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Fall Asleep to Elijah _ The Prophet Who Called Fire from Heaven... Then Asked God to Let Him Die · truthunedited

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: There is a kind of exhaustion that has nothing to
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: do with sleep. You know, the one you have given
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: everything you had, You did what was right, You stood
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: when others ran, and then one morning you woke up
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: and the fire was gone. Not your faith exactly. Something
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: harder to name than that, the feeling that you have
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  Speaker 1: nothing left to give and no one to tell. To night,
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: we follow a man who felt exactly that he stood
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  Speaker 1: alone before a king. He called fire from heaven. He
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: outran horses in a storm, and then he sat down
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  Speaker 1: under a small desert tree and asked God to let
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: him die. His name is Eliah. And before this night
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  Speaker 1: is over, you will understand why the angel did not
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: give him a sermon. The angel gave him bread. Settle in,
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  Speaker 1: close your eyes. The fire is about to fall, but
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: that is not the end of the story. Chapter one,
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  Speaker 1: The Man before the Fire. Every story has a beginning
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: the writer chooses carefully. The beginning tells you everything about
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  Speaker 1: what kind of story you are about to hear. The
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: Gospel of Mark begins with a man walking out of
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  Speaker 1: the desert. Matthew begins with a long genealogy, tracing a
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  Speaker 1: family line across forty two generations, Luke begins like a historian,
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: carefully noting his sources, writing to a patron named Theophilus.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: And then there is the story of Elijah. Elijah begins
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  Speaker 1: with no genealogy, no childhood, no introduction from the narrator
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: explaining who this man is, where he came from, or
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: how he was trained. He simply appears, fully formed, already burning,
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  Speaker 1: already speaking. The first time Elijah opens his mouth in
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: the biblical record, he is standing before Ahab, the King
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: of Israel, and he is saying something that no reasonable
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: person would say to the most powerful man in the country.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: He is announcing a drought. Before we understand why that
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: was extraordinary, we need to understand who Ahab was and
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: what Israel had become, because the world Elijah stepped into
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  Speaker 1: was not simply a world that had drifted from God.
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  Speaker 1: It was a world that had made a deliberate, systematic,
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  Speaker 1: and politically calculated decision to replace God with something more convenient.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: Ahab was the seventh king of the Northern Kingdom of Israel.
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  Speaker 1: He ruled for twenty two years, and the Biblical account
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: of his reign uses language that appears nowhere else in
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  Speaker 1: the records of the kings. It says that Ahab did
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  Speaker 1: more evil in the sight of Yahweh than all who
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: were before him. That is a remarkable statement, because the
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: kings before him were not good men. To be worse
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  Speaker 1: than all of them required genuine effort. His marriage to
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: Jezebel was the hinge point. Jezebel was the daughter of Ethbal,
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  Speaker 1: king of the Sidonians, and she came from a culture
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: in which Baal worship was not simply a religious practice,
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  Speaker 1: but the organizing principle of public life. Bal was the
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: storm god, the god of rain and fertility, the god
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  Speaker 1: who made crops grow and rivers run and land produce.
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  Speaker 1: In an agricultural society, Baal was not a peripheral figure.
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  Speaker 1: He was the center of everything that mattered for survival.
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  Speaker 1: When Jezebel married Ahab, she did not quietly adapt to
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  Speaker 1: the religious culture of her new home. She brought her
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  Speaker 1: gods with her. She funded the construction of a temple
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  Speaker 1: to Baal in the capital city of Samaria. She installed
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  Speaker 1: four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and four hundred
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  Speaker 1: prophets of Asher, and gave them seats at the royal table.
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  Speaker 1: She began systematically killing the prophets of Yahweh, hunting them
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  Speaker 1: down the way you would hunt down the agents of
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  Speaker 1: a foreign power. This was not syncretism, where two religious
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  Speaker 1: systems blend together uncomfortably. This was replacement, a deliberate cultural
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  Speaker 1: and spiritual project designed to move Yahweh from the center
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  Speaker 1: of Israelite identity and installed Bahal in his place. And
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  Speaker 1: for the most part, it was working into this world
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  Speaker 1: with no introduction and no warning walks a man named Elijah.
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  Speaker 1: Let us begin with his name, because in the Hebrew tradition,
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  Speaker 1: a name is never simply a label. A name is
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  Speaker 1: the first declaration of being makes about itself before it
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  Speaker 1: has done anything at all. The name Elijah comes from
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  Speaker 1: two Hebrew roots pressed together. The first is Eli, which
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  Speaker 1: means my God. The second is Yahoo, which is a
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  Speaker 1: shortened form of Yahweh, the personal name of the God
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  Speaker 1: of Israel. Put them together, my God is Yahweh. In
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  Speaker 1: a world where Ahab had built a temple to Baal,
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  Speaker 1: in a world where Jezebel had installed hundreds of Baal's
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  Speaker 1: prophets at the royal table, in a world where the
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  Speaker 1: official state religion was systematically replacing the God of Israel,
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  Speaker 1: a man walks in whose very name a counter declaration,
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  Speaker 1: My God is Yahweh. Before Elijah speaks a single word,
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  Speaker 1: his name has already answered the central question of his
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  Speaker 1: entire life. Now where did he come from? The text
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  Speaker 1: tells us he was a tish Bite from Tishby in Gilead.
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  Speaker 1: Gilead was the region east of the Jordan River, a
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  Speaker 1: rugged highland territory of deep forests and steep valleys, a
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  Speaker 1: place known for its balm and its remoteness. It was
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  Speaker 1: not a place of influence or prestige. It was not
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  Speaker 1: the kind of place that produced kings or scholars or
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  Speaker 1: men of letters. It produced shepherds and farmers, and men
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  Speaker 1: who knew how to survive in difficult terrain. There is
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  Speaker 1: a detail that Biblical scholars have puzzled over for centuries.
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  Speaker 1: The word Tishbite appears in the Hebrew in a form
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  Speaker 1: that carries some ambiguity. Some interpreters suggest it points to
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  Speaker 1: a specific place called Tishbe. Others have read it as
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  Speaker 1: indicating someone whose sojour, a man without permanent roots, some
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  Speaker 1: one passing through the exact meaning has never been settled
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  Speaker 1: with certainty, and that uncertainty feels intentional. A pattern that
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  Speaker 1: careful readers of the Hebrew text have consistently noted is
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  Speaker 1: that the most important thing about how Elijah is introduced
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  Speaker 1: is what the text does not say. No father, no tribe,
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  Speaker 1: no lineage, no training, just a name, a region, and
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  Speaker 1: a declaration. In a culture where identity was entirely tied
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  Speaker 1: to family and ancestry, to be introduced without a father's
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  Speaker 1: name was almost to be introduced as someone who exists
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  Speaker 1: outside the ordinary system of human categories. Entirely he appears,
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  Speaker 1: that is all. What we can reconstruct from the tradition
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  Speaker 1: is that Gilead was a place of spiritual marginalization. The
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  Speaker 1: centers of power and religious life in Israel were in
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  Speaker 1: the west, in cities like Some and Jezreel. Gilead was
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  Speaker 1: the periphery. It was the kind of place where the
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  Speaker 1: old ways persisted longer because the new fashions of the
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  Speaker 1: capital took longer to arrive. If Elijah grew up in
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  Speaker 1: Gilead in the years leading up to his confrontation with Ahab,
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  Speaker 1: he would have grown up watching from a distance as
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  Speaker 1: the spiritual center of his nation was hollowed out. He
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  Speaker 1: would have heard the reports the temple of Baale rising
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  Speaker 1: in Samaria, the prophets of Yahweh being hunted down and killed,
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  Speaker 1: the systematic dismantling of everything his name declared to be true.
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  Speaker 1: My God is Yahweh. But Yahweh it seemed had been replaced.
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  Speaker 1: Think of someone you might know who has lived through
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  Speaker 1: a version of this. Someone who watched the institutions they
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  Speaker 1: trusted slowly become something unrecognizable. Someone who did not wait
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  Speaker 1: for permission or for an organized movement. Someone who simply
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  Speaker 1: said what was true because it was true, and because
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  Speaker 1: someone had to say it, and because they were there.
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  Speaker 1: That is the kind of person Gilead produces, not polished,
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  Speaker 1: not credentialed, simply formed by hard, terign and long silence
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  Speaker 1: and the knowledge of what is actually true. Before Elijah
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  Speaker 1: stands before the king, the Hebrew text gives us one
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  Speaker 1: physical detail about him that has captured the imagination of
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  Speaker 1: every generation that has read these stories. He is described
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  Speaker 1: as a hairy man wearing a leather belt around his waist,
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  Speaker 1: simple rough, a man of the outdoors, not the palace.
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  Speaker 1: When he is later described to a king who has
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  Speaker 1: never seen him, the king recognizes who it is immediately
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  Speaker 1: from that description alone. He is recognizable not by his position,
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  Speaker 1: but by what he looks like, the man from the wilderness.
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  Speaker 1: There is a long tradition in the Hebrew scriptures of
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  Speaker 1: the wilderness as the place where God forms people for
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  Speaker 1: public work. Moses spent forty years in the wilderness of
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  Speaker 1: Media before the Burning Bush. David fled to the wilderness
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: from Saul John, the Baptist, whom the Gospel of Luke
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  Speaker 1: explicitly connects to the Elijah tradition. Lived in the wilderness
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  Speaker 1: and wore camel's hair and a leather belt, language that
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  Speaker 1: deliberately echoes the description of Elijah himself. The wilderness does
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  Speaker 1: something to a person that comfort cannot do. It removes
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  Speaker 1: the distractions. It takes away the scaffolding of social approval
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  Speaker 1: and institutional belonging, and the quiet hum of ordinary life
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  Speaker 1: that keeps us from having to think about what we
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  Speaker 1: actually believe. In the wilderness, the only things left are
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  Speaker 1: the hard ground and the open sky, and the question
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  Speaker 1: of whether what you trust is real. Elijah was formed
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  Speaker 1: in that kind of place, and it shows in everything
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  Speaker 1: he does. Now we come to the moment of his
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  Speaker 1: first appearance. First Kings, Chapter seventeen, verse one. You need
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  Speaker 1: to hear this the way the first readers would have
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  Speaker 1: heard it, because the abruptness of it is part of
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  Speaker 1: the meaning. He simply appears before Ahab and speaks. He
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  Speaker 1: does not request an audience, He is not escorted in
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  Speaker 1: by courtiers. He arrives the way truth arrives, without announcing itself,
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  Speaker 1: without asking permission, without softening the message to make it
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  Speaker 1: easier to receive. And what he says is this, as Yahweh,
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  Speaker 1: the God of Israel, lives before whom I stand, there
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  Speaker 1: shall be neither due nor reign these years except by
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  Speaker 1: my word. Let us stay in that sentence for a moment.
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  Speaker 1: The first thing he does is invoke the name Yahweh,
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  Speaker 1: the personal name of the God of Israel, in the
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  Speaker 1: court of a king who has spent his reign replacing
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  Speaker 1: Yahweh with Bal. That alone is a provocation that alone,
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  Speaker 1: in Jezebel's Israel, is a potentially fatal thing to say,
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  Speaker 1: But the content of the declaration makes it even more significant.
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  Speaker 1: Rain Bal is the god of rain. Baal is the
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  Speaker 1: storm god god, the one who brings the water that
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  Speaker 1: makes the crops grow and keeps the people alive. The
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  Speaker 1: entire religious and economic case for Ba'al worship rested on
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  Speaker 1: the idea that Ba'al controlled the weather and therefore controlled survival.
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  Speaker 1: Elijah is not simply announcing a drought. He is announcing
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  Speaker 1: that Yahweh, not Bal, controls the rain. He is placing
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  Speaker 1: a direct challenge at the center of everything Jezebel's project
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  Speaker 1: has built. If there is no rain until Elijah says so,
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  Speaker 1: then Bale is nothing. And if Bal is nothing, then
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  Speaker 1: everything built around his worship is nothing. The declaration is short,
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  Speaker 1: It takes perhaps fifteen seconds to say, and then Elijah
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  Speaker 1: is gone. The word of Yahweh came to him immediately afterward,
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  Speaker 1: telling him to go east and hide himself by the
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  Speaker 1: brook Cherith, which flows east of the Jordan. Go into
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  Speaker 1: the wilderness, get out of sight. What has been set
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  Speaker 1: in motion will take time, and you will not avive
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  Speaker 1: what comes next if you stay. This is the rhythm
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  Speaker 1: that will define Elijah's ministry. Declaration, then withdrawal, fire, then silence,
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  Speaker 1: the moment of impossible courage, and then the quiet place
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  Speaker 1: where God sustains what human endurance cannot. It is easy
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  Speaker 1: to read the story of Elijah and focus only on
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  Speaker 1: the fire, the moments of confrontation and miracle and divine atavonsion.
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  Speaker 1: But the story is equally about what happens between those moments,
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  Speaker 1: the hiding, the waiting, the days at the brook when
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  Speaker 1: nothing seems to be happening, and the only evidence that
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  Speaker 1: anything matters is the fact that you are still there,
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  Speaker 1: still fed, still breathing. Before Elijah calls fire from Carmel,
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  Speaker 1: he spends years at a brook and in a widow's house,
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  Speaker 1: learning to receive what he cannot produce himself. That is
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  Speaker 1: not a lesser part of the story, that is the
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  Speaker 1: foundation of it. The night is long, and the story
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  Speaker 1: has only just begun, But even here, at the very
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  Speaker 1: threshold of Elijah's life, something has already been made clear.
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  Speaker 1: God does not always choose the person who comes from
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  Speaker 1: the right place. He does not always choose the person
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  Speaker 1: with the right credentials, or the right family, or the
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  Speaker 1: right institutional backing. Sometimes he reaches into the margins, into
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  Speaker 1: the remote and the rough and the overlooked places, and
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  Speaker 1: finds some one whose name is already a declaration, And
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  Speaker 1: he says, go and say what is true, because some
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  Speaker 1: one has to say it, and you are there. Chapter two,
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  Speaker 1: The word that shut the sky. Consider what it means
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  Speaker 1: to close a sky, not as a figure of speech,
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  Speaker 1: not as a theological abstraction. In concrete agricultural survival terms,
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  Speaker 1: consider what it means for an entire region to receive
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  Speaker 1: no rain and no dew for years. The dew matters
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  Speaker 1: as much as the rain. In the land of Israel,
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: particularly in the dry summer months. Dew was not a
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  Speaker 1: minor meteorological detail. It was the moisture that kept crops
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: from dying between the rains. It settled on the vegetation
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: in the night and kept things alive through the long
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  Speaker 1: dry heat of the day. Farmers depended on it, shepherds
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  Speaker 1: depended on it. The entire ecosystem of the land depended
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  Speaker 1: on it. When Elijah stood before Ahab and declared that
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  Speaker 1: there would be no dew and no rain except by
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  Speaker 1: his word, he was not delivering a polite theological disagreement.
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  Speaker 1: He was announcing an ecological catastrophe. He was placing the
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  Speaker 1: weight of an entire nation's survival on a declaration about
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  Speaker 1: which God was real. And then he disappeared. The command
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: from God was specific, Go east, hide yourself by the
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  Speaker 1: brook Cherith, which is east of the Jordan. The j
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: geography matters. The Jordan River was the boundary. East of
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  Speaker 1: the Jordan was Gilead. Elijah's own homeland, the wilderness territory
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  Speaker 1: where he had been formed. God was not sending him
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  Speaker 1: somewhere unfamiliar. He was sending him back to the place
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  Speaker 1: that made him to wait. The brook Cherith is mentioned
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  Speaker 1: nowhere else in the Biblical record. Interpreters across the centuries
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  Speaker 1: have placed it in different locations, some in the deep
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  Speaker 1: ravines east of the Jordan, others along smaller tributaries that
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  Speaker 1: would have been nearly invisible on any map. The exact
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: location has never been established with certainty. What matters is
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  Speaker 1: what happens there. God says that he has commanded ravens
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  Speaker 1: to feed Elijah there, and the ravens bring him bread
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  Speaker 1: in the morning and meet in the evening. He drinks
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  Speaker 1: from the brook now the ravens. This detail has puzzled
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: readers since the earliest commentators. Ravens in the levitical law
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  Speaker 1: given to Moses are listed among the unclean birds. They
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: were not to be eaten. A faithful Israelite who kept
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  Speaker 1: the dietary laws would not touch a raven, would not
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  Speaker 1: handle a raven would want nothing to do with a raven.
