We've been in a study of the life and times of Elijah for the past couple of months, and I hope you've been as blessed and as encouraged by it as I have. This is the fifth lesson in that series, and it brings us today to the closing section of 1 Kings chapter 17. Now, if you remember back to the very first week of our study, we took note of the abrupt way Elijah comes on the scene in verse 1 of this chapter. That's his first appearance in scripture, and he charges into the historical narrative of scripture the same way he charged into the court of Ahab, without any prelude or any sort of introduction. There's no hint that he's coming. Suddenly he's just there. He announces the drought as a judgment against Ahab. and against Jezebel and the wickedness that they represented in the land of Israel. And then just as quickly as he appeared, he disappears into the wilderness where God graciously cares for him through the ministration of some ravens until the brook Cherith finally dries up. And that's pretty much a quick summary of what this chapter has taught so far. Then last week We followed Elijah on a dangerous journey right through Ahab's backyard to a place near Jezebel's hometown where God had commanded a Gentile widow woman to give Elijah room and board for the duration of the drought. And that brings us up to this morning. You'll remember that when Elijah arrived in Zarephath, the hometown of this widow, He found this woman and her little boy on the verge of starvation. Elijah met her and she was out gathering some sticks to build a fire for what she was convinced would be the last meal she and her little boy would ever eat before they died. But we saw last week how God graciously intervened in that situation. and provided for the needs of that widow and her son and Elijah as well, not by giving them an overflow of abundance, but by miraculously providing for them a new handful of flour and a small portion of oil each day, so that their supplies, while never in surplus, were always sufficient for what they needed. And we saw that as a picture of how God normally dispenses His grace. He gives us sufficient grace without necessarily giving us a surplus of grace. Lamentations 3, 22 and 23 says, His compassions fail not. They are new every morning. He renews them on a daily basis. Great is His faithfulness. James 4, 6 says, He giveth more grace. But He dispenses that grace in accord with our present needs. Often in handfuls and small measures. Rarely in superabundant portions. But the grace that He gives us is always sufficient. And that's His promise. And sometimes when God does want to lavish superabundant grace to us, the prelude to that is a dark and difficult trial. Suffering is always the pathway to glory. And hardship, you could look at hardship like the container into which God pours His grace. The larger the vessel, the greater the measure of grace. And for that reason, when God wants to lavish on us a superabundant measure of grace, He often does it by way of a trial. And that's what happened here. We believe, don't we, that God orders our lives through His sovereign providence. He works all things after the counsel of His own will, Ephesians 1.11 says. And one of the most favorite promises in Scripture, we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, Romans 8.28. And those promises are meaningless unless we can see that God is working in all things. Because if He's not working in all things, how can we be confident that He'll work all things together for our good? He's ultimately sovereign over all things, and he's working them all together, he promises, for our ultimate good, no matter how dark the providence may seem to us. And in fact, God's providence extends to the tiniest minutia of life. I made a comment like that in passing a few weeks ago, and someone came up to me afterwards and said, look, Phil, I agree that God is essentially sovereign over the big things of life. I agree that his plan is going to ultimately come out the way he wants it, but I just have trouble with this notion that God providentially controls every minute little detail, even the small things. He said, granting that God is sovereign, I still think there are some matters that God leaves to the realm of human free will. For example, he said, I have a hard time imagining that it matters in the plan of God whether I wore gray socks or black socks this morning. I can't conceive, he said, that God would bother with minutia like that. Is it really right to portray God as sovereign over every little detail of life? Aren't there some things that he doesn't govern? Doesn't it trivialize the doctrine of divine sovereignty to teach that God is in control over even the tiniest minutia of life? I don't think so. In fact, Scripture expressly tells us that even the hairs of our heads are numbered. Jesus said not even a sparrow falls to the ground apart from God's sovereign providence. Everywhere in Scripture we are taught that God is at work even in the minute details of life. And that means that not one thing can happen to you unless God gives his permission and unless God has a good purpose in it. Because if he's working all things together for good, he's not going to permit something that would thwart that purpose. Not one thing that happens to you can possibly go wrong. Ultimately, in the ultimate sense, God has a good purpose in it. Even your bad wardrobe choices. And God is as much in control of the details of my life and your life as he was in Elijah's. Elijah wasn't a special case just because he was a prophet. It's true of us as well that God is working all things together for our good, and that is his promise to us. Now, we are commanded to trust in the ultimate goodness of God's