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The Widows and the Economic Meltdown

By Ike Hughes | October 20, 2008

Have you listened to the headlines? Food prices are through the roof. Incomes are sinking faster than the proverbial lead balloon. Homes and farms are being lost faster than you can blink. People are no longer able to provide for their family and are wondering where their next meal will come from.

If you think that I am talking about news stories and headlines from the past month, you would be wrong. What I am talking about is the Northern Kingdom, the 10 tribes of Israel that seceded from Judah.

But even though, these ‘headlines’ are from several thousand years ago, there is something that can be said for us today.

One of Israel’s kings, Ahab, was a particularly evil king. He had married a woman by the name of Jezebel. Jezebel was a Gentile from the country of Phoenicia. Now the Phoenicians had a particularly nasty habit of worship the god, Baal. Baal was seen as the bringer of rain in the springtime when it was time to plant the crops.

The Canaanites saw a direct correlation between the fertility of spring and human fertility. Because of this, there were. what the Old Testament writers called, ‘detestable practices’ that happened in the worship of Baal. Jezebel brought those practices to the Northern Kingdom when she married Ahab and Ahab readily incorporated them into the worship of God.

Because of this worship, God raised up Elijah as his prophet against Baal. One of the most popular miracles that Elijah performed was when he met with the prophets at Mount Carmel. There he set up a battle between Baal and Yahweh. Needless to say, Yahweh won.

Another thing that God did through Elijah was to bring 3 ½ years of famine on the Northern Kingdom. This famine affected everyone, even Elijah. God sent Elijah to a small stream and made sure that Elijah was fed and taken care of. But the stream dried up, and that is where we pick up his story.

1 Kings 17:8-16 (ESV)
8 Then the word of the Lord came to him,
9 “Arise, go to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and dwell there. Behold, I have commanded a widow there to feed you.”
10 So he arose and went to Zarephath. And when he came to the gate of the city, behold, a widow was there gathering sticks. And he called to her and said, “Bring me a little water in a vessel, that I may drink.”
11 And as she was going to bring it, he called to her and said, “Bring me a morsel of bread in your hand.”
12 And she said, “As the Lord your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of flour in a jar and a little oil in a jug. And now I am gathering a couple of sticks that I may go in and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it and die.”

13 And Elijah said to her, “Do not fear; go and do as you have said. But first make me a little cake of it and bring it to me, and afterward make something for yourself and your son.
14 For thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘The jar of flour shall not be spent, and the jug of oil shall not be empty, until the day that the Lord sends rain upon the earth.’ ”
15 And she went and did as Elijah said. And she and he and her household ate for many days.
16 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.

Now Elisha was used to hearing from God. He was God’s prophet. And God came to him and told him to go to Zarephath.

And God tells Elijah that once he get’s to Zarephath, he can expect to be taken care of by a widow. Now, most of the translations that I read said that God was going to have the woman ‘feed’ Elijah. However, the word that is used in the original language can actually mean sustain. Elijah was not going to Zarephath for a meal; he was going expecting to be taken care of.

There are three things that I find interesting thing about this command. The first is that God didn’t have to send him to this particular city to take care of Elijah.

From what we know of the area at the time of this famine, the Jordan Rive was still flowing and there were places along that river that God could have sent Elijah to the Jordan and continued to take care of him the way He had been for some time.

The second thing that I find interesting about this command is that God sends Elijah to Zarephath. Let’s have a short geography lesson. Elijah is a prophet of the nation of Israel. He is in Israel.

Zarephath is in Phoenicia. Remember what I said about Phoenicia earlier? That was the home of Jezebel, the center of Baal worship. God sends Elijah away from the safety of the stream and Israel and straight into enemy territory.

The third thing that I find interesting about this command is that God sends Elijah to a widow. Now, a widow in the days of Elijah was a poor as poor can be. In those days, men worked the land and men were the providers for the family.

Once a man died, if there was no one to take care of the land, if there were no sons or such, control of the land went into the hands of the closest male next of kin until a son could be born and grow up to regain control of the land. Widows also would have been the first to loose everything to a famine because they could not provide for themselves and depended upon the generosity of others.

God had set up provisions for taking care of widows in Israel but Zarephath was not in Israel it was in Phoenicia. The woman that Elijah was sent to was a widow and not in a position to take care of a prophet.

