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Expositor's Bible Commentary 1 Kings 19:1 And Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and withal how he had slain all the prophets with the sword. ELIJAH’S FLIGHT 1 Kings 19:1-4 "A still small voice comes through the wild, Like a father consoling his fretful child, Which banisheth bitterness, wrath and fear, Saying, ‘Man is distant, but God is near."’ - TEMPLE THE misgiving which, joined to his ascetic dislike of cities, made Elijah stop his swift race at the entrance of Jezreel was more than justified. Ahab’s narrative of the splendid contest at Carmel produced no effect upon Jezebel whatever, and we can imagine the bitter objurgations which she poured upon her cowering husband for having stood quietly by while her prophets and Baal’s prophets were being massacred by this dark fanatic, aided by a rebellious people. Had she been there all should have been otherwise! In contemptuous defiance of Ahab’s fears or wishes, she then and there-and it must now have been after nightfall-dispatched a messenger to find Elijah, wherever he might be hiding himself, and say to him in her name: "As sure as thou art Elijah, and I am Jezebel, may my gods avenge it upon me if on the morrow by this time I have not made thy life like the life of one of my own murdered priests." In the furious impetuosity of the message we see the determination of the sorceress-queen. In her way she was as much in deadly earnest as Elijah was. Whether Baal had been defeated or not, she was not defeated, and Elijah should not escape her vengeance. The oath shows the intensity of her rage, like that of the forty Jews who hound themselves by the cherem that they would not eat or drink till they had slain Paul; and the fixity of her purpose as when Richard III declared that he would not dine till the head of Buckingham had fallen on the block. We cannot but notice the insignificance to which she reduced her husband, and the contempt with which she treated the voice of her people. She presents the spectacle, so often reproduced in history and reflected in literature, of a strong fierce woman-a Clytemnestra, a Brunhault, a lady Macbeth, an Isabella of France, a Margaret of Anjou, a Joan of Naples, a Catherine de Medicis-completely dominating a feebler consort. The burst of rage which led her to send the message defeated her own object. The awfulness which invested Elijah, and the supernatural powers on which he relied, when he was engaged in the battles of the Lord, belonged to him only in his public and prophetic capacity. As a man he was but a poor, feeble, lonely subject, whose blood might be shed at any moment. He knew that God works no miracles for the supersession of ordinary human precautions. It was no part of his duty to throw away his life, and give a counter triumph to the Baal-worshippers whom he had so signally humiliated. He fled, and went for his life. Swift flight was easy to that hardy frame and that trained endurance, even after the fearful day on Carmel and the wild race of fifteen miles from Carmel to Jezreel. It was still night, and cool, and the haunts and byways of the land were known to the solitary and hunted wanderer. "He feared, and he rose, and he went for his life," ninety-five miles to Beersheba, once a town of Simeon, now the southern limit of the kingdom of Judah, thirty-one miles south of Hebron. But in the tumult of his feelings and the peril of his position he could not stay in any town. At Beersheba he left his servant-perhaps, as legend says, the boy of Zarephath, who became the prophet Jonah-but, in any case, not so much a servant as a youth in training for the prophetic office. It was necessary for him to spend his dark hour alone; for, if there are hours in which human sympathy is all but indispensable, there are also hours in which the soul can tolerate no communion save that with God. {Mat 26:36} So, leaving all civilization behind him, he plunged a day’s journey into that great and terrible wilderness of Paran, where he too was alone with the wild beasts. And, then utterly worn out, he flung himself down under the woody stem of a solitary rhotem plant. The plant is the wild broom with "its cloud of pink blossoms" which often afford the only shadow under the glaring sun in the waste and weary land, and beneath the slight but grateful shade of which the Arab to this day is glad to pitch his tent. And there the pent-up emotions of his spirit, which had gone through so tremendous a strain, broke up as in one terrible sob, when the strong man, like a tired child, "requested for himself that he might die." Of what use was life any longer? He had fought for Jehovah, and won, and after all been humiliatingly defeated. He had prophesied the drought, and it had withered and scorched up the erring, afflicted land. He had prayed for the rain, and it had come in a rush of blessing on the reviving fields. In the Wady Cherith, in the house of the Phoenician widow, he had been divinely supported and sheltered from hot pursuit. He had snatched her boy from death. He had stood before kings, and not been ashamed. He had stretched forth his hands to a disobedient and gainsaying people, and not in vain. He had confounded the rich-vested and royally maintained band of Baal’s priests, and in spite of their orgiastic leapings and self-mutilations had put to shame their Sun-god under his own burning sun. He had kept pace with Ahab’s chariot-steeds as he conducted him as it were in triumph, through the streaming downpour of that sweeping storm, to his summer capital. Of what use was it all? Was it anything but a splendid and deplorable failure? And he said: "It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life: for I am not better than my fathers" He could have cried with the poet:- "Let the heavens burst, and drown with deluging rain The feeble vassals of lust, and anger, and wine, The little hearts that know not how to forgive; Arise, O God, and strike, for we count Thee just- We are not worthy to live." Who does not know something of this feeling of utter overwhelming despondency, of bitter disillusionment concerning life and our fellow-men? Some great writer has said, with truth, "that there is probably no man with a soul above that of the brutes that perish, to whom a time has not come in his life, when, were you to tell him that he would not wake to see another day, he would receive the message with something like gladness." There are some whose lives have been so saddened by some special calamity that for long years together they have not valued them. F.W. Robertson, troubled by various sorrows, and worried (as the best men are sure to be) by the petty ecclesiastical persecutions of priests and formalists, wrote in a letter on a friend’s death: "How often have I thought of the evening when he left Tours, when, in our boyish friendship, we set our little silver watches exactly together, and made a compact to look at the moon exactly at the same moment that night and think of each other. I do not remember a single hour in life since then which I would have arrested, and said, ‘Let this stay." "Melancholy so deep as this is morbid and unnatural," and he himself wrote in a brighter mood: "Positively I will not walk with any one in these tenebrous avenues of cypress and yew. I like sunny rooms and sunny truth. When I had more of spring and warmth I could afford to be prodigal of happiness: but now I want sunlight and sunshine. I desire to enter into those regions where cheerfulness and truth and health of heart and mind reside." Life has its real happiness for those who have deserved, and taken the right method to attain it; but it can never escape its hours of impenetrable gloom; and they sometimes seem to be darkest for the noblest souls. Petty souls are irritated by little annoyances, and the purely selfish disappointments which avenge the exaggerated claims of our "shivering egotism." But while little mean spirits are tormented by the insect-swarm of little mean worries, great souls are liable to be beaten down by the waves and storms of immense calamities-the calamities which affect nations and churches, the "desperate currents" of whose sins and miseries seem to be sometimes driven through the channels of their single hearts. Only such a man as an Elijah can measure the colossal despondency of an Elijah’s heart. In the apparently absolute failure, the seemingly final frustration of such men as these there is something nobler than in the highest personal exaltations of ignobler souls. "Now, O Lord, take away