Experiencing God No.8 Elijah at Horeb

This morning's reading is taken from the first book of Kings, chapter 19. Now Ahab told Jezebel everything Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. So Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah to say, May the gods deal with me, be it ever so severely, if by this time tomorrow I do not make your life like one of them.

Elijah was afraid and ran for his life. When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his servant there, while he himself went a day's journey into the desert. He came to a broom tree, sat down under it, and prayed that he might die.

I have had enough, Lord, he said. Take my life. I am no better than my ancestors.

Then he lay down under the tree and fell asleep. All at once an angel touched him and said, Get up and eat. He looked around, and there by his head was a cake of bread baked over hot coals, and a jar of water.

He ate and drank, and then lay down again. The angel of the Lord came back a second time and touched him and said, Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you. So he got up and ate and drank.

Strengthened by that food, he travelled forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God. There he went into a cave and spent the night. And the word of the Lord came to him, What are you doing here, Elijah? He replied, I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty.

The Israelites have rejected your covenant, broken down your altars, and put your prophets to death by the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too. The Lord said, Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.

And after the fire came a gentle whisper. Elijah heard it. He pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

Then a voice said to him, What are you doing here, Elijah? He replied, I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, broken down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.

The Lord said to him, Go back the way you came, and go to the desert of Damascus. When you get there, anoint Hazael king over Aram. Also anoint Jehu son of Nimshi king over Israel.

And anoint Elisha son of Shaphat from Abel Meholah to succeed you as prophet. Jehu will put to death any who escape the sword of Hazael, and Elisha will put to death any who escape the sword of Jehu. Yet I reserve 7,000 in Israel, all whose knees have not bowed down to Baal, and all whose mouths have not kissed him.

I'd be glad if you'd have your Bibles open at 1 Kings in chapter 19. The 12th verse I repeat after you have heard it once through Anne, Christian's reading. We're glad to have Anne back with us, feeling so much better now.

1 Kings 19 verse 12. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.

When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face, and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave. I remind you who are regular in the attendance at the tab, and just introduce my subject to friends who are with us this morning, that we're looking at the most important subject, perhaps next to the gospel, and maybe including the gospel, that confronts any believer, any person on this earth. And I refer to our experience of God.

Our experience of God. There is nothing I feel that needs to be proclaimed from the pulpit, nothing that needs to challenge our hearts more than this. Then the question, do we, do you, do I know the Lord God? The prayer of Paul which started off, you recall my series some weeks ago in Ephesians 1, 17, refers to Paul, that great pastor saying, I keep on praying.

I keep on praying that all of you might know the Lord. As though knowledge of God is something that you can increase upon, as the year follows year in your Christian pilgrimage. And it seemed right to take us from our introductory look at Paul's prayer, back to Old Testament instances, where men have had amazing confrontations with the Lord.

And once again I employ that means of teaching, as I bring you to the story, and somewhat briefly this morning, of Elijah. He was a remarkable man. And in this particular chapter as you discover him, he might be like you are at this moment, somewhat depressed and dejected.

And if there is anything that Elijah needed to set him right, it was a word from God, it was an encounter with the Lord. And I would be so bold as to suggest that there's not one of us in this tabernacle, who could exempt ourselves from saying that that's really what we need. More than anything else, for God to speak to us, even though He may have spoken yesterday and the day before, we need for Him to speak to us again.

And not only to speak, but for us to have an encounter with Him, to know His presence. But what does it mean to know the presence of God? Is it a tingling feeling in your body? Is it a sort of creepy shiver that runs up your spine? Do you need to have an emotional high? What is constituted by an experience of God? Well, the answer to that question is manifold. There are many, many responses that can be given, almost in accord with the infinite variations that there are in personality.

Because God, as I shall show you, does take stock of our personality as He reveals Himself to us. But I detract. Here is Elijah, and he's all in.

He finds himself perhaps in that same situation as Jeremiah gives evidence on, when in the ninth chapter of his prophecy, and the second verse, he says, Oh, that I had in the desert a lodging place for travelers, so that I might leave my people and go away from them. Here is Jeremiah, like Elijah, and he wants to get away from it all. Elijah has traveled forty-odd days and nights.

He's had some remarkable experiences with God before he sets off on that journey. But where is he moving to? Because I argue that his destination is extremely important. He is moving towards Horeb, the mountain of God.

You remember that's conceded in the eighth verse of our chapter. Let me say there's no spot on earth more associated with the manifest presence of God than Horeb. It was there that the bush started to burn but was not consumed.

