The Stuff of Manhood: Some Needed Notes in American Character

by Robert E. Speer

He appears first of all in connection with the great drought which he prophesied and which lasted for the three years he had foretold. We see him by the little brook Cherith, fed of the ravens, until through the long cessation of the rain the brook itself disappeared. Then we see him in the house of the widow of Sarepta, feeding with her on her little supply of meal, and in her hour of depthless sorrow raising her son from death to life. And then, in the second chapter, he breaks forth once more upon the national stage. Ahab and Obadiah, his chief man, had sought for him up and down the land, having divided the country between them, partly that they might seek water for their fast diminishing herds, partly that they might meet again and punish this troubler of Israel. At last, on one of the highways, the man of God appeared to the prime minister and told him that he had no fear to meet the king and would do so if he would carry word to Ahab. True to his word, he met the king, confronted him with his disloyalty to Jehovah, and challenged him to produce the prophets of Baal for the great test on Mount Carmel; and then, after his triumph, Elijah again disappears.

In the third chapter we have the only account of the man’s inner life. If it were not for that chapter with its story of his subjective struggle, Elijah would be no example for us men of this day. In all the other chapters of the story he appears absolutely undaunted, unafraid of the face of man, clearly convinced of what God would have him do, and absolutely fearless in the doing of it. But here we are shown the man in his own inward wavering, in doubt in some measure about the reality or power of his mission, afraid to carry forward that which he had set out to do with such daring spirit; and in the wilderness alone, first beneath the juniper tree and then on Mount Horeb, Elijah had to face again his life and settle himself once more in that faith in the living God which had brought him out of the desert. And God stood out and spoke to him, and Elijah rose up on his feet once more a man unafraid to resume his mission. God bade him return and anoint a new king over Syria and a new king over Israel, and to go to Abel-meholah and find his own successor, the young man Elisha, plowing behind his oxen. And the prophet went out from his hour of discouragement to find at once the young man who was to take up his work after him and to be an even mightier prophet than he.

Then for a long time Elijah disappears again, only to reappear when he confronts Ahab once more, in Naboth’s vineyard, shows him how little he fears him, and pronounces upon him the judgment of Jehovah. Then he vanishes from the stage for three years at least of solitary meditation in the wilderness, vanishes so long that the common people apparently forgot him, so that when one day he met a little party of the servants of the new king Ahaziah on the highway bound to Ekron to consult Baal-zebub, they did not know who the prophet was and brought back his message to the king, able only to say of him that he was a hairy man, with a leather girdle about his loins. But the king well knew that the Tishbite had broken once more upon the stage of the nation’s life, and he bowed beneath the judgments of God that the man from Gilead denounced.

Then in the concluding chapter we see Elijah and his young man coming down from Gilgal to Bethel and then to Jericho and then back to the wilderness out of which he had come, that from his own deserts where he had come to know God he might go back to God again. And there in the chariot of fire the man who was himself “the chariots of Israel, and the horsemen thereof,” went up to the Lord God of Israel, Who was alive, to meet Him before Whom he had always stood.

One does not wonder that the old man impressed as he did the imagination of his people, and that when centuries later John the Baptist emerged upon the stage challenging the attention of the nation, almost the first question addressed to him was, “Art thou Elijah?”

And we have the secret of Elijah’s life given to us in these words with which he is introduced to us, “As the Lord God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand.” Out there in the barrenness of the desert beyond the Jordan, Elijah had come to believe in a God Who was alive, and before Whom he lived his life. The deserts have never bred polytheism. The great polytheistic systems have sprung from the lush jungles of the tropics. The great monotheisms have been born in the deserts. And out on the lonely sands beyond the Jordan, beyond the hills and amid the great level places where there was no one but God, Elijah came to know that He was and to know that his life stood in Him.

This was the principle of the man’s life—the consuming conviction of a living God and of the commission of His uncompromising service. Indeed we are not sure that we know Elijah’s name. It is possible that the name by which we think we know him is only a pseudonym—Elijah, “My God is Jehovah.” It may be that from the very repetition of this phrase to which he was addicted, “The Lord God of Israel, before whom I stand,” men came at last to call him by the opening note of his message, “the man of the living God.”

Now what that message meant to Elijah was just this: that the Lord God was no dead force, no unknown cause of things, that the Lord God was alive, and that a man was to have dealings with Him; that a man’s life was not his own personal and irresponsible experiment, but a work to be done in front of God; and that a man must reckon in all his thoughts, in all his ways, with One Who lives, and go out and do his work in the world in the consciousness of his relationship and his subjection to an active, working, personal God Who would stand by him in the fire, would uphold him before kings, and carry him through to the end of each of his appointed tasks. If there is one thing that we need to get clearly fixed in our own lives it is the matter of our attitude towards this infinite and unseen God Who is alive.

This faith in a God Who is alive, before Whose face a man is to live his life, is no mere theory. You cannot find any conviction that will more really mould and transform all our conduct and put uncompromising stiffness in it than the conviction that we are living our lives thus before the eyes of a God Who observes. In the life of Thring of Uppingham we are told of an incident that pleased him greatly. It is a story that came to him regarding a little group of boys who were spending the summer in France. A visitor saw these English schoolboys and overheard their conversation as to what they should do on Sunday. Some of the boys were proposing a certain course of action, and all seemed to agree until one fellow spoke up and said: “No, I do not agree. I will not do it.” And when the other lads urged him to come along, he still insisted that he would not. They asked him his reasons. He said: “Well, Thring would not like it, and what Thring would not like I do not intend to do.” “Well, but Thring isn’t here,” they said; “he’s back at Uppingham.” “I do not care,” said the boy; “Thring would not like it.” He believed that he was living in a real sense—I mean in the most real sense of all, in the life of his personal will—before the standards of his master, and by those standards as in the light of his master’s countenance he insisted that he would uncompromisingly live. Before the eyes of God a man will beware how he lives his life. If he knows that this life of his can find no darkness where he can hide himself from God, if he knows that all of his days are to be spent before His face, that all his deeds are to be done beneath the gaze of God, assuredly that will govern and control a man’s decisions about his practical ways. The consciousness of a living God will give direction to a man’s moral life.

And it will not only give direction. There is many a man among us who knows that the consciousness of a God Who is alive not only gives determination and direction to his ways, but puts a new power and inspiration in them.