my life!" The prayer, however natural, however excusable, is never right. It is a sign of insufficient faith, of human imperfection; but it is breathed by different persons in a spirit so different that in some it almost rises to nobleness, as in others it sinks quite beneath contempt. Scripture gives us several specimens of both moods. If Jonah was, indeed, the servant-pupil of Elijah, the legendary story of that meanest-minded of all the prophets-the meanest-minded and paltriest, not perhaps as he was in reality-for of him, historically, we know scarcely anything-but as he is represented in the profound and noble allegory which bears his name- might almost seem to have been written in tacit antithesis to the story of Elijah. Elijah flies only when he has done the mighty work of God, and only when the life is in deadly peril which he would fain save for future emergencies of service; Jonah flies that he may escape, out of timid selfishness, the work of God. Elijah wishes himself dead because he thinks that the glorious purpose of his life has been thwarted, and that the effort undertaken for the deliverance of his people has failed; Jonah wishes himself dead, first, because he repines at God’s mercy, and would prefer that his personal credit should be saved and his personal importance secured than that God should spare the mighty city of Nineveh with its one hundred and twenty thousand little children; and then because the poor little castor-oil plant has withered, which gave him shelter from the noon. Considering the traditional connection between them; it seems to me impossible to overlook an allusive contrast between the noble and mighty Elijah under his solitary rhotem plant in the wilderness wishing for death in the anguish of a heart "which nobly loathing strongly broke." and the selfish splenetic Jonah wishing himself dead in pettish vexation under his palma Christi because Nineveh is forgiven and the sun is hot. There are indeed times when humanity is tried beyond its capacity, when the cry for restful death is wrung from souls crushed under accumulations of quite intolerable anguish and calamity. In the fret of long-continued sleeplessness, in sick and desolate and half-starved age, in attacks of disease incurable, long-continued, and full of torture, God will surely look with pardoning tenderness on those whose faith is unequal to so terrible a strain. It was pardonable surely of Job to curse the day of his birth when-smitten with elephantiasis, a horror, a hissing, an astonishment, bereaved of all his children, and vexed by the obtrusive orthodoxies of his petty Pharisaic friends; unconscious, too, that it was God’s hand which was all the while leading him through the valley of the shadow into the land of righteousness-he cried: "Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life to the bitter in soul?" In those who have no hope and are without God in the world, this mood-not when expressed in passing passion as by the saintly man of Uz, but when brooded on and indulged-leads to suicide, and in the one instance recorded in each Testament, an Ahithophel and a Judas, the despairing souls of the guilty:- "Into the presence of their God Rushed in with insult rude." But Elijah’s mood, little as it was justifiable in this its extreme form, was but the last infirmity of a noble mind. It has often recurred among those grandest of the servants of God who may sink into the deepest dejection from contrast with the spiritual attitudes to which they have soared. It is with them as with the lark which floods the blue air with its passion of almost delirious rapture, yet suddenly, as though exhausted, drops down silent into its lowly nest in the brown furrows. There is but one man in the Old Testament who, as a prophet, stands on the same level as Elijah, -he who stood with Elijah on the snowy heights of Hermon when their Lord was transfigured into celestial brightness, and they spake together of His decease at Jerusalem. And Moses had passed through the same dark hour as that through which Elijah was passing now, when he saw the tears, and heard the murmurs of the greedy, selfish, ungrateful people, who hated their heavenly manna, and lusted for the leeks and fleshpots of their Egyptian bondage. Revolted by this obtrusion upon him of human nature in its lowest meanness, he cried to God under his intolerable burden: "Have I conceived all this people? I am not able to bear all this people alone. And if Thou deal thus with me, kill me, I pray Thee, out of hand; and let me not see my wretchedness." In Moses, as doubtless in Elijah, so far from being the clamor of whining selfishness, his anguish was part of the same mood which made him offer his life for the redemption of the people; which made St. Paul ready to wish himself anathema from Jesus Christ if thereby he could save his brethren after the flesh. Danton rose into heroism when he exclaimed, " Que mon nom soit fletri, pourvu que la France soit libre "; and Whitefield, when he cried, "Perish George Whitefield, so God’s work be done": and the Duke of Wellington when remonstrated with for joining in the last charge at Waterloo, with the shot whistling round his head he said, "Never mind; the victory is won, and now my life is of no consequence." In great souls the thought of others, completely dominating the base man’s concentration in self, may create a despondency which makes them ready to give up their life, not because it is a burden to themselves, but because it seems to them as if their work was over, and it was beyond their power to do more for others. Tender natures as well as strong natures are liable to this inrush of hopelessness: and if it sometimes kills them by its violence, this is only a part of God’s training of them into perfection. "So unaffected, so composed a mind, So firm, yet soft, so strong, yet so refined, Heaven, as its purest gold, by tortures tried:- The saint sustained it, but the woman died." The cherubim of the sanctuary had to be made of the gold of Uphaz, the finest and purest gold. It was only the purest gold which could be tortured by workmanship into forms of exquisite beauty. The mind of Jeremiah was as unlike that of Elijah as can possibly be conceived. He was a man of shrinking and delicate temperament, and his life is the most pathetic tragedy among the biographies of Scripture. The mind of Elijah. like those of Dante or Luther or Milton, was all ardor and battle brunt; the mind of Jeremiah, like that of Melancthon, was timid as that of a gentle boy. A man like Dante or Milton, when he stands alone, hated by princes and priests and people, retorts scorn for scorn, and refuses to change his voice to hoarse or mute. Yet even Dante died of a broken heart, and in Milton’s mighty autobiographical wail of Samson Agonistes, amid all its trumpet-blast of stern defiance, we read the sad notes:- "Nor am I in the list of them that hope; Hopeless are all my evils, all remediless; This one prayer yet remains, might I be heard, No long petition, speedy death, The close of all my miseries, and the balm." When the insolent priest Pashur smote Jeremiah in the face, and put him for a night and a day in the common stocks, the prophet-after telling Pashur that, for this awful insult to God’s messenger, his name, which meant "joy far and wide," should be changed into Magormissabib , "terror on every side"-utterly broke down, and passionately cursed the day of his birth. {Jer 20:1-18} And yet his trials were very far from ended then. Homeless, wifeless, childless, slandered, intrigued against, undermined-protesting apparently in vain against the hollow shams of a self-vaunting reformation-the object of special hatred to all the self-satisfied religionists of his day, the lonely persecuted servant of the Lord ended only in exile and martyrdom the long trouble of his eternally blessed but seemingly unfruitful life. I dwell on this incident in the life of Elijah because it is full of instructiveness. Scripture is not all on a dead level. There are many pages of it which belong indeed to the connected history, and therefore carry on the general lessons of the history, but which are, in themselves, almost empty of any spiritual profit. Only a fantastic and artificial method of sermonizing can extract from them, taken alone, any Divine lessons. In these Books of Kings many of the records are simply historical, and in themselves, apart from their place in the whole, have no more religious significance than any other historic facts; but because these annals are the annals of a chosen people, and because these books are written for our learning, we find in them again and again, and particularly in their more connected and elevated narratives, facts and incidents which place Scripture incomparably above all secular literature, and are rich in eternal truth for all time, and for a life beyond life. It is with such an experience that we are dealing here, and therefore it is worthwhile, if we can, to see something of its meaning. We may, therefore, be permitted to linger for a brief space over the causes of Ehijah's despair, and the method in which God dealt with it. 1 Kings 19:4 But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die; and said, It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers. ELIJAH’S DESPAIR 1 Kings 19:4-8 "So much I feel my genial spirits droop, My hopes all flat, nature within me seems In all her functions weary of herself, My race of glory run, and race of shame, And I shall shortly be with them that rest." - Samson Agonistes. WHAT are the causes which may drive even a saint of God into a mood of momentary despair as he is forced to face the semblance of final failure? 