The Current and Swell of the Faithfulness of God - How the structure of stories participate in its meaning

Elijah in the Desert by Washington Allston

I don’t typically write about Scripture, but because I wrote a piece earlier this week on the topic of faithfulness, what I noticed while reading in 1 Kings this week seemed to be providential. I share it in hopes that it will be an encouragement to you both spiritually and in your own practice of reading, whether sacred or secular texts. The structure of a narrative is not accidental or incidental; it is the root of any meaning we find in any text, including Holy Scripture.

 1 Kings 18 & 19 is a famous passage of scripture, and deservedly so. It is there that the prophet Elijah is at his most epic. He confronts the wicked king Ahab who has been hunting him unsuccessfully for three years and he doesn’t mince words or waste time; he tells Ahab exactly what God wants him to say. He then challenges the prophets of Baal to a showdown, a winner-take-all contest, a final demonstration proving beyond any doubt which god is the True God in Israel.

Hopefully, you already know the story. It is magnificent. Not only is it an excellent narrative, but it is full of principles that believers through the centuries have found comforting and bracing in difficult times. The faithfulness of God to his people is seen again and again in this portion of Scripture, and that is a comfort to everyone, not just fiery old testament prophets.

When I read the chapter this time, though, something stood out as brand new to me. Here is the passage in full:

And it came to pass after many days that the word of the Lord came to Elijah, in the third year, saying, “Go, present yourself to Ahab, and I will send rain on the earth.”
So Elijah went to present himself to Ahab; and there was a severe famine in Samaria. And Ahab had called Obadiah, who was in charge of his house. (Now Obadiah feared the Lord greatly. For so it was, while Jezebel massacred the prophets of the Lord, that Obadiah had taken one hundred prophets and hidden them, fifty to a cave, and had fed them with bread and water.) And Ahab had said to Obadiah, “Go into the land to all the springs of water and to all the brooks; perhaps we may find grass to keep the horses and mules alive, so that we will not have to kill any livestock.” So they divided the land between them to explore it; Ahab went one way by himself, and Obadiah went another way by himself.
Now as Obadiah was on his way, suddenly Elijah met him; and he recognized him, and fell on his face, and said, “Is that you, my lord Elijah?”
And he answered him, “It is I. Go, tell your master, ‘Elijah is here.’ ”
So he said, “How have I sinned, that you are delivering your servant into the hand of Ahab, to kill me? As the Lord your God lives, there is no nation or kingdom where my master has not sent someone to hunt for you; and when they said, ‘He is not here,’ he took an oath from the kingdom or nation that they could not find you. And now you say, ‘Go, tell your master, “Elijah is here” ’! And it shall come to pass, as soon as I am gone from you, that the Spirit of the Lord will carry you to a place I do not know; so when I go and tell Ahab, and he cannot find you, he will kill me. But I your servant have feared the Lord from my youth. Was it not reported to my lord what I did when Jezebel killed the prophets of the Lord, how I hid one hundred men of the Lord’s prophets, fifty to a cave, and fed them with bread and water? And now you say, ‘Go, tell your master, “Elijah is here.” ’ He will kill me!”
Then Elijah said, “As the Lord of hosts lives, before whom I stand, I will surely present myself to him today.”
So Obadiah went to meet Ahab, and told him; and Ahab went to meet Elijah.

In past readings, I was so caught up in Elijah’s narrative that I completely missed the importance of Obadiah’s story. Here is a man whose name means Worshipper of the Lord who is currently employed in the house of Ahab, the cursed and wicked king of Israel, and not only is he working there but he is in charge of the king’s entire house. It reminds me of Joseph in Egypt, in the houses of Photiphar and then Pharoah. Like Joseph, Obadiah remains faithful to the Lord while working in the house of the demon-worshipping Ahab and Jezebel. Scripture makes a point to tell us that he feared the Lord greatly. So much so, that under the very nose of his boss and his boss’s boss (the queen), he manages to hide one hundred prophets of the Lord in two separate caves, and keep them supplied with food and water. This is an incredible feat! I doubt the caves were near one another, so the logistics of getting two separate supplies of food to the prophets must have been difficult to manage. We don’t know how long he has kept them hidden – maybe the full three years? – but to keep them hidden and fed while a royal manhunt was taking place, rounding up all the prophets and slaughtering them – this is incredible.

But it wasn’t just Obadiah’s incredible devotion to the Lord and his willingness to do everything he could to save the prophets of the God he loved and feared. It was that Ahab, the wicked king, trusted him and valued him as his steward. Ahab and Obadiah go on a mission together to “find grass to keep the horses and mules alive,” and Ahab trusts Obadiah enough to decide it would be the best use of all their time and effort to split up and cover more ground. He knows Obadiah will do the job well so he sends him off on his own to carry on the hunt. It says something about the integrity of Obadiah that he was so trusted, that he did his job so well, that Ahab could leave the task in his hands and trust it would be done as well as the king himself would do it.