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  Speaker 1: And yet here, at the very beginning of Elijah's ministry,
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  Speaker 1: God chooses ravens as the instruments of his provision. Later
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  Speaker 1: interpreters in the Jewish tradition wrestled with this detail at length.
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  Speaker 1: One strand of that reflection suggests that God was making
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  Speaker 1: a point not just about ravens, but about the nature
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  Speaker 1: of provision itself. That He is not constrained by the
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  Speaker 1: categories of clean and unclean when it comes to sustaining
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  Speaker 1: his servants, that the instrument of his grace does not
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  Speaker 1: have to be the expected instrument. That he can use
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  Speaker 1: what others dismiss, overlook, or consider unsuitable to accomplish what
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  Speaker 1: nothing suitable could accomplish. The ravens come in the morning,
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  Speaker 1: the ravens come in the evening, bread meat every day.
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  Speaker 1: Think about what Elijah's days at Cherith must have been like.
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  Speaker 1: He is a man of fire and declaration. He walked
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  Speaker 1: into the presence of the most powerful king in Israel
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  Speaker 1: and pronounced judgment. He is not, by any measure a
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: man designed for stillness, and yet here he is sitting
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  Speaker 1: by a small brook in the wilderness, watching the ravens come,
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  Speaker 1: waiting for something to happen that is not yet visible.
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  Speaker 1: Think of someone you might know who has lived through
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  Speaker 1: a season like this, a person always in motion, always building,
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  Speaker 1: suddenly brought to stillness by something outside their control. Someone
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  Speaker 1: who told a friend that they had never felt more
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  Speaker 1: useless in their life, that they kept looking for the
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  Speaker 1: thing they were supposed to be doing, and there was
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  Speaker 1: nothing there, just waiting, just small daily provisions, just the
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  Speaker 1: sense that something was happening somewhere that they could not see.
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  Speaker 1: And the friend said something that stayed with them. The
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: brook is not a punishment. The brook is preparation. What
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  Speaker 1: God is doing at Cherith is not less than what
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  Speaker 1: He did at the court of the King. It is
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  Speaker 1: the other half of the same work. You cannot sustain
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  Speaker 1: what Carmel requires without what Cherith teaches. That understanding does
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  Speaker 1: not come quickly. It comes the way the ravens come,
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  Speaker 1: one day at a time. Bread in the morning, meet
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  Speaker 1: in the evening. Day after day, The ravens come, day
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  Speaker 1: after day. The water runs and nothing dramatic happens, and
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  Speaker 1: then the brook begins to dry up. The text says
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: it simply because there was no rain in the land.
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: The brook dried up. This is not mysterious. It is
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: the natural consequence of the very drought Elijah announced. The
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: word he spoke has shut the sky, and the sky
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  Speaker 1: being shut is now affecting the place where he is hiding.
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  Speaker 1: The very proclamation that protects his mission is also threating
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: the water supply that sustains him. There is a painful
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  Speaker 1: reality in that the instrument of your purpose can create
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  Speaker 1: the conditions of your hardship. The drought that Elijah was
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  Speaker 1: called to declare is the same drought that is drying
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  Speaker 1: up the brook he needs to survive. His obedience and
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  Speaker 1: his difficulty are not separate things. They are connected. God
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  Speaker 1: does not explain this. He does not send a message saying,
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  Speaker 1: I know this is difficult. Here is why it is happening,
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  Speaker 1: and here is how long it will last. He simply
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  Speaker 1: gives a new instruction. Arise and go to Zeriphath, which
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: belongs to Sidon, and dwell there Behold, I have commanded
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  Speaker 1: a widow there to feed you. Let us pause on
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: the geography, because it is significant in a way that
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: the first readers would have felt immediately. Sidon was a
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  Speaker 1: Phoenician city. Sidon was not in Israel. Sidon was the
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  Speaker 1: homeland of Jezebel herself. This is the region from which
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  Speaker 1: she came, the culture from which she imported baal worship
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  Speaker 1: into Israel, and God is sending his prophet directly into
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  Speaker 1: the center of that territory. There is a pattern in
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: the Hebrew scriptures that the early readers recognized and that
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  Speaker 1: modern readers sometimes miss. God keeps sending his servants to
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  Speaker 1: the unexpected places, not the safe places, not the places
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  Speaker 1: where they will be welcomed and supported by people who
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  Speaker 1: share their values. Moses is sent to Pharaoh, Jonah is
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: sent to Nineveh, and now Elijah is sent to Zaraphath
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: in Sidon, which is Jezebel's country. God does not respect
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: the borders that human hostility draws. The instruction says that
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: God has commanded a widow to feed Elijah. When Elijah
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: arrives at the gate of the city, he finds her
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: immediately she is gathering sticks. He asks her for water
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: and for bread, and she answers him with one of
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: the most heart breaking sentences in the entire hebrewrough scripture.
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: She says, as Yahweh, your God lives. I have nothing baked,
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: only a handful of flour in a jar and a
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: little oil in a jug. And now I am gathering
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: a couple of sticks that I may go in and
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: prepare it for myself and my son, that we may
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: eat it and die. She knows his name for God.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: She uses it, Yahweh, your God. This woman in Jezebel's homeland,
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: in the city of Sidon, where Baal is worshiped, knows
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: the name of the God of Israel. She is not
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: making a claim of faith. She is simply using the
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: name this stranger invoked when he asked her for something.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: And what she tells him is that she is preparing
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: the last meal she and her son will ever eat.
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: This is whom God has sent Elijah to, Not a
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: wealthy benefactor, not a stable household with resources to spare,
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: a widow with a dying child and a handful of
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: flour and a small amount of oil, a woman who
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: is already made making peace with the end. Elijah's response
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: is extraordinary in its boldness. Do not fear go and
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: do as you have said, But first make me a
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: little cake of it and bring it to me, and
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: afterward make something for yourself and your son. First make
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: me a cake. He is asking a dying woman to
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: give the last food she has to him before she
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: feeds her starving child. The discomfort of this request is
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: the point he is asking her to act on a
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: promise before the promise has shown any evidence of being true.
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: For thus says Yahweh, the God of Israel, the jar
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: of flower shall not be spent, and the jug of
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: oil shall not be empty until the day that Yahweh
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: sends rain upon the earth. She goes, she does what
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: he says, and the jar of flower is not spent.
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: Every morning she goes to the jar, expecting it to
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: be empty. Every morning. It is not enough for to day,
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: just enough for to day. The night is still, the
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: jar is full, and somewhere across the dry land something
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: is being prepared that not even Elijah can yet see. Clearly,
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: he is learning what the word he carries can do,
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: and the next lesson is coming in the form of
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: a child who has stopped breathing. Chapter three, The Widow
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: and the Jar that Never Emptied. There is a kind
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: of grace that does not announce itself. It does not
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: arrive with thunder. It does not part a sea or
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: call down fire or make the ground shake beneath your feet.
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: It simply appears in the ordinary place where you expected nothing,
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: and it keeps appearing quietly every morning in a mounts
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: just sufficient for the day. This is the grace Elijah
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: lived inside for nearly three years. But before we understand
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: what those years at Zaraphath meant for the man who
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: would stand on Carmel, we need to go back to
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: the beginning of that season and stay with it longer
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: than the story glory usually allows us to. Because what
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: happened in that widow's house is not simply a miracle story.
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: It is a school, and Elijah was the student. When
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: God sent Elijah to Zaraphath, the drought had already been
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: in effect long enough to hollow out the landscape. The
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: springs were low, the pastures were dry, animals were dying.
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: The kind of slow catastrophe that does not make dramatic
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: news but quietly dismantles entire communities season by season, had
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: been building across Israel and into the surrounding regions. Zaraphath
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: sat on the Phoenician coast, wealthier than most inland towns,
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: with access to trade routes that could import food. When
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: local supplies failed, but by the time Elijah arrived, even
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: the widow gathering sticks at the gate was preparing her
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: last meal. The drought had reached the margins of the economy,
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: which is always where catastrophe arrives first. Not named in
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: the text, the Hebrew tradition does not give her a name,
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: she is identified entirely by her situation. A vido a mother,
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: a woman with a son who is running out of time,
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: and she is gathering sticks, which is one of the
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: smallest and most ordinary acts of preparation. A person can
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: make the simplest possible response to a need she can
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: no longer meet with anything more substantial. There is something
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: worth staying with. In that image, she is not paralyzed.
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: She is not sitting in her house weeping, though she
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: would have had every reason to. She is outside at
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: the city gate, doing the next small thing, gathering sticks.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: When the flower is almost gone and the oil is
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: almost out, and the child is hungry, and the future
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: has closed down to a single meal, she is still
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: doing the next small thing available to her. That quality,
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: that refusal to stop doing the smallest possible useful thing,
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: even when the larger situation is beyond any hope of
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: repair is the quality that made her the right person
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: for what was about to happen. A man appears. He
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: asks her for water, then he asks her for bread,
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: and she tells him the truth. She does not perform optimism,
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: she does not feel, She does not pretend the situation
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: is better than it is. She says exactly what is true.
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: I have a handful of flour and a little oil.
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: I am gathering sticks so I can cook the last
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: meal for my son and for me, and then we
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: will die. She says it plainly, without drama, without excessive
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: despair that would have made the declaration about herself rather
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: than about the facts. This is also a form of
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: honesty that matters. And Elijah, standing before this woman who
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: has just told him she is preparing to die, says
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: something that should sound outrageous. He says, do not fear
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: go and do as you have said, But first make
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: me a small case, can bring it to me, and
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: after that make something for yourself and your son. First
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: make it for me. Let us not rush past the
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: difficulty of this request, because the text does not rush
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: past it, and neither should we. He is asking a
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: dying woman to give the last food she has to
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: him before she feeds her starving child. The discomfort is
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: the point, because what Elijah is actually asking her to
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: do is to decide, in the most concrete possible terms,
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: whether she believes the word that follows. He is not
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: asking for her flower. He is asking whether she will
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: act on a promise before the promise has shown any
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: evidence of being true. For thus says Yahweh, the God
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: of Israel, the jar of flower shall not be spent,
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: and the jug of oil shall not be empty until
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: the day that Yahweh sends rain upon the earth. The
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: jar will not run out, the jug will not empty.
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: But she has to give first before she sees that.
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: She has to act as though the word is reliable
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: before the word has demonstrated its reliability. This is one
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: of the most demanding things the Biblical narrative asks any
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: of its characters to do. And she does it. She goes,
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: she makes the cake, she brings it to Elijah, and
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: then she makes food for herself and her son, and
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: the jar of flour is not spent. The next morning,
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: she goes to the jar, expecting it to be empty.
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: It is not. She goes to the jug. It has
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: oil in it. Enough for today, just enough for today.
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: This is the nature of the provision at Zaraphath, and
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: it is worth examining carefully because it is not the
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: kind of miracle most people, given the choice, would have designed.
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: The jar does not overflow. She cannot take from it
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: more than she needs and store the surplus somewhere safe.
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: The provision is exactly sufficient every single day, with nothing
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: left over to constitute a margin of security. Every morning
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: she has to go back and find out if to
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: day will be provided for. Every morning she has to
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: re encounter the fact that the promise is still holding.
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: Think of someone who has lived through a season like this,
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: someone caring for a loved one through a long illness,
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: never knowing what the next week would bring, never having
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: a surplus of strength or clarity to bank against what
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: was coming. Someone who said quietly that the hardest part
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: was the dailiness of it, not the weight, though the
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: weight was real, the dailiness, and then said something like this,
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: but I always had what I needed for that day,
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: not more, not less. That is Zaraphath. The provision is
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: not spectacular. It is not designed to produce awe or
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: build a crowd or serve as public evidence of anything.
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: It is a private, daily miracle witnessed only by a widow,
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: her son and a prophet who is himself learning something
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: about the nature of what he carries. Because Elijah is
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: learning something at Zarafath that he could not have learned
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: at Cherith. At Cherith, the provision came to him, the
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: ravens brought it. He was the recipient of something that
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: required nothing from him except to be present and receive.
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: Zarapath is different. At Zarafath, he is the instrument of
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: the provision. He is the one who carries the word,
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: and he is watching every morning as the word he
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: carries does something he cannot explain and did not produce.
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: He is learning that the word in his mouth is
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: not his. This matters enormously for what comes next. When
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: he stands on Carmel before four hundred and fifty prophets
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: of Baal, the confidence he speaks with will not be
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: the confidence of a man who has worked himself up
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: into a state of religious certainty. It will be the
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: confidence of a man who has watched a jar of
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: flower sustain three people through years of drought. He has
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: seen what the word does. Now he knows, and then
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: the sun des Let us stay in this moment, because
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: it is easy to read it as a transitional scene
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: on the way to the miracle and miss the depth
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: of what is actually happening here. The child's illness comes
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: suddenly and progresses quickly. The text says the sickness was
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: so severe that there was no breath left in him.
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: This is not ambiguous. The child is dead, and the
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: woman who has fed this prophet from her last resources,
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: who has trusted the word he brought and watched it
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: prove itself every morning, turns to him with a grief
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: that has become something sharp. What have you against me, o,
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: man of God? Have you come to me to bring
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: my sin to remembrance and to cause the death of
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: my son? She is not asking a calm theological question.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: She is accusing him. In her understanding of how the
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: divine and the human interact, suffering is connected to guilt.
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: The presence of a holy man has somehow exposed or
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: activated some sin she carries, and the consequence is her
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: son's death. The ancient world thought this way. Suffering was
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: not random. It meant something. It came from somewhere, and
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: when you could not identify the cause you looked at yourself,
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: because that was the most available explanation. Elijah does not
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: debate her theology. He does not explain. He does something
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: far more urgent than theological correction. He takes the child.
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: He carries the dead boy upstairs to the room where
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: he has been staying. He lays him on the bed,
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: and then he prays in a way that is unlike
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: almost any other prayer in the Hebrew record up to
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: this point. He does not use the formal language of petition.
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: He goes directly into the hardest place. Oh yahweh, my God,
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: I sojourn by killing her son. He is questioning God.
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: He is holding the situation up before God and asking
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: is this what you intended? He is not in a
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: posture of calm acceptance. He is in a posture of
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: honest struggle. He knows who God is. He has watched
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: what the Word does, and what he is seeing with
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: his eyes does not fit what he knows to be
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: true about the character of the one he serves. This
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: is what the Hebrew tradition calls arguing with God, and
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: far from being a sign of weak faith. It is,
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: in the tradition, one of the most honest expressions of
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: faith available to a human being. You only argue with
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: someone whose reality you take seriously. You only press against
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: a promise if you believe the promise was made. Elijah
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: believes the promise was made. And then he stretches himself
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: over the child three times, his body over the body
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: of the dead boy, pressing warmth into cold, pressing life
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: toward the place where life has stopped. Oh, Yahweh, my God,
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: let this child's life life come into him again. The
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: Hebrew word for life here is nefish. It does not
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: mean simply the biological fact of breathing. It means something
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: closer to the animating center of a being, the part
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: of a person that makes them a person, rather than
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: simply a body, the self, the soul in its most
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: fundamental sense. Let his nephish come into him again, And
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: it does. The text says, Yahweh listened to the voice
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: of Elijah, and the nefish of the child came into
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: him again, and he revived. Elijah carries him downstairs. He
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: places him in his mother's arms, and she says the
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: words that are perhaps the most theologically precise statement made
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: by any gentile in the entire Hebrew scripture up to
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: this point. Now I know that you are a man
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: of God, and that the word of Yahweh in your
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: mouth is truth. She had trusted before this. The flower
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: and the oil had been evidence enough to continue. But
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: this is different in kind, not just in degree. She
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: has moved from evidence based trust to something she can
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: only call knowing. The word of Yahweh in your mouth
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: is truth. She says it about him, but he is
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: learning it about himself, or rather about the word he carries.
