Let us lift up our heart with our hands unto God in the heavens.
All Commentaries on Lamentations 3:41 Go To Lamentations 3
Tertullian of Carthage
AD 220
One [Elijah] whose “heart” was habitually found “lifted up” rather than fattened up, who in forty days and as many nights maintained a fast above the power of human nature while spiritual faith supplied strength (to his body), both saw with his eyes God’s glory, and heard with his ears God’s voice and understood with his heart God’s law, while he taught him even then (by experience) that humankind lives not on bread alone but on every word of God; in that the people, though fatter than he, could not constantly contemplate even Moses, fed as he had been on God, or his leanness, sated as it had been with God’s glory! Deservedly, therefore, even while in the flesh, did the Lord show himself to him, the colleague of his own fasts, no less than to Elijah. For Elijah had, by this fact primarily, that he had imprecated a famine, already sufficiently devoted himself to fasts: “The Lord lives,” he said, “before whom I am standing in his sight, if there shall be dew in these years and rain shower.” Subsequently, fleeing from threatening Jezebel, after one single meal of food and drink, which he had found on being awakened by an angel, he too, in a space of forty days and nights, his belly empty, his mouth dry, arrived at Mount Horeb; where, when he had made a cave his inn, with how familiar a meeting with God was he received! “What are you doing here, Elijah?” Much more friendly was this voice than, “Adam, where are you?” For the latter voice was uttering a threat to a fed man, the former soothing a fasting one. Such is the prerogative of circumscribed food, that it makes God tent fellow with a man—peer, in truth, with peer! For if the eternal God will not hunger, as he testifies through Isaiah, this will be the time for a person to be made equal with God, when he lives without food.