So Elijah does what we would expect a prophet of God to do, he gets up and goes to Zarephath. When he gets there, he meets a woman and asks her for a drink of water. The woman that he has met gets him his drink and then Elijah asks her for a morsel of bread.

The woman, who has already showed her willingness to serve by getting the water proceeds to tell Elijah that she is gathering sticks in order to make her and her son a piece of bread with the last of her flour and oil. Now, when I was I kid, I used to think that the lady was going to make the bread out of the sticks.

But she was actually gathering what sticks she could find in order to make a fire so that she could have enough heat to make her bread.

Now, this lady didn’t have much left. I would guess that she probably had enough supplies left in her house to make a piece of bread about the size of a pita. (Hold up your hands for example).

This small piece of bread would feed her and her son and then she would sit and wait for her and her son to die. This lady, this widow was truly destitute and without hope of survival.

An interesting thing about this woman though is that she acknowledges that Elijah is a prophet AND that he is a prophet from God. Then she acknowledges belief in Elijah’s God. See where it says, “As the Lord your God lives…”

Someone who professes that a god lives is professing belief in that god. Here is Elijah, in the middle of enemy territory and he finds a pagan woman who believes in God. At this point, Elijah had to be thinking that God was crazy.

But he trusts God and asks the woman for food anyway. And when she tries to make excuses Elijah tells her that if she will just feed him first, God would provide for her and her son.

Now, I don’t know about you, but if a complete stranger tells me to give me my last morsel of food and God will provide, I’m going to be skeptical, a LOT skeptical. But the woman complies and God takes care of her and her son throughout the rest of the famine.

I want to look at another story as well. This story has parallels to the one we just looked at. There is a widow with children in this story. There is debt and hardship from the loss of the husband. And there is oil in this story.

This next story happens some years after the famine is over in the kingdom. Ahab and Jezebel are dead and Elijah has trained his replacement, Elisha.
Not only has Elijah trained his replacement, Elisha has seen Elijah carried up into the heavens on a fiery chariot. Elisha is leader of the prophets of Israel. And one day a widow comes to him with a problem.

2 Kings 4:1-7 (ESV)
1 Now the wife of one of the sons of the prophets cried to Elisha, “Your servant my husband is dead, and you know that your servant feared the Lord, but the creditor has come to take my two children to be his slaves.”
2 And Elisha said to her, “What shall I do for you? Tell me; what have you in the house?” And she said, “Your servant has nothing in the house except a jar of oil.”
3 Then he said, “Go outside, borrow vessels from all your neighbors, empty vessels and not too few.
4 Then go in and shut the door behind yourself and your sons and pour into all these vessels. And when one is full, set it aside.”
5 So she went from him and shut the door behind herself and her sons. And as she poured they brought the vessels to her.
6 When the vessels were full, she said to her son, “Bring me another vessel.” And he said to her, “There is not another.” Then the oil stopped flowing.
7 She came and told the man of God, and he said, “Go, sell the oil and pay your debts, and you and your sons can live on the rest.”

We have talked about widows earlier. They are the poorest of poor. But this woman had it one worse, she was the widow of a prophet. In the Northern Kingdom of Israel, prophets relied on the generosity of others for their sustenance.

But they were also reviled at this time in Israel, so this man had not only not provided for his family through the generosity of others, he had also gone into debt in order to give what provision he could. So his widow was not only poor beyond help, she was in debt.

During Elisha’s day, if a family was in debt, the sons could go into servitude to another until the year of jubilee in order to pay off a debt.

The sons’ labor would serve as payment for monies owed and when the year of jubilee came around again, the remaining debt would be forgiven and they would retake control of what land they had coming.

The problem was, if the sons were taken into servitude, there would be noone to take care of the mother.

So this lady was in a bind. And she came to the one man that she knew could help, Elisha, and told him her situation and begged for his help.

Now, Elijah would have known this woman and her family because he was the leader of the prophets, as I mentioned earlier. So he would have known that she spoke the truth when she claimed that her husband had feared the Lord.

The first thing that Elijah does is ask the woman what she has in her house. He does this to see just how destitute she really is. Elijah is, in effect, saying to her, “What do you have that is valuable that you could sell so that you could pay off your debts?”