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: He is not the source of what has happened. He
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: is the one in whose mouth the word lives and
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: speaks and acts. The provision was not his. The boy
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: in his mother's arms was not revived by his warmth.
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: He ja vassal. He is a mouth through which something
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: older and deeper than himself is speaking. He is learning
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: what kind of servant he is. And the drought is
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: still continuing, and somewhere in Israel a king and his
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: advisers are running out of options, and the moment is
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: coming when the servant who has learned what he has
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: learned in this widow's house will need to use every
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: bit of it. The word of Yahweh in his mouth
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: is truth. He is ready almost There is still one
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: more meeting before the fire falls. Chapter four Obadiah and
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: the Man who hid a hundred prophets. Not all courage
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: looks the same. Some courage stands in front of kings
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: and declares impossible things, and calls fire from heaven and
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: outruns horses in a storm. That is the kind of
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: courage that makes it into stories. That is the kind
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: that gets remembered and repeated across three thousand years. But
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: there is another kind, quieter, less visible, the kind that
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: shows up every day inside a system that has gone wrong,
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: doing what small good it can do, sustaining what would
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: otherwise be lost, keeping faith alive in the only way
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: available to it, which is not a dramatic way, which
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: is not a heroic way, which will leave no record
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: except in the lives of the people who were quietly
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: saved by it. That is the courage of Obadiah. Obadiah
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: deserves more than he usually gets. Three years into the drought,
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: God speaks to Elijah again. The word that comes is
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: simple and direct. Go and show yourself to Ahab and
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: I will send rain upon the earth. Three and a
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: half years have passed since Elijah stood before the king
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: and shut the sky. This span of time comes to
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: us through the New Testament writers who reflected on the
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: Elijah story, and it has become the tradition's way of
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: measuring the duration of the drought. In that time, Ahab
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: has turned Israel upside down looking for him. The text
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: says Ahab sent messengers to every nation and kingdom searching
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: for Elijah, and when each nation said they had not
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: seen him, Ahab made them swear an oath. This is
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: the behavior of a king who is desperate. The drought
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: has been catastrophic. The land is stripped bare, there is
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: no grass for the live stock. Animals are dying, and
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: the man responsible for all of it cannot be found anywhere.
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: He has been in Zaraphath, in Jezebel's own homeland, the
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: last place anyone thought to look. Now, Elijah is going back.
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: He goes to meet Ahab, but on the way, before
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: he reaches the king, he encounters some one else. His
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: name is Obadiah. The text tells us that Obadiah was
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: over the household of Ahab, which means he was the
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: chief steward of the royal palace, the highest administrative officer
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: in the king's domestic operations. He managed the resources, the staff,
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: the logistics of the palace. He was, in every practical sense,
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: one of the most powerful men in Ahab's government. And
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: then the text adds one sentence that changes everything about
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: how we understand him. Now, Obadiah feared Yahweh greatly. He
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: feared Yahweh greatly. The adverb is important, not slightly, not
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: in a private, carefully compartmentalized way that did not interfere
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: with his professional obligations. Greatly, the kind of fear that
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: shapes everything, the kind that, as the next sentence reveals,
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: had consequences. When Jezebel was cutting off the profits of Yahweh,
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: Obadiah took a hundred profits and hid them by fifties
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: in a cave and fed them with bread and water.
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: Let us understand what this means in context. Jezebel was
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: not simply discouraging prophecy in the name of Yahweh. She
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: was executing the profits systematically, with the resources of the
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: royal government behind the effort. This was an organized elimination
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: campaign conducted by the most powerful woman in the country,
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: using the machinery of the state, and Obadiah, from inside
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: that machinery, from within the palace of the king, married
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: to the woman conducting the campaign, quietly found a hundred
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: prophets and hid them and kept them alive with bread
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: and water. Bread and water in a dram when both
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: were precious and scarce, and every additional mouth being fed
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: required resources that had to be quietly diverted from somewhere
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: and quietly transported somewhere else without anyone noticing. A hundred
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: people need food, they need water. Someone has to acquire
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: those provisions without drawing attention. Someone has to transport them
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: without being seen. Someone has to maintain the secrecy of
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: the hiding place while also managing the daily operations of
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: the royal household, where Jezebel's people are watching for exactly
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: this kind of subversion. Obadiah did this every day, without
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: being discovered, without a public declaration, without a dramatic confrontation
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: with the system he was working inside. He did it
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: in silence, at enormous personal risk, in a way that
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: left no finger prints. This is the man Elijah encounters
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: on the road. When Obadiah sees elike. He falls on
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: his face. He calls him, my Lord Elijah. The reverence
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: is genuine, but what follows is complicated because Elijah has
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: a request, go and tell your lord Ahab that Elijah
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: is here. Obadiah's response is one of the most humanly
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: understandable reactions in the entire Elijah narrative. He says, in effect,
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: are you trying to get me killed? He explains carefully.
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: He says that Ahab has searched everywhere for Elijah. He
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: says that if he goes to Ahab and says Elijah
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: is here, and then the spirit of Yahweh carries Elijah
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: somewhere else before Ahab arrives, Ahab will kill him. He
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: says he has feared Yahweh from his youth. He recounts
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: what he did for the profits of Yahweh. He is
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: presenting his credentials. He is saying, I am one of you.
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: Please do not ask me to do something that will
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: destroy me. There is something deeply human in this that
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: deserves attention Rather than di dismissal. Obadiah is not cowardly.
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: He has already proven his courage in the most sustained
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: and consequential way. Possible. He has been doing the hard, invisible,
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: daily work of keeping people alive under a regime that
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: wants them dead. But what Elijah is asking him to
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: do now feels different. It feels like walking into a
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: situation where his survival depends entirely on the reliability of
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: a prophet who has a documented history of being impossible
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: to locate. He is not wrong to be afraid, but
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: there is something else happening here, something the text does
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: not say explicitly, but that sits just beneath the surface.
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: Obadiah and Elijah represent two different responses to the same
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: impossible situation. Both of them fear Yahweh. Both of them
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: have acted on that fear at significant personal cost, but
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: the shape of their obedience looks almost entirely different. Elijah
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: has been visible, confrontational, dramatic. He walked into the king's
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: court and announced a drought. He has been the lightning rod,
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: the point of public conflict, the one whose name Ahab
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: searches for across every nation. Obadiah has been invisible, patient, systematic.
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: He has worked inside the corrupt system rather than outside it,
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: sustaining what would otherwise be destroyed, keeping the remnant alive
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: through the long dark season, when the visible prophet was
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: somewhere no one could find him. Who was more faithful?
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: The text does not answer that question the way we
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: might expect. It does not rank them. It places them
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: side by side on the same road and lets them talk.
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: It does not suggest that Elijah's approach was superior, or
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: that Obadiah should have been more publicly courageous. God needed
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: both of them. He needed the prophet who would stand
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: in public and shut the sky and call down fire
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: and force the question that the nation could no longer avoid.
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: And he needed the administrator who would quietly keep a
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: hundred of his servants alive with bread and water through
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: the years it took to get to that moment. He
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: needed the confrontation, and he needed the continuity. He needed
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: the lightning, and he needed the shelter. Think of someone
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: you might know who has spent years inside a broken institution,
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: not because they lacked the courage to leave, but because
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: leaving would have meant abandoning the people under their care.
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: Someone who redirected what resources they could toward those who
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: needed them. Someone who maintained integrity in the small daily
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: decisions that no one examined someone who kept the door
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: open for the people who eventually spoke publicly by staying
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: when staying was the harder choice. History does not remember
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: those people by name, but the hundred prophets in hiding,
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: fed with bread and water through the long drought, would
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: have disagreed strongly with the idea that their work did
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: not matter. The quiet faithfulness that no one sees and
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: no one records is not lesser faithfulness. It is the
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: other half of the same work. Elijah reassures Obadiah. He
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: swears he will not disappear before Ahab arrives. He will
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: show himself to day, and Obadia goes. He finds Ahab.
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: He delivers the message, and Ahab comes to meet Elijah.
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: When Ahab sees him, the first thing he says is
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: is it you, you troubler of Israel? He calls him
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: a troubler. The Hebrew word carries the sense of one
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: who disturbs, disrupts, brings calamity upon Ahab has not, in
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: three and a half years, connected his own choices to
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: what has happened. He has not asked whether installing four
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: hundred and fifty prophets of bail in the country devoted
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: to Yahweh might have had something to do with the drought.
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: He has simply held the messenger responsible for the message.
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: This is also a recognizable human response. Elijah's answer is precise.
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: He says, I have not troubled Israel. You and your
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: father's house have troubled it because you have abandoned the
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: commandments of Yahweh and followed the bals. Then he gives
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: the instruction that will lead to Carmel. Now, therefore, send
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: and gather all Israel to me at Mount Carmel, and
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and the
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: four hundred prophets of Asherah who eat at Jezebel's table
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: Mount Carmel, the mountain sacred to Baal, the high place
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: where his worship was practiced and his presence was claimed.
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: Elijah is not choosing a neutral venue. He is choosing
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: the home ground of everything that has replaced Yahweh in Israel.
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: He is walking into the center of the opposition and
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: asking the opposition to meet him there. The King does it.
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: He sends word, he gathers all Israel, He summons the prophets,
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: and from that gathering, one of the most dramatic confrontations
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: in the history of human religion is about to unfold.
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: But before the fire falls, there is a question Elijah
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: will ask the people of Israel that is more important
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: than any miracle. It is a question about a choice
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: they have been avoiding for years, and it cannot be
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: avoided any longer. Chapter five, Fire on Carmel. There are
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: moments in human history when everything that has been building
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: for years arrives at a single point in time and space,
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: and the question that everyone has been quietly avoiding is
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: suddenly the only question left in the room. Mount Carmel
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: was one of those moments. The mountain itself rises from
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: the Mediterranean coast in the northwest of Israel, a long
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: ridge running southeast from the sea, covered in dense forest
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: and deep ravines. In the ancient world, Carmel was considered
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: one of the most beautiful places in the land. The
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: name in Hebrew carries the sense of a garden, a
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: place of lush and fruitful growth. It was sacred ground
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: in the religious imagination of the region, a high place
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: where the divine was believed to be especially present and accessible.
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: But by the time Elijah chose it as the site
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: of the confrontation. Carmel had become associated primarily with Bal.
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: The mountain was Bal's territory. His profits knew its terrain,
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: his altars stood on its heights. If there was any
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: place in Israel where Baal should have been able to
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: demonstrate his power, it was here. Elijah chose it deliberately.
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: He was not looking for a neutral venue. He was
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: walking into the center of the opposition and saying, we
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: will settle this here on your terms, in your place,
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: with your people watching. That is a specific kind of
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: courage that goes beyond ordinary bravery. It is the courage
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: of someone who already knows what is true and is
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: simply willing to let the truth be demonstrated in the
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: most public and unamberbiguous way possible. All Israel has gathered
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: four hundred and fifty prophets of Baala. There four hundred
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: prophets of Asherah are there, though the text says they
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: do not participate in what follows. Ahab is there, and
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: Elijah stands before all of them and speaks, how long
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: will you go limping between two different opinions? If Yahweh
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: is God, follow him. But if Baal is God, then
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: follow him. The Hebrew word translated as limping is passak.
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: It carries the sense of moving between two positions halting,
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: unable to commit fully to either. Some interpreters have connected
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: it to the idea of leaping between two things at once,
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: unable to land firmly on either one. How long will
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: you keep doing this? The people do not answer. The
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: text says not a word. They have been living in
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: the space between two loyalties for so long that the
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: question catches them with nothing to say. They are not
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: committed to bal They are not committed to Yahweh. They
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: are committed to keeping all their options open, which is
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: another way of saying they are committed to nothing. Elijah
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: lays out the terms of the contest. Let two bulls
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: be given to us. Let the prophets of Bale choose
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: one and cut it in pieces and lay it on
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: the wood, but put no fire to it. And I
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: will prepare the other bull, and lay it on the wood,
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: and put no fire to it. And you call upon
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: the name of your God, and I will call upon
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: the name of Yahweh. And the God who answers by fire,
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: he is God. The people answer, They say, it is
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: well spoken It is a logical test, simple, virifiable, no
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: room for ambiguity. The God who sends fire is the
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: god who controls what matters most for survival. Bal should
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: have had every advantage here. This was his mountain. These
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: were his prophets. The four hundred and fifty of them
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: had years of training and accumulated ritual knowledge. They knew
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: how to call on their God. They had done it
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: their whole lives. They would do it now with everything
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: they had. Elijah gives them the first turn, and they begin.
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: The morning starts with calling the prophets of Baal take
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: their bull, prepare it, lay it on the altar, and
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: begin to call on the name of Bal. The text
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: says they called from morning until noon, O Bal answer us,
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: over and over the same cry. Hours of it, and
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: there was no voice, and no one answered, and no
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: one paid attention. What was happening on that mountain during
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: those hours deserves careful consideration, because it would be easy
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: and dismissive to read this scene as simply the exposure
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: of obvious fraud. But these were not men who knew
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: their God was false and were pretending otherwise. These were
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: men who genuinely believed they had built their entire lives
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: around this belief. They had given their careers, their identities,
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: their whole understanding of how the world worked to the
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: worship of bal They were not performing, They were desperately,
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: sincerely trying, and nothing was coming back. That silence, that
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: terrible absence, that calling into a void that does not respond,
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: is one of the most painful experiences available to a
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: human being, To call out to something you have trusted
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: with everything you have, in the most urgent moment of
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: your life, in front of everyone who has ever watched
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: you believe, and receive nothing back. No voice, no fire,
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: no movement in the air above the altar, just the
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: sun moving across the sky, and the growing awareness that
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: something that was supposed to be there is not. The
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: morning passes hour after hour and still nothing, and it
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: is noon Andijah begins to speak. What he says is
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: one of the most surprising passages in the entire narrative,
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: because it does not sound like a prophet in a
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: solemn moment. It sounds like a man who is entirely unafraid.
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: He calls out to the prophets of Bail and suggests
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: that perhaps their God is occupied elsewhere. Perhaps he is
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: deep in thought, perhaps he is on a journey. Perhaps
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: he is sleeping and needs to be awakened. The words
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: carry a sharp edge of irony that the first readers
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: would have felt immediately. Elijah is taking the internal logic
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: of Baale theology, which described gods who slept and traveled
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: and had moments of distraction, and applying it directly to
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: the present silence. If Bal is the kind of god
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: your tradition says he is, then here are some possible
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: explanations for why he has not answered, and none of
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: them are good. The effect of this is not cruelty,
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: It is clarity. Elijah is refusing to treat Bale's silence
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: as mysterious or ambiguous. He is naming it for what
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: it is, and in doing so, he is naming something.
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: The people of Israel need to see. That what they
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: have been told is powerful is not answering that what
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: they have organized their national life around is not there.
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: The prophets of Baale respond by crying louder and intensifying
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: their ritual efforts. As the afternoon wore on, hours pass
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: the time of the evening offering approaches, That phrase is significant.
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: The evening offering was the time of the daily sacrifice
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: in the Jerusalem Temple, the scheduled moment when the priests
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: of Yahweh offered the sacrifice that maintained the covenant relationship
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: between God and Israel. Elijah is choosing a specific ritual time.
