Elijah the Tishbite

Under the Broom Tree — Lessons From Elijah the Tishbite

The prophet’s task is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture.
— Walter Brueggemann, RIP

This series, “Under the Broom Tree,” is a journey through the life of Elijah, a prophet who stood boldly on mountaintops and despaired under a broom tree. His story is not one of unshakable confidence, but of faith that was tested by fear, loneliness, and distress.

We live in an age not unlike Elijah’s: an age of drift, moral confusion, and spiritual fatigue. He shows us what it means to stand before God, even when everything else is crumbling. He teaches us how to be bothered in the right way — and how to remain faithful when we feel like we’re the only ones left.

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Normalizing Evil

On April 20, 1999, two students walked into Columbine High School and murdered thirteen people before turning their guns on themselves.

For weeks, we couldn’t look away. Newscasters struggled for words. Politicians offered thoughts and prayers. Pastors preached emergency sermons. Even the irreligious whispered prayers into the silence. We were stunned, asking, “how could this happen?”

More than twenty-five years later, shootings like Columbine barely make the news cycle. The outrage that once lasted weeks now disappears in hours. There are too many to name. Too many vigils. Too many breaking-news banners.

We haven’t solved the violence. We’ve just gotten used to it.

Scientists tell us that pain is easier to endure when it rises slowly. The body adjusts, the nerves go quiet. Discomfort becomes tolerable if it comes in increments. But shock us all at once, and we resist. We cry out.

That’s how moral decay works. What once shocked us becomes just another day. It doesn’t crash in like a tidal wave, it seeps in, drip by drip. As it does, we adjust and we endure. And eventually, without even noticing, we’re submerged. Evil no longer stuns us — not because it’s rare, but because it’s… everywhere! Like water to a fish, it becomes the atmosphere we breathe, the current we swim in. It becomes our way of life.

And yet, we remember. We are haunted by traces of a better world: a grandmother’s mumblings about how things used to be, a story that describes quieter times, the Torah. They stir something in us. But awareness alone doesn’t change anything. If anything, it makes things worse.

Like villagers who wade daily through parasite-infested floodwaters, the journey was slightly easier before they knew what the water was doing to them. Now they know, but they have no other path to take. Knowledge without the means to do something about it is its own kind of suffering. Or, stated in reverse, ignorance is bliss.

So, we post. We rage. We virtue-signal. We name the darkness. But it doesn’t go away.

This isn’t new. Humanity has always had a penchant for drifting, walking the slow, gradual road that leads to ruin.

Scripture makes this painfully clear. Israel’s story often seems circular: round and round they go, from fellowship to idolatry, from order to chaos, and back again. But if you let your imagination descend into the story — if you enter it — you begin to see that it’s not a closed circle, but a spiral. There is growth and movement toward something.

Though they drift like sheep, one bite at a time, God, true to his nature, keeps sending deliverers.

That is Israel’s story. And it’s ours.

Inheriting Idolatry

One of the clearest pictures of this descent comes during the reign of King Ahab. By the time Elijah walks onto the scene, the situation is bleak. Baal worship is the default religion. Nobody is surprised at the corruption of Kings; instead, like rain in Death Valley, they are amazed when a righteous one shows up… knowing he won’t last long. Prophets no longer stand in the tradition of Samuel, who was once feared by kings, instead they are hiding in caves.

How did it come to this? Not by an explosion of wickedness. No, even they wouldn’t have stood for such degradation if it was thrust upon them in a moment; neither would we. Instead, it happened by the same slow erosion that turns a rocky port into a sandy beach.

Each king after Solomon learned idolatry — not just in what they did, but in what they tolerated.

There are the shocking verses like: “Solomon had 700 wives… and his heart was not wholly true to the Lord” (1 Kings 11:3–4). And: “Jeroboam made two calves of gold. And he said to the people… ‘Behold your gods, O Israel’” (1 Kings 12:28).

There are also the more subtle ones: “Asa did what was right in the eyes of the Lord… but the high places were not taken away” (1 Kings 15:11,14).

