PROLOGUE
THE MERCILESS SUN BEAT HOT ON A COLD MAN’S HEART. His footsteps slowed and fell into beat with the thunderclaps behind him. Dark clouds hung in the distance, but only blinding dust covered the desert that surrounded him. He longed to see the rain; he longed to feel the rain; but instead he ran. He ran to escape the coming storm, two hundred armed soldiers with an order to execute him. He ran to escape the consequences of his actions, four hundred slaughtered prophets cut down at his word. He ran to escape the crushing doubt, one isolated man abandoned by the God he tried to serve. The scorched earth spread out before him like an endless sea of stone.
Three years ago the heavens had been shut. Not one drop of water, not even dew, had fallen on Israelite soil. By his word it had halted, and by his word the sky again opened, surrendering its storehouses to a dormant land. But there was no time to savor the sweet smell or feel the cool droplets or even enjoy the sight of the parched earth eagerly gulping the rain. Instead his blistered face was pierced by the pelting sand grains of an unwelcoming landscape as he rushed toward death.
He was the last of the prophets of Yahweh, a man of vision, a man of absolutes. In truth, he was a simple peasant, but he held a peculiar position in the social structure of Israel. Priests, kings, and people all sought after the Lord, but he didn’t seek. Somehow, he knew. He existed in a different realm, as if composed of matter not wholly temporal, one in the pattern of Moses, the greatest prophet. Transcending the common and touching the supernatural in a unique way, Elijah was, in a sense, God with us. Was.
After three years of drought, Elijah had heard the whisper. It wasn’t even a whisper; it was never that real. Every time he sensed the whisper, it was just enough to get his attention, but not nearly enough to convince him it wasn’t his own thought. He was certain that the difference between him and every other Israelite was not that he heard the whisper, but that he followed it. And, strangely, others followed him. Was an entire nation simply chasing the delusions of a madman? That was what Mount Carmel was supposed to answer.
From the flattened peak of the mountain Elijah watched dawn break over the Kishon Valley. Thousands of people filled the sloping hillsides beneath him. As he scanned the crowds of doubters, he imagined the drama about to unfold, a play that would pit God against god. A company of eight hundred and fifty prophets opened the spectacle with music and song and dancing and revelry, all to the glory of Ba’al. They quickly moved through prayers and petitions to stunning orations of power and pageantry, legends of beasts brought low, heavenly beings cast down, and a god who once stirred the earth but now seemed impotent. Prophet after prophet cried from the depths of his soul, the lament growing to a desperate frenzy which soon developed into a grisly display of blood, self-immolators attempting to pierce their own souls as only Ba’al once could. With bleeding and weeping and gnashing of teeth, the pitiful performers struggled for hours to elicit a response from their god, but the skies remained silent. The gore continued and several prophets succumbed to death as a horrified crowd stared in disenchanted disgust.
“Enough!” Elijah finally cried. He rose and moved to face a despised and rejected altar of sopping stones. The audience awaited his response to the tumultuous display of the preceding acts. In contrast to the roar of hundreds, one man stood alone in silence. Softly, he asked for fire. A seam ripped open in the scorched sky, and all matter of existence was thrown apart as a fierce tongue of flame spewed from the mouth of God, consuming every holy and unholy thing on that sacred mountain. In the aftermath, the altar embers lay smoldering, the prophets of Ba’al lay dead, and the people of Israel lay on their faces in holy fear, once again baptized by the fire of the living God.
Then fell the rain, and with it a mix of celebration and condemnation. While most of Israel rejoiced at the life-giving rain, a death sentence had been given to Elijah. The blood of the false prophets had fallen on his head, despite the fire, despite the rain. It seemed everyone could only focus on Elijah; no one truly cared about God. So in a final act of desperation, Elijah ran. The man who had shared an unequaled intimacy with God, who had commanded fire from heaven, who had raised the dead — this man now ran for his life. And where was God? Had the Almighty used him to destroy the cult of Ba’al only to watch him, a pawn, be consequently destroyed? The years of miraculous sustenance, the endless conversations, the closeness — all of it was gone. Had it ever been real? As suddenly as the flash of fire had descended, Elijah’s assurance had collapsed, and now he ran from death into death, cursing his doubt and cursing his faith.
He ran all day, until the day became darkness, then through the night until dawn. By noon he could run no more. His head swayed and his body slacked, both begging him for rest and nourishment, but the punisher plodded on. He was a day’s journey from the nearest town, somewhere in the desert, hardly a sanctuary, but perhaps a fitting sepulcher. His flight had originated out of self-preservation, but his thoughts now turned to self-destruction. In the absence of purpose, his life held no promise. God had abandoned him, and somewhere between the rain and the sand, he had abandoned God. He no longer wanted to see him; he no longer wanted to hear him, he no longer wanted answers. Nothing of the delusional misrepresentation of his past appealed to him anymore. He held neither fight nor faith, nor desire to recapture either. He wanted death.