1. Even the lowest element of such despair has its instructiveness. It was due in part, doubtless, to mere physical exhaustion. Elijah had just gone through the most tremendous conflict of his life. During all that long and most exhausting day at Carmel he had had little or no food, and at the close of it he had run across all the plain with the king’s chariot. In the dead of that night, with his life in his band, he had fled towards Beersheba, and now he had wandered for a whole day in the glare of the famishing wilderness. It does not do to despise the body. If we are spirits, yet we have bodies; and the body wreaks a stern and humiliating vengeance on those who neglect or despise it. The body reacts upon the mind. "If you rumple the jerkin, you rumple the jerkin’s lining." If we weaken the body too much, we do not make it the slave of the spirit, but rather make the spirit its slave. Even moderate fasting, as a simple physiological fact-if it be fasting at all, as distinguished from healthful moderation and wise temperance-tends to increase, and not by any means to decrease, the temptations which come to us from the appetites of the body. Extreme self-maceration-as all ascetics have found from the days of St. Jerome to those of Cardinal Newman-only adds new fury to the lusts of the flesh. Many a hermit and stylite and fasting monk, many half-dazed hysterical, high-wrought men have found, sometimes without knowing the reason of it, that by willful and artificial devices of self-chosen saintliness, they have made the path of purity and holiness not easier, but more hard. The body is a temple, not a tomb. It is not permitted us to think ourselves wiser than God who made it, nor to fancy that we can mend His purposes by torturing and crushing it. By violating the laws of physical righteousness we only make moral and spiritual righteousness more difficult to attain. 2. Elijah’s dejection was also due to forced inactivity. "What doest thou here, Elijah?" said the voice of God to him in the heart of man. Alas! he was doing nothing: there was nothing left for him to do! It was different when he hid by the brook Cherith or in Zarephath, or in the glades of Carmel. Then a glorious endeavor lay before him, and there was hope. But "Life without hope draws nectar in a sieve, And hope without an object cannot live." The mighty vindication of Jehovah in which all the struggle of his life culminated, had been crowned with triumph, and had failed. It had blazed up like fire, and had sunk back into ashes. To such a spirit as his nothing is so fatal as to have nothing to do and nothing to hope for. "What did the Marechal die of?" asked a distinguished Frenchman of one of his comrades. "He died of having nothing to do." "Ah!" was the reply; "that is enough to kill the best General of us all." 3. Again, Elijah was suffering from mental reaction. The bow had been bent too long, and was somewhat strained; the tense string needed to have been relaxed before. It is a common experience that some great duty or mastering emotion uplifts us for a time above ourselves, makes us even forget the body and its needs. We remember Jeremy Taylor’s description of what he had noticed in the Civil Wars, -that a wounded soldier, amid the heat and fury of the fight, was wholly unconscious of his wounds, and only began to feel the smart of them when the battle had ended and its fierce passion was entirely spent. Men, even strong men, after hours of terrible excitement, have been known to break down and weep like children. Macaulay, in describing the emotions which succeeded the announcement that the Reform Bill had passed, says that not a few, after the first outburst of wild enthusiasm, were bathed in tears. And any one who has seen some great orator after a supreme effort of eloquence, when his strength seems drained away, and the passion is exhausted, and the flame has sunk down into its embers, is aware how painful a reaction often follows, and how differently the man looks and feels if you see him when he has passed into his retirement, pale and weak, and often very sad. After a time the mind can do no more. 4. Further, Elijah felt his loneliness. At that moment indeed he could not bear the presence of any one, but none the less his sense that none sympathized with him, that all hated him, that no voice was raised to cheer him, that no finger was uplifted, to help him, weighed like lead upon his spirit. ‘I only am left.’ There was awful desolation in that thought. He was alone among an apostatizing people. It is the same kind of cry which we hear so often in the life of God’s saints. It is the Psalmist crying: "I am become like a pelican in the wilderness, and like an owl that is in the desert. Mine enemies reproach me all the day long, and they that are mad upon me are sworn together against me"; {Psa 102:6-8} or, "My lovers and my neighbors did stand looking upon my trouble, and my kinsmen stood afar off. They also that sought after my life laid snares for me Psalm 38:11-12 ." It is Job so smitten and afflicted that he is half tempted for the moment to curse God and die. It is Isaiah saying of the hopeless wickedness of his people, "The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint." It is Jeremiah complaining, "The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so: and what will ye do in the end thereof?" {Jer 5:31; Jer 29:9} It is St. Paul wailing so sadly, "All they of Asia have turned from me. Only Luke is with me." It is the pathos of desolation which breathes through the sad sentence of the Gospels, "Then all the disciples forsook Him, and fled." The anticipation of desertion had wrung from the Lord Jesus the sad prophecy, "Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, when ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me." {Joh 16:32} And this heart-anguish of loneliness is, to this day, a common experience of the best men. Any man whose duty has ever called him to strike out against the stream of popular opinion, to rebuke the pleasant vices of the world, to plead for causes too righteous to be popular, to deny the existence of vested interests in the causes of human ruin, to tell a corrupt society that it is corrupt, and a lying Church that it lies; -any man who has had to defy mere plausible conventions of veiled wrong-doing, to give bold utterance to forgotten truths, to awake sodden and slumbering consciences, to annul agreements with death and covenants with hell; every man who rises above the trimmers and the facing-both-ways, and those who try to serve two masters-they who swept away the rotting superstitions of a tyrannous ecclesiasticism, they who purified prisons, they who struck the fetters off the slave-every saint, reformer, philanthropist, and faithful preacher in the past, and those now living saints, who, walking in the shining steps of these, endeavor to rescue the miserable out of the gutter, and to preach the gospel to the poor, know the anguish of isolation, when, because they have been benefactors, they are cursed as though they were felons, and when, for the efforts of their noble self-sacrifice, the contempt of the world, and its pedantry, and its malice can find for them no words too contemptuous or too bitterly false. 