providence. We're not always promised an explanation of everything that happens to us. We can't always decipher the exact purposes of God. or read the meaning of every providence that comes our way. We're simply told that God's purposes are ultimately always for our good and it's the very essence of faith to hang on to that promise and to trust God even when it seems as if things are going wrong or our lives have passed completely out of his control. That's when faith is most necessary and that's when these promises are the most precious. And from our narrow human perspective, that's often how life in this world appears, like it's out of control, like it's beyond God's control. We face a multitude of sorrows in this life. Every one of us will experience at various times in our lives grief and pain and sorrow and sickness and affliction and misery and distress and all of the dark providences that come inevitably to each of us. As Job said, Job 5, 7, man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward. You can count on it. It's going to come your way. But the darkest providences that befall us often turn out to be the very occasions when God is choosing to bestow on us his most abundant grace. And that is precisely what happened in this account that we're going to be examining this morning. This passage is full of surprises, and in fact you could look at the entire passage as an object lesson about the unpredictability of God's providence. Everything that happens here is unexpected and surprising. In fact, virtually every verse from verse 17 through the end of the chapter contains something that's shocking or unexpected or startling or unforeseen. The whole passage, as I said, is a great lesson in the unpredictability of God's providence. And so I'd like to look at it this morning by working our way through the narrative and taking particular note of the unexpected turns of providence that we encounter. And the very first is the death of the little boy. The death of the little boy. Verse 17. We're in 1st Kings 17. I did say that, right? 1st Kings 17, verse 17. And it came to pass after these things that the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, fell sick. And his sickness was so sore that there was no breath left in him. Now that seems to describe a very sudden illness that fell on this child and quickly proved to be fatal. He fell sick. And evidently, even before this woman had time to summon Elijah's assistants or solicit his prayers, the little boy was dead. There was no breath left in him, scripture says. And it's saying, I'll show you this later, but it's saying definitely that he's dead. This is not a near-death experience. There was no breath in him. And Elijah had probably been living in the widow's home for many weeks or even months before this event happened. It's in fact quite obvious from the text that some time had elapsed since Elijah had sought shelter here, because verse 16 describes how the Lord sustained them on a daily basis, just as he had promised, by keeping those provisions from ever completely running out. Verse 16, the barrel of meal wasted not, neither did the cruise of oil fail according to the word of the Lord which he spoke by Elijah. And then, verse 17 adds, It came to pass after these things, after God had shown himself faithful, it came to pass that the little boy fell sick and died. So this woman and her son had trusted the Lord for his goodness. They had already tasted that daily goodness for a long enough period of time that she knew that it was Jehovah, the God of Elijah, who was sustaining them. She seems to have had a rudimentary kind of faith at this point. Scripture doesn't say whether she was genuinely converted yet or not, but at least on an intellectual level, she knew that Elijah's God had graciously spared her life and her son's life, and that God was supernaturally sustaining them through these daily provisions that kept filling her jars. And remember that when she had first met Elijah, she essentially had given up her son for dead and herself. She was resigned to the fact that she and the boy were going to die, and they were going to die soon. At that point, she was already emotionally spent, and yet she was grieving over what she knew lay ahead. And then she met Elijah, and his coming changed all of that. The threat of starvation was now over. The worry that she had borne for all that time while the supplies were beginning to run low, that worry was gone. The constant pressure of knowing that she faced imminent starvation and she would have to watch that little boy die. She had long since given that up and was rejoicing in God's miraculous provision. And by that provision, those supplies, she believed, would never run out. And Elijah, in fact, had assured her that the drought itself would end before God's faithful, daily provision for them dried up. She had her son back, as it were, from the dead. And if anything, after After the Lord began to provide for their daily needs in such a miraculous fashion, that little boy's life became more precious to her than ever, because of the knowledge that he had come so close to starvation, and God had spared his life. And I think it's safe to speculate that she was rejoicing, and she was glad for the Lord's goodness to her, and she was grateful for Elijah's having come to her household, because it meant life for her and her son. Perhaps she'd even reached the point where she'd gotten over the emotional trauma of that close brush with starvation. Maybe didn't even think about it anymore. God was now meeting those daily needs, and she was no doubt learning about God and His goodness in an even deeper way from Elijah, who was teaching her. He'd sought shelter under his