00:00
00:00
00:01
Transcript
1/0
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. We have a variety
of resources to help you grow in the knowledge of God's Word.
If you would like to enroll in our sermon library or simply
learn more about sword and trowel, please visit us online at www.swordandtrowel.org. That's www.swordandtrowel.org. Again, the web address is www.swordandtrowel.org.
Lessons From A Dark Providence
Series Prophet of Fire
Elijah was a man with a nature like ours — James 5:17
Phil Johnson examines the life and times of Elijah is a series of vignettes that capture the prophet's true greatness while also weighing Elijah's struggles in a straightforward, candid way. You'll be encouraged and strengthened to learn that the real secret to Elijah's greatness was not anything remarkable about the man himself, but the remarkable God he served.
| Sermon ID | 72111154186 |
| Duration | 42:05 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday Service |
| Language | English |
Documents
Add a Comment
Comments
© Copyright
2026 SermonAudio.