Whether wicked, righteous, or somewhere in between, every king permitted a little bit of idolatry. And those little bits accumulated. A drip becomes a stream. A stream becomes a flood. Until a nation that once feared the Lord became indistinguishable from the nations that didn’t.

This moral drift crescendos with Ahab, of whom it was written: “Ahab the son of Omri did evil in the sight of the Lord, more than all who were before him” (1 Kings 16:30).

Unsurprisingly, just five verses earlier, the same was said of his father: “Omri did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, and did more evil than all who were before him (1 Kings 16:25).

What father doesn’t want his son to surpass him?

No, Ahab didn’t invent wickedness — he inherited it. He was a product of immersion. He walked in the ways of Omri, who walked in the ways of Jeroboam, who walked in the ways of Egypt. And so, the baton passed, and the people followed. What once was sin became culture and what once was rebellion became religion.

Divine Delay

Then why didn’t God do something about it!?

These are the kinds of questions posed by atheists who have grown up around Christians who are more normal than odd. In such an environment — where God’s people are mostly known for what they say (or write) than what they do — it is easy to see God as a dormant, uncaring, impassible God, who yawns while evil’s steady and deliberate invasion gains a foothold.

Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard’s wisdom shines through in his 1947 pastoral letter, “The great mark of a Christian is what no other characteristic can replace, namely the example of a life which can only be explained in terms of God.”

Where those lives cannot be seen, people will see a dormant God… if they see one at all.

But the truth is that God is patient, sometimes frustratingly so. Several times he could have delivered when we thought deliverance was opportune. Why did he wait for the Egyptian army to breathe down Israel’s necks before parting the Red Sea? Why forty years in the Wilderness? One understands a slight delay, but 40 years?! Come on!

The truth is, as Dallas Willard says, “God is interested in the kinds of people we become.” Through his patient acts of deliverance, he reveals himself to us, giving us the kind of expensive knowledge that only comes from lived experience.

Such was the case with Israel at the Red Sea. Imagine if it was parted without the army bearing down on them. The Song of Moses would have been meager, at best.

And so God waits to deliver. (see Isaiah 30:18)

He waits for a Moses, a David, an Elijah, a Mary. Not superhumans, mind you. All were flawed in ways that might make us break forth in doxology. Because it means we have a shot.

We are prone to remember them in their glory; this, after all, is how we remember loved ones. It is a strange funeral, where a list of faults is read. But we must remember that they are what they are, not in spite of those faults. God took the ingredients of their lives, scars and all, and used them to bring deliverance to the world.

Hungering, Thirsting, and Bothered

Therefore, while we see Elijah in his glory on the mountain — Carmel and Transfiguration — we must also see him despondent, complaining, and ready to die, underneath the broom tree.

Resist the urge to lionize him, don’t make him a superhero. He will break down. He will get depressed. He will run. He is, as the apostle James reminds us, “a man with a nature like ours” (James 5:17).

It is this man, a man from nowhere — as Tishbe has never been found on any ancient maps — that wanders into the presence of King Ahab. He wanders in from a people — the Tishbites — known for being a sojourning people — but, as Tolkien reminds us, “Not all who wander are lost.”

Elijah knows exactly where he is, why he is there and, most importantly, whose he is. But before we get to what he says, consider what brought him to Ahab.

He is a man that was immersed in the culture, while also standing apart from it. A bothered man, if there ever was one.

Jesus speaks about such people in his famous sermon. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” he said, “for they shall be satisfied.”

To hunger and thirst for righteousness while immersed in a culture of wickedness is to be bothered. It is like living in a hair shirt, where everything rubs you the wrong way, especially the fact that nobody else seems to see what you see — the quintessential prophet’s burden.

When we are bothered there are only two options: get used to what is bothering you or adjust to it. Elijah’s discomfort will not let him adjust. While Scripture does not fill us in on all the details of what unfolded before his talk with Ahab, James provides enough helpful pieces for us to fill in the rest of the puzzle.

“He prayed fervently that it might not rain” (James 5:17).

Praying for Judgement, Longing for Reconciliation

What an odd prayer request. Why not, “Lord, be with your people.” A suitable prayer that many a Christian is wont to pray when they know not what else to say. But Elijah’s prayer was in response — as all prayer should be — to the word of God.

