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Therefore, I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. The heathen, the non-Christians, seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
Our loving God shows His fatherly care and providence and protection for us in many ways. But I don’t think this care of God is on better display anywhere than in His care for widows and orphans, because because widows and orphans are the neediest of all people. If we took everything God said or did about widows and orphans together—everything in the Bible, all the laws of Moses, all the narratives from the Old Testament or from the Gospels, all the letters of Paul, the Proverbs, the Psalms, and every single prophetic oracle—if we took all these together that had to do with widows and orphans—we could talk about it all day and draw so much comfort from it. God talks about it all the time, but this morning, God has given us this beautiful story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath and her fatherless son.
I want to teach you the story and see all the lessons we can draw from it. I think we need to start with a little context of this Old Testament story to really appreciate what’s going on. The story takes place in the northern kingdom of Israel under King Ahab. This was about 850 years before Christ. Now, King Ahab was about as bad of a king as you possibly could imagine. The author of Kings said Ahab did more evil than every single king who was before him. If you’re reading through the Book of Kings from beginning to end, you’ll notice there’s a pattern. After each king, the author gives a certain assessment of how well that king did according to God’s word, and usually that king will weigh or the author of Kings will weigh each king’s actions by whether or not they walked in the sins of Jeroboam.
Jeroboam was the first king of Israel, and he set a pattern of wicked governness. Governing, he led a revolt that caused the kingdom of Israel to split into a northern and southern kingdom. He built sanctuaries to worship God outside of Jerusalem in Dan and Bethel. He built golden calves to put in those sanctuaries as a way to worship God, and he did this all so that the people in his kingdom would not travel into the other kingdom and to Jerusalem to worship God there. Forcing everyone in his kingdom, or at least encouraging them, to disobey God’s law, which says in Deuteronomy 12, “You shall worship me in the place where I choose to cause my name to dwell.”
Jeroboam did many other bad things as well. He didn’t just serve the God of Israel falsely; he served false gods. He made high places for them, shrines for them, and he made priests out of people who were not Levites, even though God said Levites are to be the priests. But for Ahab, who stands in the background of our story, the author of Kings says Ahab considered it a light thing, a trivial thing, to walk in the sins of Jeroboam. In other words, those sins were not bad enough; they were nothing to him. He was so much worse. He’s best known for taking a wife not from Israel but from Tyre of Sidon. He took Jezebel, and then he worshipped Jezebel’s god Baal and worshipped him, building an altar for Baal and a temple for Baal in Samaria, which is the capital of the northern kingdom.
When you hear the name Jezebel, notice that Bel part that stands for Baal. That’s that false god Israel was not to worship. You’ve probably noticed when you hear or read the Old Testament all the time, certain figures have the name Yah in them, like Elijah, Josiah, Zedekiah, Hezekiah. That Yah means Yahweh, the true God. So in this queen that Ahab took for himself, you have the false god’s name, Bel Jezebel right in the name. To make it even more vivid, this is probably true. But we have this poem that was written to tell the story of Baal. It’s called the Baal Cycle, and the name Jezebel is probably a quote from a line in that. So she’s just super idolatrous. I don’t know how else to say it.
But there’s several Baals going on in the land around Israel. Each little section would have its own particular Baal it worshipped. If you imagine Texas as its own kingdom, which I know some of you like to do, anyways. You could think of other surrounding kingdoms that we would, of course, have the God of Israel as our patron deity. But in Oklahoma they would have Baal of Tulsa, or in Arkansas you would have the Baal of Little Rock, or that sort of thing, right? Well, the god of Jezebel was Baal Shamin, or sometimes called Shamayim, that literally means Lord of the Sky. That’s an important little detail we’ll come back to in just a moment.
So how is God going to punish Ahab for doing all of these wicked things and for bringing Baal Shamin worship into Israel? Well, he sends Elijah the prophet right at the beginning of 1 Kings 17, and Elijah is given the task to announce to King Ahab that as a punishment for his sins, God is going to send a drought on the land. So this is the irony. In other words, God is saying you, Ahab, worship the Lord of the sky. Well, now the sky is going to withhold its rain for you. There’s going to be a drought on the land, and so a drought overtakes the land.
But God cares for Elijah. They want to kill Elijah, but Elijah is told to go and hide by a particular brook. And there, by the brook, he has fresh water to drink. And there’s these birds that God sends to miraculously bring him bread and meat. So it’s okay for a little while, but after a while, with no rain, the brook dries up. The birds that were bringing him bread and meat have died. The animals that he would probably watch come drink water beside him have stopped coming. And so now Elijah is alone. He hungers, he thirsts, and for what reason? For preaching God’s word faithfully. He suffers drought because his king is wicked.
And then our text begins, our Old Testament reading for today: “Arise, go to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and dwell there. Behold, I have commanded a widow there to feed you.” I know there’s a lot of names going on, but we have to point this out. Notice first of all that Zarephath. It’s not in Israel; it’s in Sidon. Who else is from Sidon? Ahab, the king of Israel’s wicked wife Jezebel, who brought the worship of Baal into Israel. So there’s a lot of irony going on here. To get it straight, Elijah has to go to a Gentile homeland, the homeland of Baal shaman, and there he’s going to find a Gentile woman who worships the true God of Israel, and who is going to save Elijah’s life.
I mean, we could think about this miracle for the entire sermon. This alone is very comforting for us. That Elijah has lost everything, the king seeks after his life, he’s hiding, and then his food runs out, and now God is going to provide for him by the hand of a widow. This is no less miraculous than being fed by the birds. What is a widow going to have in a time of famine? Not much, as we will see. Elijah approaches the city gates, and behold, there is a widow gathering up some sticks.
