As a believer, I find the stories of the Bible more real than I am many times. For instance, I carried for many years an irrational fear that my lack of faith caused God to punish my brother who suffered from cancer - and the rest of my family - by not healing him of the tumor and instead causing him to undergo a surgery that removed his knee and replaced it with a straight metal rod. This twisted belief had a perilous logic to it that afflicts me to this day - my lack of confidence in Gods power, demonstrated by the tiny kernel of doubt that asked "What if God doesn't heal", caused my brother pain. I suspect that I'm not the only one to ever feel this kind of guilt, and find it a relief to discover that even biblical Giants of faith had their moments of doubt - and were not punished for it, and neither were those they cared for.
Case in point, Elijah; in I Kings 17, the prophet is in hiding from Israels King, who wants to kill him. Elijah is first fed by ravens by a stream, and then sent to Lebanon, to shelter in the home of a widow with one young boy (7-16). All is well for the prophet, the widow and her son - the little they have is miraculously stretched by God each new day - until the boy gets sick. He dies, and the widow in her grief accuses Elijah of being sent by God to punish her for her sins by killing her son (18).
Outwardly, the prophet seems unshaken: he simply asks for the child's body, carries it to an upper room, and lays it on the bed very calmly. But I wonder what was going on in his mind during that long climb to that upper room? For he then cries out, "O Lord my God, have you brought tragedy also upon this widow I am staying with, by causing her son to die?" (20) There in that upper room, so unlike the one that served Jesus' disciples as a crucible, and yet so much alike, Elijah faced the crisis of whether God could be trusted or not to do good, and a crisis of faith doesn't get much more desperate than that. It's at that moment of wavering - does God plan evil, and not good? - that if God were to "smite", smithing should start.
But that is not the God of the Bible. It is the God of my deepest fears, doubts, failures, mistrust and let downs - but it is not God in reality. This God is big enough to be doubted by those he loves, to be rejected by His own - and refuses to become the kind of God we expect. He waits for us to find the bottom of our faith, as He did with Elijah, who cries out to God for the life of the boy; God answers, the child lives, and the widow finds faith (21-24). But as you read the rest of 1 Kings, you find the prophet continues to doubt, continues to question God, even as he stands up to the world for Gods cause.
So the real believer is not always answered with fire and resurrection, as Elijah was, but the real believer honestly faces the hard reality of life, and the unpredictable nature of Gods sovereignty in it, may lose heart, may even question Gods basic goodness - and yet obeys. I may never know the whys of unanswered prayer and unexplainable tragedy - but I can trust this God, big enough to not be threatened by my desperate doubts, close enough to see past them to the child he called out of darkness into light. And if you will try, you too can find this God...even if you never feel Him near until you stand in his presence by faith in Christ.
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