5. But there was even a deeper sorrow than these which made Elijah long for death. It was the sense of utter and seemingly irretrievable failure. It happens often to the worldling as well as to the saint. Many a man, weary of life’s inexorable emptiness, has exclaimed in different ways:- "Know that whatever thou hast been, ‘Tis something better not to be." That sentiment is not in the least peculiar to Byron. We find it again and again in the Greek tragedians. We find it alike in the legendary revelation of the god Pan, and in the Book of Ecclesiastes, and in Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann. No true Christian, no believer in the mercy and justice of God, can share that sentiment, but will to the last thank God for His creation and preservation and all the blessings of this life, as well as for the inestimable gift of His redemption, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory. Nevertheless, it is part of God’s discipline that He often requires His saints as well as His sinners to face what looks like hopeless discomfiture, and to perish, as it were, "In the lost battle Borne down by the flying, Where mingles war’s rattle With the groans of the dying." Such was the fate of all the Prophets. They were tortured; they had trials of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment; they were stoned, were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword; they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, they hid in caves and dens of the earth, being destitute, afflicted, tormented, though of them the world was not worthy. Such, too was the fate of all the Apostles set forth last of all as men doomed to death; made a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men. They were hungry, thirsty, naked, buffeted; they had no certain dwelling-place; they were treated as fools and weak, were dishonored, defamed, treated as the filth of the world and the off-scouring of all things. Such was conspicuously the case of St. Paul in that death, so lonely and forsaken, that the French skeptic thinks he must have awakened with infinite regret from the disillusionment of a futile life. Nay, it was the earthly lot of Him who was the prototype, and consolation, known or unknown, of all these:-it was the lot of Him who, from that which seemed the infinite collapse and immeasurable abandonment of His cross of shame, cried out: "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" He warned His true followers that they, too, would have to face the same finality of earthly catastrophes, to die without the knowledge, without even the probable hope, that they have accomplished anything, in utter forsakenment, in a monotony of execration, often in dejection and apparent hiding of God’s countenance. The olden saints who prepared the way for Christ, and those who since His coming have followed His footsteps, have had to learn that true life involves a bearing of the cross. Take but one or two out of countless instances. Look at that humble brown figure, kneeling drowned with tears to think of the disorders which had already begun to creep into the holy order which he had designed. It is sweet St. Francis of Assisi, to whom God said in visions: "Poor little man: thinkest thou that I, who rule the universe, cannot direct in My own way thy little order?" Look at that monk in his friars’ dress, racked, tortured, gibbeted in fetters over the flaming pyre in the great square at Florence, stripped by guilty priests of his priestly robe, degraded from a guilty Church by its guilty representatives, pelted by wanton boys, dying amid a roar of execration from the brutal and fickle multitude whose hearts he once had moved. It is Savonarola, the prophet of Florence. Look at that poor preacher dragged from his dungeon to the stake at Basle, wearing the yellow cap and sanbenito painted with flames and devils. It is John Huss, the preacher of Bohemia. Look at the lion-hearted reformer feeling how much he had striven, not knowing as yet how much he had achieved, appealing to God to govern His world, saying that he was but a powerless man, and would be "the veriest are alive" if he thought that he could meddle with the intricacies of Divine Providence. It is Luther. Look at the youth, starving in an ink-stained garret, hunted through the streets by an infuriated mob, thrust into the city prison as the only way to save his life from those who hated his exposure of their iniquities. It is William Lloyd Garrison. Look at that missionary, deserted, starving, fever-stricken, in the midst of savages, dying on his knees, in daily sufferings, amid frustrated hopes. It is David Livingstone, the pioneer of Africa. They, and thousands like them, have borne squalors and shames and tragedies, while they looked not at the things that are seen, but at the things that are not seen; for the things that are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal. Might not they all have said with the disappointed Apostles, "Master, we have toiled all the night and have taken nothing"? Might not their lives and deaths-the lives which fools thought madness, and their end to be without honor-be described as one poet has described that of his disenchanted king:- "He Walked with dreams and darkness, and he found A doom that ever poised itself to fall, An ever-moaning battle in the mist, Death in all life, and lying in all love, The meanest having power upon the highest, And the high purpose broken by the worm." "Yes; the smelter of Israel had now to go down himself into the crucible." 1 Kings 19:5 And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat. HOW GOD DEALS WITH DESPONDENCY 1 Kings 19:5-8 "Why art thou so vexed, O my soul? and why art thou so disquieted within me? O put thy trust in God; for I will yet praise Him who is the health of my countenance, and my God." - Psalm 42:11 "It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers." The despondency was deeper than personal. It was despair of the world; despair of the fate of the true worship; despair about the future of faith and righteousness; despair of everything. Elijah, in his condition of pitiable weariness, felt himself reduced to entire uncertainty about all God’s dealings with him and with mankind. "I am not better than my fathers"; they failed one by one, and died, and entered the darkness; and I have failed likewise. To what end did Moses lead this people through the wilderness? Why did the Judges fight and deliver them? Of what use was the wise guidance of Samuel? What has come of David’s harp, and Solomon’s temple and magnificence, and Jeroboam’s heaven-directed rebellion? It ends, and my work ends, in the despotism of Jezebel, and a nation of apostates! God pitied His poor suffering servant, and gently led him back to hope and happiness, and restored him to his true self, and to the natural elasticity of his free spirit. 1. First,

He arose and went for his life. 1 Kings 19:3-18 The flight into the wilderness F. S. Webster, M. A. This is a sad sequel to the triumph on Mount Carmel. Elijah had forgotten Jezebel. Not present herself on Mount Carmel, she had received with sceptical scorn the reports which had reached her. The fire from heaven she looked upon as a mere conjurer's trick. The rain following the prophet's prayer was a mere coincidence, and, like all others who speak so glibly of coincidences, she never asked what power had made the two events coincide. So she felt utter contempt for the cowards who had stood by while her prophets were butchered by a madman. In a passionate fury she declared that she was no turncoat to forsake the gods of her fathers at the bidding of a wild Bedouin. If no one else had the courage to withstand Elijah, she would do it herself. So the letter was sent which made the prophet flee. Are we not all in danger of repeating Elijah's mistake, and forgetting our chief adversary? We reckon with the opposing forces that we can see, but we forget the unseen array of principalities and powers whose hostility is implacable, who with deadly craft and subtlety wait for our unguarded hours. Elijah, too, had taken his eyes off God. "When he saw that, he arose, and went for his life." It is impossible for us to justify his flight. He acted in a panic. There was no waiting for Divine guidance. Oh, the sad pity of it! A moment's reflection would have changed the whole aspect of affairs. "Fear not, only believe." Jezebel may rage, but Jehovah lives. One such word — a child might have spoken it — and the prophet's faith would have leaped up, his old courage would have returned; and instead of fleeing from Jezreel, he might have driven Jezebel out of the kingdom. But why were his eyes off God? I think because, though to a certain extent unconsciously, his eyes were