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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 341. The Prophet and the Widow
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The Prophet and the Widow
In the heat of Elijah's conflict, how strange, how significant that “truce of God,” when Jehovah's champion, in the hour of defeat, is directed to accept the hospitality of one whom his experience taught him to regard as a born enemy of God! No doubt Elijah needed the softening of such an association lest the wine of earnestness should ferment into the vinegar of bigotry. In that strangely peaceful interlude of Elijah's stormy career, when the stern monotheist lived upon the charity of the poor idolatress, we see Providence teaching him, and teaching us, that humanity is a true service of God; that the ignorant devotees of a false religion are by no means God's enemies; that the deeds of benevolence are a worship which God accepts of those from whom His name is hidden; that the servant of God must not disown the obligations of charity to those whose sin he must sternly reprove. Elijah learnt to sympathize with one of another race and a strange religion, and his stern nature was in some degree softened by contact with human suffering. He rewarded the widow's charity first by miraculously increasing her small store of meal and oil, and later by restoring her child to life. His experience began to prepare him for a higher revelation, which he was in due time to receive.
The prophets and saints of God do not always understand the meaning of Providence or the lessons of their Divine training. Francis of Assisi at first entirely misunderstood the real drift and meaning of the Divine intimations that he was to rebuild the ruined Church of God, which he afterwards so gloriously fulfilled. The thoughts of God are not as man's thoughts, nor His ways as man's ways. The education of Elijah was far from complete even long afterwards. To the very last, if we are to accept the records of him as historically literal, amid the revelations vouchsafed to him he had not grasped the truth that the Elijah-spirit, however needful it may seem to be, differs very widely from the Spirit of the Lord of Life. Yet may it not have been that Elijah was sent to learn from the kind ministrations of a Sidonian widow, to whose care his life was due, some inkling of those truths which Christ revealed so many centuries afterwards, when He visited the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, and extended His mercy to the great faith of the Syro-Phœnician woman? May not Elijah have been meant to learn what had to be taught by experience to the two great Apostles of the Circumcision and the Uncircumcision, that not every Baal-worshipper was necessarily corrupt or wholly insincere? St. Peter was thus taught that God is no respecter of persons, and that whether their religious belief be false or true, in every nation he that feareth Him and doeth righteousness is accepted of Him. St. Paul learnt at Damascus and taught at Athens that God made of one blood every nation of men to dwell on the face of the earth, that they should seek God if haply they might feel after Him and find Him, though He be not far from every one of us.1 [Note: F. W. Farrar.]
2. Elijah might well have thought that God had sent him to a strange helper in this poor widow with her empty cupboard; and it must have taken some faith on his part to reassure her with his cheery “Fear not!” The prediction of the undiminishing stores demanded as much faith from its speaker as from its hearer, and the raising of the widow's dead son even more. The woman had a firmer faith in Elijah than ever after she received her son alive at his hands; but Elijah himself had more confidence than ever in his God. It was by such experiences as these that Jehovah was training His servant up to that sublimity of faith and courage which he evinced on Mount Carmel, when he confronted Ahab and the priests and prophets of Baal. It was easy for him to ask fire to come down and consume his sacrifice, after he had seen God restore a dead child to life in response to his entreaty.
People commonly assume that religious faith consists in holding an intricate and complicated system of beliefs. The real process is both simpler and more difficult. Faith has first to shine within us, giving light to all the blind gropings, the immature instincts, the faltering affirmations, which are the chaotic fragments of a spiritual nature; all the hopes, questionings, presentiments, doubts, aspirations, which, at the shining of that light, are to come to a knowledge of themselves, and find their own meaning and value as a living experience of God. In the light and fire of this experience, faith itself will be purified and chastened, and will emerge from it as a knowledge of God.1 [Note: A. Chandler, Faith and Experience.]
I have lately been reading R. H. Hutton's Modern Guides of English Thought in Matters of Faith. Carlyle, Newman, and Maurice are to my mind the men best worth studying-and for this reason: they are all in earnest. All these three men subordinated everything to the thought of the supreme direction of God. No doubt their conceptions of God were very different. It was perhaps impossible for anyone so totally devoid of humility as Carlyle to be a Christian. God was in his eyes the Schoolmaster of the Universe whose first care was for discipline. Carlyle himself was “the good boy” of the school who was never weary of preaching to his comrades that they would “catch it.” But he was “terribly in earnest.” He believed in law and order, and never lost sight of discipline. Maurice had taken to heart, perhaps more than any other man of this century, “God is love”; and, as in all these men truth is “touched by emotion,” he devoted his life to proclaiming the conviction. Newman has felt that there were only two existences that concerned him, God and himself; and his life has been a long and strenuous preparation for eternity. All these have been influenced throughout life by their faith, and belief is the true cure for all the lowering influences which act upon us. It seems to me that Christians who squabble about forms of Christianity are like people in the following fable. In an eastern city the plague was raging. A great doctor came from a foreign country and gave the doctors of the city an elixir which was a specific for the plague. The doctors approved it and announced that they were going to administer it, but unfortunately, instead of setting to work to dispense it, they took to quarrelling and wrangling about the shape of the glass in which the elixir should be given, and every one to hear them would have thought that the virtue lay not in the elixir, but the glass.1 [Note: Life and Remains of the Rev. R. H. Quick, 111.]