This was something I hadn’t noticed before. There are all sorts of personal applications one could make, and I’ll leave you to do that for yourself, but I loved the way God structured this story of faithfulness – both His own to Israel in spite of their continued national sin and idolatry, and that of His people’s to Him, those who loved Him and feared Him and who wanted to serve Him while living in an extremely hostile situation. He starts the episode not with the almost-overwhelming feats of prophetic strength of Elijah, but with the consistent, unseen faithfulness of the hardworking Royal Project Manager, Obadiah.

Another interesting thing I notices was how Scripture sets us up in the story to see the humanity of Elijah in the midst of all his wonder-working. Several times in chapters 18 and 19, Elijah says something like, “I’m the only prophet of the Lord left.” After the show-down between God and Baal, where Baal was soundly defeated and shown to be as nothing compared to the Lord of Hosts, and after the slaughter of the false prophets of Baal by Elijah and the newly-recommitted people of Israel, Jezebel somehow gets a message to Elijah promising to kill him by the next day. It’s hard to believe after all that he has done and seen, it would be Jezebel’s threat that sends Elijah running in fear, but it did. He runs a day’s journey into the wilderness, collapses under a tree, and prays to die, hopeless and lost in despair. The wilderness outside mirrors the wilderness of fear within. Instead of giving him what he wants, God miraculously feeds Elijah (twice) and sets him on another journey, this time directed by God and not fear, to “Horeb, the mount of God.” It’s there that Elijah officially lodges his complaint to the Lord about being hunted for slaughter, again saying, “The people of Israel have thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword, and I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life, to take it away.” God answers him by at first seeming to completely ignore this complaint and instead gives him a new assignment, telling him he needs to go anoint Hazael to be king over Syria, and then Jehu to be Israel’s king, and then Elisha to take over for Elijah as prophet to Israel. Hazael, Jehu, and Elisha will be the swords of the Lord: “And the one who escapes from the sword of Hazael shall Jehu put to death, and the one who escapes from the sword of Jehu shall Elisha put to death.” After this, the Lord mentions, almost as a p.s., “Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him.”

You and I started the story knowing that Obadiah had squirrelled away one hundred prophets and had kept them alive for possibly the full three years that the Lord withheld rain. Elijah is also told this at the beginning of the chapter, though we’re not told if he believed Obadiah or not. We know it’s true, though. Scripture leans toward us in that passage that is translated as a parenthetical insert and tells us it is so before Obadiah brings it up. You, me, Obadiah, and Elijah all know there are one hundred and one prophets left to the Lord (the hidden hundred plus Elijah), and at least one hundred and two people faithful to Him (the hidden prophets plus Elijah plus Obadiah) in Israel. So every time Elijah makes a comment about being the only one left, I think we are supposed to remember Obadiah and his hidden prophets. I think we are supposed to recognize that Elijah’s perspective is a bit askew.

But at the end of the episode, both Elijah and the reader are surprised to learn there are not just 100 faithful prophets in Israel, but seven thousand faithful people. We thought we had the whole story, but neither Elijah did nor, it turns out, did we. The Lord brings out this plot twist at the very end like a final crescendo in a symphony of faithfulness. But really, like a symphony beginning with it’s major theme in the overture, it was a theme that was there from the beginning. Who brought the food to the prophets in the caves? It wasn’t Obadiah doing all the grunt work by himself, not if he is head of Ahab’s house. That is a task similar to being a mayor or a city manager. His responsibilities of oversight would have kept him from being able to do the work of hiding and victualling the prophets all by himself. This means that Obadiah had a network of trusted men, men who also feared the Lord greatly and who were faithful to tend to the hidden prophets, men whose names we are never told. The Lord says there are seven thousand men, like Obadiah, living quiet faithful lives, flying under the Baal radar, and the Lord sees them. He has taken a count of them. He knows them, even if Elijah - and you and I - don’t.

I loved the way this whole episode was structured. We start off reading in an ironic position – as in, we know more than the characters of the story; irony is a form of literature where the audience knows more than the characters in the story – but then we find out we didn’t know much more at all, if anything. The Lord was doing things we couldn’t see and which we only find out about because we are allowed to listen in on His words to one of his children lost in a fit of despair. By the end of the episode, He leaves us with an image of a God who, like Obadiah, hides away His people and provides for them, but not in caves - in plain sight.

The structure of stories, both sacred and secular, are an important part of the meaning we find in them. This portion of Scripture is such a good example of that. The faithfulness of Obadiah is a foreshadow of the greater faithfulness of God Himself. When we see how the text takes us from the silent, unknown, unnoticed faithfulness of a servant of God and his trusted band of God-fearing men, to the climax of the fire of God descending on the dripping altar in faithfulness to His own God-ness and to His people lost in sin, and back again to the quiet, unknown, unnoticed faithfulness – this time of God Himself to His own God-fearing men scattered in Israel – we can feel the current and swell of the faithfulness of God in every letter of the story. The structure infuses every part of it. There is a harmony inherent in the story because of the way it is structured. It’s like a spiral carrying us up and up, and with each turn of the story we get a greater and grander view of God’s faithfulness.