THE STILL SMALL VOICE

A Sermon by Rev. Coleman S. Glenn

21 February 2010

Toronto, Ontario

            In just a few days, Elijah went from complete victory to almost total despair.  How could this have happened?  Remember the contest that Elijah had just won.  He had set before the people a choice: follow Jehovah or follow Baal.  He prayed, “Oh Jehovah, hear me, that this people may know that You are Jehovah God, and that You have turned their hearts back to you again.”  At these words Jehovah sent down fire which burned up Elijah’s sacrifice – and the people had turned again to Jehovah, proclaiming, “Jehovah, He is God! Jehovah, He is God!”  Elijah’s deepest wish had been granted – the people had turned back to their God!  At his command they seized the prophets of Baal, and Elijah executed them.

            But that was not the end of Elijah’s triumph.  After three years of drought, the rain was coming!  It come from across the sea, first as a small cloud, then as a mighty storm; “the sky became black with clouds and wind, and there was a heavy rain.”  The parched land drank up the water; dry riverbeds ran again in with torrents of water.  The people had returned to Jehovah!  And the rain had returned to the land!

            And yet a few days later we find Elijah sitting under a juniper tree in the wilderness, saying to Jehovah, “It is enough! Now, Jehovah, take away my soul, for I am no better than my fathers!”  How did he end up here after his moment of triumph?  As the rain began to come, Elijah ran ahead of Ahab in celebration to the very gates of Jezreel, where the kings at the day had their summer homes.  Ahab had seen the power of Jehovah – how could he and his wife Jezebel now continue to worship Baal?

            But in Jezreel, all of Elijah’s hopes were crushed.  The queen Jezebel sent him a messenger – not to tell him that she had repented of her worship of Baal, but to tell him that she was going to kill him.  Instead of rejoicing in his victory, Elijah had to flee.  The kingdom had not been averted from idol worship after all – Jezebel was still queen, and she would not change her ways.  Elijah ran for his life to Beersheba, the southernmost point in the land of Canaan.  Here he left his servant behind and trekked out a day’s journey into the wilderness.  After seeing rain come, he found himself again in the desert.  Here he sat under that juniper tree, far from the land that he was supposed to be guiding, and here he prayed that his soul might die.

            Have you ever been there?  A place where everything seems to be going wrong just after everything seemed to be going so right.  It can happen overnight.  Last week we talked about making a choice to follow the Lord – taking a stand for something, and feeling the Lord’s fire inside of you – a strong love and desire to change.

Imagine a woman who feels like her life has gotten out of control – she is overwhelmed with stress and worry.  She finds herself lying awake one night, wrestling with the problems in her life, and she opens the Word – and she sees in a flash of clarity, the way that her life can change.  Her stress and worry come from a desire to control everything in her life, to make sure things happen the way she thinks they are supposed to.  But the Lord is in charge!  She realizes that if she lets go of that desire to control things, the stress will fall off her shoulders.  There’s a rush of joy and peace at the thought.  Suddenly she’s wide awake, and she knows what she needs to do.  She WILL stop trying to control things.  The Lord WILL make a change in her life.  She feels that heavenly fire, and she wants to shout, “The Lord, he is God!  The Lord, He is God.”  She lies back down in bed with a smile on her face and a feeling of peace that has eluded her for a long time.  She sleeps easily.

            She wakes up the next morning with her commitment fresh on her mind.  For a while, things seem to go well – she is able to let go of things.  But at a contentious board meeting that afternoon, she feels that same stress coming back – “they can’t do things this way!”  She gets home and realizes she doesn’t have the ingredients for the dinner she had planned to make – and her teenage son has borrowed the car.  Everything starts piling up, and by the end of the day, she finds herself snapping at her kids, at her husband – still trying to control things.  She can’t let go of that desire to control things.  She falls down into bed that night exhausted and devastated.  Nothing has changed!  The demons of worry and control are too strong, there are too many of them.  Less than 24 hours after her epiphany, she feels completely overwhelmed – she has taken on an impossible task.  It’s just too big for her.

This experience is common.  As soon as we make a commitment to something – whether it’s marriage, or following the Lord, or changing a bad habit – the evil spirits around us attack in full force. They do not want us to change.  And when they attack, they can overwhelm us.  Immediately after the Lord Himself was baptised, He was tempted in the wilderness for forty days.

            That’s where Elijah was.  We’ve mentioned before that Elijah represents the Word.  But he also represents those higher parts of ourselves where we want to follow the Word.  It’s in this part of ourselves that we feel that despair – “I’ll never be able to change.”  “I am no better than my fathers,” says Elijah.  Prophets before him had tried to turn Israel to Jehovah, and still they turned away.  Those prophets were now in the grave; why should Elijah be any different?  He would go no further – he lay down where he was, and slept.

            But while he was sleeping, an angel came and touched him, and said to him, “Arise, and eat.”  He awoke, and saw a cake baked on coals and a jar of water, and he ate and drank, and lay down again.  A second time the angel said, “Arise, and eat, because the journey is too great for you.”  Almost a thousand years later, the Lord found Himself in a similar place.  Like Elijah, He felt that He could not go on; He prayed in the garden of Gethsemane, “Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless, not My will, but Yours, be done.”  In the middle of these terrible temptations, an angel appeared to Him, strengthening Him.

