What Can We Learn From Elijah’s Depression? — Murray on the Fainting Prophet
⏱ 16 min read
You are tired in a way sleep does not touch. You have been running, in the metaphorical and probably the literal sense, for a long time — through the season at work, through the household, through the people who depend on you, through the small ongoing crises that have become the texture of your year. And somewhere in the last few weeks, something quiet broke. You found yourself, at the end of an ordinary day, with no energy for the things you usually have energy for. You found yourself, at three in the morning, not anxious — flat. The flatness is the part that frightens you most. You have known anxiety before. The flatness is new, and the flatness has the kind of stillness in it that you are not sure how to come back from. The question what can we learn from Elijah in the Bible arrives, for you, with a small tremor in it — because the prophet under the broom tree is the one figure in scripture who lay down in the wilderness and prayed to die, and you would like to know what God did with him in that wilderness, because the wilderness has gotten quite quiet in your own week.
This is the slow walk. Not the chariot-of-fire version. The actual figure — read through Andrew Murray’s Waiting on God and his companion writings, the late nineteenth-century South African pastor who treated the interior life of the exhausted Christian with more clinical tenderness than almost any pastor of his era — held next to the question your soul actually came in carrying. The Everspring Dry Season Devotional carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice. For now — read slowly. (The companion essays in this contemplative series sit at what does the Bible say about guilt — Murray on the conscience, what does the Bible say about waiting — Murray on waiting on God, and what the old saints knew about God’s silence — Murray on waiting.)
Elijah, before the broom tree, had spent three years confronting Israel’s most violent king and queen, three years sheltering in a brook bed and a widow’s house, three years calling Israel back from the worship of Baal — and then, on Mount Carmel, he had stood alone against four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and asked God to send the fire. The fire came. The whole nation watched. The false prophets were killed. Elijah, exhausted and exhilarated, ran ahead of the king’s chariot back to Jezreel — a journey of perhaps thirty kilometres on foot, after a day that had begun in confrontation and ended in slaughter. And then Jezebel sent a messenger to tell him she would have him killed by the next day. The text of 1 Kings 19 records what happened next in three short verses. He arose, and went for his life, and came to Beersheba. He left his servant there. He walked another day into the wilderness alone. He sat down under a broom tree. He asked to die. It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers. And then he lay down and slept.
This is the figure. Not the man on the mountain. The man under the broom tree. The honest answer to what can we learn from Elijah in the Bible begins where most retellings end — not at the fire, but at the collapse the morning after, which is the place the modern Christian woman who has been running too long actually needs the figure to meet her.
The first episode: the broom tree and the food
“It is where Thou enterest to rest, to refresh and reveal Thyself, that Thou makest holy. O my God! may my heart be Thy resting-place. I would, in the stillness and confidence of a restful faith, rest in Thee, believing that Thou doest all in me. Let such fellowship with Thee, and Thy love, and Thy will be to me the secret of a life of holiness.”
— Andrew Murray, Holy in Christ
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Murray is naming the thing the broom tree began. It is where Thou enterest to rest, to refresh and reveal Thyself, that Thou makest holy. Notice the order. The resting comes first. The refreshing comes second. The revealing comes third. The holiness is the fourth thing, downstream of the first three. This is the order the angel of the Lord followed at Elijah’s broom tree, and it is the order that runs against the order the exhausted Christian woman has been operating by for years.
The text of 1 Kings 19 is precise about what the angel did. He did not address Elijah’s despair directly. He did not give him a sermon about how Jezebel was not really going to win. He did not remind him of the fire on Carmel and tell him to take heart. He touched him, woke him, and said arise and eat. There was a cake of bread baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. Elijah ate. He drank. He lay back down. He slept again. The angel woke him a second time. Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee. He ate again. He slept again. The text gives no record of any spiritual content in this sequence. The Lord, through the angel, treated the prophet’s collapse as a body problem first.
This is the first thing the figure has to say to you, and it is the part the modern Christian instinct most often misses. The flatness you are sitting in is, at one level, a spiritual condition. At another level — the level Elijah’s angel addressed first — it is a body collapsed from too much carrying. The food came before the still small voice. The sleep came before the cave. The journey was acknowledged to be too great before any theological work was done on the prophet’s interior. The Lord’s first treatment of His exhausted servant was bread, water, and a second sleep.
What we can learn from Elijah in the Bible, here, is the order of the recovery. It is where Thou enterest to rest. The resting is where God enters. The exhausted Christian woman has been trying to enter the resting from the inside — to think her way out of the flatness, to pray her way out of the flatness, to read her way out of the flatness — when the figure shows her, gently, that the first step is the bread and the second sleep. The body has to be met before the soul can be met. The angel came twice. The food came twice. The journey was named. The interior work began only after the body had been carried back from the edge of collapse.
