God is Incomprehensible, But Righteous.
1 Kings 19:8-21
We often make the same
mistake that Elijah makes in this chapter. We think that if we do things the way
God says we ought to do them that somehow that will guarantee a certain result
in life, and sometimes unconsciously or in a non-sophisticated way of thinking
we don’t really focus on how we are formulating the goals, the objectives that
form our own expectations. Then suddenly we get a speed bump and it sends us
for a loop because we didn’t expected it was going to happen. After all, we had
been faithful in our attendance at Bible class, faithful in studying God’s
Word, faithful in prayer, in dependence upon Him, claiming promises, trying to
walk by the Spirit, and so we ask, shouldn’t have that guaranteed a certain
result? Yet now what I am facing is crisis, adversity difficulty and heartache.
What happened? What is wrong? And if we do not understand the dynamics of God’s
plan and purposes in life and if we don’t understand the principle and reality
of His incomprehensibility when it comes to His plans and purposes, then we
often make these subtle mistakes of taking His plan for granted. In other words,
we substitute our plans for His plans.
What Elijah did, to give us
an example, is in a way he had formulated in his own mind what the purpose of
his ministry was, and that that purpose was to bring about revival in the
northern kingdom of
Example: Parents often face a
crisis with children. They grow up, enter adolescence, go off to college, and
try as they will to have instilled biblical values into their children, somehow
in their twenties or thirties they just no longer seem to be concerned about
spiritual things. The parents then question the care of God and the plan of
God. Can I really trust God? Why is it that this has happened to me? Look at
these other parents who have raised godly children and it didn’t happen to me,
so it must be God’s fault. We end up blaming God just as Elijah is doing
implicitly.
What happens it that we
wrongly formulate the goal in our thinking. One way to formulate that objective
is to say my goal in life as a parent is to raise obedient Christian kids who
will love the Lord and obey Him. What is wrong with that? We can’t control it.
Those kids have volition. So what we have done there is defined our life work
as a parent in ways that are not under your control. Those kids can exercise
their own volition and turn away from the Lord, and then we can have kids who
are disobedient and rebellious. The right way to formulate our thinking is to
say, My goal is to be a godly consistent parent, teaching my children about the
Lord as faithfully as I can. We can control that. We can control what we do as
a parent and how we model doctrine, the application of doctrine, in our life,
and then the results are up to the volition of our children and the plan of
God.
Another way in which people
often get a tremendous road block of disappointment is in their career. This
has particular resonance today in the light of the economy. People work had,
they are committed believers, they are trying to apply everything that they have
learned from the Word, making their spiritual life a priority, and they set a
goal to be successful in their career, to glorify God, to be able to provide
all of the material things that they can for their family. Then after years of
faithful service for a company all of a sudden they don’t have a job and
wondering what in the world happened and, has God deserted them? Again we do
the same thing; we incorrectly formulate our goals in our head. The wrong way
to say it is, my goal is to have a successful career, to provide for my family
all the wonderful things that I can. We can’t control that, there are too many
variables that come into play. The right way to formulate the goal is to say
that my goal is to be faithful, industrious, respectful of those in authority
over me, and to be a doctrine-applying believer so that God is glorified in my
career. We can control that; we can make the right decisions based on the
circumstances that we are facing, but we recognize that beyond a certain point
the circumstances we face and the results of our decisions are completely
outside of our hands, they are in the hands of the Lord and other humans who
make decisions that impact us.
A wrong way of stating a goal
in a more general way is to say my goal in life is to be happy and secure as I
see it. That is how we often think. But we can’t control any of these things;
it is beyond our ability. What we can control is what we do, the decisions we
make in life in the circumstances that we are in. We can say, My goal is to mature
and grow spiritually and do everything in my life to the glory of God. That
states it in ways that we can control.
There are various promises
that relate to this. Proverbs 16:9 NASB “The mind of man plans his
way, But the LORD directs his steps.” We make our plans but we have to
recognize that ultimately it is up to the Lord as to how things work out, and
in some cases up to the volition of other people. People will make decisions
because of free will and that is allowed by God under His permissive will, and
so sometimes people say, Well that must be God’s will because that happened.
Well it is His permissive will; He allowed it to happen, but that doesn’t
necessarily make it good or correct.
Proverbs
Proverbs 21:1, 2 NASB
“The king’s heart is {like} channels of water in the hand of the LORD; He turns
it wherever He wishes.
God is going to teach
Elijah a very important lesson. He is going to have His own personal Bible
class to emphasize the doctrine that underlies all of this, and that is the
incomprehensibility of God. There are things that we know about God for sure,
that we can know true things about God with certainty, but there are many
things that we do not know about God and His plan is ultimately beyond our
knowledge, therefore we have to learn to walk by faith and not by sight.
