The fourth number in Felix Mendelssohn’s oratorio “Elijah” offers both a plaintive plea somehow to find the distant God and a reassuring answer on how to find him.

Though born Jewish, Mendelssohn was baptized Lutheran at age seven. Although his narrative is based on several incidents found in the books of Kings, he drew the exposition from other sections of the Old Testament. Our English text does not come from the King James Version, with which he may not have been familiar, but from the German Bible. However, the King James clearly reflects the text from which the composer worked.

He has his character Obadiah cry out as a tenor solo:

Oh, that I knew where I might find Him,
That I might even come before His presence.

For this, he seems to have in mind the story of Job. Eliphaz the Temanite had reasoned: “Is not God in the height of heaven? and behold the height of the stars, how high they are!” (Job 22:12, KJV) Then he challenged Job in his own presumptuous wisdom: “If thou return to the Almighty, thou shalt be built up. . . . For then shalt thou have thy delight in the Almighty, and shalt lift up thy face unto God.” (vs 23-26).

At this bleak reality, Job despaired. Despite his unshakable confidence in the purposes and will of God and his eventual recovery, there were dark moments in which God seemed inexplicably distant. Job could but cry desperately: “Oh that I knew where I might find him! that I might come even to his seat!” (Job 23:3).

Mendelssohn found the biblical answer Job sought in two other Old Testament passages, and he put it this way:

If with all your heart ye truly seek Me,
Ye shall ever surely find Me,
Thus saith our God.

The composer seems to have found this, first, in the Deuteronomic instructions of Moses as he summarized the Law as to how the Israelites are to live when they enter into what God had promised. Moreover, God anticipated their failure so to live and Moses counseled that when they come to the point where they can no longer find God:

“But if from thence thou shalt seek the LORD thy God, thou shalt find him, if thou seek him with all thy heart and with all thy soul.” (Deuteronomy 4:29).

Second, centuries later the prophet Jeremiah addressed the Jews God had sent into exile in Babylon because they had effectively distanced themselves. The prophet sent a letter from Jerusalem to these exiles and prophesied that when the seventy years of discipline would be accomplished, and God would call them back to Jerusalem:

“Then shall ye call upon me, and ye shall go and pray unto me, and I will hearken unto you. And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.” (Jeremiah 29:12,13)

What God expects of us is not something of a successful search and rescue operation, but simply that we want to find him—and the willingness to be found of him. However, we may have estranged ourselves from God and however distant he may seem, God is not so hard to find. The Old Testament teaches this, and Mendelssohn recognized it.

The God we would seek has already found us. All we need do is to seek him with all our hearts—truly seek him with our whole being. Then we just look up and there he is, waiting to be found.