For you, this is the part to sit with. The thing you have been treating as a spiritual failure may be a body that has been asked to carry too much for too long without bread, water, and a second sleep. The recovery does not begin with louder prayer. It begins with the small mercies the angel brought first. The figure is not embarrassed by this. The text of 1 Kings 19 is not embarrassed by this. The Lord is not embarrassed by this. The body comes first.
The second episode: the cave and the still small voice
You know what happened next. Elijah, fed twice and slept twice, walked forty days through the wilderness to Mount Horeb — the same mountain Moses had met God on five hundred years earlier. He went into a cave. The word of the Lord came to him with a question. What doest thou here, Elijah? And Elijah, in the cave, gave the answer that is the most human thing he ever said. I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.
The answer is wrong. The text will tell him so, in a few verses, when God informs him that seven thousand others in Israel have not bowed to Baal. But the wrongness of the answer is not the point. The point is that the Lord did not correct the answer. He did not say Elijah, you are mistaken. He did not point out that the answer was self-pitying or factually inaccurate. He said go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. The treatment of the prophet’s despair was not theological correction. It was an invitation to come and stand.
“How the very thought of God in His majesty and holiness should silence us, Scripture abundantly testifies. … The message is one of deep meaning: ‘Take heed and be quiet;’ ‘In quietness shall be your strength;’ ‘It is good that a man should quietly wait.’”
— Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
Read this one slowly. Murray is naming what happened on the mountain. In quietness shall be your strength. Elijah stood on the mountain. A great wind tore the rocks. The Lord was not in the wind. An earthquake shook the mountain. The Lord was not in the earthquake. A fire came. The Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire — a still small voice. The Hebrew is more literally a sound of thin silence, or a low whisper. The Lord met the broken prophet not in the seismic events but in the smallest possible audible thing, the kind of thing that can only be heard if everything else has gone quiet.
This is the second thing the figure has to say to you. The Lord does not come to the exhausted soul in the dramatic event. He comes in the still small voice, which is to say: the small audible thing inside an interior that has gotten quiet enough to hear it. The exhausted Christian woman has, often, been listening for the wind, the earthquake, and the fire — the dramatic confirmation, the obvious sign, the loud answer to the question she has been asking. Murray, gently, tells her that the Lord she is listening for has been speaking in the thin silence the whole time. The hearing was not blocked by His silence. The hearing was blocked by the louder events her exhausted mind was scanning for.
Take heed and be quiet. This is the practice the cave was given for. Not the wind. The quiet. The cave was the place Elijah finally heard the One who had been speaking the whole time — through the food, through the second sleep, through the long walk, through the patient question what doest thou here — but who could only be heard in a frequency the prophet had been too overwhelmed to receive. The cave was the listening room. The still small voice was the form the Lord chose for the kind of soul Elijah had become.
For you, this is the part to sit with. The flatness in your own week is not the absence of God. It is, possibly, the very condition in which the still small voice is, at last, audible to you. The wind has gone past. The earthquake has gone past. The fire has gone past. What remains is the thin silence — and it is in the thin silence that the small audible thing is most likely to arrive, if you can stay in the cave long enough for the ear to adjust. The cave is the practice. The quiet is the strength. The voice will come.
(If the silence in your own walk has been longer than a season, what the old saints knew about God’s silence — Murray on waiting is the slower companion piece to this article.)
The somatic that goes with the fainted prophet
Pause here. The teaching has a body to it, and the body is where Murray’s vocabulary becomes most translatable to a modern week.
Sit somewhere quiet. Lie down, if you can — the broom tree posture, the body’s natural response to the kind of exhaustion this article is for. If lying down is not possible, settle into the chair with both feet flat and the spine supported. Let the back of the head rest against whatever is behind it. The neck has been holding the head up through too many hours of the week, and the neck is the muscle that gives last. Let it stop. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the whole body soften by an inch into the surface that is supporting it — not by relaxing, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold yourself up at all. Take a second slow inhale. On the second exhale, let the surface carry more of your weight. The surface is not asking you to perform. The surface is the bread, the water, the second sleep.
Stay with three slow breaths under the full support. Then sit up gently and continue reading.
The body you have just allowed to be carried is the body Elijah’s angel laid down under the broom tree. The body of the soul that has been running too long is a body that has forgotten how to be carried. The body of the soul whom the angel touched and fed is a body that is, at last, allowed to be carried by something other than its own ongoing effort. The journey is too great for thee. The carrying is not weakness. The carrying is mercy. The body, allowed to be carried for one slow breath, is the body of the prophet under the tree.
