The Barrel and the Boy

Friend,

At the gate of a town called Zarephath, a widow is picking up sticks. A stranger asks her for some water, and as she goes to get it, he asks for bread as well. She tells him what she has: "an handful of meal in a barrel, and a little oil in a cruse." She is gathering two sticks to cook it, so that she and her son can eat it and die. Elijah tells her to make him "a little cake first."

I want to write to you about where this story goes, because it nearly always gets stopped at verse sixteen. First, notice who she is. "Zarephath, which belongeth to Zidon" was in Jezebel's home country, where Baal was worshipped, and Baal was the god the drought was aimed at. God sends His prophet to be fed by a woman from an enemy nation who is at the end of everything. Jesus later reminded His own town of this, and they tried to kill Him for it: "unto none of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow."

She does what Elijah asks, and "she, and he, and her house, did eat many days." Then comes our verse: "And the barrel of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil fail." Every morning she found the proof again.

Then comes verse seventeen. Her son falls sick, "and his sickness was so sore, that there was no breath left in him." All that daily proof did not stop her crying out: "What have I to do with thee, O thou man of God? art thou come unto me to call my sin to remembrance, and to slay my son?" It had not settled things for the prophet either. Up in the loft, Elijah brings his own complaint to God: "hast thou also brought evil upon the widow with whom I sojourn, by slaying her son?"

God heard him, and the boy breathed again. Only then did the widow say, "Now by this I know that thou art a man of God, and that the word of the LORD in thy mouth is truth." She said "now," after all those mornings of meal.

Here is what I want you to keep. Food that holds out day after day is a real gift from God, but it cannot answer the question that wakes you in the night about your child. She needed both, in the same small house, one after the other, and God gave her both. The God who fills the barrel is also the God who hears the cry in the loft, and He has not run out of either kind of help for you.

Yours on the same road,

a fellow learner

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 246 is Blessed for Trusting (Jeremiah 17:7).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two