1 Kings 19:3 NASB
“And he was afraid and arose and ran for his life and came to
1 Kings 19:4 NASB
“But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down
under a juniper tree; and he requested for himself that he might die, and said,
“It is enough; now, O LORD, take my life, for I am not better than my fathers.”
The reason he thinks he is a failure is because he misunderstood his objective.
His goal was not to bring about revival. That would be a legitimate desire but
that was not his purpose. He had let his desires slip into being a part of the
primary goal or objective and he realized that was not realizable and therefore
he just falls apart into despair and despondency. In the midst of this the Lord
shows His grace to him. One of the great lessons here is that the way we are to
handle problems is through the problem-solving techniques that God has revealed
to us in His Word.
For us in the church age
it means that whenever we have hard times the first thing we need to do is make
sure that we are in fellowship, that we are walking by means of the Spirit so
that whatever takes place in the midst of the trial, tribulation, adversity, we
can handle it in a way that has spiritual value for our own spiritual growth.
Then the next development is the faith-rest drill, putting into application the
principles and promises that God has given us. The faith-rest drill is really
fundamental to everything in the Christian life. We just really need to trust
Him, not just in a vacuum, not just believing in God because we have faith in
faith; we have faith in the promises, in the person of God, in specific content
that God has given us, and when we are living on the basis of those truths then
we are solving the problem and can be relaxed even in the midst of tremendous
opposition, difficulty and resentment. The next thing is we have to be oriented
to God’s grace. That means no only that we are not trying to somehow stimulate
God’s blessing by the things that we do, we realize that everything that God
gives us is based on who he is and what Christ did on the cross, but we also
have to let that impact the way we deal with circumstances and other people.
When things don’t go the way we do we don’t cave into anger, resentment,
striking out at other people verbally. What we do is learn to relax, treat
others in grace just as we expect God to treat us in grace, and to be aligned
with that.
Here is Elijah and he is
out of fellowship. He is not trusting God but God shows us that He always meets
us where we are, even when we are out of fellowship. God is always working in
our life to get us back to reorient to doctrine, to confess our sins and to
refocus. This is a tremendous example of that where the Lord sends an angel to
provide nourishment for him. God is emphasizing that there are physical needs
that have to be met.
1 Kings 19:7, 8 NASB
“The angel of the LORD came again a second time and touched him and said,
‘Arise, eat, because the journey is too great for you.’ So he arose and ate and
drank, and went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to
Horeb, the
1 Kings 19:9 NASB “Then
he came there to a cave and lodged there; and behold, the word of the LORD {came} to
him, and He said to him, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’” Twice this
question is going to be asked and the emphasis in both places is on a verbal
revelation to Elijah. The reason for emphasizing that is that this is the
passage that many people will go to and say, well I just need to get off by
myself where I can listen to that still small voice of God. That is very
mystical, that somehow we can just get away from everything and God will speak
to us. God only speaks to us through His Word. He doesn’t speak to us apart
from His Word anymore. God’s speaking to us in any way, shape or form is
revelation. Not all revelation was inscripturated or canonized but any time God
communicates it is revelation. We have non-verbal revelation that goes on in
the heavens—The heavens declare the glory of God…God’s invisible attributes are
clearly seen in the works of His creation—but this is a non-verbal,
non-directive type of revelation; it is called general revelation by theologians because it doesn’t give specific
content about God but it is clear that it gives enough information about the
existence of God and about His attributes that all human beings know that God
exists and are held accountable for that; they are without excuse—Romans 1. But
there is also verbal communication from God or verbal revelation which is
called by theologians special
revelation. Not all special revelation is included in Scripture. There were
times when God told prophets to seal up the revelation and so they were not
intended to be written down. Whenever God speaks to His creatures that is
revelation. We believe that revelation ceased with the closing of the canon of
Scripture because God had given a sufficient revelation to the human race, and
so in the church age the issue is not seeking more revelation but to unpack and
understand the complete revelation God has given us so that we live in light of
what He has said.
If we look at this passage
and understand the Hebrew the “still small voice” is not any kind of
revelation. The revelation comes in these two questions that frame the event:
“Elijah, what are you doing here?” He is getting Elijah to stop and reflect
upon the decisions he has made in getting to this point in his life when he
just thinks he is a failure, want to give up, and wants God to take his life.
God asks the same thing as us as we go through circumstances when we know all
of a sudden that this isn’t the way things ought to be. We need to stop and ask
what we are doing here. It is a time for self-reflection and analysis in light
of God’s Word, and this is the beginning point of change where we are turning
from our own self-centered carnality to walking in dependence upon God.
