Sermon Tone Analysis

God invites the prophet to “stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord,” for God will pass by there

We have access to Mount Zion by grace through faith.

He rewards those who diligently seek Him.

This theophany, or appearance of the Lord, reminds readers of , where Moses desires to see God’s glory and is rewarded by being allowed to view “the back” of the Lord’s splendor.

God places Moses in the rock and covers him with a divine “hand” to protect him.

יהוה yhwh Yahweh: The name God gives to the Israelites through Moses.

He's going to repeat this phrase.

God from Adams fall to us all, He asks questions for introspection.

Elijah (Eh-lia-who)

God's prophet or seer to the nation during Ahab's reign in Israel.

Elijah answers as in : Israel has rejected the covenant, Israel has become idolatrous, he is the only prophet left, and Jezebel plans to kill him.

Implied in this response is Elijah’s doubts that the Lord can save him or turn the nation back to the covenant.

Who has God become in the prophet’s life?

Only a restatement and reassessment of his theology can extricate him from this pit of fear and depression.

Apparently he had hoped that the Mount Carmel episode would produce a final victory over Baalism.

Disappointed, panicking, depressed and angry.

a fire Wind, earthquakes, and fire are often associated with a divine appearance or theophany (see ; ; ; ; ).

Here, they precede Yahweh like a messenger ().

Fire as a Motif of Divine Presence

Tempest, earthquake, and fire, as awe-inspiring natural phenomena, are in the Old Testament especially signs and attestations not only of the absolute power of God, but particularly of His anger, i. e., of His penal justice against His enemies, the ungodly.

Thus they appear in connection with one another sq.

and , and they have the same significance here also.

But since they occur here separately, one after the other in regular succession, they plainly indicate a succession of punishments differing in degree and kind.

The tempest points to the rending, scattering, and turning to dust (; ; ), the earthquake to the shaking of the foundations and the falling down ( sq.;, ; ), the fire to the complete consuming ( sq.;; ).

In none of these three now was Jehovah, only out of the gentle whispering does He speak, i. e., the punishments come indeed from Him, pass before Him and bear witness of Him; but He Himself, that which he is, his essence (name) is not to be discerned in them; to this corresponds, rather in contrast with those destructive phenomena of nature, the gentle, soothing, refreshing, revivifying breeze after the storm.

The word דְּמָמָה from דָּמַם to be silent, in Poel to silence (), means properly stilling, and is used in both the other places where it appears, of the rest and refreshing which have followed pain, distress, and terror (; ).

When now Jehovah “passes by” here in this, the same thing is expressed symbolically which Moses there heard in words, as Jehovah passed by; Jehovah is a God merciful and gracious, &c.

The significance of the whole phenomenon is accordingly this: Jehovah, the God of Israel, will indeed display His punishing, destroying might to His despisers and enemies, but His own true and innermost essence is grace, rescuing, preserving, and quickening love, and though the people have broken the covenant of grace, yet He maintains this covenant, and remains faithful and gracious as He promised.

For the bowed down and accusing prophet this was the well-attested divine answer, which contained comfort and consolation as well as incitement to carry on His begun work, and not to despair of Israel, nor allow Himself to be wearied out or led into error by the apparent fruitlessness of His efforts thus far

Lange, J. P., Schaff, P., Bähr, K. C. W. F., Harwood, E., & Sumner, B. A. (2008).

A commentary on the Holy Scriptures: 1 Kings (p.

220).

Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software.

a spectacular demonstration of the power of God, this time in wind, an earthquake, and fire.

But on this occasion the Lord was not in any of these, that is, they were not His instruments of self-revelation.

Evidently some time later when Elijah was back in his cave () he heard the sound of a gentle whisper.

a quiet, subdued voice

sound of a low whisper

(qol de'ma-ma) Hebrew: voice of calmness.

Without waves.

Unshaken before Elijah who's faith was shaken.

Certainly Elijah has experienced God’s sovereignty over nature, and has benefited from miraculous fire, but what he needs now is a definitive word from the Lord.

He receives this word in “a gentle whisper.”

Perhaps the Lord attempts to teach Elijah not to expect always the miraculous and wondrous deliverance from problems.

God speaks in a quiet voice here to a prophet drained of strength.

It is God’s word alone that will heal the prophet in this moment of crisis.

The Lord’s word to him reaffirms God’s uniqueness, his sovereignty over all nations, and the importance of the prophetic word.

God tells him, “Go back the way you came,” a command that calls Elijah back into active service of the Lord

In this divine revelation men have recognised from the very earliest times a repetition of the appearance of God which was granted to Moses upon Sinai.

As God, in token of His grace, granted the prayer of Moses that he might see His glory, after he had striven zealously for the honour of the Lord when the people rebelled by worshipping the golden calf; so did He also display His glory upon Horeb to Elijah as a second Moses for the purpose of strengthening his faith, with this simple difference, that He made all His goodness pass by Moses, and declared His name in the words, “Jehovah, a gracious and merciful God,” etc. (, ), whereas He caused Elijah first of all to behold the operation of His grace in certain phenomena of nature, and then afterwards made known to him His will with regard to Israel and to the work of His prophets.

This difference in the form of the revelation, while the substance and design were essentially the same, may be explained from the difference not only in the historical circumstances, but also in the state of mind of the two servants to whom He manifested His glory.

In the case of Moses it was burning love for the welfare of his people which impelled him to offer the prayer that the Lord would let him see His glory, as a sign that He would not forsake His people; and this prayer was granted him, so far as a man is ever able to see the glory of God, to strengthen him for the further discharge of the duties of his office.

Hidden in the cleft of the rock and shielded by the hand of God, he saw the Lord pass by him, and heard Him utter in words His inmost being.

Elijah, on the other hand, in his zeal for the honour of God, which was not quite free from human passion, had been led by the want of any visible fruit from his own labour to overlook the work of the Lord in the midst of His people; so that he had fled into the desert and wished to be released from this world by death, and had not been brought out of his despair by the strengthening with meat and drink which he had received from the angel, and which enabled him to travel for forty days to the mount of God without suffering from want, a fact which was intended to remind him of the ancient God of the fathers, to whose omnipotence and goodness there is no end; so that it was in a most gloomy state of mind that he reached Horeb at last.

And now the Lord designed not only to manifest His glory as the love in which grace and righteousness are united, but also to show him that his zeal for the honour of the Lord was not in harmony with the love and grace and long-suffering of God.

“The design of the vision was to show to the fiery zeal of the prophet, who wanted to reform everything by means of the tempest, the gentle way which God pursues, and to proclaim the long-suffering and mildness of His nature, as the voice had already done to Moses on that very spot; hence the beautiful change in the divine appearance”