How to Read the Old Testament
June 22, 2025 – The 2nd Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 7C
1 Kings 19:1-15a; Galatians 3:23-29; Luke 8:26-39
How much do you know about the Old Testament? I don’t mean, how many stories can you recall. I mean, how much do you know about the collection itself—the composite of ancient texts written and rewritten by multiple communities and traditions over the span of a thousand years that we now call the Old Testament? How much do you know about it? Has anyone ever taught you how to read it—how to make sense of the ancient Hebrew texts and relate them to your life as a twenty-first-century Christian?
I don’t presume in one sermon to attempt to tell you how to read the whole, complicated, multi-faceted collection, but I do want to spend some time today talking about the Old Testament in general and offering some specific, concrete guidelines that I think can help us encounter these sacred texts as the life-giving, faith-forming, Holy-Spirit-inspired words that God has given them to us to be. And I want to use today’s lesson from 1 Kings as a model for reading and studying other Old Testament texts.
Let me start by noting that I didn’t pick this story about Elijah encountering God in the sound of sheer silence. In The Episcopal Church, we use a lectionary—a three-year cycle that assigns four readings to every Sunday and other major feast in the Christian year. Preachers in our church don’t get to choose the readings, but, as Lora mentioned last week, we do get to decide what verses we want to focus on.
The truth is that it’s often easier for a preacher to relate the Gospel text to contemporary life, which means that congregations like ours aren’t invited to wrestle with a passage from the Old Testament as often. That, combined with the fact that, until the current prayer book was adopted in 1979, the lectionary largely ignored the Old Testament altogether, has led us to think of the Hebrew Bible as second-class scripture. But, considering the fact that what we call the Old Testament was for people like Jesus and Paul the only Bible they knew, it’s important for us to find a way to receive it not as an afterthought but as the very heart of what God is saying to God’s people today.
The most important thing I want you to learn about the Old Testament is that, when we read it, we need to hear three distinct but overlapping layers at work in the biblical text. The first layer is the story of the text itself. What happened? Who is involved? What twists and turns does the story take? The second layer is larger the story of God’s people. How does this particular passage fit unto the overall story of God’s relationship with Israel? What period of Jewish history does this story come from? What happened before the story started, and what will happen after it is finished? The third layer is the even larger story of salvation. What does this particular story and its place in the history of Israel tell us about God’s ongoing work of salvation? How are the ultimate themes of creation and covenant, sin and redemption, exile and return reflected in the text? And, therefore, how does the story relate to our own experience of salvation?
Now, let’s turn to today’s reading from 1 Kings and use that three-layer model to explore the passage. First, let’s talk about the story of the text—the story of Elijah fleeing the wrath of Jezebel and finding God in the silence as he stood outside a cave on Mt. Horeb. This is a story about a victorious but exhausted prophet (Elijah) running away from an angry and vindictive queen (Jezebel) who has sworn by her gods that she will have the prophet executed or else they can take her own life.
Jezebel is the Phoenician bride of the Israelite King Ahab, the ruler of the northern kingdom of Israel, the nation that broke away from the southern kingdom of Judah during a civil war after King Solomon’s reign. Elijah has defeated and slaughtered many of Jezebel’s prophets because they worshipped the Canaanite god Baal. Jezebel is furious and issues the death sentence. Exhausted from his previous victory, Elijah flees south to Judah, beyond the reach of Jezebel and Ahab. There, in the wilderness, the prophet collapses in the shade of a broom tree and asks God to take his life. He is completely spent and ready to die.
But, while he sleeps, an angel of the Lord appears to him in a vision and encourages him to eat and drink in preparation for a long journey. Sure enough, God has provided a griddle cake and some water to sustain the prophet for forty days and forty nights, while he makes his way to Horeb, the mountain of God. There on the holy mountain God confronts him, saying, “What are you doing here Elijah?” And the prophet responds, “My passion and zeal for you have gotten me into this mess, O Lord. All the faithful prophets are gone. Your people have forsaken the covenant. I am the only one left, and they are trying to kill me.”
