I'm So Alone!

“I’m So All Alone” by Steve Keeler

Elijah, in a contest between Jehovah God and Baal, had just shown that Baal, the god of Jezebel, was a false god and that Jehovah was the One True God! He had embarrassed the queen by proving that she and her idol god were liars and cheap imitations of the real thing. At the end of the contest, Elijah ordered the prophets of Baal be taken to the creek and be killed.

1 Kings 19:1-8

“1 Now Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. 2 Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, ‘So may the gods do to me and even more, if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by tomorrow about this time.’ 3 And he was afraid and arose and ran for his life and came to Beersheba, which belongs to Judah, and left his servant there. 4 But 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 my life, for I am not better than my fathers.’ 5 He lay down and slept under a juniper tree; and behold, there was an angel touching him, and he said to him, ‘Arise, eat.’ 6 Then he looked and behold, there was at his head a bread cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. So he ate and drank and lay down again. 7 The angel of the Lord came again a second time and touched him and said, ‘Arise, eat, because the journey is too great for you.’ 8 So he arose and ate and drank, and went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mountain of God.” (N.A.S.B.)

Today we are going to catch up with Elijah and all the goings on. In our Scripture we find Elijah running away from Queen Jezebel. He is sitting under a broom tree (Juniper). It is really a shrub that he tried to use to get out of the desert sun. As we can tell from the text, he was not a happy camper.

Two weeks ago, we studied about the feud that Elijah setup between God and Baal. He began to preach to the folks there that they needed to make a choice as to who they would serve God or Baal. So he setup this test and challenged the prophets of Baal to see if their god was greater than the God of Israel.

When it was clear that Baal would not and could not answer the prophets, Elijah prayed and in dramatic fashion, God sent fine from the sky to totally consume Elijah’s sacrifice as well as the alter it sat on and all the water they had poured on it.

Imagine the look on the faces of Baal’s prophets as Elijah’s alter was completely consumed? And to top it off by the end of the day, all 450 of the prophets of Baal were dead at Elijah’s command.

You know Queen Jezebel was plenty ticked off, and when the queen’s not happy you can also bet that King Ahab wasn’t happy. So they ordered Elijah killed. Elijah thought the better part of valor was to run, so he took off and didn’t stop until he was way out into the desert. That’s where our Scripture finds him, sitting, trying to get some shade from a bush. He is crying out to the Lord. “I have had enough, LORD! Just kill me and get it over with.”

Now Elijah was pretty certain that he was in the center of God’s will yet here he was on the run again. He was all alone with no support, out in the desert. I’m sure he was feeling all those really uncomfortable things like disappointment, abandonment, disillusionment, despondency and so on.

He was likely feeling like that old kids song, “Nobody loves me, everybody hates me guess I’ll just eat worms!” Now I don’t know if any of you have ever felt this way but I can sure tell you that I have. Sometimes it’s our friends that can make us feel that way and sometimes it’s people that are much closer. Even family or spouses can sometimes make us feel this way. Well, Elijah was so upset that in his frustration he cried out to God and said, “why don’t you just kill me?” He was ready to be done with all this. He was done fighting to try to help the lost. He was discussed with the so called “children of God”. And this is what brought on this pity party.