Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 307 · November 3
After the Fire
“And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.”
The mouth of a cave on a mountain in the far south, and a man asleep inside it who has already asked God to kill him.
Elijah has just won on Carmel. Jezebel sends one messenger with one sentence, and he runs. Beersheba, where he leaves his servant, a day out into the wilderness, a juniper tree: It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life. Then he sleeps, and an angel touches him: Arise and eat. He eats and lies down again. The angel comes back a second time, touches him again, and gives a reason: because the journey is too great for thee. Then forty days on the strength of that meat, and nobody has yet said a word to him about his state of mind.
At the cave he gets a question. What doest thou here, Elijah? He answers with a speech he has clearly rehearsed: I have been very jealous for the LORD God of hosts, and I, even I only, am left. Then he is put out on the mountain. A great and strong wind, and the LORD was not in the wind. An earthquake, and the LORD was not in the earthquake. A fire, and the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire a still small voice. Ten English Bibles, checked one by one, all keep the quietness: a still small voice in some, a gentle whisper in others.
Then the part that gets missed. The voice asks the same question: What doest thou here, Elijah? And he gives the same answer, word for word, unchanged by any of it. What he is given is work and company: three men to anoint, and one fact he did not have. Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel. He was wrong about being the last one, and nobody scolds him for it.
Return to the mouth of the cave. He stayed inside it for the wind and the earthquake and the fire; what brought him out was the quiet. He wrapped his face in his mantle and stood in the entering in of the cave, the same tired man with the same complaint, and from that doorway was sent back up the road he had run down.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 307 is A Special People (Deuteronomy 7:6).