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Elijah comes on the scene in 1 Kings 17. He just drops out of nowhere. And the first thing that he does is he announces a drought. Jesus said here in verse 25 that the sky was shut up for three and...three years and six months. It doesn't say that in 1 Kings, it does say that here and it says it in James 5:17, it refers to the same occasion, so we know it was a three and a half year drought. No rain in Israel for three and a half years. The result, the end of verse 25: "When a great famine came over all the land." You've got a lot of widows in the land. Now God cares about widows. There's all kinds of instruction in the Old Testament to take care of widows. Exodus 22, Deuteronomy 10, through the Psalms, Isaiah 1, many, many places and God has a special heart for widows. God in Psalm 68:5 is called "The God who is the defender of widows." Psalm 146:9, "God, the Lord who relieves widows." And He instructed the people to care for the widows and that was a very important part of living out godly righteous life. Even in the New Testament, the New Testament enjoins upon Christians to take care of widows because they are of particular care in the mind of God. So God cared for widows. So it's a time in Israel, apostate, they're worshiping Baal, they've turned from the true God, the true and living God, they're worshiping false gods. There are many widows. God sends a judgment on Ahab, a judgment on Israel and it's a three and a half year drought. And a three and a half year drought produces a famine, people start to die. The people who are at the bottom of the food chain are the widows because they're charity cases. The people dependent on charity suffer the worst because the people who give to charity only have enough to survive. So the people at the end of the food chain get nothing, so widows are on the brink of death. Widows are dying, the special care of God are these widows, not enough food to feed your own children let alone to give it away to some widow. That’s the situation. That is a judgment of God. First Kings 17, that judgment comes through Elijah, he drops on the scene out of nowhere and he announces this judgment. The judgment comes and it is a judgment on the idolatry, the Baal worship of Ahab and the people of Israel.

Now it says, verse 26, "And Elijah was sent to none of them." You know, the Jews didn't like this story, I can tell you, and as Jesus starts to tell it, they start to get angry. Why is He bringing that ugly story up? God, the God of the fatherless and the widow, God, the God who cares about the widows, there was a famine in the land for three and a half years and the people were dying and the widows were dying and God never cared for any of the widows. We don't like that story at all. They were familiar, believe me, with 1 Kings 17, very familiar with it. And if you think that was bad, that Elijah was sent to none of those Jewish widows, this was worse. He was sent to Zarephath in the land of Sidon to a woman who was a widow there. Now this is worse. Why? This woman in the land of Sidon, hang on, is a Gentile. It's bad enough to be a woman in Jewish tradition at this time, it's far worse to be a Gentile woman. But to come from Sidon, that is unthinkable. How could God ignore the Jews of Israel? But then how could He possibly send His prophet to go minister to a Gentile widow in, of all places, Sidon? Sidon was Gentile territory on the north coast of Israel, Tyre and Sidon, the two familiar cities. Tyre and Sidon in that Gentile region, Zarephath was a town in between the two, Tyre and Sidon, a Phoenician city. The area was the home... This is even more amazing. The area was the home of the father of Jezebel. You know what his name was? Ethbaal, he was so devoted to Baal He named himself after Baal. Ethbaal means "Baal is alive." And Ethbaal was such a wicked man he murdered his predecessor and he was a priest as well as being a king. He was the king of Phoenicia, Tyre and Sidon, he was the king, he was a Baal-worshiping king, he was also a priest in the temple of Melqart and Astarte, two of the deities in the pantheon of Baal worship. This is the most wretched thing imaginable. This is the father of the apos...of the apostasy, in a sense, in Israel because he's the father of Jezebel who came and polluted Israel worship when she married Ahab, and so forth. And so here God sends His prophet to a woman from the home region of Jezebel, a Gentile widow. That famine... That area, by the way, was also affected by the famine. Food supply was low. Well, if you go back to 1 Kings 17, I don't have time, you're going to hang with me now, another few minutes, because we can't break this off, I'm not going to get to speak to you for a while, we've got to cover this, this is so powerful.

So if you look at 1 Kings 17 you see the story. God sends Elijah in this midst of all this famine over to Zarephath, to this widow. This is a widow who believes in the true God. The text of 1 Kings 17 indicates that. She says, "The Lord God of Israel lives." She gives testimony. Somebody had witnessed to her about the true God of Israel and she trusted in the true God of Israel. She is a pagan Gentile widow in the midst of a pagan godless area but believes in the true and living God. And so to her goes the prophet of God rather than to Israelites. Her food supply was down to one little bit of flour and one little bit of oil, enough to make one cake, right? One scone, if you will, one biscuit. And the prophet comes to her and you can read the story in 1 Kings 17, I wish we had time to do it, we don't. And he says to her, first of all, "Could you get me some water?" Huh. And then he says when she's going to get the water, "Can you also take what you’ve got left and make me a meal?" Huh. This is a stranger, she's never met this guy in her entire life, he walks in and says, "Take what you've got, that's all you've got and make me a meal, I am the man of God, I am from the God of Israel." She knows the God of Israel lives. She says it, "The Lord God of Israel lives." Well, I'm from the God of Israel and I'm going to ask you, if you will, to take all that you have left, your last meal before you die, starve to death, and she had a son as well, and give it to me.

Now, you know, if she had been in the synagogue at Nazareth, she would have probably said, "Oh no, no, no. Aha, not on your life. How do I know you're a man of God? How do I know whether you're going to take that one thing and you're going to do with that one thing something that's going to provide for me all the rest of my life? How do I know that I can trust you? Could you please fly up in the air and spin around, could you do a few healings? Could you do some magic somewhere? I need to see something so that I can believe."

That wouldn't have proved anything if he had spun up in the air and done some amazing things, if he had done some healings or whatever, it wouldn't have proven anything. The only way she would ever know whether God would supply all she ever needed was to take the little that she had and trust it to him. She figured that out, by the way. She wasn't in the synagogue in Nazareth and it was probably a good thing or she might have been influenced by the crowd attitude. She probably thought like this, "Well, I only have one little cup left, one little bit of oil, that's all I've got. If I give it to him and he is a man of God, then I'll have life. And if he's not, I'll just have one less meal and die half a day sooner. I'm going to die anyway, what have I got to lose?" Pretty good thinking, isn't it? "All I've got is one meal left. I'm destitute. I'm desperate. I'm in poverty. I have nowhere to turn. If I don't trust the God of Israel who lives, if I don't trust the man of God, I'm dead anyway, what's half a day longer? But if he is the man of God, and if God did send him, then I have life." The only way she would ever know was not if he went up in the air and spun around a few times, not if he went out and healed some people, the only way she would ever know that the God of Israel would give her all she would ever need was if she took what she had in her poverty and trusted him with it. She did.

And you remember the story? She made the little cake, the prophet ate it and the next thing that happened was her barrel was never empty. Remember that? It just was supernaturally filled all the time. And the cruse of oil was never empty. It just kept getting filled and filled and filled. That's an analogy of spiritual life and supply. She took the little that she had, she gave it to the man of God and in return she got life, permanent life. And then...and the Lord did another amazing thing. Her son got sick and died, remember? And he raised her son from the dead just because she trusted the tiny bit that she had. She knew that she was the poor, the prisoner, blind, and the oppressed. And Jesus was saying to those Jews, "Let me tell you something, you may be Jews, you may be part of Israel, you may be the people of the covenants and the people of the Messiah, but I'll tell you this, God will save an outcast Gentile widow who admits her spiritual destitution before He'll save you."

believe, it still works that way.

(taken from John MacArthur's sermon)