INTRODUCTION
We’re now onto the second talk in our series called ‘Bible Stories for Grown-Ups.’ In these talks we’re going back to some of the famous stories in the Old Testament which we may have heard as children, perhaps at home or at Sunday School. The idea is to take a fresh look at them as grown-ups.
This week I’m cheating. The children’s story I should be looking at is ‘Elijah and the Prophets of Baal.’ That is covered in 1 Kings 17 and 18. It’s the story of Elijah achieving an extraordinary victory over the prophets of Baal. I expect you remember it: the 450 prophets of Baal call on Baal to answer them, and nothing happens. Then Elijah calls on God and God sends fire from heaven which consumes the sacrifice. It’s a great story! But I’m not going to look at that story. I’m going to look at the aftermath of the confrontation, in 1 Kings 19.
In 1 Kings 19, Elijah is dejected. He has totally lost his courage, he is no longer seeing the situation correctly or thinking correctly, and he has suicidal thoughts: he asks God to take his life. He appears to remain in a similar mood for five or six weeks. It seems to me that in common English we would describe Elijah as depressed. I’m not a doctor but I think that a psychiatrist would also describe Elijah as depressed. He has a persistent feeling of sadness and unhappiness.
Why is this important to look at? The key reason is that mental health is so much of an issue in western society today. I suppose many of us have become much more aware of the issue over the past five years thanks to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry’s campaign to eliminate stigma in relation to mental health. The NHS, and charities such as MIND and the Mental Health Foundation, give us some fairly shocking statistics about depression. In 2014, the NHS found that ‘around one in six adults … surveyed in England met the criteria for a common mental disorder.’ That’s a lot! I don’t think the NHS figure has been updated. It’s also clear that a lot of treatment of depression at present doesn’t work.
Christians are not immune from depression. Elijah was a great man of faith and he was depressed! Martin Luther and Charles Spurgeon both experienced depression. Perhaps thirty years ago I heard George Verwer, the founder of the mission organization Operation Mobilization, speak in a meeting. At the time, he was travelling all over the world, meeting loads of people serving God in far-flung places. He commented that 80% of the missionaries he met were depressed! At the time, I was preparing to go overseas, and his comment really made an impression. Some years back I got involved with a Christian youth organization called Youthscape. They were carrying out research into the state of youth work in the UK. They titled their report, ‘Losing Heart’. They found that was the typical state of people involved in youth work. Priscilla [my wife] and I have a number of Christian friends who are experiencing depression now or have experienced it recently. The point is that depression is a common and debilitating problem. We can get depressed. We might have friends who are depressed. We need to know how to respond to it.
But Elijah wasn’t only depressed. He asked God to take his life. He felt suicidal. Suicide is also a massive issue in society today. In round numbers, about 600,000 people die every year in the UK and about 6,000 of those deaths are from suicide. So, we may think: one in a hundred deaths are from suicide. Not good, but not SO bad, surely? But suicide is different from other ways of dying. Ruth Sutherland, who is the Chief Executive of Samaritans, wrote: ‘A suicide is like a rock thrown into the water with the ripples spreading outwards, covering family, friends, soaking work colleagues, acquaintances, the wider community.’ It’s something that we are especially sensitive to at Rosebery Park. Last year, four people took their lives at Pokesdown Station. They had an average age of 40. Three of the four were men. That reflects the national average. If you’re a UK male between the age of 5 and 49, suicide is the most likely thing you will die from.
So, we’re going to go to this passage about Elijah and hope to draw some lessons from it about depression and suicide.
I think there’s so much in this story that I’m going to take two weeks over it. In today’s talk I’ll give an introduction (I’m nearly finished with that!), then some background. After that, we’ll move on to the scene where an angel meets Elijah (vv.4-8). In my next talk we’ll look at what happens when God meets Elijah (vv.9-16).
Before we proceed, I want to give a caveat. I am not a psychiatrist. I don’t claim to be an expert on depression. We’re simply looking at what God did for Elijah. There are many different kinds of depression and I’m not saying that here is a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution for every kind of depression. But I think that what we see here provides us with general principles which I imagine apply in many kinds of depression. As I started to look at this passage from the perspective of mental health, I found some Christian organizations with an interest in depression and mental health, led by qualified psychiatrists, who have also gone to this passage and drawn very similar lessons from it as I had. Some reflections on the passage by a Dr Troy Reiner, who has set up a ministry called ‘Faith Therapy’, were particularly helpful. I’ve also looked at the NHS website in relation to depression. A lot of what God did for Elijah is in line with what the NHS recommends, but there are some interesting differences…
• The NHS does not recommend going away to spend time with God, which is something Elijah does!
