An interlude · outside the twenty-one
On stew, blankets, fires, songs, and the hand of someone who loves you
Springs
He had just won. Fire had fallen on Carmel in front of the whole nation, the prophets of Baal were finished, and the drought had broken. Then one woman sent one message, and the greatest prophet of the age ran a day into the desert, sat down under a shrub, and asked God to let him die.
What happens next is the thing I want you to see.
And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat. And he looked, and, behold, there was a cake baken on the coals, and a cruse of water at his head. And he did eat and drink, and laid him down again. 1 Kings 19:5–6, KJV
No sermon. No rebuke for the self-pity, though there was plenty of it. No theology of Carmel, no reminder of what God had just done through him that same week.
A touch. Warm bread. Water. Permission to go back to sleep.
And then it happens a second time, and this time there are words — but notice that the words come after the meal, and notice what they are.
Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee. 1 Kings 19:7, KJV
The morsel for this page
“Because the journey is too great for thee.”
Said by an angel, over a hot meal, to a man who wanted to die.
Wells
This volume has spent twenty-one days arguing that comfort is a Person called alongside, and that our English word has gone soft — that paraklēsis is a brace rather than a blanket.
All of that stands. But it would be a poor study that left you thinking the blanket was beneath God’s notice, because Scripture will not have it, and 1 Kings 19 is where the argument breaks down.
… that he may bring forth food out of the earth; and wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man’s heart. Psalm 104:14–15, KJV
Read what the psalm says God is doing and why. Not merely keeping people alive. Gladness. A face that shines. A heart strengthened by bread — and there is our Latin word again, confortare, arriving through a loaf.
Paul says the same thing flatly: God giveth us richly all things to enjoy. The word is apolausis, enjoyment, and it is in a sentence warning the rich. Even there, the created good is not the problem.
And here is the one that ought to settle it. When Isaac had buried his mother and grieved for three years:
And Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent, and took Rebekah, and she became his wife; and he loved her: and Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death. Genesis 24:67, KJV
The verb is nacham. H5162. The same root as Lamech’s hope on Day One, as Isaiah’s doubled command on Day Four, as the rod and the staff on Day Nine.
Scripture uses the great comfort word of a man being married, loved, and held. Not as a metaphor for something more spiritual. As the thing itself.
Once you are looking, it is everywhere. Paul, in the last letter he wrote, from a cold cell, asks Timothy to bring the coat he left at Troas. The risen Christ — glorified, death behind him, the whole of eternity in front of him — stands on a beach at dawn beside a charcoal fire with fish already laid on it, and says come and dine.
He could have said anything. He made breakfast.
So here is how the warm bowl of stew and the fire on a cold day fit into a book about the God of all comfort.
They are real comfort, of a lower order, and they are His. Every one of them is a created good handed to you by the same hand. The stew, the blanket, the chair by the fire, the favourite song, the heat on a tired muscle, the hand of someone who loves you — none of these is a distraction from the doctrine. They are the doctrine arriving in the only form a body can receive.
Two things keep them in their place, and both are already in this volume.
The first is Day Fifteen. There is a way of taking these things that is a collecting — apechō, paid in full, receipt issued. The rich man in Luke 6 had his consolation and it was spent. The difference between a gift received from God’s hand and a consolation collected in place of Him is not in the object. It is in whether you know whose hand it came from.
The second is Day Two. These are all things, and the Comforter is a Person, and a thing cannot abide with you for ever. The stew goes cold. The song ends. The fire burns down and the hand on your shoulder eventually lets go, or you do. That is not an argument against any of them. It is only the reason they cannot be the last word.
If you are in the middle of something and somebody brings you soup, eat the soup. If you are exhausted, sleep, and do not call it a failure of faith. If there is a fire and a chair, sit in it.
Elijah’s trouble under that shrub was not that he needed a meal and a nap. He needed exactly those, and Heaven sent an angel with them before it sent him a single word. The still small voice at Horeb came forty days later. The bread came first.
Aquifer
Verify the Genesis claim yourself. Open Genesis 24:67 in an interlinear and find the Strong’s number on was comforted. It is H5162 — the same lemma as Genesis 5:29, Isaiah 40:1, Psalm 23:4 and Job 42:11. This is the single strongest warrant in Scripture for treating ordinary human warmth as genuine comfort rather than as a lesser substitute, because the Bible spends the same word on it.
On the “juniper tree.” The Hebrew rothem is generally identified with the white broom, a desert shrub of the Negev that grows large enough to shade a lying man. Not a juniper in our sense. The King James translators reached for a familiar tree; the picture is a scrubby bush in open desert, which fits the story better.
Read the sequence in 1 Kings 19 as a sequence. Verses 5–8: touch, food, sleep, touch, food, and only then a journey and a word. The theophany — wind, earthquake, fire, and the still small voice — does not arrive until verse 12, forty days later. Whatever else the chapter teaches, it does not teach that the spiritual remedy comes first.
Where honest readers disagree: created goods. One long tradition in the church has treated bodily comforts with suspicion, on the grounds that appetite is where most of us are lost, and there is real pastoral wisdom in that caution. Another reads Psalm 104, Ecclesiastes 9:7, and 1 Timothy 4:4 — every creature of God is good — as a positive doctrine of enjoyment, and treats refusal of good gifts as its own kind of error. This page sides with the second while keeping the first’s warning, which is exactly what Day Fifteen was for. The two are not as far apart as they look: both agree the danger is in the taking, not in the thing.
Further, if you want to chase it. Ecclesiastes 9:7 and 2:24 on eating your bread with joy; Proverbs 5:18–19 on rejoicing with the wife of your youth; 1 Samuel 16:23 on a harp and a troubled king; 2 Timothy 4:13 on Paul’s cloke at Troas; John 21:9–12 on a charcoal fire at dawn.