It would be so much easier if I could text God. An email, maybe? Come on, I’d even take a burning bush. It worked for Moses, after all. The Bible says that God talked to him face-to-face (Exodus 33:11)! How is that fair? I wish God would talk to me like that. I feel like I can’t ever hear him. Or maybe he just doesn’t talk to me at all.
Does that sound like you? Do you ever catch yourself
complaining that you can’t hear God’s voice? It’s so common for us in our busy
lives not to hear the Lord speaking to us. We might even think that he’s being
silent. Have you ever considered, though, that you’re listening for him in all
the wrong places?
We tend to think that God will speak to us in an extremely
obvious way. And sometimes he does. But I’ve found that a lot of the time,
God’s voice is a lot quieter and simpler than we expect it to be. Maybe that’s
why we sometimes don’t hear it. We are waiting for the clap of thunder and miss
the whisper.
Let’s look at part of the prophet Elijah’s story. Elijah was
a prophet of the Lord during the reign of King Ahab and his wife, Jezebel.
Elijah spoke very boldly against the worship of Baal. He eventually issued a
public challenge to the priests of Baal: Let’s see whose God is the real thing.
On top of Mt. Carmel, 450 pagan priests set up an altar to Baal, and Elijah set
up an altar to Yahweh, the true God. The challenge was to see which God would
prove his power by lighting a prepared sacrifice with fire from heaven. The
priests of Baal prayed for hours and hours, cutting themselves to add their own
blood to the sacrifice, doing dances, trying everything they could think of to get
their “god” to listen. Eventually, Elijah decided to up the ante a little and
dump water on his altar three times so that it was soaking wet. Then he prayed
to God, who lit the entire thing on fire, proving that he was the true God over
Baal. Then Elijah ordered the deaths of all the pagan priests. Unfortunately
for him, though, Jezebel was an avid Baal-worshipper, and she was not very
happy when Elijah had all her priests killed. She had people sent to kill him,
and he was forced to hide in a cave on Mt. Horeb. This is where we’re picking
up the story:
“And the word of the Lord came to him: ‘What are you doing here,
Elijah?’
He replied, ‘I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have
rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets
to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are
trying to kill me too.’
The Lord said, ‘Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’
Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains
apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind
there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake
came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire
came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it,
he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood
at the mouth of the cave.
Then a voice said to him, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’”
(1 Kings 19:9-13, NIV)
You can read the rest of Elijah’s story in 1 Kings, but
that’s where we’re going to leave off. God showed Elijah (and us!) a massive
truth in this passage. He caused an earthquake, a fire, and a wind, essentially
a tornado. All of these things are natural disasters that we would associate
with power and force. They are unstoppable. What can you do to stop an
earthquake? Nothing. It will shake what it wants to shake, destroy what it
wants to destroy, and crumble what it wants to crumble. An earthquake is beyond
powerful and entirely out of our control.
But God didn’t use the powerful, obvious things to speak to
Elijah. He did not manifest himself in any of the ways that we might expect the
Almighty to appear. It wasn’t about the appearance, the obvious, the bravado.
God spoke to Elijah in a still, small voice.
Who would have expected that? God showed Elijah his power through his
control over natural disasters. But his presence wasn’t in them. It was in the
whisper that followed them. Do you think you would have heard it?
How often do you think we miss God’s still, small voice
because we are waiting for him in the earthquake? This is not to say that God
doesn’t ever speak to us through our earthquakes. But more often than not, a
nudge in your spirit or a thought you know wasn’t your own will pop up. And
that’s God’s still, small voice. You’ll miss it or write it off as nothing if
you’re not waiting expectantly for it. Do you think Elijah would have heard the
whisper if God hadn’t told him explicitly that he was about to pass by? He
might have assumed that God had spoken through one of the natural disasters and
that he just missed it. But God had told him that he was about to pass by, so
Elijah wasn’t prepared to miss that. He was waiting in expectation. That’s what
we need to be doing.
Look for God in the less-than-obvious places. Don’t try to
put limits on how or when he can speak to you. He is God. Almighty,
all-powerful, able to do anything. He may choose to speak to you in an obvious
way… But don’t be surprised if you get a still, small voice rather than an
earthquake.
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