There was going to be no easy way out for this widow. She was going to have to take part in her own bailout plan. Elijah wasn’t just going to step in and take care of it for her.

Well, after taking stock of what she had, she told Elijah that all she had in the house was a ‘jar of oil.’ Let’s look at this word jar for a moment.

When I think of jar, at least jars in the Old Testament, I think of these large pottery things that you see in pictures; they look like they could hold two or three gallons. But, in the original language, this would is actually describing something more along the lines of a flask. This is a very small container.

This container did contain something valuable – oil. Olive oil was a grand commodity in Elijah’s day. One of Israel’s largest exports was olive oil and it was a lucrative trade.
So, once again, God directs in a way that seems odd. Elijah tells the woman to have her sons gather up as many jugs as they can from the neighbors.

He specifically tells them to gather a lot of jugs. Once they have gathered up these jugs, they are to lock themselves in their house and pour from this flask into all the containers until the flask was empty.

So she and her sons did as they were directed by Elijah and a miracle happened. The flask didn’t empty. As long as the widow had jars to fill there was oil in the flask.

Once the last jug was full, the oil stopped flowing. I would have gone, “Man, if I had just collected 10 more jars. Elisha told me to get a lot of jars and I thought I had, but 10 more would have been great.”

So the widow goes back to Elisha and tells him what has happened with the oil and the jugs and Elisha tells her to go and sell the oil, pay off her debtors and us the rest to support her family.

The widow was basically told to be prudent with her money. She could have hoarded the oil; the widow in the previous story got to keep her stuff and use it on herself and Elijah.

But the times were different; the famine was over and people could trade again. There was a market for oil and this widow could raise the money she needed to pay off her debts.

She could have thrown a party with the money from the oil or the money that was left over. It could have been a grand party, I’m sure.

But she had to do with her money what was right and what was proper; and what was right and what was proper was that she pay off her debts and take care of her family.

These are two wonderful accounts of God showing his power over and above the prevailing religion of the day. And I want to take a look at four things that I think can be gleaned from these stories.

O, there are more than 4 things in these accounts, things like economic cycles and such but I won’t bore you with my economics degree; but I want to focus on just 4 things today.

The first thing that I want to look at is that God didn’t provide for these people in any way that would have been expected. Elijah probably was expecting to go to another river or stream to find food; he didn’t, he went to a city.

Elijah was probably looking to go to a city in the nation of Israel; he didn’t he went to Phoenicia. Elijah was probably expecting a wealthy benefactor; he got a widow. The widow in Elisha’s story was probably expecting more direct help from Elisha; she didn’t get it, she got jugs full of oil.

How many of you have seen Angels in the Outfield? This movie is about a young boy who is living in a foster home. His father promises him that if the Angels have a winning season, they will be a family again.

So the boy goes home that night and prays that the Angels have a winning season so that he can have a family. Well, an angel, played by the crazy professor from the Back to the Future movies, helps the baseball Angels to have a winning season.

And the boy gets excited, he sees his father at one of their court appearances and his hopes are high that they will be a family again. But, the father is at court that day to finally sign away his paternal rights.

The boy is crushed; the one thing that he had pinned his hopes on, getting a family, was now only a dim and distant fantasy. But as the movie goes on, the boy is befriended by the manager of the Angels and at the end of the movie, this manager adopts the boy and he is part of a family. The boy got his family, but it didn’t come in the way he expected.

None of the people in these stories got God’s help in ways that were expected.

The second thing that I think is important for today comes from the second story. The widow in Elisha’s day was expected to give up her stuff if it was valuable enough to pay off debts.

She couldn’t come and expect Elisha to help her out if she had things in her possession that could be used to pay off debts.

There is a law in Florida that says that if you have a judgment against you for monies owed, your home cannot be taken away from you.

The most famous person to take advantage of this is O.J. Simpson. Now, there is some good to this law. If you or I end up with a judgment against us and the only asset that we have is our home, it cannot be forcibly taken from us.

But someone who buys a house in Florida with the vast majority of his assets in order to tie them up so that their creditors can’t get to it, that’s wrong. The widow was expected to help out with her own debt problems.

The third thing that I found in this passage was that once God did provide, the widow in the Elisha account couldn’t just hoard what she was given; she had to use it to pay off her debts. Then she had to be prudent with what was left over so that she could take care of her family.