God beckons Elijah out of the cave and promises to pass by. First, there is a violent wind. Next, there is a powerful earthquake. Then, there is a blazing fire, but God is not found in any of them. Finally, there is nothing left but what the NRSV calls the “sound of sheer silence”—a decent attempt at translating an enigmatic Hebrew phrase that defies translation. Whatever it is, the Lord is found in the absence—in the silence—and in the silence itself God confronts the discouraged prophet. “What are you doing here, Elijah?” a voice from within the silence asks. And then from that silence the Lord recommissions the prophet and directs him to go—go back to the north from which you fled for I am not finished with you yet. That’s the first layer.
Stories from the Old Testament are never told in isolation. They are always a part of a bigger narrative. The second layer for us to consider is the centuries-long story of God’s people. Ahab and Jezebel weren’t the only rulers in Israel to lead God’s people astray. This episode comes amid a long series of mostly faithless kings who, little by little, erode the moral and religious foundation of Israel. We are supposed to read this episode and remember that human leaders almost always let God down. But this story also shows us that, even in an era of pervasive decline, God uses faithful people like Elijah to carry out God’s will. It also teaches us that things usually aren’t as bad as they seem. The prophet was discouraged, exhausted, and felt all alone, but, as the story continues, we discover that God has preserved a remnant of 7,000 faithful people who are ready to support Elijah and his efforts of reform.
There are other stories from the history of God’s people that resonate with this one, and the biblical authors are counting on us to make those connections. The mountain to which God sends the prophet is Mt. Horeb, also known as Mt. Sinai. It is the same place where God met Moses centuries before Elijah showed up. Perhaps that’s why it took Elijah forty days and forty nights to get there—the same amount of time that Moses spent fasting on that mountain. You may remember that, in the time of Moses, God often confronted God’s people in violent winds, powerful earthquakes, and blazing fires. Elijah may have been expecting God to reveal Godself in one of those familiar and formidable expressions, but God was not found in any of them, and that is significant for us. Instead, God confronts Elijah in a haunting silence, and, when the prophet encounters the divine presence within that silence, he knows that God is sending him back to confront his enemies, not with earthly might, but with that same divine power. That is the second layer.
Haven’t we learned over the millennia that God’s power abides with us not in earthquake and fire, not in sword and spear, but in the persistent, unwavering, and often surprising holiness that unfolds within us and those around us? That brings us to the final layer of the story—the larger story of salvation—the great arc of redemption history that bends all things and all time toward God’s perfect fulfillment. This is where we connect the story of Elijah standing up to the evil powers of the ninth century BC to the countless examples of courage and faithfulness that stretch from the pages of scripture all the way down to our own day.
The story of Elijah reminds us that earthly power always stands contrary to God’s power and that the prophets who confront those who hold it are universally denounced and threatened by those who refuse to yield it back to God. It shows us that God can use our moments of weakness, vulnerability, and exhaustion to bring about real change. It teaches us yet again that God shows up in ways we don’t expect and that, even within the story of God’s people, our understanding of God’s power changes throughout the generations. And the story of Elijah reminds us that, even when we are ready to give up, God isn’t finished with us yet because God still has difficult but important work for us to do. That’s the third layer.
We must remember that the stories of the Old Testament are our stories, just as they were the stories of Jesus and Paul. They aren’t always easy to read. They rarely offer simple or straightforward moral lessons. And the characters involved are usually far from perfect role models. But these stories are no less holy than Luke’s account of the miraculous deliverance of the Gerasene demoniac or Paul’s vision of the unity of all people in Galatians. When we remember that every story of the Old Testament has meaning beyond the simple reading of the text—that there are multiple layers of significance to each encounter—we begin to hear them as sacred scripture that was written for our learning.
God is the hero of every story in the Bible—from Genesis to Revelation, from beginning to end. It’s up to us to find God in all of them, or else we’ll never be able to find ourselves in the story of salvation that God tells.
© 2025 Evan D. Garner
