when God goes quiet

I’ve been thinking a lot about the sermon our pastor gave yesterday, based on this passage in 1 Kings 19:

“And there he went into a cave, and spent the night in that place; and behold, the word of the Lord came to him, and He said to him, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’

So he said, ‘I have been very zealous for the Lord God of hosts; for the children of Israel have forsaken Your covenant, torn down Your altars, and killed Your prophets with the sword. I alone am left; and they seek to take my life.'”

What’s happening? Elijah saw God rain truth from the sky. He thought the evidence couldn’t be argued by anyone… and yet, people chose to do anything but see reason. Acknowledge the truth.

Why was Elijah so passionate about this? Because he cared about the glory of God AND he cared about his people. And here the people refused to do the right thing, despite the obvious. Despite Elijah’s effort. Despite God’s display. And now he sees nothing else to do but just go away. Hide in a cave… and (in a move I can really relate to)

despair to the point of hopelessness.

But then…

“Then He [God] said, ‘Go out, and stand on the mountain before the Lord.’ And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire… a still small voice.”

My word, I love theatre. I love it in real life, and I love it in the Bible. It speaks to the truth that we want God to step up… and step up BIG.

We want the dramatic reversal, don’t we? We want Him to prove the truth in a way that settles it. Loudly. Publicly. Unmistakably. Deus ex machina! A God to come down and rescue us from the sky! (Sidenote: Won’t he do that though? I digress…)

Elijah wanted that too.

He’d just come off the greatest spiritual victory of his life and now he’s hiding in a cave, exhausted and convinced he’s the last faithful person standing. So he waits for God to show up and set things right. Or to die. Whichever comes first.

And does God show up.

First with wind so violent it shatters rocks. Then an earthquake. Then fire.

But the mind boggling thing? He wasn’t there.

The LORD was not in the wind. The LORD was not in the earthquake. The LORD was not in the fire.

Three times, the text says it. It forces you to feel the absence before what comes next.

Then: qol demamah daqah.

I’m no Hebrew scholar, but from what I’m gathering from a smidgen of research, the Hebrew is almost untranslatable. Qol — voice. Demamah — silence. Daqah — thin, fine, crushed small. Literally, a sound made of stillness. The KJV calls it a still small voice, but that doesn’t quite reach it, even though I find it to be the closest. It’s more like the voice is the silence.

Paradoxical. Intimate. Impossible to receive from a distance.

God wasn’t absent from the wind and the earthquake and the fire. He’s God. He makes those things. He can do those things. He simply wasn’t in them this time.

Because the theatre would have let Elijah stay in the audience, enjoying the spectacular signs. As an audience member, you are required to do nothing except awe over what you see. But qol demamah daqah? That requires you to do something. It requires you to come close.

The silence isn’t absence. It’s a summons.

Isn’t this what we do as parents? As teachers? When we really need to stop the distracted, scattered attention of who we are trying to talk to, the key isn’t to get louder — as tempting as that might be. The real way to get attention is to get quieter. Something about whispers and soft tones does something that volume never could. It requires those who want to listen to move toward instead of away.

The God of Wonders knows how to get the room quiet.

Isn’t it interesting that God asked Elijah “What are you doing here?” twice in this passage? He already knew the answer. He wasn’t gathering information. He was drawing Elijah out — creating space for him to say out loud what he was thinking. To name what was broken. To stop hiding his despair and actually voice it.

That’s not theatre. That’s a conversation.

(Sidenote: It’s worth observing here that Elijah came into that cave convinced he was alone, the last one left, and that nothing he’d done had mattered. God’s quiet response was essentially — there are seven thousand. Elijah just couldn’t see them from in there. Doesn’t the cave do that? Distort everything?)

Maybe you know what it is like to feel the isolation that comes when people come after you.

Maybe you know how sick your heart gets when hope is deferred. Or maybe you have felt that incredulity — when the right thing is so obvious it cannot possibly be ignored. And yet it is.

Maybe you feel so sad, you want to retreat into a cave and just let it all end there.

Maybe you want God to come down and show Himself in a huge way. To shake the earth. To rattle the world. To remind you that He sees — and that He has the power to move mountains.

(Maybe to believe He can move yours, too.)

Maybe He will do that for you and be in it all.

But instead, He might just feed you.
Let you sleep.
Feed you again.

And then speak to you in such an intimate way that you have no choice but to lean in so close that you can hear Him whisper.

My prayer for you today — my prayer for myself today — is that we will grasp what God is in. That instead of resenting Him for not doing or not being in the big things we say we want, we will receive the gift of thin silence for what it is:

God drawing us close enough to really hear Him.