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: He is situating what he is about to do within
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: the framework of official Israelite worship. And there was no voice,
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: no one answered, no one paid attention. Now Elijah steps
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: forward wood, and what he does first is not called fire.
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: What he does first is repair something broken. He calls
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: the people to come near. He takes twelve stones, one
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: for each of the tribes of the Sons of Jacob,
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: and with those stones he repairs the altar of Yahweh
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: that had been broken down. The broken altar matters. It
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: is not just scenery. It is a symbol of what
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: has happened to Israel under Ahab and Jezebel. The worship
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: of Yahweh has been dismantled. The structures that held the
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: covenant together have been torn apart. Before Elijah calls fire,
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: he rebuilds what was destroyed. He takes the twelve stones
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: representing the twelve tribes and makes them into a single altar.
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: He is not just preparing a sacrifice. He is making
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: a statement about what Israel is supposed to be. Then
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: he digs a trench around the altar. He arranges the wood,
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: he cuts the bull and lays it on the wood.
• 55:59
  Speaker 1: And then he does something that requires either extraordinary faith
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: or fearless confidence, or possibly both. He says, fill four
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: jars with water and pour it on the burnt offering
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: and on the wood. They do it, and he says
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: do it a second time. They do it, and he
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: says do it a third time. They do it. The
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: water runs down around the altar and fills the trench.
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: The wood is soaked, the sacrifice is soaked. Everything that
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: fire would need to consume is now saturated with the
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: most fire resistant substance available in a drought. Water is precious.
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: Using it to drench a sacrifice and fill a trench
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: is an extravagant, almost defiant act. Elijah is removing every
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: natural explanation for what is about to happen. He is
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: constructing the most difficult possible conditions and then calling on
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: Yahweh to act within them. This is a form of trust,
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: the trust that says let there be no ambiguity. Let
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: what happens be so clearly beyond natural possibility that the
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: question of who is responsible has only one answer. And
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: then Elijah praise. His prayer. Compared to the hours of
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: elaborate effort from the prophets of Baal is short, it
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: is perhaps the most compressed and theologically precise prayer in
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: the Hebrew scripture. Oh Yahweh, God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel,
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: let it be known this day that you are God
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: in Israel, and that I am your servant, and that
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: I have done all these things at your word. Answer me,
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: Oh Yahweh, Answer me, so that this people may know
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: that you, oh Yahweh, are God, and that you have
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: turned their hearts back. He roots the prayer in history, Abraham, Isaac, Israel.
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: He is invoking the long covenant relationship, the promises made
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: across generations, the faithfulness that has sustained the people of
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: Israel from their beginning. He is not asking for something new.
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: He is asking for the covenant God to act in
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: accordance with who that God has always been. And then
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: the fire falls. The text describes it in one sentence,
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: The fire of Yahweh fell and consumed the burnt offering
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: in the wood and the stones and the dust, and
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: licked up the water that was in the trench, one
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: sentence for the most dramatic moment in the narrative. The
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: restraint is deliberate. The text does not linger on the spectacle.
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: It does not describe the color of the flame, or
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: the sound it made, or the faces of the people watching.
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: It simply states what happened in plain language and moves
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: immediately to the effect the stones. The text says, the
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: fire consumed the stones, not just the sacrifice, not just
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: the wood. The stones of the altar themselves were consumed.
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: Stone does not burn in any natural sense that the
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: ancient or modern world has a mechanism to explain. The
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: fire that fell was something that left the very stones
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: as evidence of an event outside ordinary categories. And when
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: all the people saw it, they fell on their faces,
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: every person on that mountain, every Israelite who had spent
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: years limping between two opinions, every person who had stood
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: there that morning saying nothing. When Elijah asked his question,
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: they fall face down on the ground and they say
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: seven words, Yahweh, he is God, Yahweh, he is God.
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: In Hebrew, the sentences Yahweh, who ha Elohim. It is
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: the answer to the question that Elijah's name has been
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: asking his entire life. Who is God? Not Bahal, not
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: the storm, not the political convenience of a royal marriage.
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: Yahweh is God. And those syllables pressed into a name
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: three thousand years ago are the name of the man
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: standing in front of them. Eli yahou my God is Yahweh.
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: He has been living his answer his entire life. He
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: has carried it through Cherith and Zaraphath, and the widow's
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: house and the dead child, and years of waiting. He
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: has carried it to this mountain and spoken it with
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: water soaked wood and a short prayer and the fire
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: that follows from trusting a God who has never been absent.
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: Now the people know. And then Elijah turns to the
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: matter of the prophets of bal The text says he
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: brought them down to the brook Kishon, and there, in
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: accordance with the covenant law of Israel, that prescribed judgment
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: for those who led the nation into false worship, justice
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: was carried out all four hundred and fifty. It is
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: a severe passage. The tradition has always acknowledged it as such.
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: The biblical text does not dwell on the details, and
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: neither will we. What matters is what the people said
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: when the fire fell. Yahweh, he is God. That is
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: what Carmel produced, not simply a demonstration of power, a declaration,
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: a return, a moment when the nation that had been
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: limping between two opinions finally landed on one. But Elijah
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: is not finished. He turns back to the work that
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: has not yet been done. He says to Ahab, go up,
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: eat and drink, for there is a sound of the
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: rushing of rain. And Ahab goes to eat and drink.
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: And Elijah goes to the top of Carmel and bows
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: himself down on the earth and puts his face between
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: his knees. The posture matters. This is not the posture
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: of triumph. This is not a man standing with his
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: arms raised in victory. This is a man folded into himself,
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: face toward the ground, in the most humble physical posture
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: available to a human body. He is just called fire
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: from heaven, and now he is curled up on the
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: earth asking for rain. The fire was dramatic. The rain
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: will be quiet, But the rain is what the land
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: actually needs. The fire proved the point. The rain sustains
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: the life. He sends his servant to look toward the sea.
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: The servant goes and looks and comes back there is nothing.
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: Elijah says, go again. Seven times. This exchange happens six times.
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: The servant comes back with nothing to report. Seven is
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: a significant number in the Hebrew tradition. It carries the
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: weight of completeness of seeing something through to the end.
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: Elijah does not give up at two, He does not
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: give up at four. He does not allow the absence
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: of visible evidence. On the sixth attempt to tell him
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: that the promise is not going to keep, he says
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: go again. And on the seventh time the servant comes
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: back with something. A little cloud like a man's hand
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: is rising from the sea, A cloud the size of
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: a hand. After years of drought, after fire from heaven
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: and the declaration of an entire nation, the sign of
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: coming rain is a cloud the size of a man's hand.
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: Elijah sends the servant to tell Ahab to prepare his
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: chariot and go down before the rain stops him. And
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: the sky grows dark with clouds and wind, and there
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: is a great rain. The drought is over, and Ahab
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: rides toward Jezreel in his chariot, and the hand of
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: Yahweh is on Elijah, and he runs before Ahab to
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: the entrance of Jezreel. He outruns the chariot in a storm.
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: After a day of confrontation and prayer and the most
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: spiritually and physically demanding sequence of events in his life,
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: he runs ahead of the king's horses all the way
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: to Jezreel. There is something almost joyful in that detail,
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: something that feels like the pure physical release of a
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: man who has carried an enormous weight for years and
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: is finally, for one brief stormy evening, simply running. He
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: is not afraid, he is not exhausted. He is running.
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: The wind is in his face, the rain is soaking
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: his rough clothing. The horses are behind him, and he
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: is ahead. For one evening, everything is right with the world.
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: He does not know yet what is waiting for him
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: in Jezreel. He does not know that by morning everything
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: is going to change. He does not know that the
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: fire on Carmel and the rain on the road, and
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: the joy of running ahead of the King's horses is
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: about to be followed by the worst night of his life.
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: The man who outran the horses, the man who called
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: fire from heaven, is about to ask God to let
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: him die. Chapter six, The sound of rain and the
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: man who ran. There is something no one tells you
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: about great victories. They leave you empty, not immediately. In
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: the immediate aftermath. There is still the momentum, the physical
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: sensation of having done something in naught. Elijah ran to
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: Jezreel in a storm ahead of the king's horses, which
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: is the body's way of spending everything it has left.
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: But momentum runs out, the storm passes, the morning comes,
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: and in the morning a message arrived. Jezebel sent a
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: messenger to Elijah, saying, so may the gods do to me,
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: and more also, if I do not make your life
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: as the life of one of them, by this time
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: to morrow one sentence. Twenty four hours. She had heard
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: what happened on Carmel. She knew about the fire, she
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: knew about the rain, she knew about the four hundred
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: and fifty prophets of Baal who would not be returning
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: to the royal table. And her response was not fear
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: not capitulation, not the kind of reckoning that Elijah might
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: have expected after what the entire nation had witnessed. Her
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: response was a death threat. Specific personal time stamped, and
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: the man who had stood alone against four hundred and
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: fifty prophets, who had called fire from heaven, who had
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: outrun horses in a rain storm, got up and ran.
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: He was afraid. The text says it plainly, without apology
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: or explanation. He arose and ran for his life. This
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: is one of the most discussed moments in the entire
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: Elijah narrative, and it has produced centuries of commentary, most
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: of it trying to explain how the bravest man in
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: Israel could be undone by a single message from a
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: woman he had just publicly defeated. The explanations usually focus
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: on faith, on the failure of faith on Elijah momentarily
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: losing sight of the God who had just answered by fire.
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: But there is another way to understand this moment, and
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: it requires us to look not at what Elijah believed
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: in that moment, but at what his body and spirit
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: had been through in the years and days leading up
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: to it. Consider the accumulation three and a half years
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: of hiddenness, three and a half years of carrying the
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: weight of a national judgment, knowing the drought was connected
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: to the word in his mouth, watching the land suffer
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: while he waited in Zaraphath for the moment God would
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: send him back. Then the journey back to Israel, the
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: encounter with Obadiah, the confrontation with Ahab, the long day
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: on Carmel, beginning with his speech to the assembled nation
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: and ending with the judgment at the brook Kishon. Then
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: the seven trips back and forth to look at the sea.
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: Then the run to Jezreel in the storm. He has
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: given everything he has. He has burned through every reserve
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 1: of physical, emotional, and spiritual energy he possessed. He arrived
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: at Jezreel empty, and then the message came. We have
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: a word for this now. We call it burnout. But
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: the word is too small for what it describes. What
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: it points to is the collapse of the inner structures
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: that make it possible to continue. Those who have studied
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: this pattern have found that the collapse often comes not
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: during the hardest season, but in the quiet immediately after it,
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: and they have found something else. It is often the
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: people who care most who are most committed to the work,
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: who push through the most who are most vulnerable to
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: this collapse because they use caring itself as the fuel
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: that keeps them going past the point where the tank
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: is empty, and when caring runs out, there is nothing
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: underneath it. The person who held everything together through the
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: crisis falls apart when it is over, because the signal
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: finally arrives that the emergency has ended, and the body
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: and spirit respond by releasing everything they have been holding.
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 1: Elijah received that signal when he arrived in Jezreel. The
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: fire had fallen, the rain had come, he had run
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: ahead of the horses. It was over, and then the
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: message came. In any normal state of reserve, Elijah would
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: likely have responded to that message differently. He had faced
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: Ahab face to face. He had stood before four hundred
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 1: and fifty hostile men on their own mountain. A written
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 1: message from a queen who was not even physically present
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 1: would not, under ordinary circumstances, have been the thing that
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: broke him. But he was not in any normal state.
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 1: He was in the state of a man who had
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: just spent everything he had and had not yet been
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: given anything back. The message was not the cause of
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: what happened next. The message was simply the moment when
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: everything he had been holding finally fell. He ran south
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: past Bieresheba, which was the southernmost city of Judah, the
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: edge of inhabited land. He leaves his servant there, and
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: then he goes a day's journey further into the wilderness, alone,
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: into the wilderness, alone, after years of isolation, after the
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: greatest public victory of his life, after the rain and
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 1: the running and the more message, and he sits down
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: under a juniper tree. The Hebrew word for the tree
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: is wrotham. It is what we would call a broom tree,
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: a desert shrub with thin branches and small white flowers
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: that provides minimal shade in the relentless desert sun. It
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: is not a tree that anyone would choose to rest
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: under if they had better options. It is the tree
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: you sit under when it is the only thing between
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: you and nothing. And under that tree Elijah speaks. It
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: is enough. Two words in English, in Hebrew even shorter,
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: rau enough. It is enough, O yahweh take away my life,
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: for I am not better than my father's. He is
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: not pretending, he is not performing the kind of prayer
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: that looks good. He is saying, with the last coherent
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: words he has left, that he wants to stop, and
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: the reason he gives is not what we might expect.
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: He does not so I have failed. He does not
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: enumerate the ways in which the events of the last
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: day have demonstrated that everything he did was pointless. He says,
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: I am not better than my father's I am just
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: a man. I am not the exception. I am not
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: the one who is different enough from every human being
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: who has come before me to sustain what this requires.
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: I am ordinary, I am breakable. It is enough. And
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: then he lies down and sleeps. Think of the people
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: who have sat under their own version of this tree,
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: someone who gave years to a demanding calling, holding everything together,
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: and then one morning simply could not continue as they
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: had been continuing, not because the belief was gone, not
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: because the work was wrong, because the vessel was empty,
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: and the next step was genuinely beyond what they had left.
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 1: The most honest thing such a person can say is
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: exactly what Elijah said. It is enough. I have nothing left.
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: Take this and what they needed. What Elijah needed was
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 1: not a sermon or a correction or a reminder of
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: how much work remained undone. It was someone showing up
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: with food. God's response to this prayer is one of
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: the most remarkable things in the entire Hebrew Scripture. He
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 1: does not answer the theological content of the prayer. He
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: does not explain why Elijah's work is not finished, or
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: what the larger plan is, or why the death threat
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: from Jezebel is not as serious as it seems. He
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: does not offer comfort in the form of information. He
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: sends an angel, and the angel does not preach. The
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: angel does not instruct. The angel does not correct Elijah's
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: theology or challenge his despair. The angel touches him and says,
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: arise and eat. Elijah looks and there is a cake
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: baked on hot coals and a jar of water. Two things,
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 1: the most basic things, food and water, the minimum requirements
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: for a body that is still alive. He eats, He drinks.
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: He lies down again. The angel comes a second time,
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: touches him again, Arise and eat, for the journey is
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 1: too great for you. Why is there a second time?
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: Why does it happen twice because once was not enough?
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: Because a man who has been running on empty for
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: years does not recover in one meal, because the rebuilding
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: of a depleted human being does not happen in a
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 1: single intervention. The Angel knows this, or rather the God
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: who sent the Angel knows this. Arise and eat, for
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: the journey is too great for you. The journey is
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: too great for you. Not you are too weak for
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 1: the journey. Not you have failed to prepare adequately. The
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: journey is too great. The acknowledgment is of the genuine difficulty,
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: not of the person's deficiency. The thing you are carrying
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 1: is genuinely heavy. The distance ahead is genuinely far. This
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 1: is not your failure. This is simply what is true.
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: So eat. There is a clarity in this moment that
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: cuts through centuries of religious language about the importance of
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 1: perseverance and the need to press through difficulty. The Angel
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: does not tell Elijah to pray harder. The Angel does
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: not tell him to remember what God did on Carmel.
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: The Angel does not give him a theological framework for
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 1: understanding his suffering. The Angel gives him bread and water
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: and tells him to sleep, and then gives him bread
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: and water again. The body matters, The depleted human spirit matters.
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: God meets Elijah not where Elijah's theology is, but where
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: Elijah's body is under a desert shrub, wanting to stop,
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 1: unable to continue, and the response is bred. This pattern
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 1: runs through the entire Biblical narrative in ways that theological
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 1: reflection sometimes overlooks. When Hagar is in the wilderness with
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: her dying son, an angel shows her a well of water.