• The NHS sees a place for medication, which doesn’t feature in God’s treatment plan for Elijah.
• The NHS sees a place for therapy – meaning talking. God talks to Elijah, but it’s clear that the angel doesn’t offer any therapy.
There’s one more thing I want to say at this stage. Depression and suicidal thoughts are not happy things to think about. But they are no worse than, for example, a person being blind or lame or dead. Let’s approach this story as we would approach one of Jesus’ healing miracles. The difference is that here the person has a mental illness.
BACKGROUND
As always, we can’t simply dive into the passage without some sort of context! The context in this case is a marriage. The year is about 880 B.C. Israel has split into two kingdoms, a northern and a southern kingdom. The king of the northern kingdom is Omri. He decides, for various strategic reasons, that it would be good to make an alliance with Ethbaal, the king of Sidon. So, he arranges a marriage between his son Ahab, and Ethbaal’s daughter, Jezebel. Notice that EthBAAL’s name ends in ‘baal’ and JezeBEL’s name ends in ‘bel.’ The Sidonians worshipped the god Baal. You can say Baal like ‘ale’ or Baal like ‘Carl.’ Jezebel is really keen on Baal. She moves in with Ahab and brings 450 prophets of Baal with her. Before long, Ahab is worshipping Baal and Israel rapidly follows. Baal worship was very materialistic. Baal was the god who was responsible for rain, storms and fertility. Elijah has the brilliant idea of praying to God to stop it raining. If Baal can't provide then it will show that he isn’t useful, won’t it? Elijah told Ahab what he was going to do – and then God told him to hide! After three and a half years Elijah presented himself to Ahab. English people might be happy if it didn’t rain so much, but Ahab wasn’t happy. So, we read:
When Ahab saw Elijah, Ahab said to him, “Is it you, you troubler of Israel?” And he answered, “I have not troubled Israel, but you have, and your father's house, because you have abandoned the commandments of the Lord and followed the Baals.
In some versions of the Bible Ahab calls Elijah a ‘troublemaker’. It can actually be a rather honourable thing to be a troublemaker. Harry Truman called Martin Luther King a troublemaker. But King’s troublemaking brought about change. So, don’t be afraid to do some occasional troublemaking!
Elijah then invited all Israel to come to a contest, God versus Baal. Whichever god answered with fire won. How do you imagine that worked out? You guessed it. God wiped the board. There was a no-show from Baal. Then Elijah decided to set God a bit of a challenge. He poured twelve jarfuls of water over the wood of the sacrifice. God then sent fire which consumed the wood, the offering, the stones and the water. The Israelites were convinced: “The Lord, he is God; the Lord, he is God,” they said. They seized the prophets of Baal and killed them. Once the Israelites made that decisive act, the heavens opened and it poured with rain.
So … God had revealed himself in an unmistakeable way. The people acknowledged that. The prophets of Baal were dead. Game over, you would have thought. I’m sure that’s what Elijah thought. But he hadn’t taken Jezebel into account. Jezebel was a formidable woman. She had already killed most of God’s prophets. Now she’d deal with Elijah. After she hears that her prophets are dead, she sends a message to Elijah: “So may the gods do to me and more also, if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.” Elijah runs. Many preachers think that Elijah was being cowardly by running. Not at all. In a crisis the first thing is to get out of danger. After that, think about rescue, water and food.
WHY ELIJAH IS DEPRESSED
Elijah stops running and lies down under a broom tree, a typical desert tree. At this point depression washes over Elijah. He prays to God, ‘take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers’.
Why is Elijah depressed? There are some simple, basic reasons. First, he’s afraid. The passage tells us that Elijah ran for his life. We shouldn’t gloss over this. Fear affects us. When we’re afraid we simply don’t function properly. We don’t think straight.
Second, he’s exhausted. Elijah has had a massive confrontation with the prophets of Baal. It doesn’t matter that it was a victory; it was exhausting. Then he’s had two long runs. I’m not going to go into how far it is from Mount Carmel to Jezreel and then from Jezreel to Beersheba, but Elijah is definitely an ultra-long-distance runner.
