A Place of Redirection
After an extraordinary victory over the Prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel here we have Elijah, like many before him, fleeing for his life — first to Beersheba and then, all alone, a further day’s journey into the wilderness. Jezebel was never likely to find him there. Moses’s burning bush has become Elijah’s broom tree — similar but different. One was a beginning, the other hopefully would be the end (v 4). But he was wrong. As with Hagar, God had other ideas and the wilderness turned out to be a place of redirection.
First, God gets under Elijah’s skin. He may say he wants to give up because he is finished, but he doesn’t really and when he is nudged to return to life, to eat and drink, he shows no hesitation. God's wilderness is not a dying place. It is a place where life is constantly refreshed and renewed.
Unlike bricks and mortar and all the products of humanity, wilderness has a capacity to renew itself. Block it here, it will go there. Cut it back and you strengthen the resolve. Wipe huge chunks out with machines or natural disasters, leave it alone and its inner life breaks through.
But not to order, never in quite the way you might expect and rarely to replicate precisely what was there before. This is what Elijah had to learn. Not the strong wind splitting the mountains and breaking the rocks — the familiar God of power and might enforcing his will and smashing everything that stands in his way to smithereens. Not the earthquake, drawing on hidden and uncontrollable forces to change the face of the landscape. Not the fire, wiping out everything that had gone before to make way for a totally new beginning.
Silence. Wilderness silence — especially at night or if you are alone — can be far more terrifying than even the threat of Jezebel. It can concentrate the mind and touch the depths. And as one door closes, so quietly you hardly notice, you realise like Elijah that there is another you had never even noticed which his about to open.