1 Kings 17:12

Notice that she brought in the name of Jehovah. This is wonderful! The foolish people of Israel were turning their backs on the one true God, preferring the false gods of the Sidonians. Yet here is a woman who believed that Israel's Jehovah was the true God, despite the corrupting influences around her… But the widow's faith when Elijah arrived was very low. She did not say "my God," as Paul does in Philippians 4:19. Her heart was indeed towards Jehovah — no other god had any place with her. But perhaps she felt that He had quite forgotten her! Her words were the words of despair.

Here is a gloomy picture. An empty barrel, an exhausted jar, and death! Was that all? That was all for blind unbelief… God is shut out, though she could say, "As the LORD your God lives." In reality she was outside His presence. She had lost the sense of His all-sufficiency to meet her need and her household's… She looked at the things that are seen, not at the things that are unseen.

Not so the man of faith. He looked beyond the barrel and the jar. He had no thought of dying of hunger. He rested on the word of the Lord. Here was his precious resource. God had said, "I have commanded a widow there to feed you." This was quite enough for him. He knew that God could multiply the flour and the oil to sustain both him and her.

This woman was going to die, and she knew it. Elijah's words stirred up the faith that lay in her heart… What he promised would happen in a way human reason could not grasp. She did not doubt it. She accepted this impossibility and found salvation in it for herself and her son. The king of Israel also felt this coming death pressing on himself and his people. But instead of being sure of his lot, he looked for ways to escape it. This is the opposite of faith: it is unbelief. Ahab thought he could find human resources against famine and death; this woman had none.

When the brook had dried up, God sent Elijah to Zarephath to be sustained there by a widow (v. 9). In Luke 4:25-26 God sends him to the widow to sustain her. Both are true… God had a double purpose: to sustain His servant, and to bring a message of grace to the widow through him… The widows of Israel are set aside. Judgment on Israel's state opens the door for the nations to receive grace — in the very territory that Jezebel, the great corrupter of God's people, came from.

How many believers today are like this poor widow before she met Elijah. They know so little of the wonderful service the Lord has appointed them to do for Him here. So they look only for a couple of sticks. They reckon they have just enough in the barrel and the jar to die on, but nowhere near enough to live on! They have hardly grasped that they already have Christ and the Holy Spirit as the endless resources of faith — pictured by the flour and the oil. So their piety is mainly getting ready for death.

This widow from outside Israel gathered her "two sticks" for one last desperate mouthful before death. But Jehovah's bounty used them to prepare "enough and to spare" — the beginning of a new lease of life for herself and for the prophet.

Whenever God commands, He also gives the power to obey, if we can receive it… So, despite her declaration of utter poverty, Elijah said, "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." How hard and unreasonable such a request would have seemed to the natural mind. Unbelief might have said it should never have been made. But He who made it, through His servant, upheld the widow's faith with a sure word of promise… If all things are possible with God, all things are also possible to the one who believes.