One day the widow of a member of
the group of prophets came to Elisha and cried out, “My husband who served you
is dead, and you know how he feared the Lord.
But now a creditor has come, threatening to take my two sons as slaves.” “What
can I do to help you?” Elisha asked. “Tell me, what do you have in the house?” Nothing
at all, except a flask of olive oil,” she replied. And Elisha said, “Borrow as many empty jars as you can from your
friends and neighbors. Then go into your house with your sons and shut the door
behind you. Pour olive oil from your flask into the jars, setting each one
aside when it is filled.”
So she did as she was told. Her
sons kept bringing jars to her, and she filled one after another. Soon every
container was full to the brim! ”Bring
me another jar,” she said to one of her sons. “There aren’t any more!” he told
her. And then the olive oil stopped flowing. When she told the man of God what
had happened, he said to her, “Now sell the olive oil and pay your debts, and
you and your sons can live on what is left over.” (2 Kings 4:1-7; NLT)
When you look at
this drawing, what do you see? Do you see an old hag with a big nose and an
even bigger chin? Or, do you see a younger woman in a mink stole, looking off
to the side with a flowing head scarf crowned with a feather? Maybe nothing at all?
And when Elisha asked the woman, “What can I do to help you?” did he ask the
question because he didn’t know how to help, or did he ask her the question
because he really didn’t want to help? Or, perhaps, could he have asked the
question to help give the woman some perspective about her circumstances so
that God could show her what he could do with the only thing she had left to
her name?
I don’t know of
anyone who hasn’t suffered, at least at one time or another, a lack of
necessary things in their lives. There are times in our lives when the cupboard’s
bare, the bank account’s empty, the creditors are screaming for payment, and there’s
nowhere to turn. We are, in a lot of ways, just like the woman in this story.
We lack what we need, and there’s no possible means of getting it anywhere except
from God. According to Jewish history, this widow was the wife of Obadiah.
Obadiah was a remarkable prophet who wrote the Old Testament book bearing his
name, but he’d also hidden other prophets, some 100 of them, in groups of fifty
in two caves during the time of King Ahab. Ahab and his wife, Jezebel, were real
doozies: they persecuted the prophets of God and had attempted to kill every single
one of them since their teaching didn’t agree with the king and queen’s
theology.
In other words,
the woman’s husband was well known and he was a very good man – one of 7,000
who hadn’t bowed their knee to Baal. (1 Kings 19:18) So, apparently, it was because
of the faithfulness of her husband that the woman in our story went to Elisha
for help. Obadiah wasn’t the kind of man who squandered his income. In fact, he
had done his dead-level best to supply the needs of his family and support the
work of the ministry. Ironically, it was his commitment to the work of the Lord
that likely played a very significant part in the debt that he owed after his
death because it appears that Obadiah had taken his own money and spent it in
support of the prophets of God that had gone into hiding in the caves. Jewish
tradition also suggests that Obadiah borrowed money, at considerable interest,
from Ahab’s son, Jehoram, to continue this ministry – which would explain the
creditor’s aggressive attempts to foreclose on the widow’s property since
Jehoram’s dad, King Ahab, and Obadiah weren’t exactly the best of friends. So,
it’s likely that the woman’s husband had supported a hundred prophets or more for
a long time by providing them with food and supplies. As a result? Well, it
should come as no surprise then that Obadiah had accumulated a fairly sizeable debt
– and then he dies.
To most of us
this scenario seems blatantly unfair. Here’s God’s man, doing God’s work,
taking care of God’s people and what help does he get from the God he’s
serving? Well, from the passage, he gets no help at all. Making matters even
worse, he dies and it’s his family that’s left to suffer, both emotionally and
financially. What kind of God would do that? But before you get too riled up, consider
that maybe this story of the widow and her two sons may be just what we need:
hope. Because if God can provide for the debt and need of this poor widow who’s
about to lose everything she owns, can’t he do the same for each of us? David
said in Psalms that “he had never seen the righteous forsaken or their children
begging for bread.” (Psalm 37:25) In other words, God takes care of his own.
Now the woman in
our story was probably pretty panicked since, apparently, she had tried to take
care of business on her own. But, by now, the debt was simply too great. It
would be like trying to push a boulder uphill. She had come to the end of her
rope and needed help, desperately. So, after trying every possible alternative,
she finally comes to Elisha asking for God’s help. Elisha, in response, asks
her what she needs. Now, if Obadiah had been with the group of prophets as our passage
says, and if Elisha was the group’s ostensible leader, it seems reasonable to
conclude that Elisha was probably pretty well aware of the woman’s financial
circumstances. So, why then would Elisha ask her what she needed when he knew
full well the personal and financial crises she was facing?
But what if that
wasn’t the nature of Elisha’s question at all? What if the real question wasn’t
so much, “How can I help you,” but “What can God use in your life to help you?”
But, if true, what tools, what assets, or what resources did the widow have that
God could use to rescue her from such dire circumstances? A little jar of olive
oil. That’d be like telling God that the only thing we had is a half-empty box
of Bisquick. But maybe Elisha was
attempting to shift the woman’s perspective away from the enormity of her
problem to the enormity of her God. Let’s face it, her house contained nothing
of value because anything of value had already been sold in an attempt to satisfy
the debt. All she had was the roof over her head, which would soon be taken by
the bank, and her children, which would soon be sold into slavery to pay the
debt for the roof over their heads: a vicious, tragic cycle about which this
woman had lost all hope. All she had was a small jar of olive oil which, at
this point, probably seemed as good as worthless. How’s a bottle of Bertolli’s going to fix this mess?