roof, under her roof. It's inconceivable to think that he didn't teach her about the God of Israel. and for once in her life this woman had every reason to feel blessed and fortunate and happy she was living under a smiling providence and then suddenly inexplicably unpredictably the little boy succumbed to this sudden illness and he died in her arms it was by then i think probably the last thing she expected it took her totally by surprise and that the surprise of it only multiplied her pain and sorrow. From a human standpoint, this was an immense tragedy, maybe even a worse pain for her than if he had starved earlier because she had got her hope back. This struck at the worst possible time, when this woman's fragile faith was desperately in need of strengthening. It must have seemed impossible for her to make sense of this at the moment because She was beginning to hope, and suddenly those hopes were dashed. And it also must have been very difficult for her to look at these circumstances and believe that God would ever be able to wring any good out of such a dark providence. And here we encounter surprise number two, the reaction of this widow. Verse 18. And she said unto Elijah, What have I to do with thee, O man of God? Art thou coming to me to call my sin to remembrance, and to slay my son? Now there's a flash of temper that is contained in those words that is totally uncharacteristic of everything we know about this woman. Remember that when Elijah first met her, she had far more reason to heap this kind of scorn on him than at this point. At that point, on the very brink of starvation, she's preparing to make that one last morsel for her and her son before they died, and Elijah comes along and asks her for food and water. You'd think that if this woman had a hot temper, she would have expressed that temper there. She would have reacted in fury at Elijah when she first met him but despite the fact that Elijah was virtually asking her to take food from her starving child and give it to him she complied meekly with his request quietly and meekly she just gave him what he asked for without any flash of temper but now having had her hopes first restored for her little boy's life only to watch him die with this sudden affliction she could not contain the outpouring of passion that welled up in her and she took it out on Elijah And her words sound like an accusation against him. What have I to do with you, O man of God? It's an expression of contempt, revulsion, disdain. She was looking for someone to blame in this calamity that had suddenly befallen her, and Elijah happened to be the one who was there. And so he got the brunt of it. Have you come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, she says, and to kill my son? She virtually blames him as if he had murdered the little child. Now, I want you to also notice that in her words, there's almost an irrational mixture of faith and unbelief. There's a mixture of humility and rebellion. She refers to Elijah on the one hand as man of God, but then she shows him utter contempt in the way she speaks to him. She more or less acknowledges a sense of her own sinfulness, but then her words to Elijah are laden with blame and utterly devoid of remorse. She's in that state that all of us have experienced from time to time where our passions just become irrational. It's interesting that she suggested the reason for this calamity was to bring her sin to remembrance. She said that, I think, with a tone of resentment. But it is a fact that God often afflicts us in order to bring certain sins to remembrance so that we may properly and adequately repent of them. Hebrews chapter 12, verses 10 and 11 says, He chastens us for our profit, that we might be partakers of His holiness. Now, no chastening for the present seems to be joyous, but grievous nevertheless afterward. It yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby." And that's virtually teaching us that God sometimes allows us to suffer with the express purpose of bringing us to repentance to purify our own hearts, to fit us more for heaven, to make us holy like his Son. Suffering and affliction have a way of awakening the conscience like nothing else. But we need to realize that it is God's mercy to afflict us this way. He's not being cruel when He does this. This is a great mercy. Otherwise, our consciences would become seared, and we would be so hardened by sin that we would fall away completely. This is the way God deals with us in mercy. And Hebrews 12 goes on to say that, saying that if God does not chasten you in this way, Then you're bastards and not sons. You're illegitimate children. You're not really his children if he doesn't chasten you the way a father chastens his children. It's a grace. It's a mercy. It's a token of God's love. This affliction, in this woman's case, seems to have called to her mind some specific sin that she had buried in her past. We're given no clue about the nature of that sin. But it's interesting, she talks about calling my sin to remembrance. She's talking about a specific sin. She uses the singular noun. Whatever this sin was, it loomed large in her heart as she tried to come to grips with why she was being made to suffer such a painful tragedy. She believed it was related to her sin. It's interesting that she didn't think the way many people think when they suffer severe misfortune. She didn't insist that she didn't deserve such a harsh adversity. She didn't say, why me? She wasn't asking those sorts of questions. She didn't protest that it was unjust for her to suffer this way. She seemed to be confessing freely that she was sinful and completely deserving of God's wrath. but she was resentful of Elijah because she blamed him for