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 1: When the disciples have fished all night and caught nothing,
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 1: The risen Jesus is on the shore with fish already
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: on a fire. When the crowd is hungry in the wilderness,
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: bread is multiplied. The God of the Hebrew and Christian
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 1: scriptures is consistently, almost insistently interested in the physical requirements
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: of the people he loves. Elijah sleeps, Elijah eats, Elijah drinks,
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: and then he gets up. The text says that he
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: arose and ate and drank, and went in the strength
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 1: the mount of God. Forty days and forty nights. The
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: number carries weight. In the Hebrew tradition, Moses spent forty
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: days on Sinai receiving the law. The Israelites spent forty
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: years in the wilderns between Egypt and the Promised Land.
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 1: Jesus will spend forty days in the wilderness before his
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 1: public ministry begins. The number carries the sense of a
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: complete transitional period, the full span of what a significant
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: passage requires. Elijah walks for forty days and forty nights
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 1: on the strength of two meals, not on the strength
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: of a sermon, not on the strength of renewed vision,
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: not on the strength of a fresh conviction about the
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: importance of what he is doing. On bread baked on
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: hot coals by an angel, and water in a yar.
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 1: The journey is too great for you, but you ate,
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: and now you can walk. He is going to Horeb,
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: the Mountain of God, the place where Moses stood and
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: received everything that defined what Israel was supposed to be,
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: the place where the covenant between Yahweh and the people
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: of Israel was established in fire and cloud and the
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: sound of a voice from the summit. Elijah is not
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: walking toward Jezebel. He is not walking toward Ahab. He
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: is walking toward the Source. He is walking to the
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 1: place where everything began. Because the man who has given
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: everything needs to go back to the beginning and find
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: out if the beginning is still there. And it is
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: it always was, It will be waiting for him when
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 1: he arrives, not with fire this time, not with earthquake
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: or wind or any of the dramatic signs that a
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: man who is used to the dramatic might expect, with
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: something quieter, something so quiet that you can only hear
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: it when everything else has finally stopped. The bread was
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: enough to get him there, and what is waiting for
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 1: him at Horeb will be enough to send him out again.
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: Chapter seven, Under the juniper tree. There is a kind
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: of tiredness that sleep cannot fix. You have felt it,
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: perhaps you are feeling it to night. The kind that
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: is not in your muscles or your eyes, or the
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: weight of your body against the bed, The kind that
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: lives somewhere deeper than any of that, in the place
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: where you keep your reasons for continuing, in the space
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 1: where your sense of purpose used to be, before the
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 1: long season of giving everything hollowed it out and left
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: something quieter and harder to name in its place. Let
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: us stay under this tree a while longer, not to
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 1: repeat what brought Elijah here We have already walked that road.
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 1: We know the accumulation of it, the years at Cherith
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: and Zaraphath, the fire on Carmil, the run to Jezreel,
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: the message in the morning. We know how a man
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: arrives at this particular tree, in this particular desert, asking
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: for this particular thing. What we have not yet done
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: is stay inside the prayer itself. It is enough, Oh
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 1: yahweh take away my life, for I am not better
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: than my father's. The word rav in Hebrew means sufficient
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: at the point of saturation, full to the limit. It
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: appears throughout the Hebrew scriptures in many contexts, and here
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: it means the capacity has been reached. No more can
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: be added. Something has to change, because there is nothing
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: left to put into the continuation of what has been
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: raw enough. Elijah is not saying that his life has
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 1: been meaningless. He is not saying the work was wrong.
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: He is saying that he has reached the limit of
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 1: what he can hold. The vessel is full to its
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: limit and cannot receive another thing. And then the most
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 1: revealing phrase, I am not better than my father's. His
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: fathers were mortal men, limited, breakable, ordinary human beings who
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: lived and struggled and died. And what Elijah is saying
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 1: in the most honest moment of his life, is that
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: he is one of them. He is not the indestructible
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: prophet who can sustain impossible demands indefinitely without consequence. He
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: is a man, a mortal man, made of the same
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 1: material as every other mortal man who came before him.
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: He is not complaining, He is confessing. He is confessing
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 1: his humanity to the God who made him human. And
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 1: in the Hebrew prophetic tradition, the confession of humanity is
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: not a failure of faith, it is a form of it.
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: It is the acknowledgment that you are not God, that
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 1: you cannot sustain what only God can sustain, that the
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: difference between you and the one you serve is not
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 1: a problem to be overcome, but a reality to be received.
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 1: I am not better than my father's I am a man.
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 1: I am your man, But I am a man. And
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 1: then he sleeps. He does not wait for an answer,
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: He does not maintain a vigil. He simply closes his
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 1: eyes because he is exhausted and his body will not
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 1: cooperate with any other plan. He sleeps, and then something
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 1: touches him. The text says an angel touched him. The
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: Hebrew word for angel is malak, which means messenger, one
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 1: who is sent, one who carries something from a source
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 1: to a destination, and the word for touched is naga,
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 1: which in its most common usage carries a gentleness. It
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: is the kind of touch that says, I am here.
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: You are not alone. Something knows you are here. And
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 1: the Angel says four words, arise and eat. Not pull
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: yourself together, not remember what you are called to. Not
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 1: a single word about what Elijah has left undone or
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: what is still required of him. Arise and eat. Elijah
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: opens his eyes, and there near his head is a
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 1: cake baked on hot coals, and a jar of water.
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 1: Someone has been here. Someone has built a fire in
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: the wilderness where no fire was when Elijah sat down.
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: Some one has baked bread on that fire. Some one
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: has brought water in ajar to a man in a
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: desert who asked to die. He eats, he drinks, He
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: lies down again. Let us pause here, because this second
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: lying down is often passed over quickly, and it should
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: not be. Elijah eats and drinks and then lies down again.
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: He is not revived in one meal. He does not
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: arise from the first provision full of renewed purpose. He
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 1: eats and then goes back to sleep. This is not
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 1: a failure of gratitude. This is a man whose recovery
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 1: requires more than one meal, whose depletion is deep enough
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 1: that the first layer of restoration does not reach the
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: bottom of it. And God knows this. The Angel comes
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 1: again a second time, touches him again, and this time
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 1: the words carry something more. Arise and eat. The journey
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: is too great for you. The journey is too great
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: for you. This is one of the most compassionate sentences
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 1: spoken by God in the entire Hebrew Scripture, and it
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: is compassionate precisely because of what it acknowledges. It does
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: not say the journey is too great for a weak
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 1: or faithless person. It says the journey is too great
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 1: full stop. The journey itself, in its own nature, exceeds
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 1: what a single human being can sustain without being replenished.
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 1: The acknowledgment is of reality, not deficiency. The thing you
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 1: are carrying is genuinely heavy. The distance you are asked
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: to travel is genuinely far. The work ahead is genuinely
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 1: more than you have in you right now. This is
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 1: not your failure. This is simply what is true. Arise
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: and eat, for the journey is too great for you.
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 1: Think of someone who has spent years in work that
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: demanded more than they had, someone who learned over time
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: that the most dangerous belief in such work is the
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 1: belief that you should be able to handle it without
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: being handled yourself, that you can keep giving from a
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: place that is never replenished, that one meal is enough,
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 1: and then you press on. The Angel did not come
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 1: to Elijah and say you should have managed your resources better.
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 1: The Angel came and said, the journey is too great
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: for you. Eat and then eat again, because one time
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: was not enough. The journey is too great for everyone.
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 1: That is not the problem. The problem is pretending otherwise.
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: Elijah eats the second time, he drinks the second time,
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: and he aris, and he walks forty days and forty nights.
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 1: The text says, in the strength of that food to
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 1: horeb the mount of God. He did not know when
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: he lay down under the broom tree and asked to die,
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 1: that he was about to walk to Sinai. He did
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 1: not know that what he thought was the end of
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: his story was the beginning of its final chapter. He
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 1: did not know that the cave at Horeb would be
• 1:25:07
  Speaker 1: the place where he would receive the clearest word he
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 1: had ever received from the God he served. He ate
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 1: in the dark, not knowing what the bread was for.
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: He got up, not knowing where the walking would lead.
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: He walked forty days in the strength of food he
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 1: had not asked for given by a messenger he had
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 1: not summoned, at the instruction of a God who answered
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: his request to die with bread. And he arrived at Horeb,
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 1: the Mount of God, the place where Moses heard the
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: voice from the burning bush, the place where the covenant
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 1: between Yahweh and the people was forged in fire and
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 1: cloud and thunder, the holiest ground in the memory of Israel.
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 1: He went into a cave there and spent the night.
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 1: The cave, after the open confrontation of Carmel and the
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 1: open road of the wilderness and the open desert under
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 1: the broom, he is in a cave, enclosed, hidden, small
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: And then the word of Yahweh came to him and said,
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: what are you doing here? Elijah? It is a questian,
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 1: not an accusation, not a rebuke, a questian what are
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 1: you doing here? And Elijah answers, he has been very
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: jealous for Yahweh, the God of hosts. The people of
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 1: Israel have forsaken the Covenant. They have thrown down the altars,
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: They have killed the prophets with the sword, and he
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: alone is left, and they seek his life to take
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: it away. He alone is left. This is not, strictly
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: speaking accurate. There are seven thousand people in Israel who
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: have not bowed to ba' Al, as God will shortly
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: tell him. Obadiah is still at his post. The hundred
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 1: prophets in hiding are still alive. He is not literally
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 1: the last faithful person in Israel. But it is accurate
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 1: as a feeling. And the feeling is what Elijah has
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: access to in this cave, not the statistical reality of
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 1: how many faithful people remain, the felt reality of a
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 1: man who has been alone in the work for so
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: long that alone has become the only category available to him.
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 1: God does not correct the feeling. God does not say, actually,
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: you are wrong. Here are the numbers. God says, go
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 1: out and stand on the mount before me. Not explain yourself,
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 1: Not let me tell you why your theology is mistaken.
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 1: Go out, stand, be present, Be on the mountain with
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 1: your body, not just your exhaustion. And Elijah goes to
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 1: stand before the God who met him with bread before
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 1: he asked for bread, to stand in the place where
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 1: the Covenant was first spoken, to hear something he has
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 1: not yet heard in all the years of his ministry,
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 1: Something smaller than fire, something quieter than thunder, something that
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: can only reach a man who has nothing left to
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 1: make noise with. The mountain is waiting, and what waits
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: there has been waiting since before Elijah was formed in Gilead,
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 1: since before the drought, since before the ravens and the
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: widow and the fire on Carmel. It has been waiting
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 1: for exactly this, for the moment when he is empty
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: enough to hear it. Chapter eight. The still small voice
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 1: the mountain remembered everything orib the name Echoes through the
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: Hebrew tradition with a weight that every Israelite who heard
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 1: it would have recognized immediately and completely. This was the
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: Mountain of the Covenant, the mountain of the Law, the
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 1: mountain where Moses stood before the burning bush and heard
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: his name spoken by something that was on fire, without
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: being consumed the mountain where Yahweh came down in cloud
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: and thunder and spoke to the assembled people of Israel
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 1: in a voice so overwhelming that they begged Moses to
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 1: hear it for them, because they could not bear it themselves.
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 1: This was the mountain where Israel became Israel. And now
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 1: standing at the entrance of a cave on the side
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 1: of that mountain, wrapped in his cloak, is a man
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 1: who has just told God twice that he is the
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 1: only faithful person left and that he would like to
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 1: stop existing. The distance between those two realities could not
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: be greater, and yet God has sent him here, not
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: to a new place with no associations, to the most
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 1: historically weighted piece of ground in the entire Israelite tradition.
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: There is something being said in that choice of location.
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 1: You will not find what you need in a new place.
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 1: You will find it in the oldest place, in the
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 1: place where the foundation was laid, in the place where
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: the original word was spoken, in the place that remembers
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: what has always been true before any of the events
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: of your life obscured it. When Elijah arrived at Horeb,
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 1: he went into a cave and spent the night. Some
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 1: interpreters across the centuries have identified the location as the
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 1: same cleft in the rock where Moses stood when Yahweh
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 1: passed by and proclaimed his own name in the Book
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 1: of Exodus, the same hidden place in the same mountain,
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: as though the mountain keeps a room ready for this
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 1: kind of moment, a place it holds open for the
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 1: servants of God who arrived depleted and in need of
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 1: something the ordinary world cannot provide. The word of Yahweh
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 1: came to Elijah there and said, what are you doing here? Elijah?
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: The question matters, Let us spend time with it. In
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 1: the Hebrew, the question carries more intimacy than the English
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 1: translation suggests. It is not a formal inquiry. It is
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: something closer to tell me, Tell me where you are,
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: not because I do not know, but because the telling
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: of it is part of what you need. There is
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 1: wisdom in asking not what happened, but where you are,
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 1: because a person in acute suffering is very specifically located
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 1: in a particular place inside themselves, and naming that location
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 1: is the first step toward being able to move from it.
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 1: You cannot be led somewhere if you have not first
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: acknowledged where you are? What are you doing here, Elijah?
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 1: And Elijah tells him he has been very jealous for Yahweh.
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 1: The people have forsaken the Covenant, the altars are destroyed,
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 1: the prophets are dead. He is the only one left,
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 1: and they are looking for him to kill him. The
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 1: same words he said before God told him to stand
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: on the mountain, the same assessment, the same conclusion, I
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 1: alone am left. And now God responds in a way
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 1: Elijah has not yet experienced. He says, go out and
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 1: stand on the mount before me. And Elijah goes. And
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 1: then the phenomena begin. A great wind comes, the tears
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 1: the mountains and breaks the rocks in pieces before Yahweh,
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 1: but Yahweh is not in the wind. And after the wind,
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 1: an earthquake, but Yahweh is not in the earthquake. And
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 1: after the earthquake, a fire, but Yahweh is not in
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 1: the fire. Stay with this sequence because it is deliberate
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 1: and the repetition is important. Three of the most powerful
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 1: phenomena in the natural world. Wind that tears mountains, an
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: earthquake that shakes the ground, fire, and God is in
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: none of them. This is astonishing in the context of
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 1: everything that has come before in the Elijah story, because
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: Yahweh has been in fire before. The fire on Carmel
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 1: was explicitly called the fire of Yahweh. The text said, so,
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: and now at Horib fire comes, and Yahweh is not
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 1: in it. What has changed? Interpreters across the centuries have
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 1: approached this question from many directions. Some suggest God is
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 1: demonstrating his freedom, his refusal to be contained in the
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 1: forms that human expectation assigns to him. Some suggest it
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 1: is a specific word to Elijah, who has become so
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 1: oriented toward the dramatic that he needs to be taught
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: to find God in something smaller. Some suggest it is
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 1: a demonstration that God exceeds every natural phenomenon that might
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 1: be used to represent him. All of these readings contain
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 1: something true, but there is another dimension that the structure
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 1: of the story itself suggests. Elijah came to Horib as
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 1: a man whose system of receiving God through the dramatic
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 1: and the powerful had been completely depleted. He came as
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 1: a man who had run on the fuel of extraordinary
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 1: events for so long that the extraordinary had nothing left
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 1: to give him, and God at Horib does not give
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 1: him more extraordinary events. He gives him something that cannot
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 1: be metabolized into mission fuel or profit phetic momentum. He
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 1: gives him a voice so small that you can only
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 1: hear it when everything else has stopped after the fire,
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 1: A still small voice. The Hebrew is calleddemamma ducca, three
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: words that carry more weight than any translation can fully convey.
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 1: Cool means voice or sound, or call. Demama comes from
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: a root meaning silence, stillness, the cessation of sound. It
• 1:34:26
  Speaker 1: carries within it, the weight of absence, of the space
• 1:34:29
  Speaker 1: where sound has not yet arrived or has already ended.
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 1: Dakka means thin or fine, or reduced to the smallest
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 1: possible substance, the thinnest possible layer of something. Put them together.
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 1: A voice of thin silence, a sound of fine stillness,
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 1: something that occupies the space where sound and silence have
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 1: become almost indistinguishable. Later interpreters have described it in various ways.
