And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the LORD. And, behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake:
The Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains. He is not a physical agent, great or small. The wind the fire, the electricity, are ministers that do His pleasure, but they do not constitute a part of the nature, nor bear any resemblance to Him who is Lord. God is a spirit; and though the common mass of the Hebrew people might not have realized this great conception, yet there were certain individuals who, like Elijah, had more refined and elevated notions in regard to the pure spirituality of the divine nature. Progress had been made in religious knowledge from the time of the burning bush. The attention of the prophet was arrested by the phenomena that took place. His petulance was silenced, his heart was touched, and he was bid without delay return to the land of Israel, and prosecute the Lord's work there.
The design of this remarkable scene was to show Elijah that it was not according to the character of God to destroy or to coerce, but by the rational weapons of argument and preaching the Word, to persuade, the idolaters to abandon a false and to embrace the true, religion. But, to convince him that an idolatrous nation will not be unpunished, He commissions him to anoint three persons who were destined in Providence to avenge God's controversy with the people of Israel. Anointing is used synonymously with appointment (Judges 9:8), and is applied to all named, although Jehu alone had the consecrated oil poured over his head. 'The symbolical action and the figure are mixed up in a remarkable manner-an evident proof of the little importance attached to the material form, even in the case of the former. In the case of Hazael it was a symbol of the divine power which was to be imparted to him as an instrument of divine justice for the punishment of Israel. In other words, the appointment or exaltation of Hazael had a purely theocratic signification, as we may clearly perceive from the fact that Hazael was to be anointed in conjunction with Jehu and Elisha' (Hengstenberg, 'Christelegy,' 3:, pp. 126-136).
These persons were all three destined to be eminent instruments in achieving the destruction of idolaters, though in different ways. But of the three commissions Elijah personally executed only one-namely, the call of Elisha to be his assistant and successor, and by him the other two were accomplished (2 Kings 8:7-13; 2 Kings 9:1-10). Having thus satisfied the fiery zeal of the erring but sincere and pious prophet, the Lord proceeded to correct the erroneous impression under which Elijah had been labouring, of his being the sole adherent of the true religion in the land; for God, who seeth in secret, and knew all that were His, knew that there were 7,000 persons who had not done homage (literally, kissed the hand) to Baal Osculation was a common form of idolatrous worship (cf. Job 31:27; Hosea 13:2). Clemens Alexandrinus, in the seventh book of his 'Stromata,' gives a lengthened description of the various modes in which it was done.