living in her house so that God would focus his wrath so personally on her and so she's angry and yet even in the midst of that anger she is making a confession of her own sin it's also Worth noting here that in blaming Elijah, although she blames him for the tragedy, she does not seek to exonerate herself from the guilt and the responsibility of her own sin, whatever this sin may have been. Now notice surprise number three, Elijah's response. Verse 19, Verse 19, And he said unto her, Give me thy son. And he took him out of her bosom, and carried him up into a loft where he abode, and laid him upon his own bed. Now, in our introduction to this series, we talked about how Elijah was a man of strong passion. It was one of the things that characterized him. He was, on occasion, a hot-tempered man. When we get to the next chapter, We're going to see Elijah taking vengeance against the prophets of Baal by summarily killing 450 of Jezebel's favorite Baal priests. He just took up the sword and killed them all. In 2 Kings 1, he calls down fire from heaven twice, and each time he destroyed a company of 50 men. That's what I call a hot temper. It's also why the Lord didn't give me the power call down fire from heaven. I would have used it more than twice. But Elijah still was a fiery temper. He had little patience with sinful unbelief. You'll also see in the next chapter when he has this contest with the priests of Baal, he mocks them, he derides them. You can see the flashes of temper even as he engages in this contest to prove that Jehovah is the true God. He was not generally known for gentleness when he responded to the taunts and the challenges of unbelievers. But in this case his response is surprising. His answer to this grieving widow's angry outburst is the very model of a soft answer that turns away wrath. He took no notice whatsoever of her insulting and unkind words to him. His entire reply to her actually is only two words in the Hebrew, give me your son. And with that. He took that little boy's corpse and retired to his room in the attic of that woman's house, where he poured out his deepest passions before God alone. We might have expected a fiery prophet like Elijah to answer the widow firmly and maybe even harshly. but instead his response was tender and compassionate and gentle Elijah's own grief in this situation is obviously profound and in fact this is surprise number four Elijah's prayer verses 20 and 21 and he cried unto the Lord and said oh Lord my God has thou also brought evil upon the widow with whom I sojourn by slaying her son and he stretched himself upon the child three times and cried unto the Lord and said, O Lord my God, I pray thee, let this child's soul come into him again." That prayer is surprising for several reasons. Most notably, the boldness of Elijah's request. No one in the history of the world had ever died and then been resuscitated from the dead. This is the very first incident in all of scripture where a dead person came back to life it's remarkable that he had the faith to pray for this it took a an extraordinarily bold faith for Elijah to ask for such a thing it never happened in the history of the world but I want you to notice also the surprising way that he sought this miracle from God first he he did his praying entirely in private he didn't exploit the incident for publicity. He didn't make any public display of raising the boy from the dead. After the miracle occurred, even, he didn't parade this boy in public as an example of Elijah's miracle powers. Instead, he went through this entire ordeal in the privacy of his own loft, the most private venue he knew. In fact, Elijah seems to have deliberately prayed in complete solitude for this miracle. He didn't even invite the widow to join him in prayer. He took the matter to God alone. Remember, the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much, James 5.16. It's not necessary to enlist everybody you know to pray in order to get answers to your prayers. Neither will dragging private matters into a public venue. Matthew 6, 6, Jesus said, Thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret, and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. That was exactly Elijah's approach in this situation. What's even more remarkable about this prayer is the way Elijah took that dead child from his mother into his own heart. You kind of have to put yourself in the mind of an Old Testament Israelite to see how remarkable this is. Remember that in Old Testament Israel, the bodies of the dead were ceremonially defiling. And because this was such a defiling thing, the law expressly forbid priests from ever touching any dead bodies. Listen to Leviticus chapter 21, verses 1 through 4. And the Lord said unto Moses, Speak unto the priests, the sons of Aaron, and say unto them, There shall none be defiled for the dead among his people, but for his kin that is near to him, that is, for his mother, and for his father, and for his son, and for his daughter, and for his brother, and for his sister a virgin that is nigh unto him, which hath no husband, for her he may be defiled, but he shall not defile himself, being a chief man among his people, to profane himself. In other words, you'd never touch a dead body except for the family members who were responsible to prepare that body for burial. It's a thing that just was not done. So, by clasping this little boy's body to his heart, Elijah was breaking Jewish convention. But he was, in effect, accepting this widow and her little boy as if they were members of his own family. This was a tender and compassionate thing to do. He was bearing this woman's burden. He was sharing in her grief. He was identifying with her family. And ceremonial