THE DRY BROOK
‘The brook dried up.’
I. This is one of the benedictions of disaster: that it sets us face to face with the realities of life.—We come into an irresistible recognition of the fact that there is something more valuable than money, and more precious than pleasure. Day by day we are busy doing our day’s work, occupied with the small interests which crowd our time, set upon transitory purposes, taken up with matters of the moment. And these things seem the only realities there are. God is out of sight and out of mind. Heaven and hell are theological expressions. Prayer is of no practical value. But we can put our hand on the round face of the gold sovereign. We can be absolutely sure of the existence of a sovereign. That, anyhow, is real.
And then comes trouble. And what a change that makes! What a reversal of all our valuations! Can money help us? Can society console us? O Baal, hear us! But there is no voice, nor any that answers. And here is the drought and the famine, and the brook is dried up because there is no rain in the land. Then we begin to think. And we remember God. And we change the emphasis of our life, and put it in a better place. And the dry brook teaches the lesson which it taught in Ahab’s day, the lesson of the supremacy of God, the lesson of the infinite seriousness of life.
II. But Elijah knew that lesson.—There was no need to teach that to Elijah. Let the other brooks dry up; but this brook Cherith at Elijah’s feet, surely God will keep that full of water. Morning and evening came the ravens, bringing breakfast and supper to the hungry prophet, and he drinks the water of the brook. God is taking care of Elijah. The hot sun glares out of the sky, but the deep valley is in the shadow. The famine tightens its hold upon the starving people, but Elijah neither thirsts nor hungers. And he paces up and down in his solitary valley, safe and satisfied, and rejoices, like Jonah, to imagine the fearful execution of the sentence of the indignant God.
But by and by the drought touches Elijah. ‘The brook dries up.’ Here is one of the hardest things to understand in the hard problem of pain. I mean this strange impartiality. If the brook had dried up in front of Ahab’s palace, that would have been right. We could see plainly enough what that was for. But when the brook dries up at the feet of the only good man in the whole country, that is quite a different matter. ‘There was no rain in the land,’ and that affected Elijah’s brook just as it affected Ahab’s. Sometimes there is a pestilence in the land, and the saint suffers like the sinner. All the time there is trouble in the land, of one sort or another, and the trouble touches the good just as it touches the bad. There is no difference. And we wonder why. No doubt but Elijah, standing on the bank of the dry brook, wondered why.
III. The dry brook taught Elijah the lesson of fellowship.—Out goes Elijah into the suffering world. Hungry and thirsty he takes his journey across the country. He knows now what starvation means. A great pity begins to take possession of his heart. He thinks now about that great famine in quite another way, and wants it ended. And presently he is standing on the top of Carmel, and looking up into the hot sky, and praying God for rain.
It is essential that whoever would be a helper of men must first have fellowship with men. He must go out among them and know them. He cannot stay apart in any pleasant seclusion, having no experience of the hunger and thirst which devours the life of man; he must himself bear our sicknesses and carry our sorrows. We must first love him before he can be of help to us. And we can love him only when he first loves us.
Illustrations
(1) ‘Elijah must have felt it trying to his faith to see the brook vanishing before his eyes. The ravens brought him food, it is true, but when one blessing is being withdrawn from us we do not always comfort ourselves with those we have. It is easy for us to forget God’s mercy on one side when it is veiled in trouble or loss on another.’
(2) ‘The prophet, like the people, suffers from the famine. The great and powerful, and the holy and noble, are one with the rest of humanity, and are not exempted from the sorrows and troubles which press upon the obscure, the lowly, and even the sinful. It is a beneficent law; for it saves men from the inhumanity of power and pride, and, as it were, forces us to suffer with, and so to have sympathy with our brethren.’