THREE WORRIED MEN

THREE WORRIED MEN

Reading: Exodus 14:10-18; Joshua 7:1-11; 1 Kings 19:9-18

John H. Paterson


WHEN Christians encounter difficulties or dangers, they usually reassure themselves by recalling the many great promises of God in His Word, promises that He will be with them and help them. Most of these promises were, of course, originally given to great servants of God, whose stories encourage us as we read them. We are stirred by the words of God to Moses, "My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest", or His assurance to Joshua, "As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee", and which of us has not in some time of need read over God's promises to and by Elijah, and sought to make them our own: "I have commanded the ravens to feed thee"; "Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, The barrel of meal shall not waste, neither shall the cruse of oil fail ..."? It is good to have this kind of reassurance in difficult times.

But if we read the sections of the life stories of these same three men of God, we see that there were some occasions on which God responded in a quite different way -- not with comforting reassurances but with a challenge. At a moment when each of these three men was facing a particular crisis, and one of them at least was having a nervous breakdown, God's reaction to their cries for help was 'What's all this fuss about?' Each of them in turn was challenged to account for their actions: "Wherefore criest thou unto me?" (Exodus 14:15); "Wherefore liest thou upon thy face?" (Joshua 7:10); "What doest thou here, Elijah?" (1 Kings 19:9,13). Coming as they do from the God of hope, peace and reassurance, these words may well seem surprising. We must try to understand them.

Moses and His Rod

Moses and the children of Israel were in acute danger. They had left the inhabited part of Egypt, but were not yet safely across the Red Sea when Pharaoh's army recovered its poise after the ten plagues and came in pursuit of them. In no time at all, the unarmed ex-slaves were trapped between the enemy and the sea (ironically, in the same situation as the Egyptians at the end of the 1973 campaign, but with the roles reversed). Clearly, unless God intervened, it was only a matter of hours before Israel's bid for freedom was ended. Moses seems to have expected God to intervene; he tried to reassure the people (Exodus 14:13) and meanwhile he himself was evidently praying hard. It was at this moment, however, that God reacted surprisingly, by saying -- if we accept the Living Bible translation of verse 15 -- 'Quit praying and get moving'. With the sea in front and the enemy behind, God said to Moses, 'What's all the fuss about? You've got your rod, haven't you?'

A rod: what could be more ludicrously inadequate than one rod with which to combat all the king's horses and all the king's men? But God was very clear about it; this was not to be a time for praying -- it was a time for using the rod. And, of course, anyone who follows the career of Moses from his commissioning to his journey's end knows why. The rod had become, as it was to remain, the symbol of authority -- God's authority, exercised by Moses. This authority Moses already wielded, but because this particular situation was extra dangerous, and seemed even more impossible than the ones that had gone before it, Moses was evidently looking for something special in the way of a deliverance -- extra power for extra danger. And God had to remind him -- 'You already have all the power you need. Get on and use it. Quit praying and get moving.'

We shall all no doubt sympathise with Moses, for we know this same feeling: 'This obstacle confronting me is so great and so frightening [43/44] that I shall need a very special provision of grace from God to be able to survive, let alone surmount it.' But that is not true; we already have all we need for survival and success. "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore ...". Sometimes, it is not a question of praying for more, but of using what we already have. 'Quit praying and get moving.'


Joshua and the Spoils of Jericho


The second of our three worried men was facing a very different situation. Joshua, the military leader of Israel, had just seen his forces defeated at Ai and, as a general, he realised the danger which defeat brought with it: Israel's aura of invincibility shattered, and the peoples of Canaan encouraged to form a great alliance to drive his nation back across the Jordan. Something clearly had to be done quickly and the worst of it was that, although Joshua knew that something must be wrong, he could not tell what it was.

Because we have the full story in Joshua 7, we know that the trouble was caused by Achan, who had taken some of the forbidden spoils of Jericho. But Joshua was in the dark. And confronted by this situation he seems to have asked himself, as well he might, 'What would Moses have done?' We can only guess, but we do know that Joshua had been with Moses, as his helper, at times when nobody else was present -- for instance, on Mount Sinai during the tumultuous days described in Exodus 32. And in those days, Israel had faced a disaster even more terrifying than the one that threatened after the first battle of Ai: it was the declared intention of God to wipe them out (Exodus 32:10).

Faced with the threat of imminent destruction, Moses had spoken to God and said, in so many words, 'You can't do that!' But what Joshua evidently remembered in particular was the argument Moses had used on that occasion, an argument so dramatically successful that the Old Testament records, simply and laconically, "And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people" (32: 14). Moses argued that, if God did as He had said He was going to, His reputation would suffer: "Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, and say, For mischief did he bring them out ...?" There would be such a 'credibility gap' that the name of God would be brought into disrepute.

It was precisely this argument that Joshua, in his crisis, decided to employ -- the argument which had worked for Moses and might serve again: "O Lord, what shall I say, when Israel turneth their backs before their enemies ... and what wilt thou do unto thy great name?'. Poor Joshua! The Lord responded immediately. "Get thee up: wherefore liest thou thus upon thy face?" The very same prayer produced this totally, bewilderingly different response.

What are we to make of this? Once again, we have the benefit of hindsight. "Israel hath sinned": that was all the explanation necessary. God was saying to Joshua, in effect, 'Don't come here and talk to me about my reputation being in danger, just because you lost to the men of Ai. My reputation is in far greater danger from the sin among my people! Go and deal with that.'