            Elijah was undergoing temptations.  A word about temptations.  The Hebrew, Greek, and Latin words for temptation all mean a “trial,” or a “test.”  In English, we usually use it to mean a desire to do something that we’re not supposed to.  This is certainly part of temptation, but when the Word talks about temptations, it’s talking about a broader concept.  It’s talking about a spiritual struggle, a struggle that involves despair over achieving what we love.

            Elijah had plunged into temptations and despair.  When this angel appeared to him, his temptations were far from over.  He still had days and weeks of travelling through the wilderness.  But he was sustained.  After his crushing disappointment, he was given some glimmer of hope.  It wasn’t going to be nearly as easy as he thought, but there was still a way ahead.  The Lord was leading him, was still present.  A passage from the book Arcana Coelestia says, “When a person is being regenerated, at first he is in a state of tranquillity; but as he passes into a new life, he also passes at the same time into a state that is not tranquil… But inmostly the person is in a state of peace, for unless this were with him inmostly, he would not combat, for in his battlings he is continually looking to this state [of peace] as the end” (AC 3696).  Without this refreshment, Elijah could not have gone on.

            And so, refreshed by the angel’s food and water, Elijah travelled over the wilderness of the Sinai peninsula for forty days and forty nights – just as the Lord fought against the devil’s temptations for forty days, just as Noah and his family huddled inside the ark as rain and winds lashed their craft for forty days and forty nights, just as the children of Israel fought their way through enemies and droughts and famines in the wilderness for forty years of wandering.

            We can imagine the hardships that Elijah endured in those forty days, alone in the wilderness.  He did not see the angel again.  He did not have any food or water – the food and water that the angel had given him was all that he had, but it did sustain him.  He may or may not have known that he was going toward Mount Horeb, but either way he does not seem to have known what purpose there was in his going there.  When he arrived at the mountain, he took shelter in a cave, still feeling completely alone, still feeling that Jezebel and the worshippers of Baal would always have dominion over the land of Canaan.  In that cave he spent a night.

            The Writings for the New Church have little to say directly about this story, but they do discuss what that cave represents.  The book Arcana Coelestia says that this cave represents “obscure or dim good, such as exists in temptations.”  Elijah knew that he had to follow the Lord, but beyond this, he was in darkness.  One of the characteristics of temptation is that they make a person’s mind cloudy – we agonize over what he should do, how to be good.

            But in that cave, the word of Jehovah came to Elijah.  We don’t know what form this word took – perhaps again an angel appeared speaking for the Lord.  And the word of Jehovah asked Elijah, “What are you doing here?” 

            Elijah responded with words that show his despair and fear: “I have been very zealous for Jehovah God of armies; for the children of Israel have forsaken your covenant, torn down Your altars, and killed Your prophets with the sword.  I alone am left; and they seek to take my life.”  Elijah’s despair came from two sources: first, that Jehovah’s people have turned away from their God, and second, that he was all alone, and the forces of evil were seeking to take his life.

            Elijah’s despair was not simply for himself.  It was  also for the people of Israel.  This story represents the lives of each one of us – but in the highest sense, it is a story of the Lord’s inner life when He was in the world.  And all of the Lord’s temptations – His doubts, His fears, His despair – were not for His own sake.  His despair was from fear that the human race would not be saved.  Picture the Lord saying the same words as Elijah: “They have forsaken Your covenant, torn down Your altars, and killed Your prophets with the sword.  I alone am left; and they seek to take my life.”  The Lord’s love that the evil spirits constantly attacked was a love for the universal human race; and in all of His temptations the evil spirits tried to convince Him that the human race could not be saved.

            Elijah despaired over the salvation of Israel and over the salvation of his own life.  He felt that all in Israel were against him.  When we’re going through temptations, we can only hear negative voices in our heads, and we can only see evil in our thoughts and intentions.  It seems like there is nothing good in us, just as it seemed to Elijah that there was no one good left in Israel.  And just as Elijah despaired over his own life, temptation brings us to despair over our own spiritual life.  We despair that we will ever have heavenly motivations.

            At this moment in Elijah’s temptations, the word of Jehovah gave him a command – to go out from the cave and hear what Jehovah would say.  And so he went out of the cave to brave the elements and await the still small voice, his face wrapped in his mantle.

            Jehovah passed by, and His passing by did cause the wind, and the earthquake, and the fire.  But He was not in those things.  This part of the story the Writings do explain.  Arcana Coelestia says that the wind and earthquake and fire are a picture of the way that Divine truth and Divine good appear when they descend into the lower levels of our minds.  The Arcana says, “Divine truth and Divine good in the highest are peaceful and cause no disturbance whatever; but when they descend toward lower things they gradually become unpeaceful, and finally tumultuous.”