A daily companion for the slow recovery
The Everspring Dry Season Devotional walks the kind of slow reading this article is the long form of — one short passage each evening, with room for the honest sentence, a place to bring the day’s actual flatness to the page without performing wellness. Built for the woman whose questions about Elijah are not academic. The 140-day form gives the practice a shape, so the page you sit down at tomorrow already has a structure and you do not have to invent one — which matters in a dry season, when inventing structure is the kind of energy you do not have.
The third episode: the going back, and the apprentice
“Let this truth, accepted under the teaching of the Spirit in faith, remove every vestige of fear, as if abiding in Christ were a burden and a work. In the light of His life in the Father, let it henceforth be to you a blessed rest in the union with Him, an overflowing fountain of joy and strength. … What we only need is this: to take time and study the divine image of this life of love set before us in Christ. We need to have our souls still unto God, gazing upon that life of Christ in the Father until the light from heaven falls on it, and we hear the living voice of our Beloved whispering gently to us personally.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
This is the third passage. Read it once at speed, then read it again, slowly.
Murray is naming the place Elijah came to after the cave. The Lord, in the still small voice, did three things for the prophet that the cave’s quiet had finally made him able to hear. The first: He gave him a job. Go, return on thy way to the wilderness of Damascus. The second: He named the seven thousand others who had not bowed to Baal — correcting, gently, the I only am left of the cave. The third: He gave him Elisha. Elisha the son of Shaphat … shalt thou anoint to be prophet in thy room. The prophet who had collapsed under the broom tree was given an apprentice — a younger man to walk with him for the rest of his ministry, to take the burden when he was no longer the one to carry it.
The figure has something to say to you about that. The recovery from the broom tree is not a recovery to the same conditions that produced the collapse. The Lord did not send Elijah back to the same life that had broken him. He sent him back with an Elisha — with companionship, with apprenticeship, with the explicit promise that the work would not be carried alone. The prophet who had been running ahead of the king’s chariot in solitary triumph was given, after the wilderness, the long quiet companionship of a younger man who would walk with him for the rest of his life. The going-back was a different going-back.
This is what what can we learn from Elijah in the Bible finally has to say. The recovery from the kind of exhaustion that lays you down under the broom tree is not a return to the version of your life that produced the exhaustion. It is a return to a different shape of the life — one with bread in it, with second sleeps in it, with thin silence in it, with the seven thousand others you had forgotten were there, with an Elisha somewhere, even if you have not yet recognised who that person will be. The shape of the recovery is structural. The Lord does not heal the prophet’s interior only to send him back into the same broken pattern. He heals the interior and changes the pattern. The two are part of the same mercy.
For you, this is the part to sit with. The flatness you are in is not asking you to push through and return to the same week that produced it. It is asking — through the angel, through the food, through the second sleep, through the thin silence, through the seven thousand others, through the Elisha who has not yet appeared but may already be standing at the edge of your life — for a different shape of the going-back. Murray would say: take time and study the divine image. Sit in the cave a little longer. Hear the voice in the form it is choosing for you. Let the going-back, when it comes, be a going-back into a life that has been gently restructured by the One who fed you under the tree.
What can we learn from Elijah in the Bible
Three things, at the speed of the broom tree, the cave, and the apprentice.
The first is that the recovery begins in the body. The angel touched the prophet. The bread came first. The second sleep came before any spiritual content. The journey was named as too great before any theological work was done. The Lord is not embarrassed by the body’s role in the soul’s recovery. The food and the rest are not the secular layer of the healing. They are the first layer.
The second is that the still small voice is the form the Lord chooses for the kind of soul the exhausted prophet has become. The wind, the earthquake, and the fire have to go past. The thin silence is what remains. The hearing is restored not by a louder voice but by an interior that has gotten quiet enough to hear the smaller one. The cave is the listening room. The quiet is the strength.
The third is that the going-back is a different shape from the going-out. The Lord does not heal Elijah only to send him back into the pattern that broke him. He heals him and gives him an Elisha. He corrects the I only am left by naming the seven thousand. He restructures the prophet’s life so the recovery is not undone the next week by the same conditions that produced the collapse. The mercy is both interior and structural. The two are part of the same answer.
This is what we can learn from Elijah in the Bible. Not a chariot of fire. A man, watched closely, in the interior weather of a soul that had been running too long — and a God whose first mercy was bread and a second sleep, whose deeper mercy was the still small voice, and whose final mercy was the apprentice waiting on the other side of the wilderness.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Dry Season Devotional. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that holds the fainted soul in proximity to the One whose first mercy is bread, until the proximity becomes the rest.
The Everspring Dry Season Devotional carries Murray’s slow vocabulary — the still small voice, the resting-place, the quiet that is your strength — into a daily companion built for the woman whose questions about Elijah are not academic, but personal.