upon himself. "It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers." Had he thought that he was? Had tie been uplifted at the success God had given him? Had he thought that the shouts of the people would end the conflict? We must not judge him unkindly. God's first care was to give him rest and sleep. Overwrought nerves, a tired brain, and physical exhaustion, had much to do with the prophet's fall. The meeting with Ahab; the preparation for the contest; the strain of the conflict itself, with its tremendous output of faith and prayer; the excitement of the grim work of judgment; the fatigue of the long, quick run to Jezreel — had left the prophet in a state of physical tension, which nothing but calm, trustful confidence in God could have endured. Much of the low spirits and unbelief among Christians to-day is the result of rush and overstrain. And after this Elijah was not left without a congenial friend and companion. Elisha was called from the plough to follow him and to minister unto him; for it is not good for man to be alone. Solitude, while a real means of grace, may easily become a means of sore temptation. Just as Queen Eleanor was said to suck the poison from her husband's wounds (thus saving his life), so the sympathy and love of wife or sister or brothers in arms are most effective in removing the sting and virus from life's sorrows and temptations. If Elijah had had Elisha at his right hand, he would not surely have forgotten God. Let us value our Christian fellowship. ( F. S. Webster, M. A. ) The flight to the wilderness J. R. Macduff, D. D. 1. We may well learn, from this sad crisis in Elijah's history, the lesson of our own weakness, and our dependence on God's grace. In the Divine life, often the most dangerous and perilous time for the believer, is after a season of great enlargement; when he is saying to himself, "My mountain standeth strong." The spiritual armour is loosely worn; — he gets supine after the flush of victory: the bold, bounding river, that we have just witnessed taking leap after leap in successive cataracts, loses itself in the low, marshy swamps of self-confidence. 2. Beware of taking any step without the Divine sanction. Let us be careful not to follow our own paths; not to take any solemn and important step unless it be divinely owned and recognised. "In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy paths." "Blessed is the man whose strength is in Thee, in whose heart are Thy ways." 3. Beware of murmuring under trial. Each of us has, or may yet have, his day of trial — sickness, bereavement, crushed hopes, bitter disappointments, crossed wishes — stings and arrows from quarters least expected. How are we to meet them? Are we to give way to peevish, fretful repining? Are we to say, "I am wearied of life. I would I were done with all this wretchedness. What pleasure is existence to this wounded, harassed, smitten spirit?" Nay, take courage. It is not "enough." The Lord has work for you still to do. It is not for you, but for Him, to say, at His own appointed time, as He said to Hezekiah, "Thou shalt die, and not live." If we have ever been guilty of uttering such a rash prayer as that of Elijah — "Take away my life" let us be thankful God has not given us the fulfilment of our own wish — the ratification of our own desire — and allowed us to die, unmeet and unprepared! ( J. R. Macduff, D. D. ) Loneliness in religious depression U. R. Thomas. I. RELIGIOUS DEPRESSION FOLLOWING GREAT PUBLIC EXCITEMENT. 1. It is a natural reaction. As a matter of mental and moral law, such depression must follow such excitement. 2. It is a needful discipline. Continual conquests on Carmel would not be good for the prophet's own soul. He must have sometimes more of introspection and self-communing and less of challenge of foes, or of the applause of friends. II. RELIGIOUS DEPRESSION PRODUCING THE FEELING OF UTTER LONELINESS. Under the juniper-tree he longs to sob out his life and afterwards thrice over utters the pathetic "alone, alone, alone." III. RELIGIOUS DEPRESSION CAUSING MISTAKEN VIEWS OF LIFE. He, in his present passing loneliness, had two wrong notions clouding his vision. He thought, first of all, that his life-work had been a failure, whereas he had stirred the religious life of the people to its very centre, and his name ever lives as a symbol of heroic single-handed conflict with evil. 2. And he supposed the generation of godly seers was extinct. This mood of mind often leads men to see failure written on their labours, and to feel the number of the Christly a narrow instead of an ever-widening circle of men and women and children. IV. RELIGIOUS DEPRESSION DIVINELY REMOVED BY FITTING MEANS. Here Elijah was lifted from his depression through the instrumentality — 1. Of nature. 2. Of new occupation. There was fresh work to be done. 3. Fresh companionship. An Elisha was waiting for him. 4. Unveiling of forgotten facts. In the existence of the 7000 faithful men there was a fact of hope and encouragement he had forgotten. So every exiled spirit needs, and, if true to God, has, an Apocalypse. ( U. R. Thomas. ) How the mighty fell F. B. Meyer, M. A. I. His physical strength and nervous energy were completely overtaxed. We are "fearfully and wonderfully made"; and our inner life is very sensitive to our outward conditions. It has been truly said, that the most trivial causes — a heated room, a sunless day, want of exercise; or a northern aspect — will make all the difference between happiness and unhappiness; between faith and doubt; between courage and indecision. Many who send for the religious teacher would be wiser if they sent for their physician. II. HE WAS KEENLY SENSITIVE TO HIS LONELY POSITION. "I only am left." Some men are born to loneliness. It is the penalty of true greatness. At such a time the human spirit is apt to falter, unless it is sustained by an heroic purpose, and by an unfaltering faith. The shadow of that loneliness fell dark on the spirit of our Divine Master Himself when He said: "Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave Me alone; and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me." If our Lord shrank in the penumbra of that great eclipse, it is not wonderful that Elijah cowered in its darksome gloom. III. HE LOOKED AWAY FROM GOD TO CIRCUMSTANCES. Up to that moment Elijah had been animated by a most splendid faith, because he had never lost sight of God. "He endured as seeing Him who is invisible." Faith always thrives when God occupies the whole field of vision. Let us refuse to look at circumstances, though they roll before us as a Red Sea, and howl around us like a storm. Circumstances, natural impossibilities, difficulties, are nothing in the estimation of the soul that is occupied with God. They are as the small dust that settles on a scale, and is not considered in the measurement of weight. O men of God, get you up into the high mountain, from which you may obtain a good view of the glorious Land of Promise; and refuse to have your gaze diverted by men or things below! ( F. B. Meyer, M. A. ) Elijah in the wilderness I. ELIJAH'S WEAKNESS. 1. He was a man of like passions with us. He failed in the point wherein he was strongest, as Abraham, Moses, Job, Peter, and others have done. 2. He suffered from a terrible reaction. Those who go up go down. 3. He suffered grievous disappointment, for Ahab was still under Jezebel's sway, and she was seeking his life. 4. His wish was folly: "O Lord, take away my life." He fled from death, and yet prayed for death! He was never to die. How unwise are our prayers when our spirits sink. 5. His reason for the wish was untrue. II. GOD'S TENDERNESS TO HIM. 1. He allowed him to sleep. This was better than medicine, or inward rebuke, or spiritual instruction. 2. He fed him with food convenient and miraculously nourishing. 3. He made him "perceive" angelic care: "An angel touched him." 4. He allowed him to tell his grief (ver. 10). This is often the readiest relief. He stated his case, and in doing so eased his mind. 5. He revealed Himself and His ways. The wind, earthquake, fire, and still small voice were voices from God. 6. He told him good news: "Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel." His sense of loneliness was thus removed. 7. He gave him more to do — to anoint others, by whom the Lord's purposes of chastisement and instruction should be carried on.Let us learn some useful lessons. 1. It is seldom right to pray to die. We may not destroy our own lives, nor ask the Lord to do so. 2. For the sinner t is never right to seek to die; for death to him is hell! 3. For the saint it is allowable only within bounds. 