Worshipping the Roman God
And after the fire came a gentle whisper. 1 Kings 19:12b NIV
Gentle whisper – You know the story. Elijah calls down fire from heaven. He proves YHVH is the only God. He slaughters Jezebel’s four hundred false prophets. Victory is his. Then a single, wicked woman sends him a threat and Elijah, “ran for his life.” The conqueror turns coward. Have you ever wondered why? Did he just lose his nerve after such a decisive victory? Did he stop believing God was on his side? Did he think Jezebel could call forth all of Satan’s terrible powers? (By the way, that idea would be completely anachronistic). What happened to the great prophet?
Can I suggest something a bit radical? Can I suggest that Elijah’s view of God was not our view of God, our post-Hellenist view of God? Elijah’s view of YHVH did not begin with the Apostle’s Creed. It didn’t contain theological concepts like omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence. What Elijah knew of God was the personal experience of His presence, and when he didn’t feel that presence, he wasn’t sure what would happen next. He wasn’t a theologian. He was a prophet.
Now the backstory. We think of God in terms of the big “O”s: omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. But where did we get those ideas? You won’t find the words in the Bible. They are abstractions derived from texts that hint at the concepts. Unfortunately, there are texts that tell different tales, so we didn’t get these ideas without some additions to our Bible. Those additions came from Greco-Roman philosophy. In fact, our concept of the God of the big “O”s is probably more a God of philosophical speculation than a God of the Bible. Before you go into apoplectic theological withdrawals, just think about it. Where do your ideas about God in His essence really come from? Heschel’s remark might help: “ . . . the most exalted idea of God is not infinite wisdom, infinite power, but infinite concern.”[1] Ultimate knowledge, ultimate power, and total ubiquity sound more like attributes of a Roman Emperor than they do of YHVH. No wonder emperors thought of themselves as gods. But we can make the same mistake, can’t we? We can think that our real God is just like a Roman emperor, except without all the bad stuff and the human limitations. And if that’s how we think about God, as the Emperor of the Universe, then perhaps we’re really worshipping a Roman version of God rather than a biblical one.
Notice that this is precisely what Elijah has to learn. God shows up, but not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire, not in power, but in a whisper. Actually, not even that. dĕmāmâ daq is a “thin silence.” It isn’t softly spoken words that Elijah hears. It’s the awareness of God’s presence, the “thin silence” of the Spirit, that inner voice that Paul describes when we don’t know what to pray. If we learn anything at all from Elijah’s experience, it is this: “Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit.”[2] Do we really believe that?
I wonder which God we really prefer: The Emperor God who rules by power or the God who shows up in thin silence? I wonder if we haven’t fallen victim to the Roman ideal, a god who controls everything, who can fix anything, who crushes all those bad guys and rewards us for being so good, a God of party-line favoritism; or, the God who doesn’t really say anything at all, the God who turns us away from all the shock and awe we so desperately want to prove we’re on the right side, and instead, draws us into a place where there’s nothing to say, just something to feel?
I guess you’ll have to decide.
Topical Index: Elijah, whisper, power, emperor, dĕmāmâ daq, 1 Kings 19:12b
[1] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets: Two Volumes in One (Hendrickson Publishers, 1962), Vol. 2, p. 21.
[2] Zechariah 4:6
