I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 Kings 18-19.

    This is one of my favorite passages in the Bible. It contains Elijah’s confrontation with the prophets of Baal and his encounter with the still, small whisper of God’s voice. However, there is some things in this passage which I rarely receive any attention. Obadiah hid 100 prophets of God from Jezebel’s pogrom, a fact of which he reminds Elijah. Not much later, Elijah claims that he is the only prophet of God left, all of the rest have been killed. This is important because Elijah went from the high of defeating the prophets of Baal to the low of thinking he was the last prophet of God left. Elijah allowed his depression to overwhelm what he knew to be true. Despite being a great man of God, Elijah suffered from bouts of depression (or, at least, he suffered from this bout of depression).

    It is worth noting that Elijah’s bout of depression came immediately after he had what has to have been a mountaintop moment.

There he was before government officials and the people of all Israel, whom the prophets of Baal had worked into a frenzy. Yet the prophets of Baal had failed to deliver. In that moment, he called upon God and God answered in an awesome display of power. Such power that the people of Israel executed the false prophets right there in front of the powerful government officials who had sponsored them. Then to cap it off, he prayed for the drought to end and the rains came. Yet, here he was alone in the wilderness with the Queen swearing she would see him dead.

Seeing this episode in the wilderness as a bout of depression gives me a new understanding of God’s still, small voice here. In the midst of his depression, Elijah was not responsive to the power and majesty of God. In this circumstance, Elijah needed to hear God’s gentle and calm voice. Elijah needed God’s comfort and love at this moment in his life. But there is more to this than just God comforting Elijah. In that same still small voice God sent Elijah back to do His work. That work involved anointing two men to overthrow their respective governments and a successor for Elijah, belying Elijah’s complaint that he was the only prophet of God left. Then, as a capstone, God told Elijah that not only was he not alone, God had, and would continue to, preserved 7,000 faithful Israelites who had refused to worship Baal in even a superficial way.