An excerpt on doubt, despair, and restoration from Land of My Sojourn: The Landscape of a Faith Lost and Found.
Think about Mount Tabor for a moment. Remember the blinding light of Jesus’ glory and the stunning presence of Elijah and Moses, the weight of that moment and what it meant in the mind and heart of Peter, and what it confirmed about the dream that had taken up residence in his heart and his spiritual imagination. The brilliance of this dream—how incredibly close it felt on Mount Tabor—creates the unbearable cognitive dissonance with the reality of Jesus, arrested, mocked, beaten, scorned, flayed, and executed. Dead in a tomb.
These visions didn’t fit together: the bleach-white light of the Transfiguration, the ashen linen that now wrapped Jesus’ dead body, and the stony blackness of the tomb as the stone rolled shut against it. Peter had expected Elijah: fire from heaven, a land cleansed of evil. What he’d gotten instead—I don’t think he had a name for it. I don’t know him.
But maybe Peter didn’t know Elijah either.
Sometimes our expectations are the source of our pain.
Peter looked at Elijah and saw a conquering hero. But he was only paying attention to part of the story.
When Elijah humiliated the prophets of Baal, the crowd of onlookers fell to the ground and cried out, “The Lord—he is God!” (1 Kings 18:39). They then slaughtered the prophets, cleansing the land of their oppression. Elijah then prayed for rain, and it came. Ahab fled to Jezreel, unable to deny what he’d seen with his own eyes. Mission accomplished.
And yet it wasn’t. Jezebel responded to all Ahab told her by promising to kill Elijah, and the menace of humiliation and death overwhelmed him. He fled to the desert, collapsed under a broom tree, and …
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