He Was Certain He Was the Only One and He Was Wrong by Seven Thousand

The conviction arrives quietly and it feels like realism.

It is that in a building of two hundred people who have known him since he was born, he is the only one who thinks this. Not the only one with doubts, because everybody says they have doubts and nobody means anything by it. The only one asking the particular question he is asking.

He has no evidence for that and he has never checked. Checking would require asking somebody, and asking somebody is the exact thing the conviction has made impossible, because if he is the only one then asking exposes him and if he is not then he would already know.

So it becomes airtight. Twelve years of a conclusion that has never once been tested.

There is a man in 1 Kings 19 who reached the same conclusion, said it out loud twice, and was corrected with a number.

What is done for him before anything is said

The chapter does something before the theology that is worth sitting with, because it is what God does first.

Elijah has collapsed under a tree and asked to die. And the response is not a rebuke and it is not a sermon.

And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat. (1 Kings 19:5, King James Version)

Sleep, and then food, and then more sleep, and then more food. Twice. Before one word of doctrine.

That is not incidental. A man who has arrived at an airtight conclusion about being alone has usually arrived at it while exhausted, and the chapter treats the exhaustion first and the conclusion second, in that order, deliberately.

You are attended to physically before anything is corrected. 1 Kings 19:5 has an angel providing food and sleep before a word of instruction, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 8:26, who helps our infirmities, that a person is carried at the point where they cannot carry anything.

He says it twice and nobody interrupts him

Then the question, and it is asked twice, and the answer is identical both times.

And he said, I have been very jealous for the LORD God of hosts: for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant... and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away. (1 Kings 19:10)

I, even I only, am left.

He says it in verse 10 and he says the same thing again in verse 14, after the wind and the earthquake and the fire and the still small voice, word for word.

That is worth noticing. The dramatic part of the chapter happens between the two statements and it does not change his answer. He is not talked out of it by an experience.

And God does not interrupt either time. The complaint is heard in full, twice, without correction, and there is something in that for anybody who has assumed their conclusion would be argued with if they said it.

You are heard in full before you are corrected. 1 Kings 19:10 and 19:14 record the same complaint twice without interruption, and it is the Spirit of truth, John 16:13, who guides into truth rather than shouting a person down with it.

The still small voice is not the correction

Everybody remembers the wind, the earthquake, the fire and the still small voice, and most people stop there.

And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. (1 Kings 19:12)

What almost nobody notices is that the still small voice does not solve his problem. It asks him the same question again, he gives the same answer again, and only after that does the actual correction come.

So the famous part of this chapter is not the answer. It is a change of register: the God who had just done fire on a mountain in front of a nation is now doing something quiet with one exhausted man, and the quietness is the message rather than the content.

That matters for a person whose whole religious formation has been loud. The correction, when it comes, comes in a voice that would be lost in a service.

You are spoken to in a register that a loud room would not carry. 1 Kings 19:12 puts the LORD in the still small voice rather than in the fire, and it is by the Spirit, John 16:13, that a person is guided rather than moved by an event.

And then the number

Here is the correction, and it is the last thing in the list of instructions, almost tacked on.

Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him. (1 Kings 19:18)

Seven thousand.

He was not wrong by a little. He was not wrong about the situation being bad, which it was. He was wrong about the number by seven thousand, and he was a prophet, and he had been in that country his whole life.

And notice: I have left me. God takes responsibility for their existence. They are not people who held out on their own; they are described as having been kept.

The other thing worth saying is that Elijah never meets any of them in the chapter. He is told the number and then sent on an errand. Being wrong about the loneliness did not immediately produce company, and that is honest, and it is still worth knowing you are wrong.

You are wrong about the number, and God is the one keeping them. 1 Kings 19:18 says I have left me seven thousand and puts the keeping in His verb, and it is the Spirit who searches all things, 1 Corinthians 2:10, in a knowledge no headcount from a pew could reach.

Why the conclusion is airtight from inside

It is worth saying plainly how this stays true for twelve years in a room of two hundred people, because it is a mechanism rather than a mystery.

Everybody in that building who is asking the same question has reached the same conclusion, by the same route, for the same reason. Each of them believes they are the only one. Each of them has therefore said nothing. And the silence of each is the evidence the others use.

So a room can contain forty people in identical conditions, every one of them certain they are alone, and every one of them correct that nobody has ever said anything.

And if the being alone in that room has become heavier than a frustration, if it has reached the point where nobody would notice and you are not sure you want to be here, that is a thing to say out loud tonight to a doctor, a counselor, a social worker, or a pastor you trust. In the United States the 988 crisis line is answered by a real person at any hour, and calling it is not a failure of faith.

That is why the instruction in Hebrews is what it is.

Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another. (Hebrews 10:25)

Exhorting one another. Not attending. Speaking, in both directions, which is the one thing that breaks the mechanism, and the one thing nobody who is inside it can start.

You are inside a mechanism rather than a fact, and the mechanism runs on silence. Hebrews 10:25 instructs exhorting one another rather than only assembling, and it is by the Spirit, 1 Corinthians 12:7, that the manifestation is described as given to every man to profit withal.