1 Kings 19:17

A short time before, Elijah stood on Mount Carmel and saw the LORD answer by fire, and the prophets of Baal were put to death (1 Kings 18). The victory was answered by a death threat from Queen Jezebel. Elijah fled for his life, sat down in the wilderness and asked God to let him die. God sent him food and rest, and in the strength of that food he travelled forty days and forty nights to Horeb (1 Kings 19:1–8).

Several things lay behind his despair. He was worn out in body and spirit after the struggle on Carmel. Jezebel’s threat was real and close. And he felt that he stood alone, as he says in verse 10. Scripture tells us honestly that a mighty servant of God can be brought very low.

Horeb is another name for Mount Sinai. It is where God appeared to Moses in the burning bush (Exodus 3:1–2), and where he made his covenant with Israel and gave the Law (Exodus 19–20). Elijah’s flight ends at the place where Israel’s covenant began, and he comes there in need of God himself as well as of safety. Scripture often makes the wilderness a place where God meets his people, and in Hosea God promises to woo Israel in the wilderness (Hosea 2:14).

The cave, mᵉʻârâh, is the ordinary word for a cave. Caves were common shelters in that rugged country, used by shepherds, by travellers and by people running from danger, as David hid in the cave of Adullam. Elijah “lodged there”, settling in for the night as far from everyone as he could get.

“And, behold, the word of the LORD came to him.” Elijah has gone to the end of the road, and God comes to him there. The word for “word”, dâbâr, means a word or speech, and it can also mean a matter or thing. The name of God here is Yᵉhôvâh, the LORD, the covenant name of the eternal, self-existent God who binds himself to his people. So the one who speaks in the cave is the God of the very covenant Elijah believes Israel has thrown away. “Behold”, from the Hebrew v’hinneh, marks a sudden turn. Elijah came to the cave to be alone, and God speaks first.

A psalm asks where anyone could go from God’s presence, and finds his hand holding us in the farthest places (Psalm 139:7–10). Elijah finds the same in a cave at the end of a forty-day journey.

God asks, “What doest thou here, Elijah?” He calls the prophet by name. God already knows where Elijah is and why, so the question is for Elijah’s sake. It draws out what is in his heart, his fear, his frustration and his sense of failure, so that he can say them to God.

Elijah answers, “I have been very jealous for the LORD God of hosts.” The verb qânâʼ means to be zealous or jealous. Scripture uses it of God himself, who calls himself a jealous God and claims his people’s worship for himself alone (Exodus 20:5). Elijah feels the dishonour done to God as his own pain. His zeal is a righteous one, the zeal for which Phinehas was praised (Numbers 25:11), and the zeal for God’s house that consumed the psalmist (Psalm 69:9).

He calls on “the LORD God of hosts”, the God who commands all armies and all creation. There is irony in it. Elijah speaks to the God of all power about his own helplessness, and under his words lies a question about why such a God lets his covenant be forsaken and his prophets killed.

Then come three charges. Israel has “forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword”. The covenant, bᵉrîyth, is a covenant, alliance or treaty, and here it is the covenant God made with Israel at Sinai, which bound them to worship him alone. The altars are the LORD’s altars, torn down while altars to Baal went up. The prophets are the LORD’s true prophets, hunted down under Jezebel. Obadiah, who was over Ahab’s household, had hidden a hundred of them in caves and fed them with bread and water (1 Kings 18:4). Killing God’s messengers is a sin that returns again and again in Israel’s story, as with the prophet Uriah in Jeremiah’s day (Jeremiah 26:20–23). The three charges stand side by side and build in weight, from forsaking God’s covenant to killing his servants.

This was the reign of Ahab and Jezebel over the northern kingdom of Israel, in the ninth century before Christ. Jezebel, a princess from Phoenicia, promoted the worship of Baal with all the power of the throne, and anyone who stayed loyal to the LORD lived under heavy pressure.

Then the cry at the heart of it: “and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.” The verb for being left, yâthar, means to remain or be left over, the word for what survives. Elijah is sure he is the last faithful prophet, and his life is the one Jezebel wants. His prayer is a lament, a cry of complaint and sorrow brought straight to God, of the kind found in the Psalms and the prophets. Jeremiah poured out his own loneliness to God in the same way (Jeremiah 15:10), and God receives Elijah’s lament as he received Jeremiah’s.

God says, “Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the LORD.” To stand “before the LORD” is to stand in God’s own presence. Then “the LORD passed by”. The verb ‘avar means to pass over or pass by, and it recalls what God did for Moses on this same mountain. He promised, “I will make all my goodness pass before thee” (Exodus 33:19), and then “passed by before him” and proclaimed his name (Exodus 34:6). On the mountain where God passed by Moses, he now passes by Elijah.