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 1: The ancient Greek translation rendered it as a sound of
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: gentle breezes. The Latin tradition that shaped Western Christianity for
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 1: over a thousand years described it as a still small voice.
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 1: The Great twentieth century Jewish philosopher Martin Buber approached the
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 1: phrase as something closer to a sound of fine silence.
• 1:35:18
  Speaker 1: Many scholars feel this rendering captures what the Hebrew does
• 1:35:21
  Speaker 1: that any single translation cannot fully reach. A sound of
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 1: fine silence, not simply a quiet voice, as though the
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 1: divine has lowered the volume of its ordinary communication. Something
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 1: heard not by the ears exactly, but by the part
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 1: of a person that is only available when everything else
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 1: has stopped making noise. And when Elijah hears that thin,
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 1: still voice, he does something that tells us everything about
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 1: what he has recognized. He wraps his face in his mantle,
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 1: his cloak. He covers himself, and he goes and stands
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 1: at the entrance of the cave. He does not cover
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 1: his face in fear. He covers his face in recognition.
• 1:36:03
  Speaker 1: He has heard something that he knows in the deepest
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 1: part of himself is the presence of the one he
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 1: has been serving all these years. And the response is
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: not the response of a man afraid of judgment. It
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 1: is the response of a man who has just been found.
• 1:36:20
  Speaker 1: He covers his face because you cannot look at what
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 1: he has heard. You can only receive it. And that
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 1: thin still voice asks him the same question it asked before.
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 1: What are you doing here? Elijah? The same question exactly
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 1: word for word. This is significant. God is not asking
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 1: because he does not know. God is asking because Elijah
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: needs to say it again. He needs to hear his
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 1: own honest answer in the presence of the voice that
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 1: just came after the wind and the earthquake and the fire.
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: And Elijah gives the same answer, word for word. I
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 1: have been very jealous for Yahweh. The people have forsaken
• 1:37:03
  Speaker 1: the Covenant. The altars are thrown down, the prophets are dead.
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 1: I alone am left, and they seek my life. He
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 1: still believes he is alone. The wind and the earthquake
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 1: and the fire have not changed that. Even the thin
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 1: still voice has not yet changed that. But now the
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 1: response is different. God does not ask a third question.
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: He gives instructions three specific things to do. Go back
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 1: the way you came. Anoint Hazael as king over Syria,
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 1: Anoint Jehu as king over Israel. Anoint Elisha as prophet
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 1: in your place. There is work yet to do. Three anointings,
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 1: three acts that will shift the political and spiritual landscape
• 1:37:49
  Speaker 1: of the entire region. The story Elijah thought was ending,
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 1: is not ending. The chapter he thought was the final
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 1: chapter is not the final chapter. And then God adds
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 1: something that shifts everything. Yet I will leave seven thousand
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 1: in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to bow,
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 1: and every mouth that has not kissed him. Seven thousand,
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: not one, not Elijah alone in the dark. Seven thousand
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 1: people who have been quietly, invisibly, faithfully refusing to bow.
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 1: Seven thousand whose faithfulness left no dramatic public record. Seven
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 1: thousand who were sustaining the Covenant in the ways available
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 1: to them, in the places they occupied, without fire from
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 1: heaven and without the confrontation of kings. Elijah did not
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: know about them. He had no way of knowing. He
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 1: was so deep inside the experience of his own isolation
• 1:38:43
  Speaker 1: that the seven thousand were invisible to him. But they
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 1: were there. They had always been there. Think of someone
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 1: who has been through a long season of feeling like
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 1: the last person standing, Someone who watched something they loved
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 1: fall apart, who found themselves in the aftermath feeling entirely
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 1: alone in caring about what had been lost, and who
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 1: then discovered slowly that there were others people who had
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 1: felt exactly what they felt and had stayed anyway, people
• 1:39:12
  Speaker 1: who were not visible in the public story of what
• 1:39:15
  Speaker 1: had happened seven thousand. I did not know about the
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 1: seven thousand, and if some one had said to them,
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 1: you were one of them, they would not have thought
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 1: of it that way, but it would have been true.
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 1: You are not the last person who is holding what
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 1: you are holding. You cannot see every one who is
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 1: standing in the same place you are standing. The cave
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 1: will always feel like it contains only you, But the
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 1: mountain contains seven thousand people you cannot see from where
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 1: you are. The seven thousand are there. They have always
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 1: been there. God does not explain to Elijah why the
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 1: wind and the earthquake and the fire were not him.
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 1: He simply gives Elijah the instructions and the information he
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 1: needs and sends him back. Go return annoint Elisha, the
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 1: cave is not your final address. And now having heard
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 1: that seven thousand are there, something shifts in the weight
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 1: of what Elijah carries. Not because the exhaustion is gone,
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 1: not because the isolation has been replaced by warmth, but
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 1: because the story he has been telling himself about being
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 1: alone has been gently precisely irreversibly corrected. You are not alone.
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 1: There are seven thousand, and From that knowing, however, quiet
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 1: and new and not yet fully felt, the direction of
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 1: schalom becomes visible. Shalom the word that appears at the
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 1: end of the oldest priestly blessing in the Israelite tradition,
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 1: the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 1: his face shine on you, and be gracious to you.
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 1: The Lord turn his face toward you and give you shalom.
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 1: Shalom is usually translated as peace, but the word carries
• 1:41:01
  Speaker 1: more than peace in its ordinary English sense. It carries
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 1: the sense of wholeness, the state of a thing that
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 1: has all its parts in their right relationship to each other,
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 1: a person whose inner and outer life are aligned, whose
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 1: past and present and future are held together in a
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 1: coherent story. Elijah did not come down from Horeb with
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 1: shalam in that full sense. He came down with instructions,
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 1: with the knowledge that seven thousand people were keeping faith
• 1:41:28
  Speaker 1: in ways he could not see, with that fine silence
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 1: still resonating somewhere inside him, that was enough to walk
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 1: back into the world. Shalom is not always a feeling.
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 1: Sometimes it is a direction, and the direction from the
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: cave at Horeb is back toward the field where a
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 1: young man is plowing, back toward the cloak that is
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 1: about to find its next bearer, Back toward the continuation
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 1: of the work that does not end when any one
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 1: person can no longer carry it alone. Elijah came to
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 1: Horib carrying the words I alone am left. He left
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 1: Horeb carrying the words seven thousand. That is what the
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 1: mountain does, not the wind, not the earthquake, not the fire.
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 1: The voice thin, still quiet and sufficient for everything that comes.
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 1: Next Chapter nine, Elisha and the Mantle. Every great fire
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 1: eventually finds its hearth. Not because the fire grows weaker,
• 1:42:34
  Speaker 1: though it may, not because the burning is less real
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 1: than it was in the beginning, though the shape of
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 1: it changes with time, but because fire, by its nature,
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 1: passes heat from one thing to the next. That is
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 1: what fire does. It does not hoard what it has.
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 1: It reaches toward the nearest available material and gives itself
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 1: to it. And what catches becomes in its own way. Fire.
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 1: Elijah had been burning for a long time. He had
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 1: burned through Cherith and Zaraphath and Carmel and the wilderness
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 1: and the cave at Horeb. He had burned in confrontation,
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 1: and in hiding, and in grief, and in the exhausted
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 1: prayer under the broom tree. He had burned in ways
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 1: that were visible to an entire nation, and in ways
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 1: that were visible to no one at all. And now
• 1:43:23
  Speaker 1: God had told him something he had not expected to hear.
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 1: Go and anoint Elisha to be profit in your place,
• 1:43:29
  Speaker 1: in your place, not alongside you, not in addition to you,
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 1: in your place. Every person who has given years of
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 1: their life to something they love, who has built something
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 1: slowly and carefully and at great personal cost, knows what
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 1: those three words cost to hear. The work will continue,
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 1: the fire will keep burning, but you will not be
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 1: the one carrying it. This is one of the hardest
• 1:43:55
  Speaker 1: gifts God gives, and Elijah receives it with a simplicity that,
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 1: once you understand what is being asked, is almost breathtaking
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 1: in its completeness. He goes, He finds Elisha. He gives
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 1: him the cloak, and that is the whole of it.
• 1:44:12
  Speaker 1: Let us travel to the place where this happens, because
• 1:44:14
  Speaker 1: the location matters. God sends Elijah through the land of Israel,
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 1: and he finds Elisha in the valley of abel Mehola.
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 1: Abel Mehola was a fertile agricultural region in the Jordan Valley.
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 1: The soil there was rich and the land was productive,
• 1:44:31
  Speaker 1: which is why Elisha's family had twelve yoke of oxen.
• 1:44:35
  Speaker 1: A single yoke of oxen was enough for a small
• 1:44:38
  Speaker 1: farming operation. Twelve yoke represents a substantial enterprise. A family
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 1: of means a household that had built something solid and
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 1: secure over generations. Elisha was not a poor man's son.
• 1:44:52
  Speaker 1: He was not someone on the margins with nothing to lose.
• 1:44:55
  Speaker 1: He was plowing the family land with the family oxen,
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: doing the work that had sustained his household for years,
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 1: the work that would continue to sustain it after him,
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 1: the work that was his inheritance and his future. He was,
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 1: by every ordinary measure, exactly where he was supposed to be.
• 1:45:12
  Speaker 1: And Elijah walked past him and threw his mantle over him.
• 1:45:16
  Speaker 1: That is all, no words recorded, no explanation offered. A
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 1: man walking past a field throws his cloak over the
• 1:45:24
  Speaker 1: shoulders of a man plowing. In the ancient world, and
• 1:45:28
  Speaker 1: specifically in the prophetic tradition of Israel. This gesture had
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 1: a meaning that every observer would have understood immediately. The
• 1:45:35
  Speaker 1: mantle was not simply clothing. It was the external symbol
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 1: of the prophet's calling and authority. When Elijah put his
• 1:45:43
  Speaker 1: cloak on Elisha, he was performing an act of designation.
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 1: He was saying, without a single word, that what he
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 1: carried was now available to this man. The question was
• 1:45:54
  Speaker 1: whether Elisha would receive it, and Elisha's response is immediate.
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 1: Leaves the Oxen. He runs after Elijah, and he asks
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 1: for one thing. Let me kiss my father and my mother,
• 1:46:08
  Speaker 1: and then I will follow you. Let me say good
• 1:46:11
  Speaker 1: bye before I do this irreversible thing. Let me go
• 1:46:15
  Speaker 1: back to the people who love me and tell them
• 1:46:17
  Speaker 1: what is happening. Let me say what needs to be
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 1: said to the ones who will feel my absence most.
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 1: Elijah's response to this request is one of the most
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 1: discussed passages in the narrative. He says, go back again,
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 1: for what have I done to you? What have I
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 1: done to you? The sentence is strange in almost every
• 1:46:38
  Speaker 1: direction you approach it from. Some interpreters read it as
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 1: gentle permission. Go back if you must. I have not
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 1: obligated you Others read it as a quiet challenge. Go
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 1: back if you must, but consider what you are choosing.
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 1: Others read it as a statement of weight. What I
• 1:46:56
  Speaker 1: have done to you by throwing this cloak is a
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 1: real thing. Do not go back and forget what it
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: felt like when it landed on your shoulders. What have
• 1:47:04
  Speaker 1: I done to you? Whatever Elijah means by it, Elijah
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 1: hears it and makes his choice. He goes back. He
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 1: takes the yoke of oxen. He slaughters them. He uses
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: the wooden equipment of the plow as fuel and cooks
• 1:47:19
  Speaker 1: the meat. He gives it to the people around him,
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 1: and they eat, And then he arises and follows Elijah
• 1:47:26
  Speaker 1: and ministers to him. The slaughter of the oxen is
• 1:47:29
  Speaker 1: Elisha's version of burning the boats. He takes the instruments
• 1:47:33
  Speaker 1: of his former life, the oxen that were his family's
• 1:47:36
  Speaker 1: wealth and his own future security, and he turns them
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 1: into a farewell meal. He feeds the people around him
• 1:47:43
  Speaker 1: with what he is leaving behind. Think of someone you
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 1: might know who has faced a version of this, someone
• 1:47:50
  Speaker 1: who spent years building something secure and then found themselves
• 1:47:54
  Speaker 1: standing at a threshold they had not planned for. Someone
• 1:47:57
  Speaker 1: for whom The hardest part was not the decision itself,
• 1:48:00
  Speaker 1: which clarified in the end, but what they called the oxen,
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 1: the things they had to walk away from that had
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 1: genuine value, not bad things, not wrong things, good things
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 1: that other people legitimately wanted, and that they had worked for.
• 1:48:17
  Speaker 1: The important thing, such a person might say afterward, was
• 1:48:20
  Speaker 1: not simply leaving. It was doing something purposeful with what
• 1:48:23
  Speaker 1: was being left behind, giving it to someone who could
• 1:48:27
  Speaker 1: use it, rather than simply abandoning it. That was what
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 1: made it a real threshold, rather than just a retreat.
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 1: Elisha feeds the people, and then he leaves. He follows Elijah,
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 1: He serves him. The text says he ministered to him.
• 1:48:44
  Speaker 1: He becomes the attendant of the prophet, the one who
• 1:48:47
  Speaker 1: walks alongside and learns what he is being prepared to carry.
• 1:48:51
  Speaker 1: Years pass. The text does not give us the precise duration,
• 1:48:56
  Speaker 1: but the tradition understands it as a substantial period. Elisha
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 1: is watching everything, how Elijah prays, and how Elijah confronts power,
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 1: and how Elijah fails and how Elijah gets back up.
• 1:49:09
  Speaker 1: He is learning not just the content of the prophetic calling,
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 1: but the texture of it. What it costs what it requires,
• 1:49:18
  Speaker 1: what it produces in the person who carries it for
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 1: a long time. There is no short cut to the
• 1:49:23
  Speaker 1: knowledge that comes from sustained proximity to someone who carries
• 1:49:28
  Speaker 1: something true. You cannot read about it and arrive at
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 1: the same place. The knowledge Elisha acquires in the years
• 1:49:35
  Speaker 1: of walking alongside Elijah is the kind that lives in
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 1: the instincts, in the responses shaped by watching the same
• 1:49:42
  Speaker 1: person navigate the same pressures in the same spirit he
• 1:49:46
  Speaker 1: watches Elijah, and gradually, over years he becomes someone who
• 1:49:51
  Speaker 1: can carry what Elijah carries. But before the mantle is
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 1: formally transferred, there is one more confrontation that Elijah must make,
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 1: one more moment of standing before power and saying what
• 1:50:03
  Speaker 1: is true. The story of Naboth's Vineyard. Naboth was an
• 1:50:07
  Speaker 1: Israelite man who owned a vineyard near the palace of
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 1: Ahab in Jezreel. The vineyard had been in his family
• 1:50:14
  Speaker 1: for generations. Ahab wanted it. He offered Naboth a fair exchange,
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 1: either a better vineyard elsewhere or the monetary value of
• 1:50:22
  Speaker 1: the land. He was not initially trying to take it unjustly.
