He believes he is the only God fearer left and is about to be exterminated.  This is his perception of reality even though he has just been at the heart of an amazing vindication of the LORD over the prophets of Baal. 

            The LORD tells Elijah to go and stand on the mountain before the LORD to watch him passing by.  We are called to go to the place of prayer...to the place where God reveals himself.  A wind splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces goes before the LORD but the LORD is not in this wind.  After the wind there is an earthquake and the LORD is not in the earthquake.  After the earthquake there is a fire but the LORD is not in the fire.  Wind, earthquake and fire herald the LORD’s coming.  Sheer silence follows fire. 

            Have you experienced the ambulance siren that pulses sound and gives a bump to the vehicle in front?  For those who don’t look in their rear view mirror it startles the driver to attention so that they will pull over.  The wind, earthquake, and fire are pulses announcing the coming of the Lord. 

Elijah hears the silence and wraps his face in his mantle.  He goes out and stands in the entrance of the cave.  Out of the silence the voice speaks for the second time:  “What are you doing here, Elijah?”  He repeats his story verbatim.  Nothing is going to shake him out of his self pity.

            The LORD doesn’t respond to Elijah with a lecture on reality.  He doesn’t say, “Come on Elijah, snap out of it!  Get a grip on reality.  You’re not alone.  It’s not that bad.”  Instead, the LORD gives him something to do.  Go to the wilderness of Damascus.  Anoint Hazael king over Aram.  Anoint Jehu king over Israel.  Anoint Elisha as your successor.  It’s only after he commands Elijah to DO something that the LORD gives him a reality check.  Seven thousand in Israel have not worshipped Baal.  They will be preserved.  Elijah isn’t alone after all. 

The best medicine for depression is to have a sense of purpose...something to do...a direction.  The amazing thing about Elijah’s mission is that he is preparing to go out of business.  His job is to anoint his successor.  You’d think that might be enough for Elijah to enter into another downward spiral.  Instead, he responds in obedience and carries on his ministry until he is swept up to heaven in a chariot of fire.

Victor Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist who lost everything during World War II.  His family and everything he owned was taken from him and he found himself enduring the horrors of Auschwitz.  In the lining of his coat he hid a manuscript of a book about finding meaning in life.  His theory was later termed “logotherapy”.  He was devastated when his coat was taken from him and then his clothes.  He was given the rags of another prisoner who’d been carted off to the gas chamber.  He wrote: 

Instead of the many pages of my manuscript, I found in the pocket of the newly acquired coat a single page torn out of a Hebrew prayer book, which contained the main Jewish prayer, Shema Yisrael (Hear, O Israel!  The Lord our God is one God.  And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.) 

How should I have interpreted such a ‘coincidence’ other than as a challenge to live my thoughts instead of merely putting them on paper?

Much later on in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he makes sense of finding hope in unimaginable suffering:  “There is nothing in the world that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions, as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life...He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”[i]

            Out of the silence God gives us a purpose.  Our mission is to love God with our whole being and do his will.  None of us have faced the death threat of Elijah or the devastation of Victor Frankl.  Yet in our moments of despair when we’ve lost sight of the truth about things, God comes to us.  He touches and feeds us.  Will you come eating bread and drinking wine, nourished by the death and resurrection of Jesus!  To know that he suffered gives our own suffering meaning.  Do you have a why to live for that gets you through whatever you experience in life?