It was there that Moses was given the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments. It was there that Moses spent forty days and nights and awaited an encounter with God. Does Horeb sound familiar? It ought to.

Because we've been present at Horeb during the last two Sunday mornings, all those centuries have passed, in between the experience of Moses and that of Elijah. Moses feeling frustrated, Elijah feeling afraid, and Elijah moves to Horeb, the place where God encountered Moses. As though he believed there that somehow or other a word would come from the living God that would set him on his track again and enable him to cope with the future.

Maybe, have you ever thought of this, you folk who study the Bible so well? Maybe it was the very spot where Moses was that Elijah went to. You remember from last week how I told you from Scripture that Moses was hid in the cleft of the rock as the glory of God passed by? Well, it's the same mountain, remember? The same Horeb. The mountain of God, verse 8. And there, Elijah went into a cave, into a cleft in the rock, and he spent the night.

There's no place on God's earth that is so far removed that he can't get to it. There's no situation that's so damp and so dark that cannot be penetrated by the Lord. And whether you feel acutely isolated though amongst a company of people this morning, whether you feel that your circumstances are more unpleasant than those of Moses and Elijah combined, I tell you in the name of God that his word can reach you, that you can have an experience of him that will send you on your way fortified and able to cope with whatever remains in the future for you to experience.

He restoreth my soul. You remember David said that in the 23rd Psalm when he too had been going through it and he was a young fellow when he wrote that Psalm. He knew something of the pressures that young people find in their lives today.

And it was soul restoration that Elijah required as he said, as he's on Mount Horeb. And I'll tell you this, when I come around God's word on a Sunday morning and around his table, if there's one thing I need, it's the restoration of my own soul. And if you go from a company of people and your soul's not been restored, what a great tragedy that is, assuming the company were Christian people and your objective was seeking the living God.

God, I argue, makes himself known with an eye to our personality. With an eye to our personality. He doesn't deal with us on a mass production principle.

Some people are much more extrovert than others. Others are very quiet and very shy. Some are very emotional.

Some seem very doer. And whatever the facets of our personality, in a dominant sense might be, God meets us and he deals with us. And sometimes in the very encounter, he balances the weak with the strong, the pronounced with that which is more feeble.

What would you say was Elijah's dominant personality? Well, James says he's a passionate man. Passion, emotion. They ran high in the personality of Elijah.

He was in his elements when on the top of Carmel. He had the Baal prophets in front of him. And he challenged them to bring down fire from heaven as a result of praying to gods that he knew did not exist.

Elijah is a passionate man. He can confront Ahab and explode like a meteorite. He's not a quiet, he's not a shy man.

But here, he's had that strange thing which we sometimes experience today in the twists and turns of emotion. The man who has a high, when he goes low, he goes very, very low. And here's Elijah so low that he's asked in some of the verses that precede the one to which I call your attention to have his life taken from him.

He wants to throw in the towel. But God's going to meet that man at the point of his need. And so he causes Elijah to leave the cleft of the rock and to stand on some more prominent point on the hills that make up that mountain.

Verse 11, Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by. Here is one of the most dramatic scenes ever painted in the whole of scripture as God brings the whole of nature to act at his bidding. And he has in mind the emotion and the need of Elijah the Tishbite.

A great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart. Rocks which had never been moved since the beginning of time were suddenly dislodged and fell like massive hailstones. The ground beneath the prophet's feet starts to shake and to tremble.

And just as it looks as though there's no stability at all in the whole environment of Sinai, the thunder is heard. And it echoes from one mountainside to another mountainside as God has caused some great natural trumpeters to sound out his power and his glory. And after that, or rather interspersed with it, after the earthquake, after the wind, there's the fire, the flashings of lightning, hitting one rock and then another rock.

The whole of the darkness of that night illuminated remarkably by God's majestic power as it plays itself. And as Elijah stands by, and I believe he enjoyed the whole thing, I love myself to watch a storm. I like to take my car down to the seafront during the winter when there's a tremendous wind and watch those waves as they pound their ongoing beach.

I love to watch the sky as it has the great heavy clouds of thunder and sometimes it's illuminated by God's lightning because there's an emotional streak to my nature too. But you see, we're told here that God was not in the wind. Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart, but the Lord was not in the wind.

And there was this earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And then there was a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. Elijah has this to recognize, that it's not only in the dramatic that God makes himself known.

God who dealt with Elijah and responded to his prayer at Carmel had other ways of making himself known to the prophet. The dramatic is the more unusual. The quiet and the calm is the most general.

And Elijah has to recognize this. And after this mass display of the forces of nature in full blast, there's a stillness that's almost audible. After the fire came a gentle whisper.