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 1: Naboth refused his reason was rooted in the covenant law
• 1:50:31
  Speaker 1: of Israel. The land of Naboth's father's was not simply
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 1: property in the modern sense of something that can be
• 1:50:36
  Speaker 1: bought and sold at will. It was his inheritance, his
• 1:50:40
  Speaker 1: family's portion of the covenant promise, their share in the
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 1: land that Yahweh had given to Israel. To permanently transfer
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 1: that land would be to sever the family from their
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: place in the covenant. Naboth was not being obstinate, he
• 1:50:55
  Speaker 1: was being faithful. Ahab understood this, and he went home
• 1:50:59
  Speaker 1: and sulked, which is one of the more undignified moments
• 1:51:03
  Speaker 1: in the record of the kings. He lay on his
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 1: bed and turned his face to the wall and refused
• 1:51:08
  Speaker 1: to eat, and Jezebel found him there. She was not
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 1: interested in the theological complexity of Nabeth's position. She operated
• 1:51:17
  Speaker 1: under a different understanding of the relationship between monarchs and
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: their subjects. In her frame work, the king's desire functioned
• 1:51:25
  Speaker 1: as the legal framework. She wrote letters in Ahab's name,
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 1: sealed them with his seal, and sent them to the
• 1:51:31
  Speaker 1: elders of Jezreel. The letters instructed them to arrange a
• 1:51:35
  Speaker 1: public accusation against Naboth, on false charges and to carry
• 1:51:39
  Speaker 1: out the legal consequences. They did it because the system
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 1: that was supposed to prevent exactly this kind of abuse
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 1: had been so thoroughly corrupted that there was no one
• 1:51:50
  Speaker 1: left inside it willing to refuse. Naboths died, an innocent man,
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 1: faithful to the covenant of his father's killed for a
• 1:51:59
  Speaker 1: piece of ground that his family had held for generations.
• 1:52:02
  Speaker 1: The vineyard he had refused to surrender now stood empty,
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 1: available for a king who had done nothing to deserve it.
• 1:52:09
  Speaker 1: This is the weight of what Elijah is walking toward
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 1: when God sends him to Jezreel, and when he arrives
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: at the vineyard and Ahab sees him, the king says
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 1: again what he always says, Have you found me, o,
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 1: my enemy? He has not changed. Elijah is still in
• 1:52:26
  Speaker 1: Ahab's understanding, the troubler, the man responsible for Israel's suffering.
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 1: And Elijah says, I have found you because you have
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 1: sold yourself to do what is evil in the sight
• 1:52:37
  Speaker 1: of Yahweh. And then he delivers the word, the word
• 1:52:42
  Speaker 1: that traces the consequence of what has been done all
• 1:52:44
  Speaker 1: the way to its end. It is a severer word.
• 1:52:48
  Speaker 1: The Biblical text states it plainly and does not dwell
• 1:52:52
  Speaker 1: on its details, and neither will we. What matters here
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 1: is not the severity of the judgment, but what happens
• 1:52:58
  Speaker 1: immediately after it is delivered. Because something unexpected happens. Ahab
• 1:53:04
  Speaker 1: hears the word, and he repents. He tears his clothes,
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 1: he fasts, he lies in sackcloth, He goes about quietly.
• 1:53:15
  Speaker 1: The text says he walked softly, which is the Hebrew
• 1:53:18
  Speaker 1: way of describing a person who has been brought genuinely
• 1:53:21
  Speaker 1: low by the recognition of what they have done. And
• 1:53:25
  Speaker 1: Yahweh says to Elijah, have you seen how Ahab has
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 1: humbled himself before me? Because he has humbled himself before me,
• 1:53:33
  Speaker 1: I will not bring the disaster in his days. Even Ahab,
• 1:53:38
  Speaker 1: even the king whose reign was described as the worst
• 1:53:41
  Speaker 1: in the history of Israel, even the man who stood
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 1: passively while his wife arranged the death of an innocent
• 1:53:47
  Speaker 1: man for a vineyard, even he has within him the
• 1:53:50
  Speaker 1: capacity to hear and to soften and to turn. And
• 1:53:55
  Speaker 1: God sees it and responds to it. The disaster will
• 1:54:00
  Speaker 1: still come. The consequences of what has been set in
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 1: motion cannot be entirely reversed, but they are delayed because
• 1:54:08
  Speaker 1: he humbled himself. This is one of the most important
• 1:54:11
  Speaker 1: moments in the Elijah narrative and one of the least discussed.
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 1: It disrupts the clean narrative of the righteous prophet and
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 1: the wicked king with something more complicated and more true.
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 1: It shows us that the categories of righteous and wicked
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 1: are not, in the Hebrew tradition sealed and permanent. Even
• 1:54:30
  Speaker 1: the most compromised human being in the record can, in
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 1: the right moment, with the right hearing, turn, And the
• 1:54:37
  Speaker 1: God who counts seven thousand people who have not bowed
• 1:54:41
  Speaker 1: is also the God who notices when one person who
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 1: has bowed his entire life briefly turns his face in
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 1: the other direction, he sees Ahab. He responds, this is
• 1:54:52
  Speaker 1: Elijah's last word to Ahab. He will not speak to
• 1:54:56
  Speaker 1: him again. The long confrontation between these two men, which
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 1: began with a declaration of drought in the king's court
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 1: and continued through the years of drought and the fire
• 1:55:06
  Speaker 1: of Carmel and the rain and the word about Nabeth's vineyard,
• 1:55:10
  Speaker 1: is complete. Now there is only one thing left, the transfer.
• 1:55:15
  Speaker 1: The tradition tells us that Elijah and Elisha made a
• 1:55:18
  Speaker 1: final journey together through the land from Gilgal to Bethel,
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 1: to Jericho to the Jordan. Four stops, the geography of
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 1: a country that Elijah has walked across for the entirety
• 1:55:30
  Speaker 1: of his ministry, as if the route itself is a
• 1:55:33
  Speaker 1: form of farewell, a last movement through the landscape of
• 1:55:36
  Speaker 1: a life given entirely to a calling. At each stop,
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 1: Elijah says the same thing to Elisha, stay here, for
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 1: Yahweh has sent me on. And at each stop Elisha
• 1:55:49
  Speaker 1: gives the same answer, as Yahweh lives, and as you
• 1:55:52
  Speaker 1: yourself live, I will not leave you. Three times, the
• 1:55:57
  Speaker 1: same offer and the same refusal. Eli keeps giving Elisha
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 1: the chance to stop. Elisha keeps refusing to take it.
• 1:56:05
  Speaker 1: There is a community of profits at each stop, younger
• 1:56:08
  Speaker 1: men training in the prophetic tradition. At each stop, they
• 1:56:11
  Speaker 1: approach Elisha privately and ask do you know that to
• 1:56:14
  Speaker 1: day Yahweh will take away your master from over you?
• 1:56:18
  Speaker 1: And Elisha says, yes, I know. It be silent. He
• 1:56:22
  Speaker 1: knows he has known for some time that this day
• 1:56:26
  Speaker 1: was coming. He does not want the weight of it
• 1:56:28
  Speaker 1: narrated aloud by people who are watching from the outside.
• 1:56:32
  Speaker 1: He wants to be present for it without the commentary.
• 1:56:35
  Speaker 1: They reach the Jordan, Elijah takes his mantle and rolls
• 1:56:39
  Speaker 1: it up and strikes the water with it, and the
• 1:56:42
  Speaker 1: water parts to the right and to the left, and
• 1:56:45
  Speaker 1: the two of them cross over on dry ground. The
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 1: echo is deliberate. Moses and the Sea, Joshua and the Jordan,
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 1: and now Elijah and the Jordan, the same God, the
• 1:56:59
  Speaker 1: same pattern, the same water, yielding to the same authority.
• 1:57:03
  Speaker 1: When they have crossed, Elijah asks, tell me what can
• 1:57:07
  Speaker 1: I do for you before I am taken from you?
• 1:57:10
  Speaker 1: And Elisha asks for what he has come all this
• 1:57:13
  Speaker 1: way to ask for. Please, let there be a double
• 1:57:16
  Speaker 1: portion of your spirit on me. In Hebrew inheritance law,
• 1:57:20
  Speaker 1: the first born son received a double portion of his
• 1:57:22
  Speaker 1: father's estate. It was not a request for twice as
• 1:57:26
  Speaker 1: much as Elijah had. It was a request for the
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 1: inheritance of the first born the portion that belongs to
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 1: the primary heir. Elisha is asking to be recognized as
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 1: the legitimate successor, the one who carries forward what Elijah carried.
• 1:57:41
  Speaker 1: It is not in a regant request. It is an
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 1: honest one, and Elijah's answer is careful. You have asked
• 1:57:48
  Speaker 1: a hard thing. Yet if you see me as I
• 1:57:51
  Speaker 1: am being taken from you, it shall be so for you.
• 1:57:54
  Speaker 1: But if you do not see me, it shall not
• 1:57:56
  Speaker 1: be so. The condition is seeing, not doing, not achieving,
• 1:58:02
  Speaker 1: not passing a theological test. Seeing, be present for what
• 1:58:07
  Speaker 1: is about to happen. Watch it fully, do not look away.
• 1:58:12
  Speaker 1: And then the chariot of fire appeared, horses of fire,
• 1:58:17
  Speaker 1: a chariot of fire coming between the two of them,
• 1:58:20
  Speaker 1: and a whirlwind lifting Elijah up away into the sky
• 1:58:25
  Speaker 1: until he was gone. One sentence for the most extraordinary
• 1:58:30
  Speaker 1: departure in the Biblical record, the same restraint the text
• 1:58:33
  Speaker 1: used for the fire on Carmel one sentence, because the
• 1:58:38
  Speaker 1: event exceeds anything that additional words could add to it.
• 1:58:42
  Speaker 1: Elisha sees it, He sees it all. He cries out,
• 1:58:46
  Speaker 1: my father, my father, the chariot of Israel and its
• 1:58:49
  Speaker 1: horsemen my father, not my master, not my teacher, my father.
• 1:58:57
  Speaker 1: This is the word that describes the relationship formed over
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 1: the years of walking together. Elisha has not simply learned
• 1:59:03
  Speaker 1: from Elijah. He has been fathered by him in the
• 1:59:07
  Speaker 1: deepest sense of that word. The chariot of Israel and
• 1:59:10
  Speaker 1: its horsemen. A chariot and its horses represent military protection
• 1:59:15
  Speaker 1: in the ancient world. Elishah is saying that Elijah himself
• 1:59:19
  Speaker 1: was the true protection of Israel, that the real security
• 1:59:22
  Speaker 1: of the nation was not its military resources or its
• 1:59:25
  Speaker 1: political alliances, but the presence of a man who carried
• 1:59:29
  Speaker 1: the word of the living God. Now that man is gone,
• 1:59:33
  Speaker 1: Elisha tears his clothes in grief. He does not pretend
• 1:59:37
  Speaker 1: that this is not loss. It is loss the man
• 1:59:41
  Speaker 1: who fathered him in. The work has been taken, and
• 1:59:43
  Speaker 1: the tearing of the clothes is the honest, acknowledgment of it.
• 1:59:47
  Speaker 1: And then he looks down. The mantle of Elijah has fallen.
• 1:59:51
  Speaker 1: It is lying on the ground where the chariot came
• 1:59:54
  Speaker 1: between them. The cloak that was thrown over Elishah's shoulders
• 1:59:57
  Speaker 1: in the field at able Mahola all those years ago,
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 1: the mantle that represented everything Elijah carried it is here.
• 2:00:06
  Speaker 1: Elisha picks it up. He goes back to the bank
• 2:00:09
  Speaker 1: of the Jordan. He takes the mantle of Elijah and
• 2:00:12
  Speaker 1: strikes the water, saying, where is Yahweh, the God of Elijah?
• 2:00:17
  Speaker 1: And the water parts to the right and to the left,
• 2:00:21
  Speaker 1: same water, same God, different man, same result. The sons
• 2:00:28
  Speaker 1: of the prophets, watching from the other bank, see it,
• 2:00:31
  Speaker 1: and they say, the spirit of Elijah rests on Elijhah,
• 2:00:36
  Speaker 1: not a copy of Elijah, not a replacement in the
• 2:00:39
  Speaker 1: sense of something interchangeable. The spirit that Elijah carried has
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 1: found its next vessel. The fire has found its next hearth.
• 2:00:47
  Speaker 1: The word that was in Elijah's mouth is now available
• 2:00:50
  Speaker 1: to the mouth of the man standing at the Jordan
• 2:00:53
  Speaker 1: with a cloak in his hands. The mantle has found
• 2:00:56
  Speaker 1: its bearer, and the work continues. Fire eventually finds its hearth,
• 2:01:02
  Speaker 1: and every hearth eventually sends the fire on. That is
• 2:01:06
  Speaker 1: not the diminishment of the fire, That is its nature.
• 2:01:10
  Speaker 1: That is what fire does.
• 2:01:15
  Speaker 2: Chapter ten, The Chariot of Fire. Nothing that is truly
• 2:01:21
  Speaker 2: given is ever truly gone. This is one of the
• 2:01:25
  Speaker 2: hardest things to believe, and one of the most persistently
• 2:01:28
  Speaker 2: demonstrated realities in the entire Biblical record. We are not,
• 2:01:33
  Speaker 2: by nature a species that finds it easy to trust
• 2:01:37
  Speaker 2: the continuation of what we love beyond the point where
• 2:01:40
  Speaker 2: we can no longer see it. We are oriented toward
• 2:01:44
  Speaker 2: the visible. We trust what we can touch and confirm
• 2:01:47
  Speaker 2: with our senses. And when something we love moves beyond
• 2:01:51
  Speaker 2: the range of what we can confirm, the very human
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 2: response is to treat it as lost. The Biblical text
• 2:01:59
  Speaker 2: does not describe Elijah dying in the ordinary way. He
• 2:02:03
  Speaker 2: did not lie down in old age like the patriarchs.
• 2:02:07
  Speaker 2: He was not struck down by illness or enemy, or
• 2:02:10
  Speaker 2: the ordinary course of a human life. The text says
• 2:02:14
  Speaker 2: he went up by a whirlwind into heaven. The Hebrew
• 2:02:17
  Speaker 2: word for whirlwind is sarah, a word that appears in
• 2:02:21
  Speaker 2: the tradition to describe the most intense and overwhelming movement
• 2:02:24
  Speaker 2: of wind, the kind that is beyond ordinary wind, the
• 2:02:28
  Speaker 2: way a river in flood is beyond ordinary water, wind
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 2: that carries within it something of the divine. And in
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 2: that Sarah Elijah went up. The same God who had
• 2:02:41
  Speaker 2: sustained him through the drought and the ravens, and the
• 2:02:44
  Speaker 2: widow's house, and the fire on Carmel, and the bread
• 2:02:47
  Speaker 2: under the broom tree, and the thin still voice at Horeb,
• 2:02:51
  Speaker 2: was present at his departure, and he did not let
• 2:02:54
  Speaker 2: Elijah fall. Among the clearest accounts in the Hebrew scripture,
• 2:02:59
  Speaker 2: there are are two figures described as being taken by
• 2:03:02
  Speaker 2: God in a way that bypasses the ordinary experience of death.
• 2:03:07
  Speaker 2: The first is Enoch, described briefly in the Book of Genesis,
• 2:03:12
  Speaker 2: about whom the text simply says he walked with God
• 2:03:15
  Speaker 2: and he was not for God took him. No detail,
• 2:03:20
  Speaker 2: no account of what this looked like, just the statement
• 2:03:23
  Speaker 2: that walking with God had a particular consequence for this man.
• 2:03:28
  Speaker 2: The second is Elijah, and unlike Enoch, whose departure is
• 2:03:32
  Speaker 2: a single sentence in a genealogy, Elijah's is described in detail,
• 2:03:37
  Speaker 2: witnessed by Elisha, and immediately followed by the continuation of
• 2:03:42
  Speaker 2: the work Elijah had been doing. The chariot came, the
• 2:03:46
  Speaker 2: fire came, the whirlwind came, and Elijah was gone. Elisha
• 2:03:52
  Speaker 2: stood at the Jordan with the cloak. The sons of
• 2:03:55
  Speaker 2: the prophets looked for Elijah for three days, insisting that
• 2:03:59
  Speaker 2: perhaps the spirit of Yahweh had set him on some
• 2:04:02
  Speaker 2: mountain or in some valley. Elisha told them not to search.
• 2:04:07
  Speaker 2: They searched anyway, because the human resistance to accepting an
• 2:04:11
  Speaker 2: irreversible departure is strong and almost universal. They found nothing,
• 2:04:17
  Speaker 2: because there was nothing to find. He had been taken
• 2:04:21
  Speaker 2: the tradition immediately began asking a question that would persist
• 2:04:25
  Speaker 2: across every generation that came after. Where did he go?