Three mighty things go before him. First “a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD”. The word rûwach means wind, breath or spirit, and this wind is strong enough to tear the mountain apart. Then comes an earthquake, raʻash, a shaking or quaking of the ground. Then comes a fire.

Each of these marks God’s coming elsewhere in Scripture. At this mountain he came down to give the Law in thunder, lightning and thick cloud (Exodus 19:16–19). He appeared to Moses in a flame of fire in the bush (Exodus 3:2), and he is called a consuming fire (Deuteronomy 4:24). He answered Job out of the whirlwind (Job 38:1). And on Carmel Elijah had just watched fire fall from heaven and consume his sacrifice (1 Kings 18:38). Elijah, and anyone who knew Sinai’s story, would expect God to come in exactly these.

Yet after each one the verse says, “but the LORD was not in the wind”, “but the LORD was not in the earthquake”, and in verse 12, “but the LORD was not in the fire”. The KJV prints “but” and “was” as words the translators supplied, and the Hebrew is blunter still. The LORD is sovereign over wind, earthquake and fire, and they go before him at his bidding, and he makes himself known to Elijah in a way of his own choosing.

This had a sharp edge in Elijah’s day. Baal was worshipped as the storm and fertility god, the “lord” who was thought to send rain and harvest. On the mountain of the covenant the LORD lets storm and quake and fire pass by as things he commands, and then he comes to his prophet in quietness.

“And after the fire a still small voice.” In Hebrew it is qol demamah daqqah. qôwl is the word for a voice or for any sound, from a whisper to thunder. dᵉmâmâh comes from a root meaning to be silent or still, and means quiet, calm or stillness. daq means thin, fine or small, and its root carries the sense of something crushed fine. Together they describe a sound so quiet it is close to silence, a whisper after the roar, heard by someone listening closely. That is why some translations render it a gentle whisper.

When Elijah hears it, he knows that God is near, and he goes out to meet him.

When Elijah hears the voice he wraps his face in his mantle, goes out and stands in the entrance of the cave. The mantle, ʼaddereth, is a large outer cloak, the garment that marked Elijah as a prophet and stood for his calling and authority. Later he would strike the Jordan with this same mantle and the waters would part (2 Kings 2:8).

Covering the face before God is a sign of reverence and awe before his holiness. Moses hid his face at the burning bush (Exodus 3:6), and the seraphim cover their faces before the LORD’s throne (Isaiah 6:2). When the LORD had spoken to Job, Job humbled himself before him (Job 40:4). Elijah covers his face with the very garment of his calling, bowing in worship before the God who gave it.

He came to the cave to hide, and now he moves to its mouth. He still keeps a reverent distance at the threshold, but he has turned toward God and is ready to hear.

“Go, return on thy way to the wilderness of Damascus”. The way, derek, is the road Elijah must now take, and midbâr means wilderness or desert. Damascus, Dammeseq, was the capital of Syria, or Aram, a strong and often hostile neighbour of Israel. Elijah is to turn round from his flight and head toward the land of Israel’s enemy.

“anoint Hazael to be king over Syria”. The verb mâshach means to smear or rub with oil, to anoint. When it is done to consecrate someone, it sets that person apart for an office by God’s choice, as Samuel anointed Saul and then David. Kings and priests were anointed in Israel, and prophets less often. Hazael, Chăzâʼêl, a name meaning “God has seen”, was a high official at the court of Ben-hadad, king of Syria.

For an Israelite prophet to anoint a foreign king was highly unusual, and it shows that the LORD rules the nations as well as Israel. He removes kings and sets up kings (Daniel 2:21), and it is he who appoints leaders (Psalm 75:6–7). Isaiah calls Assyria the rod of God’s anger, an instrument in his hand (Isaiah 10:5–7), and God calls Cyrus his anointed (Isaiah 45:1). Hazael would become a cruel ruler and an instrument of God’s judgment on Israel for its idolatry.

“Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel”. The verb here is shâʼar, to remain or be left, and in this causative form to leave over or spare. Its subject is God: “I have left me”. The faithful in Israel exist because God kept them for himself.

“Seven thousand” is shebaʻ (“seven”) with ʼeleph (“thousand”). Against Elijah’s “I, even I only”, God names a real company of living people whom Elijah had never seen, and he knows how many they are. Elijah could see only his own loneliness, and God knew each of them. Seven often carries a sense of fullness in Scripture, and here that sense rests on a real count.

