It’s as if Elijah had spiritual cataracts rapidly develop across his heart so that his spiritual sight had become cloudy.
Previously he did not doubt the presence and activity of God in the quiet, in the small and even hidden ways. But now, having experienced a public display in which even the ungodly were constrained to shout “Behold the Lord He is God!’ that perception seems lost to him.
Behind his despair lay a twisted and false perspective concerning God and His ways. Well did Isaiah say “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8-9)
This is the lesson Elijah is graciously given by God as the Lord restores spiritual vision and a renewed sigh of spiritual reality.
Here at Horeb Elijah is graciously given by God a renewed and arguably an enlarged sight of God as a God who is in the quiet, in the seemingly unseen or unnoticed events and circumstances.
How many times has the Lord taken you to the equivalent Horeb in your experience? He may not have confronted us in such miraculous ways, and yet have we not known something of this self-revelation of God? Have we not found in the reading of the Word or exposure to some Christian fellowship or writing, or even in a season of worship our sight of God and His ways clarified and confusions, doubts and even despairs lifted?
How sweet and refreshing those sights of our gracious Lord were and are to us!
Spurgeon urges us,
Long more and more to see Jesus. Meditation and contemplation are often like windows … through which we behold the Redeemer. Meditation puts the telescope to the eye, and enables us to see Jesus after a better sort than we could have seen Him if we had lived in the days of His flesh. Would that our conversation were more in heaven, and that we were more taken up with the person, the work, the beauty of our incarnate Lord. More meditation and the beauty of the King would flash upon us with more resplendence. (Morning & Evening, pm Nov.16)