DEVOTION / Are you in the right place?
What are you doing here?
Did you ever have someone walk up to you and ask, What are you doing here? Usually that means that you are somewhere you shouldn’t be. Maybe you said that to your children who were still watching TV after their bedtime. You might look at them with a stern eye and ask, What are you doing here? Or perhaps you stepped into a meeting where you weren’t invited. What are you doing here?
What was Elijah doing there?
God once asked Elijah that same question. Elijah had just won a contest on Mount Carmel against the prophets of Baal. The test was to see whose god was the real god who could come down and light the sacrifice. Of course, the God of Elijah not only burned up the sacrifice but the altar as well. Do you know what happened next?
When the contest was decided, Elijah had the false prophets put to death. This made wicked King Ahab and Queen Jezebel very angry. They planned to arrest Elijah and kill him. So he ran deep into the desert. When he thought he was safe, he sat down under a scrubby tree and began to pout. What good was it for him to be part of that great miracle, only to be hunted down and killed a few days later? The Lord came to Elijah and told him to eat a meal and journey to Mount Horeb. Elijah obediently did as he was told. When he arrived there, he crawled into a cave, frightened, lonely, and dejected. That’s when God came to Elijah and asked, What are you doing here? (1 Kings 19:9). Discouraged, Elijah replied, I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too (19:10). It was then that God assured Elijah that he was not alone; God was still right beside him.
We will never be in a situation like Elijah, but there will be times in our lives when we will feel discouraged and wonder if it was all worth it, and, like Elijah, we would just as soon crawl into a cave and stay there. It’s times like those when God might well ask us, What are you doing here? Isaiah had the answer. He wrote in Isaiah 41:13: I am the LORD your God, who takes hold of your right hand and says to you, “Do not fear; I will help you.” Those are words we need to hear. No matter how hopeless our situation may seem, we can be assured that God is there to lift us up.
By Reynold R. Kremer