(Elijah #4-2/6)
THE REMEDY FOR HIS DEPRESSION Look at God’s servant now, morosely convinced that neither his own faith and
obedience on the one hand, nor the much publicised power of God to save on the other hand,
has really changed anything at all. See how God gently takes His stricken servant in hand.
Lost in the desert of despair, he is not lost to God. He feels that he is because he
has tumbled into the foolishness into which we all tumble when we become depressed. He has
shut his ears to every voice in the world except the complaining voice of his own
miserable and unhappy self. To that voice he gives his undivided attention. He needs -
desperately - to hear God’s voice. And soon, he will. But not just now, because for
the moment he has no ears for it. The time for counsel is not yet. God lets him say his
piece; He hears Elijah out, without rebuke, without interruption. He simply listens, till
His child has nothing left that is hidden still to say. The first thing a depressed person needs is someone who will listen, without rebuke and
without interruption, till he or she has said it all. The last thing a depressed person needs is someone who will kick him while he is down
by telling him "to pull himself together", or that "a Christian has no
business to be like that and he had better ask whether he was ever really born
again." God did not do that. He listened quietly and baked him a cake! According to Doctor God,
that is a depressed person’s first need - an understanding ear and kindly care so
they know they are not rejected, but accepted just as they are. Where we might feel
obliged to urge all sorts of drastic spiritual prescriptions upon the patient, God says
not a word. Too many of us want to be more spiritual than God. We should remember that
"Give us this day our daily bread" belongs in the same prayer as "Thy
Kingdom come." If you are depressed, do not try to be more spiritual than God. See to your physical
wellbeing first, and look around for "the cake God has baked for you" - the
supply of some practical necessity that carries an assurance of His care and regard for
you. That first. And then Elijah made his way to Horeb, the mount of God ... where Moses met Him. It is
hardly surprising that he went there. It was the God of Moses he had championed against
the Baals. Elijah wants to meet Him again where Moses met Him at the first. Verse 9 has an odd feature that is obscured by every translation I have consulted
except the Jerusalem Bible. The Hebrew says, "There he came to the cave ..." not
a cave, but the cave. What cave was that? The same cave surely of which we read in Exodus
33:22, where God said to Moses, "There is a place where you shall stand upon the
rock, and while my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will
cover you with my hand." That was the place. That is where he went. He wanted to hear
God speak, and speak to him, Elijah; he wanted to meet God again, face to face. Elijah knew, as every Christian knows, that when we can look into our Father’s
face the way a little child can look into his father’s face, and see that face light
up with the joy of beholding his little son, then we shall be happy again. So the prophet
went back to Horeb, responded to the need to go back to the first things, the old tried
things; just as the depressed person needs to go back to the foundations, back to the
Gospel, back to the Cross, where the light of God’s countenance shone upon him at the
first, and his burden of guilt and failure rolled away. When he knows that God has heard him, Elijah is ready to hear God. He is eager now to
listen to another voice than his own: the voice of God speaking out of His people’s
past, and reverberating still in memory. Remember this, when you are depressed. Do not stifle the voice of your desperate self.
Give it the floor. Let it state its whole case against life, and against God as
responsible for it. God encouraged Elijah to do that! But do not allow the dismal jimmy
within to be the only speaker on the floor. Insist that God also be heard. Let what He has
said also pour into the information room of your troubled heart. When the chaos of present
experience serves only to confuse, go back again to the remembered, tried and proven words
of God. What you knew once to be true, when you walked so joyfully in its light, has not
now become suddenly untrue, simply because you have walked into a dark place. So Elijah went to the cave. The story of what happened then is superbly told. The demonstrations of God’s
power and presence that have meant so much to Elijah pass before him again; the same
things that had been the signs of God’s presence on this mountain with Moses: the
storm, the earthquake and the fire. On Horeb, on Carmel, these things had been the power
of God, so God Himself was not distinguished from the instruments He used. But now, God Himself is not in them. Like a violin that had seemed a thing alive while
the violinist played it, so these things had seemed alive with God. But now, the way a
violin when it is laid aside becomes a dead thing, so all these things were empty of
God’s presence. What thoughts raced through the prophet’s mind as he crouched,
half forward to see, half backward to protect himself, and watched the gale shriek among
the savage peaks, felt the shock that split the trembling mountains and saw the flames of
the forest fire torn by the wind? It was in all these things he had known God once. Now
they were empty of Him. Was God lost to him, then? Where was God? And then, the great silence; and in the silence, the whisper of a gentle stillness. In
that stillness, Elijah was aware of God as he had never been before. All the world lay
quiet, like a tool a craftsman has laid aside, but God had not been laid aside with His
tools. He was near - in Elijah’s own inner being, nearer than his heart-beat. A man, a woman cannot, by searching, find out God. But let them search and God will
find out them. We must wait for God, until He comes. He is not at our beck and call, like
some genie when we rub a prayer lamp, but in His own sovereign freedom He will come, with
infinite majesty, in a stillness so awesome and alive that like Elijah we must bury our
face in our mantle, for none can behold Him and live. How long Elijah was held in thrall we are not told, but when that time had passed - as
pass it must - Elijah had been "made into another man," as had Saul. (I Samuel
10:6, 9) The vision of God does that; always it does that. And only the vision of God does
it. He knew now what before he doubted, that the Lord of Nature was also Lord of Humanity.
God was GOD still, in the inwardness of the human heart; whether Elijah’s or
Jezebel’s, God ruled and was sovereign. "He sits above the circle of the earth,
and its inhabitants are as grasshoppers before Him; He brings princes to nought, and makes
the rulers of the earth as nothing." (Isaiah 40:22) He is "the God of the
spirits of all flesh." (Numbers 27:16) And this new knowledge is confirmed in commands that bear directly on human lives.
Elijah, wallowing in despair under a broom tree had fancied himself a beaten man where
Jezebel had only begun to fight. But God it was Who had only begun to fight! For all its splendour then, Elijah’s high endeavour had been but an episode
(though a real one) in a long procession of events from far back that God was carrying
forward and building into a pattern of sweeping magnificence across the ages. Elijah would
stand one day upon a mountain in Galilee bathed in the splendour of the Son of God, and
know that his own and Moses’ work were but preludes to HIS final and age-abiding
triumph. "Lord," wrote Moses, "Thou hast been our dwelling-place in all
generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever Thou hadst formed the earth
and the world, from everlasting to everlasting Thou art God." (Psalm 90:1, 2) "The Lord has established His Throne in the heavens, and His kingdom rules over
all." (Psalm 103:19) Of this God, who is our God, it is written that His dwelling is with men. (Revelation
21:3) "For thus saith the high and lofty one, Who inhabits eternity, Whose Name is Holy,
I dwell in the high and holy place and also with him who is of a contrite heart and a
humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the
contrite." (Isaiah 57:15) That is where God is! And you and I may rest our lives in His hand ... even when they
are disordered! --------------- Rev Paul T Harrison BD (This material is copyright. Subscribers to this Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list are
welcome to use it, provided any written or spoken reproduction includes this notice to
acknowledge Rev Paul T Harrison as the author. Thankyou.)
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