After the Spiritual Battle
I Kings 18 is one of my favorite chapters in the Bible. I won’t retell the story (you can read it here), but this is where Elijah calls out those prophets of Baal and has a little contest. God proves to the people He is in fact God by listening to Elijah’s prayer and sending fire to consume a water-saturated sacrifice after the prophets of Baal had no success with their own bone-dry offering. As many times as I’ve read this, and what happened in chapter 19 after the spiritual battle, I always come away with some new insight, some new thought. This time, I didn’t even read it. Life intersected with my memory of this story and bought me something new.
You may have noticed it’s been a couple of weeks since my last article. It was a tough December/January. I won’t go into great detail, but on several levels, we felt like the devil himself was after us. Which, to be clear, is always the case with God’s people. It just felt more concentrated and manifested itself in all-too-concrete ways this time. What did we do? We prayed. And we trusted. But it was still quite the month. God didn’t send fire from heaven at our request. But He did give us deliverance in the form of answers and assurances. And we thanked Him.
Often, however, after getting through difficult slogs, there is the crash. I myself often get sick, like I did after my grandma’s funeral. Sure, the hardest part is over and there is relief, but the reverberations from the battle still echo. Maybe you replay things in your mind, and you find you’re really quite exhausted and hope nothing else is coming your way for a bit.
That didn’t look like it was going to happen for Elijah. Jezebel is still queen. She still holds Ahab’s heart. And she is raging after Elijah with blood on her mind. Elijah runs away and prays to God for God to take him before finally falling asleep, exhausted, under a broom tree. God isn’t going to take him yet – He rather provides him with food and tells him to take a trip. Which he does – to Mt. Horeb, also known as Sinai of Exodus fame. This must be God’s favorite mountain….
Elijah goes to sleep in a cave, which seems awfully metaphorical to me, but I’ll leave that for another time. Upon awaking, God asks him what he is doing there. Thus begins a conversation where neither Elijah nor God answers the other directly. First, Elijah pours out his complaints and God tells him to get out of the cave and stand on the mountain in His presence. Several scary things happen while Elijah is standing there – a great wind, an earthquake, and a fire in quick succession. The important thing to note here is that God is not in any of those things. Oh, He could have been, but He wasn’t. Rather, He comes in the gentle whisper that follows. God asks again, “What are you doing here?” Elijah repeats the same complaints. I think God takes that to mean Elijah is not particularly doing anything there and therefore has time to do something useful. He gives him a few jobs.
This is the kicker for me – God never chews Elijah out. He never blows him off, shakes him out, or burns him. He never says, “Come on already! I sent fire from heaven for you! What else do you want??” He doesn’t yell, “Don’t you get it already? I’m with you, you don’t have anything to be afraid of!” He didn’t begrudge him the forty days off. God wasn’t in the hurricane or the earthquake or the fire, He came in the gentle whisper to a man who needed to regain perspective.
And I take it this way – after the spiritual battle, God is okay with us taking some time to lick our wounds. He’s okay with waiting to tell us what He wants us to do next. He understands our frailty and accommodates accordingly. I, for one, and very glad of it….
