Elijah and the Widow

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Elijah and the Widow

We live in the dark ages, in a manner of speaking. The world we live in is covered with gross spiritual darkness, and as time goes on, it’s only going to get worse – more and more difficult to keep the faith. As one who has experienced those dark times—they are terrible. Now I ask you, how can we be sure that we will not drift? How can we be sure that in that day when the Lord calls we will be sufficiently attuned to answer His voice? Is there a key to spiritual safety? If ever there was a time to know what it is, it is now.

About 920 B.C., there lived a poor widow in a small gentile village bordering Israel called Zarephath. Like everyone else, this poor widow suffered from the effects of a devastating famine brought on by the wickedness of God’s covenant people. Her food supply dwindled until there was virtually nothing. Resigned to her fate, she went out one day to gather sticks to make a fire to cook the last of her flour into bread.

There came upon her a stranger who asked for a drink of water. Graciously she complied, and as she turned away to fetch the water, he called again to her, “…Bring me, I pray thee, a morsel of bread in thine hand.” (1 Kings 17:11)

She turned back and explained to him that she had only enough food left for one last meal for her and her son, and then they would die. How could you sit and watch your own son die? Can you sense something of the suffering and the despair that this woman has endured?

The stranger then says, “…Fear not; go and do as thou hast said: but make me [thereof] a little cake first, and bring it unto me, and after make for thee and [for] thy son. For thus saith the Lord God of Israel, The barrel of meal shall not waste, neither shall the cruse of oil fail, until the day that the Lord sendeth rain upon the earth.” (1 Kings 17:13-14)

What a request! How could anyone ask such a thing? – especially of a starving widow and a tender child. If this man is an imposter, she will be trading her life and that of her son for a stranger.

I don’t know what happened. Maybe this gentile woman sensed something in this holy man. Whatever it was, she fed him – first, and according to his promise, both her barrel of meal and cruse of oil never failed. They lived on miraculously, many days.

But as it is with us, her test wasn’t over yet. She had yet more to prove—more to gain. Her son died suddenly, and in her agony of grief, she cried out to the man of God while holding her son, and blamed herself. Tenderly the prophet reached and took the child out of her bosom, carried him up to a loft room leaving the widow to her grief. She could not have known what was going to happen next. Death is, and always has been permanent, but not now. Her faith and devotion to the prophet makes the impossible probable.

The man of God appears shortly thereafter carrying her son alive again, and presents him to his mother. “…See,” he says, “thy son liveth.” (1 Kings 17:23)

As she held her son, the mother cried out in faith and joy, “…Now by this,” she said, “I know that thou art a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in thy mouth is truth.” (1 Kings 17:24)

That man of God was the great prophet of the sealing power, Elijah. And that woman: She was lifted up by the Savior Himself as an example to us all of faith. (Luke 4:25) What she did, my friends, is what we must all do in trying times: Obey the prophets, and that with exactness. In mortality they may seem as other men, and in scripture they may seem larger than life. They are neither. They are men of God made powerful by Him. They are our only safety. If we hold to them, when it’s all over, we too will live eternally with our sons and daughters, and mothers and fathers – and our joy will be full forever.

Adapted from 1 Kings 17