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 2: And more urgently, will he come back? The prophet Malachi,
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 2: writing in the tradition of the Hebrew Prophets, says, in
• 2:04:37
  Speaker 2: the closing words of the prophetic collection, Behold, I will
• 2:04:41
  Speaker 2: send you Elijah the Prophet, before the great and awesome
• 2:04:44
  Speaker 2: day of Yahweh comes. He will turn the hearts of
• 2:04:47
  Speaker 2: fathers to their children, and the hearts of children to
• 2:04:50
  Speaker 2: their fathers. Elijah will come before the day of Yahweh.
• 2:04:56
  Speaker 2: The tradition held this promise carefully across the centuries that
• 2:04:59
  Speaker 2: follow When Jewish families gathered for the Passover meal, they
• 2:05:04
  Speaker 2: set a place at the table for Elijah. They poured
• 2:05:07
  Speaker 2: a cup of wine for him. Near the end of
• 2:05:09
  Speaker 2: the meal, the door of the house was opened, and
• 2:05:12
  Speaker 2: the family looked out into the night, as if expecting
• 2:05:15
  Speaker 2: to see the rough figure of the man from Gilead
• 2:05:18
  Speaker 2: standing on the threshold, returned from wherever the whirlwind carried him,
• 2:05:23
  Speaker 2: ready to announce that the day they had waited for
• 2:05:26
  Speaker 2: was finally here. The cup of Elijah set at Passover
• 2:05:30
  Speaker 2: tables for over two thousand years. He has not been forgotten.
• 2:05:36
  Speaker 2: He has been expected. And then something happened that the tradition,
• 2:05:40
  Speaker 2: in all its careful preparation, had not entirely anticipated. A
• 2:05:45
  Speaker 2: group of disciples were walking with Jesus. When he asked
• 2:05:48
  Speaker 2: them who people said he was. They gave various answers.
• 2:05:52
  Speaker 2: Some say John the Baptist, they told him, some say Elijah,
• 2:05:58
  Speaker 2: some say one of the prophets Elijah. The people watching
• 2:06:02
  Speaker 2: Jesus thought he might be Elijah returned, the man from Gilead,
• 2:06:07
  Speaker 2: the one who had been taken by the whirlwind, the
• 2:06:10
  Speaker 2: one for whom the place at the table was kept.
• 2:06:13
  Speaker 2: And then something happened. On a mountain. Jesus took three
• 2:06:17
  Speaker 2: of his disciples, Peter and James and John, and led
• 2:06:21
  Speaker 2: them up a high mountain, and his face shone like
• 2:06:24
  Speaker 2: the sun. His clothes became white as light, and two
• 2:06:28
  Speaker 2: figures appeared beside him, Moses and Elijah. There they stood
• 2:06:35
  Speaker 2: on the mountain in the light, the law giver and
• 2:06:39
  Speaker 2: the prophet, the man of the burning Bush and the
• 2:06:43
  Speaker 2: man of the still small voice, the two who between
• 2:06:46
  Speaker 2: them had carried the covenant across the most difficult centuries
• 2:06:49
  Speaker 2: of Israel's history, standing together in the presence of the
• 2:06:54
  Speaker 2: one who would fulfill everything both of them had ever said,
• 2:06:57
  Speaker 2: or done, or suffered. For the disciples fell on their faces.
• 2:07:02
  Speaker 2: When they lifted their heads, they saw no one but Jesus.
• 2:07:06
  Speaker 2: Only Moses and Elijah had come and gone. But the
• 2:07:11
  Speaker 2: disciples had seen them. They had seen with their own
• 2:07:14
  Speaker 2: eyes that the men who had walked with God in
• 2:07:16
  Speaker 2: the most complete way the tradition had recorded, was still present,
• 2:07:21
  Speaker 2: still available to appear when the moment required it. Elijah
• 2:07:25
  Speaker 2: was not gone, He was beyond what could be seen. Now.
• 2:07:30
  Speaker 2: Look back over the whole arc of his life, and
• 2:07:33
  Speaker 2: something becomes visible that was always there, but only clear
• 2:07:37
  Speaker 2: from here. He was prepared for that mountain. The drought
• 2:07:41
  Speaker 2: did not waste him. The hiding at Cherith did not
• 2:07:45
  Speaker 2: diminish him. The exhaustion at Jezreel, and the despair under
• 2:07:49
  Speaker 2: the broom tree, and the isolation in the cave at
• 2:07:52
  Speaker 2: Horeb were not detours from his purpose. They were the
• 2:07:55
  Speaker 2: path to it. Every season of being emptied and refilled
• 2:08:00
  Speaker 2: sent out again was making him into the person who
• 2:08:03
  Speaker 2: could stand in that light. The bread mattered, the ravens mattered,
• 2:08:08
  Speaker 2: the widow's jar matted, the thin, still voice mattered most
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 2: of all. Now, let us look at what he left behind,
• 2:08:17
  Speaker 2: because the departure was not the end of the work,
• 2:08:20
  Speaker 2: It was the beginning of its continuation in a form
• 2:08:23
  Speaker 2: that did not require him. Elisha went on to walk
• 2:08:27
  Speaker 2: faithfully through his own long ministry, performing acts of provision
• 2:08:32
  Speaker 2: and healing and restoration that carried forward what Elijah had carried.
• 2:08:36
  Speaker 2: The spirit of Elijah, which Elijah had asked for at
• 2:08:40
  Speaker 2: the Jordan, proved sufficient for the work that followed. And
• 2:08:44
  Speaker 2: even after Elishah himself died and was buried, the tradition
• 2:08:48
  Speaker 2: records one final remarkable detail. A group of Israelites in
• 2:08:53
  Speaker 2: the middle of burying a man were interrupted by a
• 2:08:56
  Speaker 2: raiding band, and in haste threw the body into the
• 2:08:59
  Speaker 2: tomb of his Elisha. And when the body touched the
• 2:09:02
  Speaker 2: bones of Elisha, the dead man came back to life
• 2:09:05
  Speaker 2: and stood on his feet. Even the bones, even the
• 2:09:10
  Speaker 2: physical remains of the man who had carried what Elijah carried.
• 2:09:14
  Speaker 2: Even after death, life continued to pass through what had
• 2:09:17
  Speaker 2: been faithful. The fire does not stop at the second hearth.
• 2:09:21
  Speaker 2: In the Jewish tradition, Elijah is the expected one. The
• 2:09:26
  Speaker 2: chair set at the table, the cup poured, the door
• 2:09:30
  Speaker 2: opened into the night. He is the one for whom
• 2:09:33
  Speaker 2: space is kept because the tradition has never stopped believing
• 2:09:37
  Speaker 2: that the one who was taken will return when the
• 2:09:40
  Speaker 2: time is right. In the Islamic tradition, Elijah appears as
• 2:09:45
  Speaker 2: ilias a prophet sent to guide a people who had
• 2:09:47
  Speaker 2: turned toward bal He calls them back. He is honored
• 2:09:52
  Speaker 2: among the righteous. His story is the story of faithfulness
• 2:09:55
  Speaker 2: to the One God in the face of what cannot answer.
• 2:09:59
  Speaker 2: In the Christian tradition, beyond the Mountain of Light, Elijah
• 2:10:03
  Speaker 2: stands as the pattern of the prophetic voice that prepares
• 2:10:06
  Speaker 2: the way. John the Baptist is described in the language
• 2:10:10
  Speaker 2: of Elijah, wearing the same rough clothing, living in the
• 2:10:14
  Speaker 2: same wilderness, carrying the same call to return before something
• 2:10:18
  Speaker 2: greater arrives. The connection is not accidental. It is a
• 2:10:23
  Speaker 2: signal that the Elijah pattern continues. That the work of
• 2:10:27
  Speaker 2: the man from Gilead did not end with the chariot.
• 2:10:31
  Speaker 2: Someone will always need to stand before the king and
• 2:10:33
  Speaker 2: say what is true. Someone will always need to sit
• 2:10:37
  Speaker 2: under the broom tree and confess that they have nothing left.
• 2:10:41
  Speaker 2: Someone will always need to go to the cave at
• 2:10:43
  Speaker 2: Horeb and wait for the thin still voice that comes
• 2:10:46
  Speaker 2: after the silence, after the fire. Someone will always need
• 2:10:50
  Speaker 2: to pick up the cloak and walk back into the world.
• 2:10:53
  Speaker 2: The mantle keeps falling, and every generation is asked whether
• 2:10:58
  Speaker 2: it will pick it up. There is a question worth
• 2:11:01
  Speaker 2: asking at the end of this long journey, and it
• 2:11:04
  Speaker 2: is the honest question. Where did you recognize yourself in
• 2:11:07
  Speaker 2: this story? Were you at Cherith in the season of
• 2:11:11
  Speaker 2: hidden provision, when what is sustaining you is so small
• 2:11:15
  Speaker 2: and so daily that you can barely call it a
• 2:11:17
  Speaker 2: sign of anything. Or were you in Zaraphath, giving the
• 2:11:21
  Speaker 2: last of what you have because a word came that
• 2:11:24
  Speaker 2: you are trying to trust. Or were you on Carmel
• 2:11:28
  Speaker 2: in the moment of greatest demand when everything that has
• 2:11:32
  Speaker 2: been building must be acted on now? Or were you
• 2:11:35
  Speaker 2: under the broom tree. If you were under the broom tree,
• 2:11:39
  Speaker 2: this whole story was written for you, because the whole
• 2:11:42
  Speaker 2: story of Elijah leads to the broom tree and then
• 2:11:45
  Speaker 2: leads through it. The broom tree is not the end.
• 2:11:49
  Speaker 2: It is the place where the bread is given and
• 2:11:52
  Speaker 2: the angel touches, and the thin still voice comes, and
• 2:11:56
  Speaker 2: the walking begins again. The journey is too great for you.
• 2:12:00
  Speaker 2: But the bread is there, and the voice is there,
• 2:12:04
  Speaker 2: and the mantle is waiting. You are not alone in
• 2:12:07
  Speaker 2: the dark. You are not the last one holding what
• 2:12:10
  Speaker 2: you are holding. There are seven thousand people you cannot
• 2:12:14
  Speaker 2: see from inside your cave who are holding the same
• 2:12:17
  Speaker 2: things you are holding, in the ways available to them,
• 2:12:20
  Speaker 2: in the places they occupy. Without the fire from heaven
• 2:12:24
  Speaker 2: and without the public record, they are there. You are
• 2:12:28
  Speaker 2: one of them, and the fire does not stop. Let
• 2:12:33
  Speaker 2: us pray, Father, We have walked to night through the
• 2:12:38
  Speaker 2: life of a man who was made of the same
• 2:12:40
  Speaker 2: material we are made of, who was afraid when the
• 2:12:43
  Speaker 2: threat came in the morning, who sat under a desert
• 2:12:46
  Speaker 2: tree and asked you to take his life, who heard
• 2:12:50
  Speaker 2: the same question twice and gave the same honest answer
• 2:12:54
  Speaker 2: both times. Thank you that you did not correct him.
• 2:12:58
  Speaker 2: Thank you that you gave him breadth. Thank you that
• 2:13:01
  Speaker 2: the Angel touched him not once but twice, because once
• 2:13:05
  Speaker 2: was not enough. We are here tonight because we needed
• 2:13:09
  Speaker 2: to hear this story. Some of us are at Cherith,
• 2:13:13
  Speaker 2: sustained by provisions we cannot explain, waiting for something we
• 2:13:17
  Speaker 2: cannot yet see. Some of us are in Zerophath, giving
• 2:13:20
  Speaker 2: the last of what we have because someone spoke a
• 2:13:23
  Speaker 2: word we are trying to trust. Some of us have
• 2:13:26
  Speaker 2: been on Carmel and the fire fell, and now we
• 2:13:30
  Speaker 2: are in the valley on the other side of the fire,
• 2:13:33
  Speaker 2: trying to understand why the joy did not last longer.
• 2:13:36
  Speaker 2: And some of us are under the broom tree. If
• 2:13:40
  Speaker 2: you are under the broome tree tonight, hear this. The
• 2:13:43
  Speaker 2: same God who sent the angel to the exhausted prophet
• 2:13:46
  Speaker 2: in the desert knows exactly where you are. He knows
• 2:13:50
  Speaker 2: the exact weight of what you are carrying. He knows
• 2:13:53
  Speaker 2: how long you have been carrying it. He knows that
• 2:13:56
  Speaker 2: the journey ahead is too great for you as you
• 2:13:59
  Speaker 2: currently are, and he is not angry about that. He
• 2:14:03
  Speaker 2: is baking bread. He will touch you. He may have
• 2:14:07
  Speaker 2: already touched you to night in the quiet of this story,
• 2:14:11
  Speaker 2: in the moment when you recognized yourself in a man
• 2:14:13
  Speaker 2: who lived three thousand years ago and felt exactly what
• 2:14:17
  Speaker 2: you are feeling. Now, arise and eat, not because the
• 2:14:21
  Speaker 2: journey is not hard. It is hard, not because you
• 2:14:26
  Speaker 2: are not tired. You are tired, but because the bread
• 2:14:30
  Speaker 2: is there and the bread is enough. And on the
• 2:14:32
  Speaker 2: other side of the eating is the walking, And on
• 2:14:35
  Speaker 2: the other side of the walking is the thin still voice.
• 2:14:38
  Speaker 2: And on the other side of the voice is the field,
• 2:14:41
  Speaker 2: where the person who will carry what you cannot carry
• 2:14:44
  Speaker 2: alone is already waiting. The mantle does not fall to
• 2:14:48
  Speaker 2: the ground and stay there. Someone always picks it up. Lord,
• 2:14:53
  Speaker 2: keep these who are listening to night, keep their going
• 2:14:56
  Speaker 2: out and their coming in. Give them bread they are
• 2:15:00
  Speaker 2: under the broom tree. Give them the voice when they
• 2:15:03
  Speaker 2: are in the cave, Give them the courage to throw
• 2:15:06
  Speaker 2: the cloak over the shoulders of the person walking alongside them.
• 2:15:10
  Speaker 2: And when the chariot comes, as it comes for all
• 2:15:14
  Speaker 2: of us, in one form or another, let them go
• 2:15:17
  Speaker 2: into it knowing that what they carried did not end
• 2:15:20
  Speaker 2: with them, that the fire found its next hearth, that
• 2:15:25
  Speaker 2: the mantle is still falling and being picked up and
• 2:15:27
  Speaker 2: falling again, all the way across the sentries, all the
• 2:15:31
  Speaker 2: way to this room, this night, this breath. Thank you
• 2:15:35
  Speaker 2: for Elijah, thank you for the bread, thank you for
• 2:15:39
  Speaker 2: the thin still voice, And thank you that the darkness
• 2:15:43
  Speaker 2: has not overcome the fire, not once in three thousand years,
• 2:15:48
  Speaker 2: Not tonight, Amen, Rest Now the broom tree is small,
• 2:15:54
  Speaker 2: and the desert is wide, and the journey has been long.
• 2:15:58
  Speaker 2: But you have heard tonight, Elijah, heard in the cave
• 2:16:01
  Speaker 2: after the wind and the earthquake and the fire. Not
• 2:16:04
  Speaker 2: a sermon, not an explanation, not a theological resolution to
• 2:16:09
  Speaker 2: everything that has been hard. A voice thin, still quiet,
• 2:16:16
  Speaker 2: speaking in this room, in this night, in the space
• 2:16:20
  Speaker 2: between your breathing and the dark, you are known. You
• 2:16:25
  Speaker 2: are not alone, You are held. The journey is too
• 2:16:28
  Speaker 2: great for you, but you ate, and tomorrow you will walk.
• 2:16:34
  Speaker 2: Good Night,