4. When we do wish to die, the reason must not be impatient, petulant, proud, insolent. 5. We have no idea of what is in store for us in this life. We may yet see the cause prosper and ourselves successful. 6. In any case, let us trust in the Lord and do good, and we need not be afraid. ( C. H. Spurgeon . ) The despondent prophet C. M. Merry I. THE PROPHET'S DESPONDENCY. 1. Its intensity. For the time his depression seems almost overwhelming. Why this: that we must not expect that the sincerest piety, or the highest service for God, will preclude the possibility of our being bowed down beneath the burden of depression and discouragement. It may consist with genuine religiousness to be so circumstanced. Those children of God, in old time, whose faith rose to the loftiest altitudes, and whose courage paled not before the extremest perils, knew well the painfulness of such experience. It is well for us to bear in mind that the ground of spiritual security is distinct and separate from any state of mere feeling. Frames are uncertain, fluctuating, affected by innumerable causes over which our control is but limited, and must not, therefore, be made to determine character, standing, safety before God. The heart may sink when the soul's grasp is the strongest. 2. The causes of the prophet's despondency. People forget the closeness of the connection that subsists between their material and their spiritual part, and often connect with an imagined wrong condition of the latter, what more properly belongs to a morbid or deranged state of the former. They send for the minister, when they ought to send for the physician. They charge upon the mind a fault that really attaches to the body. Not even religion can cure some persons of melancholy; they are gloomy or pensive by natural temperament, and must await the resurrection-morn to be made otherwise, 3. Its effects upon his conduct. It had led him from the scene of actual service, bold and faithful testimony, earnest confronting of Jehovah's foes, to hide himself in wilderness solitudes. II. GOD'S METHOD OF RELIEF. 1. God recruits his exhausted strength by a timely supply of sustenance. 2. But observe, again, in God's method of relief, that He rouses His servant to exertion. Having afforded Him needful refreshment and repose, He gives him work to do; He bids him journey to the distant Mount of Horeb. 3. God's method of relief includes a manifestation of Himself in glory and grace. The journey to Horeb was not its own end. Elijah was brought thither that he might commune with Deity. 4. In God's method of relief there was a correction of the prophet's misjudgment, as to the effects of his own labours, and the cause of truth. He had thought that he had "laboured in vain, and spent his strength for nought, and in vain." ( C. M. Merry ) Elijah's depression H. Woodcock. The best of men have their defects, but do not despise them on that account; just as we don't despise a mountain because there are rifts in its side, or the sun because there are spots on its face. I. SOME OF THE CAUSES OF ELIJAH'S DEPRESSION. 1. Physical weakness. 2. Rampant wickedness. 3. Want of occupation. 4. The apparent failure of his mission. II. WHAT LESSONS SHOULD THIS SUBJECT TEACH US? 1. That great men are subject to sudden changes in their mental moods. 2. That these seasons of depression do not unchristianise a man. John Bunyan tells us that the pilgrims were as surely progressing towards the Celestial City, when climbing the hill Difficulty, passing through the valley of Humiliation, and engaged in a hand-to. hand encounter with Apollyon, as when transported with the visions of the Delectable Mountains, fanned with the balmy breezes, and regaled with the fragrant odours of the land of Beulah, where the sun always shines. "If needs be," says Peter, "ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations. 3. That God comes to the succour of His servants in seasons of depression. 4. Severe trials are fruitful of good to God's people. 5. That labour is an essential condition of enjoyment. ( H. Woodcock. ) Avoiding the shadows A. Caldwell. I looked from my window this morning across the fields. I noticed a dwelling-house whose roof was exposed to the early and cheerful sun. There had been a storm in the night, and snow covered the roof. In an hour the warmth of the sun had melted it, save where the shadow of the chimney fell. That long, dark shade kept firm grasp of the iciness. It gave me a morning lesson, like a text from Scripture. The ice of our lives lingers only where the shadow is. If we have no Christly warmth, it is because we live in the dark. If our love is chilled and our nature sluggish, there is something between us and the light. What then? We must go forth from shadows. The sun shines and its beams are full of life. If we walk in this life the ice will melt, and instead of deathly conditions, we shall become rivers of living water. Christ is the Sun. Shadows do not belong to us. They savour of death. The one aim of God is to make us children of life and light; then follows holy fellowship and hallowed communion. ( A. Caldwell. ) Discouragement D. L. Moody. I remember a good many years ago I got very much depressed because the Lord, I thought, hadn't blessed my ministry. I was cast down, and used to talk discouragingly of what was being done. There was not any life in my ministry, and this went on for three months. One Monday, when I was in the valley, and very much cast down, I met a friend who was on the hilltop and exceedingly elated. He said he had had a grand Sunday; what had I? "Oh!" I said, "I had not a good one." "Much power?" "No. What did you preach about?" "Oh, I preached about Noah." I said, "How did you get on?" "Oh, grandly. Did you ever study up Noah?" I said I thought I knew all about Noah, for there are only a few verses about him. "Oh, if you haven't studied up Noah you ought to do it. He's a wonderful character." After he left I got out my Bible, and read all I could find about Noah, and while I was reading this thought came to me: Here is this man who was a preacher of righteousness for one hundred and twenty years, and yet never had a convert outside his own family. I went to the prayer-meeting after that; and there was a man, who had just come from a town in Illinois, who spoke of one hundred young converts. "Why," I said, "what would Noah have said if he had one hundred converts, and yet Noah didn't get discouraged!" Then a man right close to me got up, and he was trembling. "My friend," he said, "I wish you would pray for me." I said to myself: "What would Noah have given if he had heard that during those one hundred and twenty years, and yet he never heard the voice of an inquirer — not one. Still, he didn't get discouraged." ( D. L. Moody. ) It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life. 1 Kings 19:4 Elijah's singular request T. Hughes. These words every way are remarkable. They proceed from a certain state of the mind, which is not common. The words are remarkable, considering the person who uttered them. They were uttered by the bold and brilliant Elijah. If we consider further the time the words were uttered, they are equally remarkable. It was just after the extraordinary manifestation of Carmel. One would have thought, after such a manifestation of the Divine presence and decided triumph, that he never would have been so shorn of courage, and cast down into such deep depression. These words, though spoken in ancient days, and come down to us through many ages; yet they contain certain pictures in human thought and feeling, which are found more or less everywhere. They are true expressions of the human soul in certain conditions, and our business here will be to mention some of the things which are common to all ages, and more or less to all people. I. THE SOUL'S SIGH IN THE SEARCH AFTER SOLITUDE. Sometime or other all sigh for solitude; you cannot destroy the feeling, it is planted deeply in the human soul. There are certain circumstances in life which develop this feeling, until it becomes strong and all-powerful, governing the whole soul. It is possible to allow this sentiment to grow wild and overleap its natural limit; but in itself, and within its proper limit, it is right and necessary. Before men can be strong they must be much with God and themselves; before they can be rich and mature, they will have to live much in the garden of their mind to weed and manure it. The conditions under which solitude is sought are various. 