A solitary shrub appeared like a wraith through the heat and stench of the desert air. His pace had slowed to a stumble, and he began to embrace his inevitable fate. He collapsed in a heap and clutched the base of the shrub. This is true glory, he thought, to choose the circumstance of one’s own martyrdom. His eyes slowly closed as the swirling sand dusted his haggard face. To sleep and simply cease was now his final wish. The tired seer in desperate slumber conceded victory to a vanished God, and softly breathed, “Let me die.”
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Elijah awoke to the touch of a stranger and the smell of burning wood. The cool of the evening was warmed by the light of a small fire near his bush. Cautiously, he moved toward the inviting flames, pausing to imbibe the entire scene — the red night sky, the glowing mountains, the air of serenity. Something heavenly had descended here, he mused, and he soon perceived a small cask of water by the fire. He sat deathly still for a moment, fiercely struggling to ignore the too-obvious wooden vessel. In time he succumbed, and to his astonishment, his lips met the sweetest water he had ever tasted. It seemed to flow with its own pulse; it almost breathed. He reclined with an ecstatic gasp, filled with wonder, filled with life. Emotions began clamoring in his skull, elations began hammering at his heart, and for a brief second, he saw God.
No, a man, a crouched figure, resolutely defining a distance between himself and the prophet, but undeniably staring at him. Elijah searched the silhouetted face. There was an eerie alienness in its form, but whether it was simply a stranger or something more he could not determine. Something certainly contradicted the presence of this being, yet nothing negated its humanity. It was no specter, for he had felt its touch. It was no man he had ever viewed before. No matter, it was not God.
So the Almighty had refused the request of the still-living Elijah. Life was, after all, the breath of God, and Elijah’s life was perhaps his God’s most telling drama. For a time, his life had seemed to be the very breath of God. Were he never to speak another holy word, it could never negate the power of the reality he once walked. Other than Moses, no other prophet had spoken the truths or performed the marvelous wonders of Elijah. If life itself be damned, his never would be! But as surely as God lived, who had denied him his presence, Elijah could no longer live with the torturous strain of providence. To live and forever search is not to live, the prophet thought; the weight of existence is more than enough. At this point, to die would be his greatest gain.
The stranger silently stared. Elijah returned his gaze as he reached into the coals for a bit of food, a freshly baked cake of bread, clearly prepared by the mysterious guest. Elijah paused and pondered, who was the guest here? Had this man come upon him, or had Elijah wandered onto his land? Ah, there was the searching again. Stop searching for meaning everywhere, Elijah scolded himself. Here was a man and nothing more. Elijah struggled to banish the suspicions from his mind, but suddenly his thoughts became more physical as the taste of the cake swelled in his mouth. He looked in astonishment at the bread in his hand. The flaky, white pastry tasted like wafers made with honey. He clenched his eyes shut in disbelief, but the cry of his senses betrayed his desire to despise. At once he knew what had entered him, a grace that had not fallen on the tongue of an Israelite for over five hundred years: manna.
He tossed the bread aside, fell to the ground, and covered his face. He had not asked for any of this. Why was God toying with him? Must a man be cursed to ask the unanswerable, to seek the invisible, to eternally scream into the emptiness of heaven, and know that no answer will ever come? He refused to return to his past position, the man of God without God. No one could be burdened with that, and he could endure no more. I am no longer a prophet, he told himself; I am merely a man like any other man. He began to dream as the night chilled his weary soul.
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Dawn’s sun pierced the morning, and the stranger’s touch again roused Elijah to face a new day. Elijah sat upright and reflected on the past forty-eight hours, marveling at the spell that could effortlessly drive a man from zealot to apostate to nihilist. He surveyed the lifeless desert around him. There were legends that the area had once been fertile. Everything exists only to die, he thought, shielding his face from the punishing sunlight. The former prophet had already weathered one drought; he wasn’t about to sustain another.
“You should eat. The journey will be too much for you,” the stranger finally spoke.
Elijah had forgotten he wasn’t alone.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“A humble servant of God like you,” the man replied enigmatically.
“A servant of God,” Elijah mused. “I envy your simple, blind faith. That type of faith I never knew when I was the prophet of God.”
The stranger smiled in a way that conveyed both sympathy and contempt.
“When did you cease to be the prophet of God?” he gently asked.
Elijah stammered for a moment, then curtailed the rage that nearly erupted from his mouth.
“How dare you…,” he warned, motioning a shaky finger toward his assailant. Then he paused to compose himself.
“You have no idea what I’ve seen. You can’t know, because I don’t even know anymore! I’ve commanded drought and deluge! I’ve been fed by birds and sustained by a handful of flour! I’ve raised dead children up from the earth and called fire down from heaven! I have heard the Lord’s voice and felt his touch more than anyone else alive! I have also persevered through long seasons of doubt and silence, and the only thing that held me together was the unwavering belief that his presence would one day return.
“But I’m tired. I’m tired of wrapping all of my hopes in the occasional glimpses of a God that ignores me most of the time. I’ve been orphaned and left for dead. If I return home the queen will have my head and the king will have my hands for trophies. I will forever be remembered as the prophet who raised his sword to the throat of Ba’al only to find myself destroyed. All this I could bear, but one thing has crushed my soul. God is gone again. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t touch. No light can shine from a darkened prophet, and I’ve had enough. He has abandoned me for the last time.”
