The Journey Is Too Great for You

There is a kind of tiredness that arrives after the win, not the loss. You finish the long shift, or the months of caring for someone ill, and instead of feeling good you sit down and cannot get up.

That happened to Elijah. He was a prophet — someone who spoke for God to a nation that did not want to listen. He lived in Israel about eight hundred years before Jesus, under King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, who had made the worship of a storm god called Baal the official religion. Elijah challenged them in public. On a hill called Carmel he built an altar — a stone table for burning an offering — and asked God to settle the matter.

Then the fire of the LORD fell and consumed the burnt offering... And all the people fell on their faces and said, "The LORD, he is God."

1 Kings 18:38-39

A whole crowd changes its mind on the spot. Then Jezebel promises to have Elijah killed, and he runs south, out of the country, into the desert.

1. He asked to die right after the biggest day of his life

He came and sat down under a broom tree and asked that he might die: "It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers."

1 Kings 19:4

A broom tree is a scrubby desert bush with barely enough shade for one person. Elijah walks a day past the last town, sits under it, and asks God to end his life. I am no better than my fathers means: I thought I would be different, and I am not.

He never says God failed him. He watched the fire fall. What he cannot carry is himself — and even at the bottom, he is still talking to God.

He was not the first. Moses led Israel out of slavery in Egypt and across a desert, and partway through said this:

I am not able to carry all this people alone; the burden is too heavy for me... kill me at once.

Numbers 11:14-15

The same load, the same wish. Two of the most important men in Israel's history said that to God, so it is not proof that a person's faith has collapsed.

Paul, who wrote many New Testament letters, had his own version of it:

We were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself... But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.

2 Corinthians 1:8-9

Paul does not call it pleasant or deserved. He says it took something out of his hands: he had been carrying the outcome, and he stopped. That is Elijah's trouble too — he thinks a nation's future rests on him.

2. God's first answer was food and sleep, given twice

Elijah asks to die, then falls asleep. God's opening move is not a lecture. An angel — a messenger sent by God — wakes him, and there is bread baked on hot stones and a jar of water by his head. He eats and lies back down. So the messenger comes again.

Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you.

1 Kings 19:7

God does not tell Elijah he is stronger than he thinks. God agrees with him. The journey is too much for you, and that is the reason for the meal, not a rebuke.

Jesus later put the same care into an invitation:

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you... for I am gentle and lowly in heart.

Matthew 11:28-29

A yoke is the wooden bar laid across two oxen so they pull a plough together. So Jesus is not offering an end to work, but a shared harness with himself on the other side.

But rest is not an escape hatch. The night before he was killed, Jesus prayed in a garden to be spared what was coming.

And there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him. And being in agony he prayed more earnestly.

Luke 22:43-44

The same pattern — a messenger sent to a man at the end of himself. But it did not remove what he dreaded. He was strengthened, and then he went. Elijah eats, then walks forty days deeper into the desert. Being helped is not the same as being let off.

3. God refused to be in the fire

Elijah walks to Horeb, the mountain also called Sinai, where God had given Israel his laws centuries earlier. God's first words there are a question: "What are you doing here, Elijah?" Elijah pours out his complaint — the people have abandoned God, they killed the other prophets, and he alone is left. Then he is sent outside to stand on the mountain.

A great and strong wind tore the mountains, but the LORD was not in the wind... after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake... after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire the sound of a low whisper.

1 Kings 19:11-12

Three huge events, each followed by a line saying God was not in it. Days before, fire had fallen on Carmel and a nation shouted. Now God sends a fire and stays out of it.

The Hebrew behind that last phrase is qol demamah daqqah: qol is a sound, demamah is silence, daqqah means thin. A sound of thin silence. The odd word is demamah, used for what happens to a storm once it is over:

He made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed.

Psalm 107:29

That song is about sailors who thought the sea would kill them, and the word for the calm they got is the word in Elijah's verse. So what reached Elijah was not a whisper of instructions but the hush after the noise stopped.

That is not a rule, though. Job, a man who lost his children and his health, demanded an explanation, and God answered him out of a whirlwind (Job 38:1). Horeb is narrower: God refused to repeat the display that had already worked, because it was not what Elijah needed.

Here is the part usually left out. After the wind, the earthquake, the fire and the thin silence, God asks the same question again — and Elijah gives the identical answer, word for word. A powerful experience is rarely what repairs a person.

4. The cure was a fact and a job

God never answers the complaint. He hands out instructions.

Go, return on your way... anoint Hazael to be king over Syria, Jehu to be king over Israel, and Elisha the son of Shaphat to be prophet in your place.

1 Kings 19:15-16

To anoint someone is to pour oil on their head to mark them as chosen for a job. Read the third name again. Elijah is sent to appoint the man who will replace him. That is a hard kind of mercy: his part has an ending, and he is not the last thing standing between God and disaster.

Then God corrects the one thing in the complaint that was simply wrong:

Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal.

1 Kings 19:18

Elijah had twice said he alone was left. Seven thousand people he had never met had refused to worship Baal. He was not the only faithful person in the country, just the only one he could see.

Paul reached for this passage centuries later, grieving that most of his own nation had rejected Jesus:

"Lord... I alone am left." But what is God's reply? "I have kept for myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal." So too at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace.

Romans 11:3-5

A remnant is the piece left over when most of something is gone. Grace means a gift given to someone who has not earned it and cannot pay it back. So the seven thousand were not heroes holding out alone. God kept them.

One honest note, because the seven thousand are not always there to count. Isaiah, a later prophet, described a servant of God who says this:

I have labored in vain; I have spent my strength for nothing... yet surely my right is with the LORD.

Isaiah 49:4

"In vain" means for nothing. This servant is not told his numbers were secretly good. He holds two things at once: the work looks wasted, and the verdict belongs to God, not to what he can see. Christians have long read these servant passages as pointing to Jesus, turned down by most of the people he came to.

What to do with this

Eat and sleep before you decide anything. If you want out of the job, the church or the friendship, decide nothing until you have had two full nights of sleep and proper meals.

Say the true version out loud. Not the tidy prayer. Tell God the thing you would be embarrassed to say in front of people. Elijah said "take my life" and was answered with breakfast.

Write down two names. Two people you know who are still going and still following God. Message one of them this week — the seven thousand made small enough to see.

Hand one thing over. Pick a task you keep because nobody else does it properly, and give it to someone this month.

Elijah never did die under that bush. Years later he was taken up in a whirlwind (2 Kings 2:11). Centuries after that, on another mountain, Jesus was praying when two men appeared beside him:

Two men were talking with him, Moses and Elijah... and spoke of his departure, which he was to accomplish at Jerusalem.

Luke 9:30-31

Moses and Elijah — the two men in the Old Testament who told God the job was too heavy and asked to die. There they are, discussing the death Jesus was going to accomplish: a word that means finish, get done. Neither of them ever carried the weight they thought was theirs. It was always his, and he finished it.