As the summer heat finally relents here in North Texas, we are looking at the life of Elisha. Elisha shows us how to remain faithful during challenging times.
There is a lot to like about Elisha during the super challenging times he lived. Elisha was a godly man in a time when so many people just didn’t care about God. Watch his heart on display carefully. Watch him carefully as he protects widows and orphans and feeds the hungry.
The Lord uses this man greatly. Find 2 Kings 4 with me if you will. As we will see, Elisha is God’s man in a time when the majority of people are apathetic about God.
Today’s Scripture
“Now the wife of one of the sons of the prophets cried to Elisha, “Your servant my husband is dead, and you know that your servant feared the Lord, but the creditor has come to take my two children to be his slaves.” And Elisha said to her, “What shall I do for you? Tell me; what have you in the house?” And she said, “Your servant has nothing in the house except a jar of oil.” Then he said, “Go outside, borrow vessels from all your neighbors, empty vessels and not too few. Then go in and shut the door behind yourself and your sons and pour into all these vessels. And when one is full, set it aside.” So she went from him and shut the door behind herself and her sons. And as she poured they brought the vessels to her. When the vessels were full, she said to her son, “Bring me another vessel.” And he said to her, “There is not another.” Then the oil stopped flowing. She came and told the man of God, and he said, “Go, sell the oil and pay your debts, and you and your sons can live on the rest” (2 Kings 4:1-7).
“And Elisha came again to Gilgal when there was a famine in the land. And as the sons of the prophets were sitting before him, he said to his servant, “Set on the large pot, and boil stew for the sons of the prophets.” 39 One of them went out into the field to gather herbs, and found a wild vine and gathered from it his lap full of wild gourds, and came and cut them up into the pot of stew, not knowing what they were. And they poured out some for the men to eat. But while they were eating of the stew, they cried out, “O man of God, there is death in the pot!” And they could not eat it. He said, “Then bring flour.” And he threw it into the pot and said, “Pour some out for the men, that they may eat.” And there was no harm in the pot.
A man came from Baal-shalishah, bringing the man of God bread of the firstfruits, twenty loaves of barley and fresh ears of grain in his sack. And Elisha said, “Give to the men, that they may eat.” But his servant said, “How can I set this before a hundred men?” So he repeated, “Give them to the men, that they may eat, for thus says the Lord, ‘They shall eat and have some left.’” So he set it before them. And they ate and had some left, according to the word of the Lord” (2 Kings 4:38-44).
We will get into this in the moments to come, but Elisha is a bright light in this really dark time. Now, we will see three storylines with Elisha this morning.
Sitcoms do this all the time. Your average 22-minute sitcom has story A and story B and they cut back and forth between the two stories to keep you interested. Take the sitcom, Young Sheldon, the first story may be where Sheldon’s father, George loses his job. While the second story features his Meemaw (it’s set in Texas) and his brother, Georgie are arrested on the border. We are going to see that the Bible shows Elisha’s life along 3 storylines that complement and contrast one another.
Let’s jump in.
1. A Desperate Time
“Now the wife of one of the sons of the prophets cried to Elisha, “Your servant my husband is dead, and you know that your servant feared the Lord, but the creditor has come to take my two children to be his slaves” (2 Kings 4:1).
1.1 Story #1: The Prophet’s Widow
In our first story, we find a woman who is in double desperation. Here is a woman who is in emotional pain. And her emotional pain is only compounded by her financial pain. No sooner has her husband died than bill collectors have shown up. And they are not just calling her house nonstop. Instead, they are threatening to take her two sons.1
Now that she is a widow, her sons are her means of support, her lifeline. Her sons are to be taken as slaves in payment of debt. I want to remind you in those days there was no life insurance, no 401K retirement plan, no social security, no welfare system, and no “safety net.” The only things arriving in her mailbox were unpaid bills, eviction notices, and threatening letters. This woman was totally destitute, totally on her own with no hope or help in sight. Again, she is in double desperation.
1.2 Story #2: Death in the Pot
In our second story, there is a famine. Just like with our widow before, it’s the sons of the prophets who were suffering. These men were sitting before Elisha, and I think we are to think of young preachers/pastors sitting in class with their professor. It was evident to all that they were hungry. So, Elisha tells a servant to make a pot of stew for the men. One goes into the field to gather items for the stew, but he grabs fruit from a wild, poisonous vine. One taste of the stew and someone cries out, “…there is death in the pot!”
1.3 Story #3: Feeding 100 Men
Leaving the desperate widow and the poisonous stew, Elisha is brought some bread and some grain.