Elijah sank to the ground in exasperation. Only the subtle sounds of the tiny fire crackled through the silent desert landscape. The stranger continued to stare at Elijah.
Then, inexplicably, the man rose. “You should eat,” he reiterated. “The journey will be too much for you.” With that he turned and departed.
Elijah watched in relief as the stranger strode away, displacing his melancholy long enough to shout, “What journey?”
No answer came.
Eat indeed, Elijah scoffed; I want to die. Hours seemed to pass, how many the prophet could not discern, but it was long enough for his visitor to completely vanish, leaving Elijah altogether alone with only his shrub, his fire and his jug. He began to weep softly, mourning the life he still clutched but wished he could release, and the God he had lost. Somewhere, deep inside his heart, he still wanted both.
He snatched the open container of water, drank, and spat in horror. The water was — wine! Elijah leaped to his feet and began spinning, circling, searching for explanations. No water for miles, but he had tasted the sweetest drink last night. How had it become wine? He remembered the cake —manna — the bread of heaven! At once, it all became clear. This man was sent from God, sent to save Elijah in his hour of weakness. He began to follow the soft impressions in the sand, quite unconsciously at first, but was soon chasing the mysterious footprints. His heart began beating faster as his pace accelerated to a run. Maybe God had not abandoned him!
Then the footprints ended. Elijah stood, dumbfounded, staring across the vast plain of unmarked earth. He moved slowly, steadily seeking a clue to the man’s end or exit. No sign of life, no motion in the hills could be perceived. He stopped, and a small chill shot through his nerves. This was no man; this was a holy messenger from God. And his message had been simple: eat.
Elijah stumbled back to the shrub and snatched one of the manna cakes from the ground. He paced around the fire as he ate, staring into the flames and fighting to make sense of the entire encounter. His understanding of angels was sparse. To him they were bearers of flaming swords, conveyors of death, hypnotic instruments of God’s wrath on earth. But this man had done very little and said even less. A fire and some food, he thought as he gulped more of the wine, and a strange statement about a journey. Elijah wasn’t on a journey; he was on a flight.
As he downed the last of his provisions he reflected on everything that had failed to summon his God. Prayer had yielded nothing. Fasting had yielded nothing. Self-denial had yielded nothing. Desperation had yielded nothing. His flight into the desert had yielded nothing. Despite his experiences, all that remained before him was a tiny burning fire.
Suddenly, he noticed the fire, the fire which had burned since his first encounter with the angel, the fire which had continually burned for the past two days, the fire which now burned, leaving no ash, consuming no bit of the wood below. And a name immediately came to his mind: Moses. No prophet had ever equaled Moses; he knew God like no one else. His own face had glowed with the glory of the Lord. He spoke with God face to face. That, that is what Elijah wanted — no mystery, no guesswork, no distance. He lifted his head, gazed to the south, and one object consumed his thoughts, one particular mountain that rose above the Sinai Desert. With a newfound passion, Elijah ran. He ran with zest; he ran with zeal; he ran to see his God, all the while repeating one name: Moses, Moses, Moses.
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Elijah entered the dark cave slowly, pausing to remove his sandals and shake off the dust of two hundred desert miles. He brushed his weathered hands reverently over the rough walls. Here was a temple that paled Solomon’s, a holy haven that all of nature fell to worship. Power seemed to pulse from its cracks. He traced the perimeter of the tiny hollow, gently sliding his fingers over the black stones, lost in the otherworldliness of the place. It was here that, for Elijah, history had been split.
He settled onto the cold floor and stared at the red rays of the setting sun that filtered through the cave entrance. Elijah had come to the mountain of God. This was the mountain where Moses worshipped before a bush that burned but was not consumed. This was the mountain where Moses received the tablets of stone written by the finger of God. This was the mountain where Moses was baptized with a privileged fire, the first man to hear the holy name of the Lord. This was the mountain where God chose a friend, and repeatedly drew the man to himself as never before. That was what Elijah desired; what he longed to see, hear, and feel. He huddled against the soundless stone wall, closed his eyes, and muttered to himself.
“Moses saw God here.”
For a moment his head reeled with all the thoughts and wishes he had ever dared to dream. He opened his eyes and sighed in sorrow. There was no trembling earth, no blinding light, no burning fire, no visible God. His stomach tightened as his logical mind tried once again to suffocate his faith, but he had come too far. Here was the spot, and here he would wait until death for God to return. Surely the Lord would honor this ground, if not for his servant Elijah, certainly for his friend Moses. Tears began to trickle down the cheeks of the prophet who felt he had fallen from grace. Tomorrow he may embrace his God; tonight he embraced what he could. A stone served as his pillow and the cold, dirt floor chilled his bones as he curled into a ball and began to drift to sleep. He rolled over and watched the daylight slowly turn to darkness.