1. The soul seeks solitude in the pangs of disappointment. We are born to disappointments — all meet them, only some are more sensitive to their point and bitterness than others. We are often either too confiding, or lofty in our wish, or sanguine in our expectation, that disappointments cannot but come. They come from foes and friends — from prosperity and adversity. 2. The soul often sighs for the solitary in life, when deeply convinced of the vanity and falsehood of society; when the soul sees and feels the faults and follies of the world, it often feels a wish to live in some place where they are not seen or heard. 3. The absence of congenial society not unfrequently turns the face of the soul towards solitude. There may be times when our companions are too numerous, as well as too few. The soul wishes to shake itself from them and be free, and often goes beyond civilisation for this freedom it longs for so anxiously. This is often the case from superior refinement, advanced piety, nobler aspirations than those of neighbours and friends. 4. The soul often sighs for the solitude in life under the influence of religious feeling. The danger is for the thing that is right in itself to become a blind sentimentality. 5. The soul is apt, in a condition of great sorrow, to sigh after solitude. 6. This feeling may and sometimes does proceed from a morbid state of mind. II. THE SOUL'S TIME OF DESPONDENT DEPRESSION. There is a shade sometime or other to cross every flowery bed, and a gloom to cover every sunny path. There are occasions in the history of most men when life, the most precious and the first to be desired, is a burden. In this state of the soul all power of enjoyment is gone, and all power and courage have taken their departure. The horizon of the soul is obscured with darkness, so that there is neither beauty nor prospect in view anywhere. 1. Sometimes this state of despondent depression comes upon the soul from a sense of its own sinfulness. 2. The thought of our own individual insignificancy has a tendency to the same result. 3. The conscious vanity of the surroundings of our present existence is another depressing element in life. 4. The darkness and uncertainty surrounding human life has a tendency to make us despondent. The simplest things are lost in mystery; the clearest things are covered with uncertainty. 5. Failure in realising our noblest plans and most cherished wishes is another depressing element which often presses us below the level of right standing. 6. The ills that men are subject to is another frequent means of human depression. III. THE SOUL'S DEPRECIATION OF ITSELF. Some people constantly depreciate themselves, and they are thought sincere and humble persons, whereas it may be nothing more than a habit, or worse, an affected self-depreciation, that others may have occasion and scope to raise them on high. 1. A sense of self-depreciation takes hold of the mind when it is filled with the conception of the Divine Majesty and His presence. 2. The feeling of self-depreciation pervades the soul in the presence or recollection of some higher examples in matters of life and ambition. An artist of sensitive appreciation of superiority in the presence of a genuine piece of art depreciates to the dust his own performances. A poet with a true poetic sense, when he reads or hears some grand poetry like Paradise Lost , feels very low in his own view. So is it in other things in life. 3. The same feeling takes hold of the mind of man often when comparing himself with the material universe and its different creations in his outward form and physical capacities. 4. This sentiment also proceeds frequently from a review of the past conduct of one's own life. 5. Self-depreciation is often the depressed language of the soul, when persecuted and cast out of society. 6. Once more, when the ills and miseries of life are calmly and seriously viewed, we ourselves being subjects of the same, the little we have done, or can do to diminish them, tends to self-depreciation. IV. THE SOUL'S WEARINESS OF LIFE, and its special desire to be released from its burden. In many cases life is a burden, but it is a rare thing, nevertheless, to wish to get rid of the burden by being relieved of life. There are cases where it appears almost natural and religious for men to wish to die, which appear almost beyond the suspicion of wrong. 1. When a person thinks that his work is done in this life, and he cannot be of much use any longer. 2. When an individual becomes helpless, and requires the time and attention of others to attend to him, he feels he is in the way, and cannot compensate for the least done to him. 3. When, by his close communion with the Divine and the heavenly, the soul is more at home from the world than in it. 4. When it is submitted, as in the case of Elijah, to the hand and will of God. ( T. Hughes. ) The Order of the Juniper tree W. L. Watkinson. Some while ago in passing through Edinburgh we noticed the procession of a friendly society whose banner declared it to belong to the Order of the Juniper tree. Many of us belong to that order, and it may prove useful to consider the suggestive contrast established by these two texts. In the one, the prophet sinks in despair; in the other, he is carried triumphantly into heaven. What has this to do with us? It presents in a dramatic form the experience of God's people in an ages. I. The sharp contrast in these texts is worthy of being remembered in DAYS OF WORLDLY ADVERSITY. Times of misfortune and disaster not uncommonly induce the mood expressed in the first text. Having suffered the wreck of our circumstances, schemes, happiness, and hopes, we court the shade of the juniper tree and pour out bitter lamentations. What is there to live for? We are failures, and the sooner we are out of the way the better. 1. It is only through discipline that we are fit for glorification. Cars of fire, horses of fire, a path beyond the stars, luminous diadems! we are presumptuous enough to think that at any time we are ready for these. But we are not ready. The perfection that qualifies for high places comes only through some form of suffering. 2. Only God knows when we are fit for glorification. "It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life." Are we sure about this enough? When you chastise a child, you find that his opinion and yours wary considerably as to what is enough. II. We may remember the strong contrast of these texts IN DAYS OF SPIRITUAL DESPONDENCY. Times of deep depression come in our spiritual history. Wesley's new life began in glorious experiences in Aldersgate Street, yet within a year of these glowing feelings we find that he suffered sad relapses into darkness and doubt; he even wrote, "I am not a Christian now." We feel worsted in the spiritual conflict, losing confidence and hope. These sad days of humiliation and despondency need not be lost upon us. They bring home the lesson of our personal unworthiness and helplessness. "I am not better than my fathers." III. We may remember the strong contrast of our texts IN DAYS WHEN WE ARE DISAPPOINTED BY THE RESULTS OF OUR EVANGELICAL WORK. Elijah was smitten with despair about God's cause. The scornful, scorching words of the wicked and wrathful queen unmanned him. All his grand hopes for his nation and race were to expire at the juniper tree. And very often do the strongest and best of men entertain similar misgivings. Yet Elijah was wrong. God works strangely, He works silently, He works slowly, but He works surely. The funeral was not to be that of Elijah. The one thing we must resolve upon is not to reason and question, but confidently to follow out all the lines and leadings of God in spiritual life and evangelical toil It is the fashion with some modern novelists to finish their stories in the most atheistic and despairing manner — the mystery and struggle of life ending in unconsoled sorrows, unrequited sacrifices, uncompensated wrongs, unanswered prayers and strivings; the palpable moral of such treatment being that there is no law, government, or purpose in human life. We know otherwise. We believe in the programme of God, so wise, so true, so good; and in our best moments we are confident that His programme cannot fail. ( W. L. Watkinson. ) As he lay and slept under a juniper tree, then an angel touched him. 1 Kings 19:5 Loving-kindness better than life F. B. Meyer, B. A. We have, in this incident, four thoughts of the love of God. I. GOD'S LOVE IN ITS CONSTANCY. It is a fact which we all admit; hut