1 Kings 19:10 NASB
“He said, ‘I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts [armies]; for the sons of
1 Kings 19:11 NASB
“So He said, ‘Go forth and stand on the mountain before the LORD.’ And
behold, the LORD was passing by! And a great and strong wind was
rending the mountains and breaking in pieces the rocks before the LORD; {but} the LORD {was} not
in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, {but} the LORD {was} not
in the earthquake.” A wind that would break the rocks would be something that
would frighten us if we were there. [12] “After the earthquake a fire, {but}
the LORD {was} not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of a gentle
blowing.” So we have these three events: wind, earthquake and fire. These are
associated with the effects of God’s,
they are not God; they are simply manifestations of God and of His judgment
upon man. God is showing Elijah that just because he had these great
manifestations of God’s power in his life—the provision at the brook Cherith,
the provision of the oil and the meal with the widow in Zarephath, and God’s
answer to prayer in restoring to life the widow’s son, and the tremendous
manifestation of God’s power on Mount Carmel—which tells us of God’s ability,
they don’t tell us about the core of God’s person and His plan. So what Elijah
has done is what we do when we get the focus away from the person of God to the
effects of God in our life, and we lose focus on who He is and His plan and
purpose. What happens in this process is that we forget that just because we
know some things about God we don’t know everything about God; He is not under
our control.
Translations: KJV and NKJV, “a still
small voice”. That gave people the idea that it was a verbal revelation from
God—once you get past all the fireworks you just have to get down to where God
has to speak to you very privately. The word that is translated “voice” is the
Hebrew word qol and it can mean voice
but it also primarily just means a sound. Its root meaning is a sound or a
noise. The NASB, “a sound of gentle blowing.” The NET Bible,
“there was a soft whispering.” The NIV, “the sound of a gentle whisper.” However, the Hebrew
doesn’t have the word for “whisper” at all. Literally is says. “there was a
sound of a small (or thin, something that is almost imperceptible) … and then
the next word is translated as a “calm or a vibrant silence.” It is the sound
of silence. God is not communicating anything here. This is not God speaking at
this time, it is that in all of the noise of the wind and the earthquake and
the fire, suddenly it all stops and there is just this incredibly profound
silence. What God is doing is getting Elijah to think about who God really is.
He is beyond anything that Elijah could ever think of and God is going to come
right back to the question here in verse 13.
1 Kings 19:13 NASB
“When Elijah heard {it,} he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and
stood in the entrance of the cave. And behold, a voice {came} to him and said,
‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’” The only statements that are made in this
episode are these two questions by God: What are you doing here? The silence
causes Elijah to think a little more deeply about who God is.
In the parallel to this in
the life of Moses when Moses was on Mount Sinai and God passed before him, God
said: “The LORD, the LORD God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and
abounding in lovingkindness and truth;
The focus of all of this
is to make Elijah reflect upon the incomprehensibility of God. He thought he
knew what God was doing. Often we think we know what God is doing in our own
lives with our careers, our children our families, our marriage, or whatever;
that if we do everything right then God is going to bring about the results
that we want. We think that is going to happen; we have God under control, but
the fact is that God is incomprehensible. But what governs His
incomprehensibility is His righteousness. That is what comes out of His
statement to Moses. He is going to bring about the righteous judgment of evil,
so we can trust Him. But He is incomprehensible, so we cannot control Him. Job
11:7, 8 NASB “Can you discover the depths of God? Can you
discover the limits of the Almighty?
1 Kings 19:14 NASB
“Then he said, ‘I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the
sons of
1 Kings 19:15 NASB “The
LORD
said to him, ‘Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus, and when
you have arrived, you shall anoint Hazael king over Aram; [16] and Jehu the son
of Nimshi you shall anoint king over Israel; and Elisha the son of Shaphat of
Abel-meholah you shall anoint as prophet in your place. [17] It shall come
about, the one who escapes from the sword of Hazael, Jehu shall put to death,
and the one who escapes from the sword of Jehu, Elisha shall put to death. [18]
Yet I will leave 7,000 in
The thing that we need to
emphasize here is that God is incomprehensible. We can know what we know truly
and accurately, and we need to know it; we need to know the Word because God
has revealed it to us and it is ours and it is accurate and dependable. But we
need not make the mistake that we know a certain amount of doctrine we
therefore have a handle on God and what God is doing in history, in our nation,
and in our own lives. We don’t know those thing, he has not revealed them to
us. All we can do is look at those circumstances and decided whether we are
going to respond and react to the circumstances in a way that glorifies God by
applying His Word, or are we going to let the circumstances and situations of
our lives be the cause of our disappointment and despair and cause us to lose
the joy that we should have as believers. That joy should never be dependent
upon circumstances, it should only be dependent upon the infallible,
never-changing Word of God and the person of God.