CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES.—
1 Kings 17:9. Zarephath, which belongeth to Zidon—Sarepta, situate between Tyre and Sidon, in the native land of Jezebel. Yet this “widow” knew JEHOVAH (1 Kings 17:12), and appealed to His High Name in verification of her words.
1 Kings 17:13. Fear not; go and do, &c.—A severe test of faith, for there was nothing between her and death except the promise of 1 Kings 17:14. Nevertheless, with nought save a promise to assure her, she made her solitary cake, and saw it eaten by Elijah. Yet starvation was not the issue, but salvation.
HOMILETICS OF 1 Kings 17:8-16
RESCUE IN EXTREMITY
I. That a time of extremity reveals the Divine source of our daily comforts. The water of the brook on which Elijah had depended for daily refreshment gradually diminished, and at length altogether disappeared, and the prophet was again reminded of his absolute dependence on God for hourly sustenance. The greatest blessings are apt to be regarded with indifference because of the constancy of their supply. The daily return of the sunlight, the equal diffusion of the air we breathe, the regular beat of the life-pulse, the abundant yield of the soil on which we tread, are bestowed with such uniformity and faithfulness, that there is danger we should forget the great source of them all. When we are deprived for a time of the most ordinary blessings of life, then do we become vividly conscious of their former presence and of their unspeakable value. Every new day should be vocal with new thanksgivings and praises for the new mercies which it brings.
II. That a time of extremity induces a spirit of ready obedience. “So he arose and went to Zarephath” (1 Kings 17:10). Elijah might be tempted to question: Why may not the same Divine power which sends the ravens with food keep the Cherith in perpetual flow? And if I must remove, why not go back to Israel rather than into Phœnicia, the idolatrous home of Jezebel, whose enormities I am commissioned to punish? But the instinct of obedience was stronger than all such questionings; and that instinct was sharpened by the difficulties in which he found himself. To remain was to perish, and to obey opened the only prospect of relief and sustenance. “Servants rise when the bell rings,” says the proverb; and Elijah at once set out on his long and adventurous journey. He was like Israel in the wilderness. “At the commandment of the Lord they rested in their tents, and at the commandment of the Lord they journeyed.” So God often leads his people out by a way that they know not, and the reluctance to follow the Divine leading is overcome by the utter perplexity of the circumstances into which they are sometimes brought, and their inability to discover a better way than the one indicated. It is the triumph of self-surrender to God when the believer can say—
Nor will I hear, nor will I speak,
Of any other will but Thine.
III. That a time of extremity encourages faith in God amid the most unfavourable appearances (1 Kings 17:10-12). The prophet was to be dependent on a woman, and she a Gentile, when there were many women in Israel any of whom would have counted it a coveted honour to minister to the wants of the persecuted champion of Jehovah; a widow woman, and a widow woman in such abject poverty that she and her emaciated son were reduced to the last point, of starvation (1 Kings 17:12). It seemed very unlikely that a woman in whose home famine had wrought such havoc should be the future hostess of the famishing prophet. But Elijah, undaunted by the ghastly and unpromising appearance of things, had faith in God; he who quailed not in the presence of Ahab and Jezebel, yielded not in the presence of improbabilities which were even more difficult to confront. True faith triumphs over the most forbidding circumstances; above all external things it sees God and His all-conquering promise. Abraham “staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief, being fully persuaded that what He had promised He was able also to perform” (Romans 4:20-21). Faith eats its way through all Alps of opposition.
IV. That a time of extremity affords opportunity for the most signal display of Divine power (1 Kings 17:12-16).
1. It reveals how God has His hidden ones in the most unlikely places. This Gentile woman was not ignorant of Jehovah, and she at once recognized Elijah as His prophet. “As the Lord thy God liveth” (1 Kings 17:12). She was probably a believer (Luke 4:26), however imperfect might be her faith, and the narrative shows she was capable of the most disinterested kindness, and of the most implicit confidence in the word of God (1 Kings 17:14-15). “Phenicia was the last place in the world to have found a worshipper of the Lord, the living God. It was also the last place in the world to have found an Elijah. And yet both are here—the one a lily among thorns, the other, in the quaint but fine thought of Lightfoot, the first apostle to the Gentiles.” The rarest virtues are sometimes found in the most unexpected places. During the last journey of Livingstone, the veteran African traveller, he was compelled, in consequence of a tribal war, to change his route, and pass through a country where no rain had fallen, and the grass, mostly burnt off, left a surface covered with black ashes, from which the heat radiated as from a furnace. Yet, out of this hard, hot surface, the flowers would persist in coming. So amid the moral wastes of heathendom, where the soil is hard and black, and apparently unfertile, and where our missionaries have toiled so long with such earnestness and devotion, the delicate flowers of Christian virtues have pushed their way, displaying their modest beauty, and scattering their hallowing fragrance—foretokens of the coming period when the wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad, and the desert rejoice and blossom as the rose” (Isaiah 35:1)
2. It reveals the boundless resources of Jehovah in supplying the needs of His people (1 Kings 17:16). With God nothing is impossible, and rather than His people should perish He will work a miracle. The same power that multiplied the loaves and fishes to the multitude on the shores of Galilee could, with equal ease, replenish the meal barrel and oil cruse in the home of the Sareptan widow. “So that,” writes Maurice, “the person from whom Elijah was to receive sustenance, and whom, as a return for that favour, he was to teach trust in the Lord God of Israel that her barrel of meal should not waste, neither her cruse of oil fail, was a woman of that very country from which Jezebel had come—the very country from which the Baal worship had been imported. The Lord God of the nation, then, was one in whom the weak and poor of all nations might confide, one from whom they might ask their daily bread, and on whom they might cast their heaviest cares.” God will be no debtor to them who trust Him in extremity, or who show kindness to His servants.