So what was
Elisha’s response? Did he tell her to go borrow money, rice, beans, cornmeal,
flour and all the necessities of life from those who had these things? No, Elisha
simply told her to get a bunch of empty bottles, jars and pots. But what good are
empty pots going do? I mean, at this point she’s probably thinking, “What kind
of crazy advice is this, anyway? This guy has spent WAY too much time in the
sun.” But there was wisdom in Elisha’s instruction since people would readily lend
her a few empty pots. Why? Well, because they’re empty. It would have been a
whole lot harder to convince her neighbors to give her leftovers in Tupperware containers since her
neighbors were probably poor just like her. And don’t forget, she was told to
collect as many pots as she could; kind of corner the market on empty pots which
would be a very bizarre investment strategy, if you ask me.
So, here’s a
woman who’s going to lose her home to foreclosure and her kids to slavery to
pay off an enormous debt that she can’t discharge through a Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
She’s like Old Mother Hubbard and
doesn’t have a morsel of food except for a small jar of oil. Now, all of a sudden,
she’s a pot collector. “Has she gone out of her mind?” a neighbor probably whispered.
“She must be some sort of crackpot!” “No,” another responds, “it’s just the
stress has finally gotten to her.” You know, sometimes we get into bad habits and
then expect God to change them. But if we really want to see God’s miracles
working in our lives, then we have to get alone with God, just like the widow
was encouraged to do by shutting the door behind her and her sons. Unfortunately,
the problem that many of us have is that we ask God to answer our prayers, but
then don’t stick around long enough to hear what he has to say.
God wanted this
widow and her sons to be alone in the house while the miracle was unfolding.
They didn’t need the interruption of bill collectors coming in on them to
destroy God’s moment of victory. They didn’t need their neighbors coming by to
get a share of the blessings, or reclaim their pots and jars when they were
full of oil. The source of our blessing, like hers, is from one place, one
person only, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. It may come to us in a
multitude of ways, but it only comes from one source. The widow’s oil was to be
poured out of one single pot, or flask, into all the pots that she and her boys
had managed to scrounge up in the neighborhood. Each time a pot was filled it
was to be set aside by itself, and the rest of the empty ones were to be filled,
one by one. You see, God wants us to remember his provision and his blessing.
We are to keep it near us, always on our minds. That way, when the next time
comes and we have a need, we will remember what God has done for us in the past.
This, in turn, gives us faith and hope for the future.
So, one by one
she filled the empty pots. One by one the pots were filled up and then set
aside. Can you imagine what she felt like when she took a large pot and filled
it from a smaller one, and the small one was still full? Can you imagine her
frantic efforts to get the pots filled as quickly as possible before the oil
ran out? Eventually, she started running out of pots, not oil. The empty pots
were now all full, and the oil jar with which she started was still full. Seems
like you just can’t exhaust God’s pot of blessings. His source is never-ending.
As long as we have room to receive it, he will keep pouring it in. Our ability
to handle it, and to hold it, on the other hand, is the only limiting factor. So,
can you just imagine as the woman, perhaps desperately, starts looking around
to find every available pot she could find. “Throw out those flowers and dump
the dirt.” “Empty out the trash can and let’s fill that too!” “Empty the
bathtub and fill it up!” “Empty the swimming pool and let’s fill that.” And the
oil kept coming and kept coming and kept coming.
This woman had
never dreamed that she would be striking it rich with an oil well in a clay pot.
But there it was, and she had no place left to pour it out for storage. And, once
she ran out of pots to fill, the flow of oil stopped, too. It stopped
multiplying. Just think if she had only known how much more oil she could have
had? Had she known what was going to happen, how many more empty pots could she
have found if she had really tried, or if her boys had really hunted them down?
Would the widow have traveled far and wide to more and more neighbors before
she came home again? Probably. But, it was too late now. The unending supply of
oil came to a stop. God had given her oil in abundance, and would have
continued to give her more, but she couldn’t receive any more so the giving
stopped.
I believe that’s
the way that God wants to pour out his blessings on each of us. His mercy, his
love, his grace, his provision for our every need is there if we have a vessel
that is empty and ready to receive his gifts. But God won’t pour his blessings
into a vessel that is still filled with the cares of life, and the love of this
world and its sin. God is looking for empty pots to fill. And God not only
wants to fill our empty pots, but he wants us to go to every one of our family members
and neighbors and search out their empty pots as well. So, why not bring them
into the house with us. And then? Then shut the door against sin and the world
and allow God to continue pouring out his oil of gladness and his grace and
mercy upon them, too.
So, what’s your
crisis? Have you lost your perspective? Have you cried out to God for help and
brought him your emptiness so that he can fill it brim-full with blessing? If
not, maybe it’s time to empty the pot since, obviously, it hasn’t been working very
well for you lately. Try using God’s economy: less is more. In other words,
empty yourself of you so that God can fill you with him. God loves pots, even
cracked pots like you and me.
Grace,
Randy
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