considerations would not deter him from this gesture of identification with that woman and her son. And so he clasped his body to his own heart, carried that lifeless boy up into the loft, laid him on his own bed, and there it says he stretched himself upon the child three times and cried unto the Lord here was total identification with this dead child in fact a generation later in similar circumstances Elijah's successor Elisha had occasion to pray for the life of another little boy who died second Kings 4 describes that incident and it says this Elisha went in and shut the door upon them twain and prayed unto the Lord and he went up And listen to what it means when it says he stretched himself out on him. It says, He lay upon the child, and put his mouth upon his mouth, and his eyes upon his eyes, and his hands upon his hands, and he stretched himself upon the child, and the flesh of the child became warm. That's the same picture we get of Elijah here, stretched out over the child, mouth-to-mouth, hands-to-hands, as if he himself wanted to breathe into that corpse the breath of life again, and as if the warmth of his own body could be transferred back to the cold corpse and revive this little boy. It's the ultimate picture of identification. And Elijah, meanwhile, passionately besought God, O Lord my God, I pray thee, let this child's soul come into him again. And may I point out what a perfect illustration this boy is of the plight of unbelievers in their unbelief. Scripture says that prior to our salvation, we were dead in trespasses and sins, Ephesians 2.1. Here's the very picture of death. This boy was no longer capable of responding to any stimulus, despite the intensity of his passions. Regardless of how many times he stretched himself out on that little boy or tried to warm his cold body, the corpse had no capacity whatsoever to respond. Only God could restore life to that little boy. And until God did restore the soul to the body, all of Elijah's techniques were utterly powerless to elicit a response. That's precisely how it is with unbelievers hearing the gospel. They're spiritually dead and nothing but the sovereign work of God in their hearts can awaken them from that state of walking death. All of our tender pleading, all of our evangelistic appeals, all of the gimmicks that we use to try to make the gospel more palatable to people, all of those things are fruitless unless God sovereignly regenerates that person. It's the work of God to raise them from the dead. We were not born again in response to our faith. If you think that you're born again because you believed and your new birth was a response to your faith, you've got it exactly backwards. It's the regenerating work of God in our hearts that elicits the response of faith. By grace, you're saved through faith. And that's not of yourselves. Even the faith doesn't come from within yourself. It is the gift of God. It's the work of God in you. It is God who raises us from that state of spiritual death. Now, someone will inevitably ask, then, what's the point of evangelism? What's the point of pleading with the lost to believe? Why should we expend any effort at all witnessing to people who have no capacity to respond unless God awakens them to faith? Well, you might as well ask why Elijah went through the motions of stretching himself out over this child. Could God have raised this child from the dead without Elijah's body heat? Of course he could. But these were the means through which God chose to work. He allowed Elijah to participate in this miracle. But that doesn't diminish the fact that the regenerating work was the work of God and God alone. So it is with our salvation. God uses external means. He employs His Word. He employs the Gospel message. He employs the pleadings of the evangelist with the unbeliever. He reasons with sinners to plead with them, to beseech them, to be reconciled with God. But apart from a miracle of regeneration, not one sinner would ever respond to the Gospel plea. Remember that when you're sharing the Gospel. And be sure to do what Elijah did here. Take your case to God and ask him to work the miracle of regeneration and to open that unbeliever's heart to receive the truth. Otherwise, you're merely pleading with a spiritual corpse. Elijah's prayer of faith was answered. And that, in fact, brings us to surprise number five, the child comes back to life. This is the biggest surprise of all. Again, it never happened in the history of the world. Verses 22 through 24. And the Lord heard the voice of Elijah, and the soul of the child came into him again, and he revived. And Elijah took the child and brought him down out of the chamber into the house and delivered him unto his mother. And Elijah said, See, thy son liveth. And the woman said to Elijah, Now by this I know that thou art a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in thy mouth is truth. Here was another astonishing turn of providence. The child comes back to life. And I'll confess to you that if I had been there, standing there watching this scene, I would have been thinking, it's utterly hopeless. Elijah, you're wasting your time. After all, why did God allow this little boy to die in the first place if his only purpose was to bring him back to life again? And by the way, I mentioned this earlier, let me say it again for any skeptics who are inclined to think that this was merely a near-death experience, and that Elijah raised the boy with a kind of rudimentary CPR treatment. The language of scripture is clear in this account. The boy was dead. His soul had departed from his body. Scripture couldn't be any more clear. He was really dead. This was the first ever case of anyone returning from the dead. Yet, Elijah's