How does Elijah know she’s a widow? By how widows dressed in the ancient world, unlike the comfortable, colorful garments donned by royalty like Jezebel, the idol-worshipping queen of Israel, this widow bore the gloomy and wavy garments of mourning—dark clothes, tattered, worn down. Public signs of her perpetual grief and neediness. Here, this widow is even with the pangs of hunger and thirst seizing her, with death fast approaching. And she still will put on these heavy, dark clothes when she leaves her house to collect wood under the scorching sun.
And Elijah sees her and calls out to her, “Bring me a little bit of water.” For all that this widow is going through, she doesn’t even hesitate, but she complies. Her flesh may be failing her, but the gospel, the law of Christ, as Paul describes it, is flowing and beating and living in her heart. She knows that blessing of which Jesus will later say, “Whoever gives a cup of water to one of these little ones because he’s my disciple will certainly not lose the reward.” It’s amazing that despite her circumstances, she does not waver for a moment to give a drink to that thirsty mouth through which God proclaimed and caused this drought and famine to happen.
If Elijah were sent to Jezebel for a cup of water, she would say, “Great! He can’t talk anymore. He’s thirsty.” But she gives him water. She wants the word of God. Elijah knows that this is the one that God was talking about, so he calls out after her before she can even get that water to make some bread for him and bring it to him. And how does she answer? We shouldn’t overlook her faith here. She takes an oath by the Lord, as the Lord lives. She says, “This is an oath by Yahweh, not Baal shaman.” She explains that she was just at that moment when he called out to her, gathering up sticks to make one last final meal for herself and for her son, so that they can eat and then die.
I can’t even comprehend these pain-laden words and her toil at this moment. I imagine, in the days prior, in the weeks before all this had really taken hold, maybe she would ask her son to go out and gather the sticks so that she could make some bread. But now her little boy is too faint. Too exhausted from the hunger to go out himself into the sun, so with her son on the brink of death, she does this. And she’s already been bereaved of her husband before our text even started. I mean, how much grief is this woman carrying? The greatest of life’s treasures, Scripture teaches us, of earthly, worldly treasures, is the spouse that God gives us. For a man, a spouse is that helper made from the place of his own heart, and a woman, she’s the house built from her head into a home.
Who looks to the head for guidance, for protection, shelter, and care? For God to give someone a spouse is to give them a person with whom they can share every joy in an inexpressible way. And also He gives them as a companion in suffering, to share not only in fortune but misfortune, not only in joy but in sorrow. So how great of an affliction it is that this widow has been deprived of her head, and now she suffers the increasing reality of famine and death without her husband. And that fruit of their union is about to die. She bears all of this alone. I can’t imagine anything more lonely and miserable than what she’s going through.
But here’s the thing for us to learn from her circumstances: it’s not from some great sin that she’s suffering all these things. Here is a faithful, God-fearing woman in a pagan land. She would have every reason to worship Baal Shamin, but she doesn’t. I can imagine that her neighbors were probably blaming the drought in some way upon her for not worshiping the god she’s supposed to with everyone else. But there’s a lesson in there for us and our suffering. When hardship befalls us, it’s very often because of the wickedness of other people. More often than not, the pains that we suffer are not a direct consequence of our particular sins.
It’s not because we’re not sinful or we don’t deserve these things to happen, but there’s often not a clear logic that it’s our fault when they do happen. This is certainly the case for Elijah. This is the case for the widow of Zarephath. But God, when He places those crosses upon us, it’s always as a loving Father, as Hebrews says, “The Lord chastens those whom He loves according to His wisdom.” That is for our eternal salvation.
So if God places upon you the mantle of poverty, if he deprives you of those dearest to you, if he tears away every source of security, then we’re blessed. The scriptures would teach us, for we can place our bodies into God’s hands with every potential idol stripped away, and we can take heart in Elijah’s words to this widow: “Do not fear. Don’t worry about it. Don’t be anxious,” as Jesus says. Make your meal; your flour and oil will not run out, and God’s word never fails.
I think we should all write these last words of our Old Testament reading upon the tablet of our hearts. The jar of flour was not spent; neither did the jug of oil become empty, according to the word of the Lord that He spoke by Elijah. Can you imagine this widow sticking her hand into the jar of flour after she had already made her last meal? She’s expecting to reach the bottom, and she just runs into a huge clump of flour. Maybe she opens her oil pitcher, and some oil spurts out because it’s so full. It’s a great comfort for us saints.
God shows His fatherly kindness to the widow, to her son, and to his servant Elijah. And this story could have been lost to history. I imagine there’s many things Elijah and all the prophets did for others that we never heard about. There’s many things that Christ did that aren’t written in the Gospels. But God wanted us to hear this particular story about this widow of Zarephath to learn from it, so we can learn what the words of Jesus means. To set our hearts and our minds not on earthly things, but on the treasures of heaven.
So let us lodge with Elijah in this widow’s house, with all your wants of body and soul. If the world enjoys the riches of Ahab and Jezebel, or if it suffers in famine and drought, let that happen outside. In here, in this house, the house of the church, the heavenly Father never dies and leaves us as orphans. Our head, our husband Christ, is never cleaved from his spouse. Here there is food that never runs out. The jar of our Lord’s body constantly here and increasing for everyone who eats of it. The oil is certainly reminding us of our baptism, that efficacious and enduring seal of eternal life, a pledge of our unfailing, unending adoption.
And the God who spoke through Elijah still speaks His inspired word here today and every day, which gives plenty from its treasures to all who eat of it. And this same kindness shown to the widow is ours today. Strength for the feeble and gladness for those who are in sorrow. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
All the creatures of our earth.