“And, behold, the word of the Lord came unto him, and he said unto him, What doest thou here, Elijah?”—1 Kings xix. 9.
There is a sound of rebuke in these words. They seem to imply that the lonely mountain of Horeb was not the place in which God expected to find such a servant as Elijah, and that there should be no indefinite tarrying, no lingering without an aim in such a solitude.
As you read the familiar history you see how the record of the prophet’s retirement and his vision in Horeb is a record, first of all, of reaction after fierce conflict; it exhibits the picture of a strong man in a moment of weakness ready to give up the hopeless struggle, crying to God, “It is enough, now, O Lord, take away my life;” and then it shows us how God dealt with him in that solitude;
we hear the Divine voice pleading in him again, bearing its Divine witness, putting its searching questions, teaching him the universal lesson that despondency, weakness, solitude, shrinking and retiring, if they have any place in our life, are only for a time, and must not be allowed to rule in it.
That Divine vision which came to Elijah in the recesses of the mountain is, in fact, the voice of God summoning him back to the duties that were waiting for him, and the renewal of his strength for the new work he had to do. And the interest of such a vision never fails, because, like Elijah, all men come to times when they too lie under the juniper tree in the wilderness longing to be set free from the burden which is too heavy for them, be it the burden of some call, or work, or duty, or of resistance to some temptation, or the struggle against sin or vice. It comes to all of us, and not once only, but many times over, this hour of darkness; and it will continue to come so long as the flesh is weak. And it is at such moments that a man is the better for going
with the prophet into this Horeb, the mount of God, making Elijah’s vision his own vision, and renewing his strength, at the same Divine source. How often it happens to men, to boys, to all alike, that they flee into the desert, away from the post of present duty, away from the face of difficulties which they cannot or will not stand up against, away from the moments of trial and discipline. And, seeing that our life is not and cannot be a solitary thing, seeing that the pulsations of each individual’s life are creating other pulsations which answer them back in other lives, we know not where or how many, whenever we thus shrink away from our duty, when we turn our back upon it, or despond about it, when we become deaf to the higher calls, we are, in fact, crying to God to be relieved of our service to Him and to our fellows. And it is a happy thing for our life if He does not answer us according to our cry, and let us go into the wilderness, and leave us alone there.
This voice, following us with the question,
“What doest them here?” is the evidence that God has not abandoned us.
“What doest thou here, Elijah?” How often must this voice have followed the monk into his solitude, refusing to be silenced, piercing through all the false notions about a man’s relationship to his fellow-men, warning each soul that it cannot separate itself from the great tide of universal life.
And the voice comes to us, the same warning voice of God, whenever we stand aloof and let the tide around us run on anyhow, as if we didn’t care how it ran, or whenever in obedience to any impulse, whether of selfishness or of timidity, we try to persuade ourselves that some duty may be left alone.