F.B. Meyer writes:

In his prayer he seems to have been led back to a denunciation made years before by Moses to the people — that if they turned aside and served other gods, and worshiped them, the Lord's wrath would be kindled against them; and He would shut up the heaven so there should be no rain (Deuteronomy 11:16-17). Flowing into this mold, his thoughts must have shaped themselves somewhat thus: “If my God does not fulfill this threat the people will think that it is an idle tale, or that He is a myth of the past — a dead tradition. This must not be. Better that the land should suffer the terrors of famine, and the people experience the bitterest agonies of thirst, and that I should be torn limb from limb. It were better that we should suffer the direst physical woes that can blast our national prosperity, than that we should come to think that the Jehovah of our fathers is as dead as the idols of the heathen.” And so he set himself to pray that the terrible threat might be literally fulfilled. “He prayed earnestly that it might not rain.”

Good doctors recognize when healing can only come through surgery. Jesus, the best of doctors, understood this too. Note that before Peter betrayed him, he said, “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail” (Luke 22:31-32). He didn’t perform a miracle to keep Peter from the trial but prayed that his faith would survive it.

As the Augustinian paraphrase goes, “trials come to prove us and improve us.”

This is the purpose of all God’s judgements; their ultimate goal is restoration, not damnation. And this is the possibility Elijah sees in Deuteronomy 11:16-17.

Take care lest your heart be deceived, and you turn aside and serve other gods and worship them; then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you, and he will shut up the heavens, so that there will be no rain, and the land will yield no fruit, and you will perish quickly off the good land that the Lord is giving you. — Deuteronomy 11:16-17

So, he prays. He knows that the way back to God for Israel would be through suffering.

This is difficult for American Christians. The waters we swim in tell us to avoid discomfort by any means necessary, like the locusts in Revelation that emerge from Hell’s pit. The message is reinforced by commercials, podcasts and popular sermons promising “your best life now.” What’s more, we are awash in technological advances that all promise ease, convenience, relief!

Ask any pastor, they’ll tell you that the fastest way to raise money for new HVAC units is to let the sanctuary get a little warm on Sunday. As soon as the discomfort sets in — beads of sweat on the forehead, bulletins turned into fans — wallets will open. How quickly we will pay to be comfortable!

Perhaps that’s okay for air conditioning units; the jury is still out on whether the same generosity will flow for spiritual correction.

But when the suffering comes from God, it is best to settle in like students in the lecture hall and learn its lesson.

As F.B. Meyer writes, “Physical suffering is a smaller calamity than moral delinquency. And the love of God does not shrink from inflicting such suffering, if, as a result, the plague of sin may be cut out as a cancer and stayed.”

Francis Thompson understood this. At the climax of his poem “The Hound of Heaven,” after ceasing his flight from God, the Lord speaks tenderly to him:

All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms.

Sometimes the clouds disappearing and the fields of wheat fading to dust are not signs of divine absence, but of divine pursuit. God’s judgment is never a tantrum, it is always an offer for healing; it is mercy with a scalpel.

And so Elijah prays.

The very fact that his introduction in Scripture is when he appears before Ahab tells us everything: the Lord affirmed his request. There would be no rain. The skies would close, the fields would wither, the famine would come. This meeting isn’t a negotiation, he’s there to acquaint the king with the facts.

But notice, Elijah didn’t begin by speaking to Ahab. He began by speaking to God.

This is important; before he stood before the throne of a corrupt king, he stood before the throne of heaven. And he asked — fervently! — that God would do what he had promised to do, even if it meant national suffering. Even if it meant becoming unpopular. Even if it meant his own life would get harder — which it did.

Because Elijah knows that discomfort is not the enemy, apathy is.

The world doesn’t need more empty hot takes. It needs people bothered enough to pray fervently. People so disturbed by unrighteousness that they carry it to God, not just to their socials. Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is to let yourself be troubled and then speak to God about what’s bothering you.

In the next post, I’ll focus on what Elijah said to king Ahab and why his words still matter today.

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