Bible Emblems

by Edward Eli Seelye

He sleeps. But one of the ministering spirits is at his side, in this hour of desperate extremity. The prophet, at his touch, starts up and eats. The gnawings of hunger being partially allayed, he again sinks down to sleep, till again the angel touches him, and bids him eat the more; for he is not to die yet. He has not yet done his work; he must tread the wild crags of Horeb, and back to Ahab and Samaria, once more. “Arise and eat; for the journey is too great for thee.”

We must have a poor faculty of apprehending spiritual lessons, if we allow this narrative to pass without some practical instruction.

We do not tax our imagination severely in order to see, in the person of Elijah, a representation of the child of God in seasons of depression and despair. Not unfrequently is he brought into the position of the prophet. Not at all times is he privileged to stand upon Zion, and to rejoice in hope. But a thousand circumstances in life conspire to disappoint his hopes and becloud his prospects, till he flees from his post, and is found far away under the juniper-tree in the wilderness.

When the sanguine expectations which he indulged at the beginning of his discipleship, become one by one disappointed; when he finds that Christian experience is a far different affair from what he had conceived of; when straits and trials spring up around him at every turn of life, such as he had not counted on, and the work of grace in his heart seems, after all, to amount to nothing; when new and unlooked-for symptoms of corruption are daily brought to light, and the ardor of his first love is dampened by the checks and crosses that thicken around him—when thus his early dreams are dissipated, and his heart feels a sickness and a faintness come over it, do you not see that he is in the wilderness? Oh who has not sickened at the slow work of grace within him? Who has not marked the sad contrast between what he once said he would be, and what he is; and who has not felt the harassments of doubt and the vanity of his own strugglings, till he despaired of success, and fled like the prophet to the wilderness?

And then ofttimes the little good which the Christian accomplishes in the world is enough to drive him to dejection. The Tishbite fled because he saw no good from all his labors. Doubtless he had expected that, with the support of miracles, he should soon have worked a reformation in Israel. But though at his word the heavens had been shut up, and though at his prayer the fire of God had descended to attest his mission, still the whole outlay of means seemed to end in nothing. His expectations had not been met; and under the burden of the keenest mortification, the most hopeless dejection, he lies down by the juniper-tree and prays for death. Have you never lain there with him, Christian?

When cast down in spirit, in view of your personal infirmities, you have asked for the good you have done in the world around you; when your efforts for Christ seem all to prove abortive; when your kindly warnings are disregarded, and in spite of your prayers and solicitude, iniquity abounds, and none turn to the Lord; when the more you strive for the Redeemer, the more your good is evil spoken of; when the wicked around you seem growing worse and worse, and disappointment and unbelief becloud your heart, and you see no hope, and the wilderness is around you—Oh, when thus the heart droops, do you not feel that you are in the wilderness? ’Tis indeed a dreary situation. But in life’s pilgrimage, the Christian sometimes journeys that way. He has his hours of sadness, of heart-sickness, of deep despondency and dejection, of bitterness which a stranger intermeddleth not with. He is at times left to experience the burdens of life, the faintings of faith and hope—to feel that notwithstanding his long trial of the Christian life, all is jeoparded, and that nothing remains for him but to cast himself down with the fugitive prophet under the juniper-tree, and say, “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life.”

But what we would observe is this: that the Saviour has provisions for his children however desolate may be their condition. It was in this dreary extremity of the prophet, that God revealed unto him his presence. Worn out with hunger and fatigue, despairing of hope, and feeling even life itself to be a burden, the fugitive drops to sleep. And now God, by a miracle, comes to his rescue. A cake baken on the coals is beside him, and the cruse of water, to refresh him and keep him from destruction. Here God came to his prophet and revived his confidence. Here he gives him a token that he has not given him up, but sends his Angel to rouse him from his dejection and bid him eat.

Not to the prophet alone has God manifested his presence and aid, but to all his dear children as they sit and sigh under the tree where the prophet slept. Not that, when we are cast down and desolate, we actually feel a hand touching us, and see before us the cruse of water and the cake upon the coals; but we find the same deliverance, and the rustic table is virtually set before us and served by a spirit hand. In the appointed means of grace we find the aliment that sustains our souls. The divine ordinances seem to us more precious than ever while we sit under the juniper-tree. In the sweet promises of the word of God, in the dawn of Sabbath hours, in the tender and timely lessons of the sanctuary, in the Bethel seasons of prayer, in these means afforded to us, we find the cruse of water and the cake that will refresh us. We may lightly esteem them in a time of ease and plenty; we may think little of a cruse of water and a cake when we repose in abundance; but in the wilderness, when hunger and faintness come over us, and the juniper boughs are our only covering, then they are as sweet to us as to the weary Tishbite.

When spiritual famine is gnawing at our hearts, and all is desolate and forsaken around us; when sickness has prostrated us, or death has cut down our companions around us, till the world seems empty, and a hue of decay and death tinges all the objects which we look at; when darkness and disappointment and disaster all weigh upon our spirits, and God is all that is left to us—how should we live were it not for the cake and the water cruse? How do we grasp the very means which we before had too often slighted.

We call up the neglected promises, and there is life in them. Our troubled thoughts find vent in earnest prayer; and whether we lie stretched on the bed of languishing, or wrestle in the closet, or meditate in the sanctuary, we find the water cruse is beside us, and we are kept from fainting. Oh, it is when, under the load of crushing sorrow and dejection, the wanderer sinks down by the shrub of the desert, it is then he prizes the cruse and the cake. Many of you, I doubt not, were you to call to mind the season when you valued most the presence of the Master, when you wrestled nearest the mercy-seat and experienced the most surprising deliverances, would point to the days of sore trial and weariness, when you gave up all hope, and when, turned out from the world, you sat alone and sighed under the juniper and waited for death. There you fed upon the bread of life. And though you felt that you were pilgrims in the desert, you still felt that you were not forsaken.