CHAPTER VI.
Womanhood in the Time of the Prophets and During the Captivity.
The Wicked Jezebel—The Widow of Sarepta—The Tishbite at the City Gate—His Strange Request—The Widow’s Unfaltering Obedience—An Appeal to Elisha—A Pot of Oil—The Widow’s Wonderful Faith—The Rich Woman of Shunem—Her Modest Life—Barley Harvest—A Ride to Carmel in the Glare of the Sun—Esther—Her Beautiful Traits of Character—Crowned as Queen—Pleading for the Life of Her People—Found Favor with the King.
The glory of the united kingdom of Israel, described in the last chapter, in a few years departed as a dream of the night. It was rent in twain, and Ahab, the wicked king, was on the throne of the northern kingdom, with the seat of government in Samaria. He had married Jezebel, the daughter of Ethbaal, King of Sidon, and she had introduced into the kingdom of Israel the heathen abominations of the Sidonians. She had even torn down God’s altars, and persecuted his prophets to the death. And it seems that too many of the Israelites raised little or no protests against these wicked acts of Jezebel. Indeed, one of the reasons why the kingdom, after the death of Solomon, was wrenched from Rehoboam, his son, was the people worshipped Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Sidonians.
So grievous had these abominations of the Sidonians become, that God was about to visit the nation with judgment. But, as He always sends warnings, and gives a season to repent, so he sent Elijah, the Tishbite, from the hill country of Gilead down to Ahab in Samaria, with this message, “As the Lord God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.” And James tells us, “it rained not upon the earth for the space of three years and six months.”
During these years of famine, the Lord directed Elijah to a widow in Sarepta, after the waters of the brook of Cherith had dried up. Sarepta (or Zarephath) was a city of Phœnicia. But the distress of the famine in Israel was felt even here, for Israel was the great grain field for Phœnicia. And this explains why Elijah, when he came to the city gate of Sarepta, found a poor woman, a widow, gathering a few sticks, that she might bake the last morsel of bread and share it with her child, after which there was nothing more to hope for. The famine was doing its awful work among the cities of the coast. The hills back of Sarepta were scorched, and the beautiful valleys on either side of the city were cracked in great fissures. In her distress this widow, in her person had wasted to a skeleton, faltering, trembling, as she staggered out to gather a few sticks to bake her last cake for self and child, and then to die. Her cheeks were sunken, her eyes hollow, and her nerves seem never to have known what rest meant. As she walked she staggered; when she stood she reeled. She was leaning against her gate, the sticks in her arms when the Tishbite saluted her with the request, “Fetch me, I pray thee, a drink of water.”
In a moment she was going toward her water pot. “Bring me, I pray thee, a morsel of bread in thy hand,” the prophet called after her while on the way to get the water.
“Bread!” Distressed and sorely tried, the poor woman breaks down, and discloses the sad condition of her home in the ever-memorable words, “As the Lord thy God liveth, I have not a cake, but a handful of meal in a barrel and a little oil in a cruse, and behold, I am gathering two sticks that I may go and dress it for me and my son, that we may eat it and die.”
She may or she may not have been an Israelite. She may have been one of the seven thousand who had not bowed unto Baal, and possibly knew who it was who addressed her. At all events she must have heard of this “lighted fire-brand, fallen out of the clouds, and hurled by the hand of Jehovah” at the wicked Ahab. She may even have heard that in the midst of the drought Ahab had divided the country between himself and Obadiah, to seek if possible, amidst its former fountains and brooks a little “grass to save his horses and mules alive,” though it did not matter to this hardened wretch of a king if his subjects died by the thousands. So this demand of Elijah must have been a real trial to her faith. Nor did her distressed condition change the demand of the Tishbite. “Do as thou hast said,” he commanded, “but bake me a little cake first!” What, serve this stranger from Gilead before her starving child? Surely how could she, with her mother heart, obey such an order? But, noble woman, staggering under the request, she placed the gathered sticks on the fire, went to the barrel and took out the last handful of meal, and poured the last drop of oil from the cruse, and baked for God’s prophet the cake, and served him first! Was there ever such unselfish self-surrender? But for her poverty and her appearance, she might have passed for an angel who had strayed away from heaven, got caught in the famine and could not find her way back. If God had not been behind this exorbitant demand of the prophet it had been simply heartless. But, along with the demand were the words, “for the Lord God of Israel hath said it.” If God said it, that was the end of all questionings, this angel in human form, reduced in her poverty, staggered off to meet the demand. There may have been no small stir in heaven when it became known that she had gone to bake her last cake for the man of God, and then to die without tasting it herself. If the jasper walls had that moment let down around her, and all the glorified had gathered about that oven, she would have felt perfectly at home without a change of raiment. But that “last cake” was never baked. As the trembling widow stood by the heated oven, in sublime obedience to God’s requirement, even as Abraham once stood by his altar fires on Moriah, with the bound Isaac upon it, there came the gracious “Fear not!” She had gone to a point in her faith where God always breaks down. He saw it all, and out of divine compassion He answered, “The barrel of meal shall not waste, neither shall the cruse of oil fail, until the day that the Lord sendeth rain upon the earth.” And the record goes on to say that she, and the prophet, and her house, had enough through the years of the famine. There was so much meal and oil that even the widow’s poor and starving relations came to partake thereof. That is the way God blesses—it always overflows upon others.
How this incident at Sarepta glorifies God, whom the Scripture teaches us to know in His unapproachable greatness and in His affable mercy and condescension! As we sat by the little brook in Sarepta, amid the noontide glow of an Oriental sun, and read afresh this charming story, and then raised our eyes to look on the little chapel which the crusaders had erected on the reputed site of the widow’s home, the thought of such a God flooded us with His precious nearness, for, in our human needs, we love to feel His comforting presence in our hearts. The Jehovah, the Almighty God, the maker of worlds, the ruler of systems beyond human vision, whose perfect will is done in heaven by angels, who holdeth the dew of heaven, the rain in the clouds, the waters of the oceans in His hands, who gives and withholds the needed bread and water, He is our Father, and exercises a father’s care, so that the individual is not forgotten of Him. He holds not only the whole, but the single parts; He looks not only into the palace of kings, but into the cottages of poverty. The need and misery of a poor widow are not too insignificant for Him; He observes her sighs and tears, and her silent, desolate cottage is for Him a place worthy of the revelation of His glory and goodness.
Matchless widow of Sarepta! As long as the name of Elijah lives, with its imperishable renown, so long shall thine be found side by side with it in the unfading annals of the church of God!