March 4
Verse of the Day for March 4
And the angel of the LORD came again the second time, and touched him, and said, Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee.1 Kings 19:7 KJV
The Key of Stillness · Day 4 of 31
Reflection · 4 min read
Arise And Eat
Elijah has just called down fire in front of the whole nation, and days later he is sitting under a tree in the desert asking God to let him die. Both of those are in the same week.
What God does about it is the part I keep returning to. There is no rebuke. There is no reminder of the fire. An angel touches him and tells him to eat, and he eats and sleeps, and then the angel comes back and does it again.
And the angel of the LORD came again the second time, and touched him, and said, Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee.
The journey is too great for thee. It is not a correction, it is an observation, and it is on Elijah's side. God agrees with him that this is too much.
Then food, and sleep, twice, before a single word of theology. The conversation about what Elijah is doing there happens later, on the mountain, after he has eaten and rested.
God treated the exhaustion as exhaustion. He did not treat it as a spiritual failure that needed correcting first.
Food first.Then the mountain.
Some of what you are calling a crisis of faith is a shortage of sleep and food, and it is not less holy to fix it that way.
The angel came twice. Once was not enough and God knew it would not be.
Carry this today
What have you been treating as a spiritual problem?
Pray
Read 1 Kings 19:3–8
3And when he saw that, he arose, and went for his life, and came to Beersheba, which belongeth to Judah, and left his servant there. 4But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die; and said, It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers. 5And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat. 6And he looked, and, behold, there was a cake baken on the coals, and a cruse of water at his head. And he did eat and drink, and laid him down again. 7And the angel of the LORD came again the second time, and touched him, and said, Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee. 8And he arose, and did eat and drink, and went in the strength of that meat forty days and forty nights unto Horeb the mount of God.
Keep praying
Reflection by Collins Asein, from the daily devotionals in the PrayerKey app. Bible text: King James Version.