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Horeb
“The law and the prophets were until John”; but both are now merged in the gospel of Jesus, who is all and in all. Moses and Elijah have long had audience of the people of God; but behold a greater than Moses or Elijah is here, and they must withdraw; and accordingly, when the Voice is silent and the cloud has cleared away, Jesus is left alone. No one remains to divide His authority, and none to share His sorrow. He must tread the winepress alone. Moses and Elijah return to the world of spirits-Jesus, God's beloved Son, to the world of men.
2. Elijah's mission was to restore in Israel the Law given in that very place through Moses. His disappointment would at first be intensified by the sacred associations of the place. In the presence of the wild scenery about him, and with memories of the giving of the Law, he could less than ever understand why the fire from heaven and the clear manifestation of the power of God had not been the beginning of a change which would immediately sweep every trace of Baal-worship from the land. The temper in which Elijah waited on the mountain for a vision of Jehovah is one that we can appreciate-a heavy and restless heart in which welled up both good and bad emotions; where faith was struggling with doubt, and pride with shame, and the impulse to complain against God beat against a longing to trust Him again.
3. Then came the revelation, a magnificent drama of nature in which the elements fought for the mastery. The narrative is spiritually one of the profoundest in the Old Testament. Jehovah represented to Elijah, by a magnificent acted parable, the contrast between law and grace, judgment and mercy. As the prophet of Jehovah, Elijah had been using the weapon of force. He had never conceived it possible to defeat the enemies of God by any other weapon. He had “magnified God's strictness with a zeal He will not own.” And he had failed. Force had left men hard and indifferent. Jehovah here made experiment upon Elijah with his own weapon. He visited the mountain with a hurricane, with an earthquake, and with a fire. The prophet's wounded spirit was not moved by any of these. Jehovah was not in them. But in the calm which followed the tumult he heard a still small voice (R.V. marg. “a sound of gentle stillness”) which thrilled his inmost being; he felt that God was there; self-abased, he wrapped his face in his mantle and waited to receive the Divine communications. He was thus taught the meaning of his failure. The priests have been killed, but Jezebel is still on the throne, as strong as ever and much more determined. Force has only aroused force. Compulsion begets compulsion. They that use the sword perish by the sword. Elijah can kill, but so can Jezebel, and she says she will, and will kill him. The storm-clouds do their work; earthquakes and fire have their mission in the progress of the universe, but mind is the master of the body, and the soul is superior to the flesh, and God is over all. And though He answers by fire, that is not the best answer He gives to the questions of the spirit of man; that best answer He supplies in the quiet of the inward life, by His gentle patience and forbearance, forgiving mercy and solacing love. The Kingdom of God comes not so much by startling miracles as through quiet human agencies and in the slow movements of history. Elijah is therefore shown that Jehovah has still a great work for him to do: he must shape the destinies of two great nations, and provide for the continuance of the prophetic succession. Three commands are laid upon him: to anoint Hazael to be king over Syria, Jehu to be king over Israel, and Elisha to be his own successor-to be a friend of the lonely man, a companion, a comrade, to humanize this son of the desert, to free him of his egotism and broaden his sympathies. And he is comforted with the assurance that the work in which he has been engaged has not been a failure; Jehovah reserves for Himself seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal.
Elijah's methods were tried on himself-power, force, law, Sinai. And the effects were nought. The Lord was not in the earthquake or in the fire. Did the prophet wonder now at the obdurate king, at the besotted people, at the fickle crowd, at the mad, vindictive queen? What had he been plying them with all his days? With miracle on miracle, a gloomy demeanour, heavens of brass, famine, thirst, death, with law and force. Does he wonder at the result now, after his present experience? Or is not his wonder rather turned in upon himself? He had been enabled to sound the deeps of that conception of God which had all his life fascinated him; he had come to His chosen place, and he found that God was something different from his idea of Him, and that His highest power was not of the kind he imagined. May we not learn something from this? Does not the conception of God which any of us has need to be supplemented? Do we not work somewhat too much on one idea of Him, thinking it perhaps a full one; and, in consequence, our work is less successful than it should be? Perhaps with some of us it is the same defect as marked Elijah's; we rather still adhere to the God of Sinai. Yet there must have been a parable to Elijah in this earthquake and this fire which were powerless, followed by the small voice in which was God Himself-a parable of Sinai and Calvary. And might there not rise up before him some such scene as he was yet to witness and to share on the Mount of Transfiguration, when the thunders of Sinai should die down, and become lower and lower through successive ages, till at last they were succeeded by the still small voice of one who “did not cry nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street,” but who was “God with us,” “unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” “For what the law could not do”-even though wielded by an Elijah-“God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin,” did-“condemned sin in the flesh: that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.”
The hugeness and immensity of the soul's interests and needs is frequently very oppressive to me. The feeling of exigency is soon suggested and not easily allayed. I need a great deal of actual Divine upholding: “I should have fainted unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord,” and I ought the more to love and serve Him; because while my fears are quickly roused and very urgent I am almost habitually raised above them; but I need to learn more fully what is implied in the promise, “In quietness and confidence shall be your strength.”1 [Note: Letters of James Smetham, 140.]
4. Of the three commissions to Elijah, one only was carried out by himself. Elisha was found ploughing his father's field, and was called to his life-work by the casting of the prophet's mantle upon him. Asking that he might bid farewell to his father and mother, he was told to do so, but with the implied warning in the prophet's exclamation, “What have I done to thee!” that his call was for life, and that there could be no return. His total break with the past was symbolized by a sacrificial feast of one of his twelve pair of oxen, boiled on a fire made of the yoke and plough he would use no more. “Then he arose, and went after Elijah, and ministered unto him.” The “anointing” of Hazael (not literally performed in his case) and of Jehu was carried out, not by Elijah, but by Elisha.
Elijah belongs to a class of men specially gifted for special purposes. Their weapon is not love, but truth. They are born not to win, but to coerce by will. Self-conquerors, and therefore subduers of men. Hence they are qualified for reformers-they are stern, inflexible. Such men have few loves, and few private affections. Their life is public; their interests national, not private. Hence their characters are sad, for they are separated from sympathy; but hence also are they elevated. The less they have of a home here, the more they make themselves a home in the awful other world, and find sympathy in God. Such a man was the Baptist, and such was Elijah.2 [Note: F. W. Robertson, The Human Race, 87.]
Spiritual teachers in all ages have perhaps fallen into the error of Elijah. They have exaggerated; they have gone into extremes, into which those whom they taught could not follow them. It is not necessary to follow them into their extremes. But these extremes are greatly due to their feeling of being isolated, and to the seemingly immovable insensibility of those whom they have to instruct. Cordial co-operation, cordial sympathy in the great general truths of the Faith, will remove these feelings and these exaggerations. And then Christian teaching will become calm, and simple, and natural; and the stream of Christian truth and life, instead of being like a noisy, furious, foaming brook, dashing itself against everything within its reach, will advance like a great, broad, placid river, without a wave upon its surface, absorbing into itself, from all sides, every contribution of the thought and life of men, and moving on with a power that nothing can resist.1 [Note: A. B. Davidson, The Called of God, 182.]