which we seldom realise in the moments of depression and darkness to which we are all exposed. It is not difficult to believe that God loves us, when we go with the multitude to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise, and stand in the inner sunlit circle; but it is hard to believe that He feels as much love for us when, exiled by our sin to the land of Jordan and of the Hermonites, our soul is cast down within us, and deep calls to deep, as His waves and billows surge around. It is not difficult to believe that God loves us when, like Elijah at Cherith and on Carmel, we do His commandments, hearkening unto the voice of His word; but it is not so easy when, like Elijah in the desert, we lie stranded, or, as dis-masted and rudderless vessels, roll in the trough of the waves. It is not difficult to believe in God's love when with Peter we stand on the mount of glory, and, in the rapture of joy, propose to share a tabernacle with Christ evermore; but it is well-nigh impossible when, with the same Apostle, we deny our Master with oaths, and are abashed by a look in which grief masters reproach. Yet we must learn to know and believe the constancy of the love of God. II. GOD'S LOVE MANIFESTED IN SPECIAL TENDERNESS BECAUSE OF SPECIAL SIN. Where ordinary methods will not avail, God will employ extraordinary ones. There is one memorable instance of this, which has afforded comfort and hope to multitudes who have sinned as Peter did, and who will bless God for ever for the record of the Master's dealings with His truant servant. The Lord sent a general message to all His disciples to meet Him in Galilee. But He felt that Peter would hardly dare to class himself with the rest; and so He sent to him a special message, saying: "Go tell My disciples, and Peter." It is thus that Jesus is working still throughout the circles of His disciples. III. GOD'S LOVE IN ITS UNWEARIED CARE. None of us can measure the powers of endurance in the love of God. It never tires. It fainteth not, neither is weary. It does not fail, nor is it discouraged. It bears all things; believes all things; hopes all things; endures all things. It clings about its object with a Divine tenacity, until the darkness and wandering are succeeded by the blessedness of former days. It watches over us during the hours of our insensibility to its presence; touching us ever and anon; speaking to us; and summoning us to arise to a nobler, better life, more worthy of ourselves, more glorifying to Him. IV. GOD'S LOVE ANTICIPATING COMING NEED. This always stands out as one of the most wonderful passages in the prophet's history. We can understand God giving him, instead of a long discourse, a good meal and sleep, as the best means of recruiting his spent powers. This is what we should have expected of One who knows our frame and remembers that we arc dust, and who pities us as a father pitieth his children. But it is very wonderful that God should provision His servant for the long journey that lay before him: "Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee." ( F. B. Meyer, B. A. ) Arise and eat, because the journey is too great for thee. 1 Kings 19:7 The weary child J. A. Kerr Bain, M. A. 1. Now, what is all this but the Lord nursing His own child? Elijah has come to one of those crises which occur in every one's life, when he stands in need of special tending and treatment; and the Father which is in Heaven is giving them. He is giving them none the less truly, that at the stage of our text it is the bodily condition of Elijah with which the Lord is dealing, and nothing higher or further. It was mostly this which was wrong just then, and it is this therefore that the Lord proceeds first of all to put right. But while the text thus speaks to us of the pity of God, and tells us how wide-winged and close-brooding it is, the text also points us to wise methods of dealing with ourselves in like circumstances. The Great Physician may well leave something of our restorations to be wrought by self-treatment when He has indicated the course which that treatment ought to take. Now, the body has its own share, and not a small one, even in our spiritual history. Our dejection and melancholy, our very unbelief, have frequently no higher or more mysterious source than the disturbance of this material machine of nerves and muscles through which the spirit deals with the outer world. For the sake of our souls themselves, therefore, those conditions of body which tell back unhappily upon the spirit ought, where they are preventable or removable, to be prevented or removed. Dejection is no virtue, but a weakness and humiliation. 2. When the Lord was comforting Elijah in that lonely place one day's journey south of Beersheba, there was being transacted there a living parable of things that lie within the higher sphere of purely spiritual experience. Every Christian of us has his journey before him. Every Christian of us has his weariness not far off within him. Ev

19:1-8 Jezebel sent Elijah a threatening message. Carnal hearts are hardened and enraged against God, by that which should convince and conquer them. Great faith is not always alike strong. He might be serviceable to Israel at this time, and had all reason to depend upon God's protection, while doing God's work; yet he flees. His was not the deliberate desire of grace, as Paul's, to depart and be with Christ. God thus left Elijah to himself, to show that when he was bold and strong, it was in the Lord, and the power of his might; but of himself he was no better than his fathers. God knows what he designs us for, though we do not, what services, what trials, and he will take care that we are furnished with grace sufficient. 19:9-13 The question God put, What doest thou here, Elijah? is a reproof. It concerns us often to ask whether we are in our place, and in the way of our duty. Am I where I should be? whither God calls me, where my business lies, and where I may be useful? He complained of the people, and their obstinacy in sin; I only am left. Despair of success hinders many a good enterprise. Did Elijah come hither to meet with God? he shall find that God will meet him. The wind, and earthquake, and fire, did not make him cover his face, but the still voice did. Gracious souls are more affected by the tender mercies of the Lord, than by his terrors. The mild voice of Him who speaks from the cross, or the mercy-seat, is accompanied with peculiar power in taking possession of the heart. 19:14-18 God repeated the question, What doest thou here? Then he complained of his discouragement; and whither should God's prophets go with their complaints of that kind, but to their Master? The Lord gave him an answer. He declares that the wicked house of Ahab shall be rooted out, that the people of Israel shall be punished for their sins; and he shows that Elijah was not left alone as he had supposed, and also that a helper should at once be raised up for him. Thus all his complaints are answered and provided for. God's faithful ones are often his hidden ones, Ps 83:3, and the visible church is scarcely to be seen: the wheat is lost in chaff, and the gold in dross, till the sifting, refining, separating day comes. The Lord knows them that are his, though we do not; he sees in secret. When we come to heaven we shall miss many whom we thought to have met there; we shall meet many whom we little thought to have met there. God's love often proves larger than man's charity, and far more extended. 19:19-21 Elijah found Elisha by Divine direction, not in the schools of the prophets, but in the field; not reading, or praying, or sacrificing, but ploughing. Idleness is no man's honour, nor is husbandry any man's disgrace. An honest calling in the world, does not put us out of the way of our heavenly calling, any more than it did Elisha. His heart was touched by the Holy Spirit, and he was ready to leave all to attend Elijah. It is in a day of power that Christ's subjects are made willing; nor would any come to Christ unless they were thus drawn. It was a discouraging time for prophets to set out in. A man that had consulted with flesh and blood, would not be fond of Elijah's mantle; yet Elisha cheerfully leaves all to accompany him. When the Saviour said to one and to another, Follow me, the dearest friends and most profitable occupations were cheerfully left, and the most arduous duties done from love to his name. May we, in like manner, feel the energy of his grace working in us mightily, and by unreserved submission at once, may we make our calling and election sure.