After the Fire

There is a cave on a mountain far to the south, and a man is spending the night in it who has already asked God to take his life.

Elijah has just won a great victory on Mount Carmel. Then Jezebel sends him one messenger with one threat, and he runs. He goes to Beersheba and leaves his servant there, and then he goes a day's journey into the wilderness and sits down under a juniper tree: "It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life." He falls asleep, and an angel touches him and says, "Arise and eat." He eats and lies down again. The angel comes a second time, touches him again, and gives a reason: "because the journey is too great for thee." On the strength of that food he travels forty days to Horeb, the mount of God. Up to this point, nobody has said a word to him about his state of mind. God has simply fed him and let him sleep.

At the cave he is asked a question: "What doest thou here, Elijah?" He answers with a speech that sounds well practised: "I have been very jealous for the LORD God of hosts," and "I, even I only, am left." Then God tells him to go out and stand on the mountain. "A great and strong wind" breaks the rocks in pieces, "but the LORD was not in the wind." An earthquake follows, "but the LORD was not in the earthquake." Then comes a fire, "but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice." The Hebrew describes a sound of thin quiet, and its word for stillness is the one a psalm uses when God "maketh the storm a calm."

Here is the part that is easy to miss. The voice asks the same question again, "What doest thou here, Elijah?" and Elijah gives word for word the same answer as before. The wind, the earthquake and the fire have not changed him. What God gives him next is work and company: three men to anoint, and one fact he did not know. "Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel." He was wrong about being the only one left, and God does not scold him for it.

Go back to the mouth of the cave. Elijah stayed inside through the wind, the earthquake and the fire, and it was the quiet that brought him out. When he heard it, "he wrapped his face in his mantle," and "stood in the entering in of the cave." He was the same tired man with the same complaint, yet from that doorway God sent him back up the road he had run down, with work to do and seven thousand faithful people he had not known about. The same God still feeds the worn out, speaks to them quietly, and sends them back on their way with company.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 307 is A Special People (Deuteronomy 7:6).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two