The prodigal son learned this lesson the hard way. He asked his father for his inheritance early and went of and squandered it on wine, women and song.

The widow did not have that luxury; she had a family to feed and if she didn’t want to end up right back in debt, she had to use her money in a responsible manner

And finally, the most important thing that the three people in need in these accounts needed was to give up something that was precious to them and trust God for the results.

Elijah had to give up the safety of his hiding place in Israel; the widow of Zarephath had to give up her last piece of bread; and the prophet’s widow had to give up her precious oil.

God didn’t work out these people’s problems in a way that they would have expected

God required the prophet’s widow to use her own resources to begin the process

God required prudence in the use of the money that he provided

God required the giving up of something valuable and trust in him to provide in its place.

Have you read the headlines? Stock Market Rollercoaster. Record Number of Foreclosures Forecasted. 401k’s Losing Value. Presidential Candidates Argue Over Fundamentals of the Economy. The Next Big Depression Just Around the Corner.

Sound bleak. These headlines, while at times meant to sensationalize so that papers are bought and news channels are watched (actually, they don’t care if you watch the news channels, they want you watching the commercials). And they may come true, but they may not.

But whether they are true or will be true doesn’t matter. Right now, what matters is that these headlines hit every one of us in someway. I’m looking for a church that not only needs me but can afford me and my family.

This economic downturn slims my prospects. Some of you have brand new families or are looking from new jobs and the prospects are slim for you as well. Some of you are relying on retirements that you watch and see dwindling.

And I could stand up here and spout of statistic after statistic about how bear markets are markedly shorter than bull markets and the returns once the bear turns around is outstanding.

But that is really no comfort. For you and I there is only one thing that we can find comfort in. And that is God and he has spoken to you and to me today in these accounts of two widows.

The first thing that he is telling you and I is that his ways are mysterious and the way this ends up and works out may not be the way we expect. Just like Elijah and the two widows; just like the boy in Angels in the Outfield, God could work in a way that you and I do not expect.

The second thing that he is telling you and me is actually a combination of 2 of my points from earlier. God expects you and me to be good stewards of our resources. God expects good stewardship.

Now, if you are anything like me, you just groaned when I said the word stewardship. The church I grew up in took faith promise cards every year before making the budget. And the week or two before the faith promise cards were due there would be sermons aplenty on stewardship.

And I grew up equating stewardship with tithe.

Folks, tithing is an important part or what stewardship is, but it is not ALL that stewardship is. God is just as concerned with what you do with what you keep as he is with what you give him.

I’ll ask you the same question that Elisha asked the widow, “What do you have that you can sell to help pay off your debts?” What can you give up?

I have probably told some of you this before, but three days after Gregory’s first birthday, I was a victim of down sizing. 16 days before Christmas, I lost my job.

Thankfully, I have a wife that starts shopping for Christmas sometime in February so most of the shopping was done, but there were bills to pay and mouths to feed.

Actually, I hadn’t shopped for her yet that year so she graciously offered to go without but I’m smarter than that. Am I right guys? That’s a trap no man should fall for.

But all kidding aside, there were things we went without. We cut the cable. We cancelled the cell phone. We stopped going out to eat. We stopped taking extra trips places to use less gas.

I sold stocks and closed out a IRA in order to pay electricity and put food on the table. When things get tough, God expects his people to handle their money and their resources in such a way that honors and glorifies him.

And finally, God wants us to trust Him. Look at the three people who needed help the most in our story. Elijah had security in his wilderness haven.

The widow had security, although very little, in her last meal. And the prophet’s widow had security in her last little bit of oil. God told all three of these people to give up what it was that gave them their security and put their trust in him.

What is it that gives you security? What is it that you are clinging to to take you through tough times? Is God asking you to let it go?

That may not mean actually parting with it. God does demand stewardship. But he also demands our trust. God is calling you and me, to let go and be willing to loose what it is that we cling tightly to for our security and to grasp him and cling to him.

If Elijah had stayed at the dried up river bed, he would have died of starvation. If the widow of Zarephath had clung to her last cake, she and her son would have starved. And if the prophet’s widow had clung to her oil and her pride, she would have lost her sons to slavery.

What are you clinging to? What is God asking you to let go of so that you can fully trust in Him for your security.

Let us pray

Topics: 1 Kings, 2 Kings |

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