            And this is one of the great truths about temptations, one of the most comforting and powerful statements.  When we enter into temptations, it is not because we are falling away from the Lord – it is because He is approaching.  When we draw closer to the Lord – when we make a commitment to following Him – He flows down from the higher levels of our mind into the lower levels.  And when this happens, there will be a battle, there will be a tumult.  There will be winds, there will be fire, there will be earthquakes.  In the woman who commits to fighting her desire to control, turning to the Lord brings about confusion, tumult, in her mind – how can I do this?  Is it even possible?  How can I tell whether I’m trying to be a good leader, a good parent, or whether I’m trying to control people in a selfish way?  Every day, every hour, there are struggles, and there is darkness – we try to follow the Lord, we do our best to battle against hell, but we do not know very well how we are doing – only that there is a battle happening.  Elijah does not actually see the wind, the earthquake, and the fire – his face is wrapped in the mantle.  God is fighting for Him – the Lord is fighting for our soul – but we experience it as unrest, as struggle, as despair – and we do not have a clear idea of what is happening inside of us.

            The tumult of temptation can last for a long time.  But eventually it does end.  Eventually the wind passed, the earthquake passed, the fire passed.  And there was peace.  All that remained was a still, small voice.  Remember the passage that we read earlier – in all temptations, a person has peace within his inmosts, and that is the end – that is, the goal – of temptations – that we come into that peace.  Because it is in the peace that follows temptations that we can clearly hear the Lord’s voice.  The still, small voice told Elijah to anoint the next king of Syria, the next king of Israel, and Elijah’s own successor: the prophet Elisha.  These three men would destroy all the followers of Baal.  If this were all, there would be little comfort for Elijah – if all of Israel followed Baal, then this meant the destruction of all of Israel.  But all of Israel did NOT follow Baal.  Jehovah said to him, “Yet I have reserved seven thousand in Israel, all whose knees have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him.”  After forty days of temptations, after fleeing for his life, after fearing that all his people was destroyed, Elijah was reassured – there were still those who would follow the Lord, and they would be free to do so without fear of Baal’s retribution.

            The Lord, too, received comfort after every temptation.  And His comfort was similar to Elijah’s comfort: His people would be saved.  The Lord’s people were more than just the nation of Israel – they were all people in the world who desired to do good to others, both those who had been born and those who had yet to be born.  The Lord was comforted by the knowledge that you and me, today, could be saved.  Arcana Coelestia says, “Every temptation entails some kind of despair, or else it is not temptation; and for that reason comfort follows” (AC 1787).  And further on: “To the Lord the only comfort was the salvation of the human race, for He was in Divine and celestial love, in which the love of all is alone regarded and is at heart” (AC 1865).

            There will be comfort after every temptation we face.  Let’s return to the woman who struggled with a desire to control others.  Her struggles are great, and maybe they last throughout her life in this world.  But she comes to moments of clarity and peace.  She goes through a day and looks back on it in a time of quiet contemplation and realizes that she has let other people act as they wanted, that she has not felt a desire to control things, she has trusted the Lord to take care of things.  She hears the still, small voice – a realization that she has thoughts and ideas and motivations from heaven, those 7,000 who have not bowed down to Baal.  There is hope – she sees that the evil spirits of worry and control can be driven out.  Isn’t this the way it so often happens?  We struggle and struggle and struggle, we do not feel ourselves making any progress – but looking back, in a moment of peace and quiet, we realize that the Lord has brought us somewhere new.  The Lord lets us go through temptations so that we realize this simple truth – we do have goodness in us, but it is not our own.  It is a gift from the Lord.

            On the strength of the Jehovah’s promise, Elijah resolves to return to the land, to return to his people.  He had been reassured that whatever challenges arose, he was not alone.  He was fighting for a cause, for the salvation of Israel – and there were still people worth saving.  And within ourselves, no matter how much we feel that there is nothing good, that we’re hopeless, there is always something worth fighting for. And we are not alone in the battle – the Lord is with us, and all the angels of heaven are on our side.  Jehovah said, “Yet I have reserved seven thousand in Israel, all whose knees have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him.”

Amen.

Lessons: Matthew 3:16-17, 4:1-11; DP 145, 146

Divine Providence 145:2. Because the internal and the external of the mind are … distinct, the internal can even fight with the external and by combat force it to compliance. Combat takes place when a person thinks that evils are sins and therefore resolves to desist from them; for when he desists a door is opened, and when it is opened the lusts of evil which occupied the internal of his thought are cast out by the Lord and affections of good are implanted in their place. This is done in the internal of thought. But as the delights of the lusts of evil which invest the external of thought cannot be cast out at the same time, a combat takes place between the internal and the external of thought. The internal wishes to cast out these delights because they are delights of evil and not in accord with the affections of good in which the internal now is; and instead of the delights of evil it wishes to introduce delights of good that are in accord. …. From this opposition arises a combat, and if it increases in severity it is called temptation.

DP 146. This may be illustrated by the example of a man who has taken delight in fraud and secret theft, but who now sees and interiorly acknowledges that these are sins, and therefore desires to desist from them. When he desists there arises a combat of the internal man with the external. The internal man has an affection for sincerity, but the external man still has delight in fraud; and as this delight is the direct opposite of the delight of sincerity it does not give way unless it is compelled; and it cannot be compelled unless by combat. …