faith staggered not at the magnitude of the miracle that he was seeking from God. It's really amazing. But Elijah knew God to be a gracious, compassionate, and righteous God. And so he pleaded with God on the basis of those attributes. He couldn't fathom that it would be God's ultimate purpose to kill this widow's only son after she had shown hospitality to God's prophet. And so he was emboldened to pray that God would return this boy to life, and God graciously granted the miracle. Notice the woman's testimony. She says, Now by this I know that thou art a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in thy mouth is truth. now whether she was a genuine believer prior to this incident or not is not clear sunk some commentators say no others say yes it may be that She had exercised a kind of rudimentary faith. I said that earlier. But it's clear, whatever the case, that this miracle had the effect of strengthening her faith and deepening her assurance and bringing her to a point of rock-solid faith where she glorified God and testified with her mouth that His Word was true. What began as a dark providence and a painful tragedy ends with this woman glorifying God. I like Elijah's response. He just hands her the boy and says, look, your son lives. But you can bet that inside he was as deliriously grateful and happy as this widow. Now, before I close real quickly, I want to highlight a few practical lessons that we can draw from this passage, number one. The terms of providence, this is the big lesson, this is the whole point that I've been making and I hope you followed it, but the terms of providence that we experience are often unexpected and mysterious and beyond human scrutiny. We cannot always figure out why God does what he does. We cannot always predict what he will do and often he surprises us. Elijah was a prophet. But even even he did not see this coming. Even he did not seem to anticipate that this boy was going to die when the boy died. Elijah seemed as surprised as anyone about it. God's ways are not our ways, and when life takes unexpected turns, we would do well to remember that God's purposes are always good and his ways are always right, even when it seems to make no sense to us. Lesson number two. Lesson number two. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, and we should praise Him in either case. This woman had benefited from God's generous provision in the time of drought, but she had no right to interpret that as a guarantee that her life would be free from calamity from then on. God has as much right to afflict us as He does to bless us. And as I said, sometimes His greatest blessings come to us disguised as afflictions. John chapter 6, verse 49, Jesus says this to the Pharisees, Your fathers ate manna in the wilderness and they are dead. Let that one sink in for a minute. The manna was a temporal blessing to sustain life for a season, but the time came when every one of those Israelites died anyway. All of them. They feasted on manna for years, and yet, they died. Same is true of this woman and her son. God graciously kept their oil and flour from running out, but that didn't mean they would never die. God doesn't promise that all of his dealings with us will always be pleasant and easy. On the contrary, he actually assures us that trials and afflictions will be part of our lot. But he promises to give us grace to endure, and he commands us to trust him. And we have to learn to trust him in the dark times as well as in the seasons of good fortune. Lesson number three. Temporal blessings are nothing compared to spiritual blessings. Consider this. The time would eventually come when this boy would actually die again. He may have lived to adulthood. Scripture doesn't really tell us. Tradition says he became a lifelong servant of Elijah, and one of the ancient rabbinical traditions held that he became the prophet whom we know as Jonah. I think that's probably not true. and script because I because Jonah was a Jew and this guy was a Gentile the scripture doesn't tell us what happened to this boy but it is safe just to assume I think that at the end of his life he died just like everyone else in scripture except for Enoch and Elijah after all it's appointed on the man wants to die for this kid was appointed twice but the one enduring aspect of this miracle is seen in the faith of the widow. This was the greatest miracle of all, that this heart, once dead to the things of God, could be established in an unshakable faith, this rock-solid conviction that she testified that the Word of God is truth. That's the aspect of this miracle that bore eternal fruit. That was also vital to the real purpose of God when he brought this tragedy about in the first place. He was giving this woman not merely a temporal blessing, the restoration of her son's life, but an eternal blessing, a faith that couldn't be destroyed. It's always interesting, isn't it, to look back on an episode like this and marvel at the wisdom and goodness of God who can bring so much eternal good out of a moment of tragedy in this life. But real faith is to be able to trust Him in the midst of the tragedy, before we see the final outcome, and rest in the assurance that He does all things well. Let's pray. Lord, this entire account is such an uplift to our spirits, yet it starts as such a tragic story. Lord, may we have faith to see that Even during the dark providences in our lives, you are working for our good. Your ways are right, and we can trust you through every difficulty that life brings us. Give us faith to walk like that. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. We hope you've enjoyed this message from our pastor. 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