Yet, there are 100 men who starving for food and only 20 loaves of bread and some grain. What does a father or mother do when there is not enough to feed everyone? We hear the word famine, and we may think they are missing a meal or two. Around this time, one mother approached the king with a problem. She told of how two mothers concocted a plan because they were so hungry where they would eat one child one day and the other child the next. Only after doing this unspeakable thing, the other mother hid her son (2 Kings 6:24-31). These were desperate times for sure.
1.4 Desperation All-Around
The Bible says there was famine and it’s likely the famine was God’s way to tell His people He wasn’t pleased with them (2 Kings 4:38). God was sending desperate times to make His people desperate for Him. Now, Elisha’s day is around 850 to 800 years before Jesus Christ. It is a really dark time for God’s people when Elisha lives. The majority of people try to combine a biblical belief in God with a belief in the god, Baal.
Academics call this practice syncretism, where you seek to combine two incompatible beliefs at one time. This goes on all the time in America. Some might live for the Lord on Sunday and live for the gods of this world for the remainder of the week. We compartmentalize our faith by seeking to keep God hermetically sealed off from our real lives. We read the Bible with our grandmother at the table but do drugs with our friends. We listen to a story about Daniel in the lion’s den but our mind is thinking about our next hookup.
1.4.1 Syncretism
Again, syncretism is where you blend opposing religious principles and practices in hopes of merging these. Baal was lord of the vine and god of fertility so he seemed like more fun than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.2 And it’s easy to see why.
To worship this false god, you would drink until you were drunk because he was the lord of the vine. And to worship this false god, you would engage in sexual intercourse with prostitutes in order to promote fertility because he was the god of fertility.
Imagine coming to “church” and engaging in some kind of sexual act as an act of so-called worship and you get the idea. In the practice of worshipping other gods, the people of Israel would come to the Valley of Hinnom just outside of Jerusalem and sacrifice their children. In their worship of a god named Molech, parents would place their children on “fireplaces” and you can figure out how these precious children died.
So, the people were combining their belief in God and their belief in other gods.
They thought you could mix religious beliefs like mixing flavors of ice cream.
God hates this kind of thing because He has taken the time to tell us exactly what we need to honor Him and to protect us.
Again, God sent desperate times to make them desperate for Him.
1.4.2 No Evacuation
But notice in our three stories, godly people were suffering. Good people were just as desperate as anyone else during the famine. When God sends desperate times, God’s people suffer with everyone else. If an invader invades, the godly are not evacuated. When a famine comes, God doesn’t send a helicopter to rescue His chosen. They suffer just like everyone else.
1. A Desperate Time
2. A Display of Faith
“So she went from him and shut the door behind herself and her sons. And as she poured they brought the vessels to her. When the vessels were full, she said to her son, ‘Bring me another vessel.’ And he said to her, ‘There is not another.’ Then the oil stopped flowing” (2 Kings 4:5-6).
2.1 Admiring Their Faith
Two Nuns served as nurses, and they would go about helping people in different remote areas. And one day, they were called to the countryside to help a person who was bedridden, and so they went and ministered to him. On the way back to town, they ran out of gas. They didn’t know what to do since they were out in the middle of nowhere. All of a sudden, a truck came by, and they flagged down the truck. The man noticed that they had run out of gas. He said, “I’d give you some gas that I have in my truck, but I don’t have a container for it.” He then said, “Do you have a container, something we could drain some gas in?” And so they rummaged through the trunk, and one of the nuns pulled out a bedpan. And she said, “Would this work?” And he said, “Well yeah, that’ll hold the gas.” And so he drained some gas into the bedpan and filled it all up about 2 quarts worth in this pan. As the man left, these two nuns were carefully pouring the contents into the gas tank from a bedpan on the side of the road. Just then, a highway patrolman comes by, and he sees them doing this and shakes his head, saying, “I do admire your faith.”
Faith is not tilting at windmills. Let me show you why.
In each of our 3 stories, God asks for a show of faith.
2.2 Back to the Widow
The widow had pleaded for help to save her two sons from being taken to pay her debt. Elisha gives her careful plans: “Go outside, borrow vessels from all your neighbors, empty vessels and not too few. Then go in and shut the door behind yourself and your sons and pour into all these vessels. And when one is full, set it aside” (2 Kings 4:3b-4).