LESSONS:—
1. God is not indifferent to the wants and sufferings of His people.
2. A time of temporal straitness is often one of richest spiritual blessing.
3. We cannot grieve God more than by distrusting Him.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES
1 Kings 17:8-16. The barrel of meal and the cruse of oil. Learn from this incident: I. The uncertainty of earthly comforts. When Elijah went to Cherith he would never dream of that brook becoming exhausted. He would settle down there till the drought passed away. But, when least expecting it, the word of the Lord came: “Arise, get thee to Zarephath.” Cherith, with all its pleasant associations, had to be left. What a picture of human life! How many are there of whose worldly comforts it may be said: “After a while the brook dried up.” One man is settled in life, with circumstances all that could be desired, and he contemplates the future with pleasure; but unexpectedly something arises—bank failure or commercial crisis—which tells him that the brook is dried up, and he has to leave his Cherith. Another looks with pride and hope upon a child—his pleasure and joy flow from that child—but, unnoticed, disease settles upon it and takes it away. So with earthly comforts. They are uncertain, and do not warrant the eagerness with which they are sought, or the value with which they are invested. II. The certainty of God’s care. God made provision for Elijah at Zarephath before He commanded him to leave Cherith. Decay and change may characterise all our earthly comforts, but they do not characterise God; He remains the same, and His care can never fail. Many changes are permitted to our circumstances, to lead us to more implicit confidence in the unchangeable God. III. Godly generosity shall not lose its reward. This woman had a truly generous spirit, which was bounded only by her means. She listened readily to Elijah’s request, and showed a spirit willing to accede to it; and her generosity secured her abundance. God blessed her house for entertaining His servant, as He blessed the house of Obed Edom for sheltering the ark.—The Study and Pulpit.
1 Kings 17:10-13. Now here was a demand upon the faith of this woman—from a foreign man and a foreign God—as large as any exacted from the great prophet himself. See how it stands: First, she was to make up her provisions for Elijah, trusting that, as he had said, more would then come miraculously to supply her own wants. What a trial! What would the bird in the hand worth two in the bush principle say to this? Who could have it in his heart to blame her had she declined to run what was, under the circumstances, so hard a risk? Who would condemn her if she had discredited this stranger? How could she know but that, after he had eaten up her precious bread, he might laugh in her face? Besides, was not his very anxiety to be served first of all very suspicious? Looked it not as if he were determined, at all hazards, to secure a meal for himself; and could we call it unreasonable had she asked for the proof first—which could be given as well before as after—that it should be as he had said? But nothing of this occurred. She went and did as Elijah had told her, and found the result as he had promised. This was faith of the true sort, heroic faith, the faith that asks no questions.—Kitto.
1 Kings 17:10. “So he arose and went to Zarephath.” Compared with 1 Kings 17:15: Obedience to God. I. Should be prompt and unquestioning. II. Involves sacrifice and suffering. III. Is always rewarded with blessing.
1 Kings 17:12. Happy was it for this widow that she did not shut her hand to the man of God, that she was no niggard of her last handful; never corn or oil did so increase in growing as here in consuming. This barrel, this cruse of hers, had no bottom; the barrel of meal wasted not, the cruse of oil failed not. Behold, not getting, not saving, is the way to abundance, but giving. The mercy of God crowns our beneficence with the blessing of store. Who can fear want by a merciful liberality, when he sees the Sareptan had famished if she had not given, and by giving abounded? With what thankful devotion must this woman every day needs look upon her barrel and cruse, wherein she saw the mercy of God renewed to her continually? Doubtless her soul was no less fed by faith than her body by this supernatural provision.—Bp. Hall.
1 Kings 17:13. Fear not! Ah! how often has a child of God bemoaned—Now all is lost! I have nothing more, and know nothing more. The operations of the Spirit of God have ceased for me; the meal and oil are gone! And yet, where there is nothing more amid the night and the darkness, the morning brings something upon which one can live and find nourishment for the soul, although the time be miserable.—Lange.
1 Kings 17:15. It was one of those sudden recognitions of unknown kindred souls, one of those cross-purposes of Providence, which come in with a peculiar charm to chequer the commonplace course of ecclesiastical history. The Phœnician mother knew not what great destinies lay in the hand of that gaunt figure at the city gate, worn with travel, and famine, and drought. She obeyed only the natural instinct of humanity; but she saved in him the deliverer of herself and her son. It may be that this incident is the basis of the sacred blessing of the Prophet of prophets on those who, even by a cup of cold water, receiving a prophet in the name of a prophet, shall receive a prophet’s reward.—Stanley.
1 Kings 17:16. The same God who spoke by means of Elijah—The meal in the barrel shall not be wasted, and the oil in the cruse shall not fail—has also promised, as long as the earth lasts, seed-time and harvest, frost and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease (Genesis 8:22). We are astonished at the little miracle in the cabin at Sarepta, but we pass over with indifference, and without attention, the large miracle.—Lange.