More about the Place

In the last post, I used the example of Elijah being in "the place" by the brook Cherith where the Lord hid him and had ravens provide an odd sort of room-service. But this was not the only "place." Elijah had a series of "the places" to be. His next makom was with a widow in Zarephath, and after that he was sent to Mount Carmel where his epic showdown with the priests of Baal took place and his prayer broke the drought. But "the place" where the Lord sent him next just might have been the most interesting of all, and he wasn't the first person to meet with Jehovah there. What made this "place" special was that it was a place where the Glory passed by.  

And the LORD said, “Behold, a place (makom) by me where you shall stand on the rock.

Exodus 33:21

This verse refers to the place where God would meet Moses. God put him in the cleft of a rock and when God's Glory passed by, Moses saw a vision of the hereafter.¹ The scripture is not super-specific at this point, but this crevice in the rock was in the area of Mount Horeb.

Fast-forward to 1 Kings 19: 8, 9a

And he (Elijah) arose and ate and drank, and went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mount of God. There he came to a cave and lodged in it.

Same mountain range. Same fissure in the rock. Same place that God's Glory had been shown to Moses about six centuries earlier.

And God asks, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
Elijah comes up with a fear-filled answer about how all the prophets are getting killed off and that people are seeking his life too. God, who is a God of Faith, considers this to be a rather lame answer and decides that Elijah needs to see the bigger picture. He tells Elijah to go to the mouth of the cave.
Read about it in verses 11 and 13.  

And he said, “Go out and stand on the mount before the Lord.” And behold, the Lord passed by, (…) And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.

It was in this place, while literally and spiritually standing on solid rock, that Elijah heard the voice of the Lord as a thin whisper. There had been a tempest of wind, the boulder-splitting noise of a quaking earth, and the roar of a raging fire. Each and every one of these would drown out a still small voice.

Elijah did not know what God's next assignment was when he first went into the rock cavity on Mount Horeb, but there he learned that there was more for him to do before God would send the chariot of fire to take him to the next makom in the heavens. It was only when he came to the right "place" that he learned that he still had to anoint the next kings of Syria and Israel and anoint Elisha to be a prophet after him.

KatieLyn, like all of us, needs to be in a place by God where she will stand on solid rock and hear the Lord. Living in a house where she is/was hearing the doubts and concerns of her mother is/was not that place. Her mother was speaking a windstorm, voicing an earthquake, and talking up a firestorm. For someone like KatieLyn who was already struggling with issues of codependency, it would be doubly difficult to ignore the voice of her mother and listen to the gentle whispering of the Spirit.

The Lesson
The lesson from the runaway bride is that it is imperative that you get yourself to the place where you can hear the Lord. Don't shrug it off and think that God can talk to you anywhere. Yes, He can talk to you anywhere, but you have to be in position to hear Him when he isn't talking in thunderclaps. 


¹ hereafter - אָחוֹר  'achowr in the Hebrew, and translated as "back parts" in the KJV, can also mean hereafter and afterwards.  In Isaiah 42:23 it is translated as time to come.