That's how the NIV captures the language and it does it very well as it puts it through into the English tongue. After the fire a gentle whisper. And when Elijah hears it, like the cherubim in the face of God encountering the Lord, he covers his head, because he recognizes that he's in the presence of the living Lord.

The Lord God speaks to Elijah, not through the tempestuous nature, but he speaks to Elijah in that still small voice. And I want to say this. Our God is refreshingly original in the way that he deals with people.

Moses, you recall, has been there centuries before, I argue, possibly in the same cleft of the rock. And Moses has said to God, show me your glory. And we're told in Scripture that God showed him his goodness, because the goodness of God is the glory of God.

He showed him that he was a merciful God. And as the power of God passes by Moses, Moses has an encounter just mysteriously described in Exodus as he sees the back parts of God. But God doesn't reproduce that incident with Elijah, because the needs are different.

And God is a God of infinite permutation. This is why I take exception to any who try to argue that spiritual experience of one must correspond with the spiritual experience of the other. God speaks.

And he speaks differently. And sometimes with completely differing emotions being aroused as he communicates himself to ordinary folk. I want you to get this straight.

Because in the very risk of preparing these addresses and quoting as I have from great men of God in the past, and women of God for that matter, it might well be that some of you have come to the conclusion he'll never speak to me like that, and he never speaks to me at all. God is a God of infinite permutation. He speaks in the fire as it belches down from heaven and consumes the drenched sacrifice at Carmel.

He can speak in the earthquake when sometimes he caused the civilizations in Amos' day to tremble. But more than often, it's the still small voice with which he speaks that comes to you perhaps in the middle of the night or even in the listening to of an address or the taking of communion. A voice of gentle stillness is what God selected as he spoke to Elijah and balanced the emotional nature of that prophet.

I say the insights of God are remarkable. If there is one thing that Elijah needed to do, do you know what it was before he could experience God? It was to calm down. To calm down.

And do you know what I think so often stops us from experiencing God and knowing Him? We're not calm. The Bible says, Be still and know that I am God. It's the still pond in the evening hour that reflects the moon in all her glory.

A ruffle pond will never do that. It will break the image. You don't get the glory of the pond, the glory of the moon in a ruffled pond.

And you never see the glory of God with a ruffled spirit. Be still and know that I am God. In quietness and confidence shall be your strength.

God is a master psychologist for he understands human nature and Elijah needs to be calmed and in the stillness that follows the storm, then God decides, determines that he will speak his word to Elijah. I'm always profoundly helped by that great man of God, Richard Wurmbran. One of the things I would love to do in life before he or I make heaven first is to meet him.

Wurmbran fascinates me because his book speaks to my own heart and he's novel in his grasp of truth. He's a prophet. He has spiritual discernment granted, I am sure, by the Lord God.

And he speaks on one occasion as I was reading him last night of his many years in prison in Romania. And he talks about being able to breathe properly as a Christian. And I thought to myself, Wurmbran, you've gone a little bit too far.

Breathing properly as a Christian, what do you mean? And in his book in which he's talking about his experience of prayer, he refers to the fact that when Jesus blessed the disciples, he breathed on them the Holy Spirit, you remember? And at the beginning of creation we're told that God breathed into Adam and made him a living spirit or a living soul. And Wurmbran brilliantly says that in scripture you read, the sinner is like the wild ass that snuffs the wind. Snuffs the wind.

And Saul was breathing out threatenings and slaughters against the church. But the Christian, as he calms himself before God, he breathes slowly and regularly, filling the whole of his lungs with God's air, stilling himself physiologically, mentally, as well as spiritually. In the Greek Orthodox Church, before a person is baptized in water, the priest breathes deeply three times on that person.

And I think that there's something in that symbolism. Well, what is the point? That Elijah is calmed by God as the Word of God is mediated to him. One great Japanese Christian was asked what his definition of prayer was and he used one word in answer to the question.

Surrender. Surrender. You can only surrender to God when you're calm.

And many of us, I speak lovingly, and God knows these addresses search my own heart as well. Many of us don't know what it is to surrender to the Lord. Let me try and use an illustration to get across what I mean.

What's that great Jewish violinist? Yehudi Menuhin. You remember? Have you ever watched him play his violin? He doesn't just play his violin with his hand, does he? And holding it in his other hand, holding the bow and the violin and making music. Have you watched Yehudi? The whole of his personality goes into the making of music.

It's not just the hand. It's not just the mind. It's the whole of the body.

It's the posture. It's the attitude of the emotion. And ere long, the music and the musician, they merge.