But I think the greatest reason for Elijah to be depressed was that he thought he’d failed. Jezebel was the real proponent of Baal worship, and she was still firmly in place. From Elijah’s point of view, it wasn’t a great victory after all. Elijah’s ancestors tried to turn the hearts of the Israelites back to God and failed, and he hasn’t done any better.
FIRST STEPS TO RESTORATION
I said that I’m going to take two weeks over this talk. God enters the picture from verse 9 and I’m going to look at what God does and says in my next talk. That’s in two weeks’ time. For the moment there is Elijah and an angel. What happens?
• Safety
Elijah is now some way from Jezebel, but he’s still in Israel. He’s going to move completely out of Israel, to Mount Horeb, in the Sinai Peninsula. There he will be completely safe from Jezebel. There are times when we need to look to God for strength to cope with strength, and other times when God will take us out of it. Priscilla and I lived for 17 years in Azerbaijan. It was very stressful. God gave us the strength to cope with it while we there. But I believe that God finally led us out of it.
• Rest
When I was in my early thirties, I joined a mission society called WEC. Before I could go anywhere, I had to go through a three and a half month ‘candidate course’ at their headquarters. A number of people gave talks at that time. One lady – I think she was a psychiatrist – had the job of helping people who had got burned out from the pressure of an overseas situation. She said that the first thing she would always prescribe was rest.
• Food (specifically, cake!)
Some versions of the Bible tell us that the angel put some bread by Elijah’s head, but my version, the English Standard Version (a.k.a. the ‘Extremely Sound Version’!) says cake. If someone gives me a cake it will certainly cheer me up! Priscilla [my wife] gets agitated when she sees cake. She thinks about calories. But I don’t worry about that. Every Christmas I give fruit cakes to various members of my family. I tell them: ‘It’s really boring, I give you the same present every year’, and they say, ‘No, we really like this present.’ Cakes usually go down well. Not so long ago I gave a cake to a friend who I thought was quite down and it seemed to have a good effect. So – after rest, the next strategy is cake. Actually, I don’t think it has to be cake! It could be a cup of coffee, for example. This probably sounds very banal. But there’s a scientific basis to it. There are lots of scientific articles which discuss the relationship between food and depression. Eating poorly can be a consequence of depression, so if we’re depressed it’s really helpful to have an angel (or a friend) encourage us to eat properly. That in turn can help us to come out of the depression.
• Angel’s encouragement
There are two things to note here. An angel came. Just coming alongside someone who is discouraged is a source of encouragement. But let’s notice what this angel DIDN’T do. I imagine that angels are very wise, probably wiser than many of us! :) But this angel didn’t give Elijah the benefit of his wisdom. He simply gave loving-care. I think he knew that it wasn’t yet the time for talking, and God would do that. There’s a good example for us!
• Journey (~200-260 miles)
The angel doesn’t tell Elijah to go down to Mount Horeb. It just seems to be assumed that Elijah will do that. You probably know that I like running. Among other things I find that running is a great way to shake off mental stress. When I read about Elijah’s journey, I thought it sounded like good therapy. The NHS says exactly the same thing: ‘there’s evidence that exercise can help depression, and it’s ONE OF THE MAIN TREATMENTS for mild depression.’ That’s strong, isn’t it? ‘…it’s ONE OF THE MAIN TREATMENTS for mild depression.’ Dr Reiner also picked up on this. He commented: ‘The depressed person needs to exercise … Studies have indicated that exercise can be as effective as medication in reducing depression.’
• Time (40 days)
Finally, let’s notice that time was required. Elijah’s condition was not going to be resolved overnight. 40 days doesn’t complete the treatment. 40 days simply prepares Elijah to meet with God. By the time he arrives at Mount Horeb he is no longer exhausted and he is not afraid. He can now start to think straight. God can now start to speak to him and unpack the deepest cause of his depression, his sense of failure. That will be our subject in two weeks’ time.
CONCLUSION
Let me conclude briefly. From this passage it’s clear that God cares for Elijah. He wants to help him to recover. We looked at six initial steps that helped Elijah out of his depression. They are not yet the key step to unlocking the deepest causes of Elijah’s depression – his sense of failure. But it seems to me that they pave the way for that step by bringing Elijah to a point where he can think straight. We will look at that final step in the second talk. The steps we’ve looked at so far are not complicated. They are things we can do, if we’re trying to recover from depression ourselves, or to help someone else. So, why not make a note of the steps, and try them out?