We must not draw from this incident the wrong lessons. It cannot be, as some groups have from time to time taken it to be, an invitation to the people of God to launch a witch-hunt to find the Achan among them: the result has almost invariably been disastrous to the Church of God and its testimony. Nor does it encourage the individual believer to torture himself with worry lest he be the Achan who is responsible for defeat among God's people (although some have thought that, too); that way neurosis lies. Let us simply ask ourselves what light this story throws on the Christian response to crisis and say that, when we confront difficult or dangerous situations, there is always something we can do; one element in the situation which we can get rid of, and that is the element of sin. Doing so may not remove the difficulty or the danger, but at least now what we confront is a genuine difficulty, not one complicated by the admixture of our own disobedience, failure or mixed motives. There is no justification for delay in eliminating whatever part of the crisis is caused by sin, not even if that delay is caused by stopping to worry about the damage to God's reputation!

The late Ruth Paxson, that wise saint of God, was once talking to a younger Christian and asked her, 'Well Jane, how are things?' Jane replied, 'O, I don't know: there seem to be a lot of things wrong.' 'No' replied Ruth Paxson. 'For a Christian there is only one thing that is ever wrong -- sin.' She was being very precise: for a Christian, 'things' may be difficult, or trying, or obscure, [44/45] but that does not mean that they are wrong. It is quite likely the will of God which has arranged them in that way, so that through the difficulty of the obscurity the believer may learn the lessons of faith or obedience. But that is never the case with sin; it is never God's will or plan. Sin is always wrong. And the thing to do is to deal with it, without delay.

Elijah and the Still, Small Voice

The third of our three men may well have been the most worried of all, but to appreciate the story we must try to discover why. Admittedly, Elijah had been having a difficult time. He was fighting, apparently single-handed, against the onset of idolatry in Israel, an idolatry that emanated from the royal palace itself. But he had just gained the most spectacular victory of his whole career when, on Mount Carmel, he had maintained the reputation of Jehovah against 400 of the prophets of Baal. At that moment, we should expect him to be delighted: he may well have felt that the tide had turned, and that his one-man fight against Baal was won.

If so, he was soon disillusioned: Jezebel was out for his blood (1 Kings 19: 2). And at this point it does not seem too unkind to say that Elijah's nerve cracked. He ran for his life and we should all have done the same. But for Elijah this was out of character. It happened at -- we cannot help thinking -- the wrong moment, and it happened to the wrong man. Elijah was less of a coward than any man in Israel: over and over again, he had boldly confronted the king himself and denounced his sin. So why should a mere message from the queen have stampeded him?

Every Bible student must answer the question for himself, but here is a possible solution: Elijah was unnerved by the unexpectedness of what happened. Anyone familiar with the history of Israel's idolatry would have expected that the triumph of Carmel would be followed by a great national revival -- by the overthrow of the idolatrous regime. It had always happened in the past. To put no finer point on it, the incident on the mountain top should, according to all that Elijah knew, have been closely followed by Jezebel having her head cut off.

Quite the reverse: not only was Jezebel very much alive, but she was hot on Elijah's track. So now he was scared, disillusioned and bewildered. If even the miracle of Carmel could not topple the regime, what could? What, indeed? This was the point and, to make it clear to Elijah, God took His servant deeper into the wilderness, where they would be alone together. There Elijah experienced the earthquake, the wind and the fire, but the Lord was not in any of them -- not even in the fire, as He had been on Carmel. Instead, He was in the still, small voice -- and there He has been from that day to this.

It seems as if God was serving notice that a new phase of His working had begun; that, from now on, the man of God in the world of evil would always be nothing but a voice in the wilderness; that the image of the work of God in this era of His purpose would always be the small voice rather than the thunder or the fire. So, at least, it has proved to be: no more evil regimes have fallen at the word of the prophet. It is not that God's power had grown weaker: Elijah himself was to experience it on several future occasions. But God had chosen to work in this way. Centuries later, a man came in the spirit and power of Elijah (Luke 1: 17) -- and the evil regime caught him and cut off his head. Centuries after Elijah, too, God's own Son came, and Him they crucified. And so it has continued to be, and the servants of God, beginning with Elijah, have had the problem of adapting to this, God's way of dealing with evil.

Let us pass immediately on to the lesson, as it comes down over the centuries to us. Elijah was going to have to accept that he would never be more than a voice crying in the wilderness and, at that, he might well be quite alone. But these were to be -- these are -- the conditions of service for God's men and women and what we must do is to accept them, not try to get them changed. If God did not change them for His own Son, He has no reason to change them for us! He certainly did not change them for Elijah; once again, as to Moses, He just said, 'Get moving!' -- "Go, return ..." (1 Kings 19: 15). And, of course, Elijah was not really alone as he imagined; there were 7,000 others who had remained faithful to God.

So let us not lose our nerve because we are standing for God alone, or because nobody appears to be paying the slightest attention to our small voices, or because evil flourishes all around. That is not an emergency situation; that is normal. That is precisely how God has arranged for it to be, for the present. But only for the present. For[45/46] Elijah there did indeed come the day of the whirlwind, when the chariots came from heaven and caught him away. And for us there exists the same hope and promise -- the end of the day of small voices and loneliness; the gathering hosts which no man can number, and the great voice filling the heavens, "Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb."
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