That's surrender. As Paul would put it, hiding yourself in God. Surrendering yourself as wood surrenders itself to a fire, and as a result becomes ashes because everything is gone in the very act of burning.

So we are asked to surrender ourselves to the Lord. And when you've surrendered yourself to the Lord, then it doesn't matter if you feel that you're isolated. That was Elijah's problem, you see, wasn't it? I only, I am left.

He got that wrong, but leave that aside for a moment. This is what he thought. He was on his own.

So what? If you're on your own, and you surrendered to him, what's the loss? There is no loss. It's just gain. Gain all the way.

Sweeter the strain when in the song, the singer has been lost. And so the word of God, which had come to Elijah before in Samaria, after he'd given his message to Ahab, in Cherith by the brook, the word of the Lord, it came again to Elijah on Horeb. Oh, my friend, don't think that the word of God can't come to you.

Horeb, I argued last week, is the Old Testament equivalent for Calvary. And it's there as I survey the wondrous cross that God becomes very real to me. This is why I think it's so important that we come as we can without being legalistic about it around the Lord's table, and we survey the cross together.

For myself, says Selwyn Hughes, of Crusade for World Revival, for myself, the discipline of making a morning appointment with God and turning up for that appointment has developed in me more character than anything else I know. The twist is in the first part of the statement. We all make appointments with God, but many of us fail to turn up in the morning.

To surrender ourselves to him and to start to look at his word. How does God speak to me? Well, he speaks to me through his word. So I turn to the book of Psalms and I ask you, Lord, will you impress one of these verses upon my mind? Will you make it illuminate, so to speak, on the page so that I know that it is you directing this contemporary word to myself? A man is what he is on his knees before God and he's nothing else.

Let me repeat that. Mary McShane said it, a great Scottish preacher years ago. A man is what he is on his knees before God and nothing else.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, though I attend so many meetings, though I engage in many, many activities, though I do so many domestic duties for the Lord, a man is what he is on his knees before God and he's nothing else. He's nothing else. Just measure yourself this morning and on your knees before God with an open Bible, he speaks.

And sometimes with your mind emptied of anything else but God, he will place thoughts into your mind. That's how God communicates. We have minds, we have abilities to think, to reason, so you offer those to the Lord and in the stillness of the early morning or in the late night, he can speak to us and give an indication of what he is about.

And sometimes he'll not bypass the mind, he'll surpass the mind. For the love of God is greater than the measure of man's mind. Sometimes he'll speak to the innermost depths of the soul which cannot articulate because there is more in us than just our minds.

There is our total emotional nature and God can reach us at that very point and even bypass words when he wants to. Listen to Selwyn Hughes again as I wait before God in the silence. Sometimes his voice is unmistakably clear.

It comes as a gentle impression right into the soul. Mostly it is a whisper, a soft inner vocalization that comes with clarity and conviction. If God in the silence says nothing to me, then I take it there is nothing else and rise to go about life's duty in the knowledge that communion with God does not always rest on words.

You've got the picture. There's Elijah, depressed, despondent man. And he goes back to Horeb.

The only man who's ever recorded in scripture of going back to Horeb. You'd have thought that they'd have all been rushing there after Moses' experience but they never made a thing out of Horeb. But Elijah goes back and there in the cleft of the rock he has an encounter which was unexpected.

He thought God would come in the fire. He thought he'd come in the wind. He thought he'd come in the earthquake.

But God, knowing his man, says, Elijah, what you need to be, what needs to happen to you is for you to be calm. And I'll speak to you in the calmness and realize this, that my way in dealing with you is the best way. And I believe that perhaps he's taken someone this morning into the cleft of the rock.

Maybe you've gazed at God and his love again at Calvary and you've thought of what he's done for you. And there's that quietness of soul. Well, count that precious.

That's as precious as any of the experiences of men of God in past years who I quoted to you. And whenever he speaks and whenever you feel his strange wooings, thank him for that. And when you break bread and you drink wine and you know that the Christ is there, then thank the great God of glory.

He reveals himself and stills your heart as he did the Tishbite centuries ago in the cleft of the rock of Horeb. Amen. He covers me up, my full mind, in full and simple trust, like Jesus' help, whose charity is truly worthy.

Keep us, God, pure in all our works and works. Provide with all our strivings peace. Take from all our souls the strain and stress and let our water rise against the beauty of thy peace.

Give to the feet of our eternal life thy goodness and thy love. And Father, however you want to speak to us, we ask that you will do so and enable us to respond for Jesus' sake. Amen.