Two marks set these people apart. The first is “all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal”. The knee, berek, stands for the whole person in worship, and kâraʻ means to bend the knee, bow down or fall prostrate, the plainest act of homage to a god. Baʻal, the name of the god, also means “lord”. The second is “every mouth which hath not kissed him”. The mouth, peh, again stands for the whole person, and nâshaq means to kiss, and also to touch. Worshippers kissed their idols, or kissed the hand and touched it to the idol, as a sign of devotion and loyalty, and Hosea speaks of men who kiss the calves (Hosea 13:2). Together the knee and the mouth cover the whole of outward worship, and the seven thousand refused both while the throne itself urged Baal on them.

This is one of the great places in Scripture for the remnant, a faithful company kept by God’s grace while most of the nation turns away. Isaiah says that without the small remnant the LORD left, Judah would have been like Sodom (Isaiah 1:9), and Zephaniah speaks of a humble and afflicted people left in the land who trust in the name of the LORD (Zephaniah 3:12–13). Paul quotes Elijah’s complaint and God’s answer, and says that in his own day too there is a remnant chosen by grace (Romans 11:2–5). God’s covenant stands even when his people are unfaithful, because he keeps a people for himself.

Elijah’s zeal for the LORD looks ahead to the zeal of Jesus. When he drove the traders from the temple, his disciples remembered the psalm about zeal for God’s house (John 2:17). Israel’s long habit of rejecting and killing God’s prophets came to its height when the nation rejected him, the one despised and rejected of men (Isaiah 53:3). Elijah only felt that he was alone, and Jesus truly bore abandonment on the cross, crying, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). Even then he was the Son who always did what pleased the Father (John 8:29). Elijah asked to die, and Jesus laid down his life of his own will (John 10:18) to bring in a better covenant, written on hearts (Hebrews 8:6–13).

Elijah fled into the wilderness in fear. Jesus went into the wilderness and met the tempter there, and held to his mission all the way to the cross (Matthew 4:1–11). The God who sought Elijah in his cave is seen in the Good Shepherd who leaves the ninety and nine to find the one that is lost (Luke 15:4–7). Jesus asked questions that drew people out, as when he asked blind Bartimaeus what he wanted him to do (Mark 10:51). He himself knew weariness and anguish, and found strength in prayer to his Father in Gethsemane (Luke 22:42). He invites all who labour and are heavy laden to come to him for rest (Matthew 11:28–30), and because our high priest is touched with the feeling of our weaknesses, we may come boldly to the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:15–16).

The word of the LORD that came to Elijah has come to us in person. The Word was God from the beginning (John 1:1), and he was made flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). God, who spoke in many ways in the past, has spoken to us by his Son (Hebrews 1:1–3). The still small voice also looks ahead to the way God came in Christ, humbly, as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). God’s power is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9), and his kingdom grows quietly, like seed growing secretly (Mark 4:26–29) or leaven in meal (Matthew 13:33). The Holy Spirit, sent in Christ’s name, teaches us (John 14:26) and guides us into all truth (John 16:13).

Elijah was sent to anoint kings and a prophet, and Jesus is the Anointed One himself. “Messiah” comes from the Hebrew mashiach and “Christ” from the Greek christos, and both mean anointed. He was anointed with the Holy Spirit (Luke 4:18–19, Acts 10:38). He is the prophet like Moses whom God promised to raise up (Deuteronomy 18:18) and the King of kings and Lord of lords (Revelation 19:16). He will judge the living and the dead (2 Timothy 4:1), and through his death God is both just and the one who justifies those who believe in Jesus (Romans 3:25–26). As Elisha carried on Elijah’s work, Jesus sent the Spirit on his disciples to make them his witnesses (Acts 1:8), and promised that those who believe in him would do the works he did (John 14:12).

The remnant of seven thousand looks ahead to the people God has gathered in Christ. The Lord knows them that are his (2 Timothy 2:19), and his people are a chosen generation, a holy nation, called out of darkness into his light (1 Peter 2:9).

This passage shows us a God who goes looking for his servant at his lowest. Elijah ran from his work, sat in a cave and wished he were dead, and the word of the LORD came to him there and called him by name. God let him say all that was in his heart, twice, and answered him with patience, with his presence and with a task.

It shows us that the LORD commands wind, earthquake and fire, and that he also comes close in a still small voice. He chooses how he will make himself known, and he gave a weary prophet what that prophet most needed.

It shows us that God’s work is far larger than anything one servant can see. He was already ruling the kings of Syria and Israel and preparing Elisha, and he had kept seven thousand faithful people that Elijah knew nothing about. When faithfulness to God feels lonely, God’s answer to Elijah is ours as well: he has a people of his own, and he knows every one of them. He has promised that he will never leave us nor forsake us (Hebrews 13:5).