No sooner has those words left his mouth than we find the widow alone doing exactly what she was told: “So she went from him and shut the door behind herself and her sons. And as she poured they brought the vessels to her. When the vessels were full, she said to her son, ‘Bring me another vessel.’ And he said to her, ‘There is not another.’ Then the oil stopped flowing”” (2 Kings 4:5-6).
2.2.1 Imagine the Scene
Imagine the scene. You would expect this desperate widow to be running around town begging for money or for food. Instead, she comes knocking on your door asking for empty containers. Can you see it? A knock on your door, and you answer it. “What can I do for you son? You want to borrow what? Honey, do we have any empty containers around the house!?”
2.2.2 Oil Everywhere
Where there was once a very limited amount of oil, she now pours until there is no more containers. Where once there was little, now there is abundance. Her meager little house was simply filled with vessels full of oil. There was oil everywhere you looked!
Before any miracle took place, the widow and her sons were to act on faith.
2.3 Flour in the Pot
Remember, in our second story, all these hungry men, sons of the prophets, were famished. A stew was prepared but someone had inadvertently poisoned the stew. They had picked poisonous fruit from the field, and the stew was ruined. Just there, Elisha says, “Then bring flour.” And he threw it into the pot and said, “Pour some out for the men, that they may eat” (2 Kings 4:41a). Before any miracle took place, the prophets were to act on faith.
2.4 Leftovers
And Elisha said, “Give to the men, that they may eat.” But his servant said, “How can I set this before a hundred men?” So he repeated, “Give them to the men, that they may eat, for thus says the Lord, ‘They shall eat and have some left.’” So he set it before them. And they ate and had some left, according to the word of the Lord” (2 Kings 4:38-44).
Have you ever been so desperate that you’ve said, “God, I need a miracle!”? Some 800 years later, Jesus had thousands of people sitting before Him. There was no place to go for food for this many people in such a remote location. Jesus asks Philip, “Where are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat” (John 6:5b)? Note that Luke tells us that while Jesus and the Twelve were in the desert, the nearest town to them was Bethsaida. Bethsaida was Philip’s hometown. Philip knew the area well and knew there was nothing around there to feed 5,000 men. Plus, how much would such an amount of food cost? It would take half of a year’s wages to pay for food they needed to provide for just one meal for all these people.3
Today, the average income of an average home in our city is just over $69,000.4 Think of your home and shelling out around $35,000 to pay for a meal.
It was Andrew who spotted the boy and his sack lunch. In all three of these situations and the one in Jesus’ day, God asks for His people to act in faith before the miracle arrives. While the miracle is on its way, God asks you to step out in faith.
1. A Desperate Time
2. A Display of Faith
3. A Touch from God
“She came and told the man of God, and he said, “Go, sell the oil and pay your debts, and you and your sons can live on the rest” (2 Kings 4:7).
Have you ever been so desperate that you’ve said, “God, I need a miracle!”? Miracles are supernatural events that offer hope and healing to people in need.5
There’s no greater concentration of miracles anywhere than in the life of Jesus Christ. He walked on water, gave sight to the blind, and called storms with a motion of His hand. But right after the stories of Jesus, one of the next major areas of concentration for miracles is with our Elisha. Elisha’s stories are chocked full of miracles.
Do you believe in miracles?
3.1 Two Kinds of People
There are only two kinds of people in the world – those who believe in miracles and those who don’t. Naturalism presents nature as a closed box with everything being explained by natural cause and effect. Supernaturalism, by contrast, sees nature as an open system, operating by natural law most of the time, but open to intervention by God. So we can say the following: your openness to believing the miracles is contingent on whether you believe in an all-powerful, altogether good, God. If you doubt God, then you will doubt the miraculous. But if you believe in God, then you will believe in the miraculous.6
I believe in miracles.
If we know in advance that miracles cannot happen then we no matter what we see, we will not be convinced. Many presuppose that miracles cannot happen. Only faith can truly answer if miracles are possible.
God is not bound by the laws of nature because there really are no laws of nature. What men call the laws of nature are in truth the laws of God that nature must obey.
3.2 Benjamin and His Test
Everyone had high hopes for Benjamin after he finished third in his class at a predominantly black high school. After all, he scored the highest SAT ranking of any student in twenty years from a Detroit public school. He could only afford the ten-dollar admission fee to apply to one college, so he chose Yale University and was granted a full scholarship. Ben was soon failing chemistry after entering college and chemistry is a prerequisite in fulfilling his dream of becoming a physician. Everything depended on the final exam. But he wasn’t ready for it, not by a long shot. That evening, Ben prayed. “Lord, medicine is the only thing I ever wanted to do,” he said. “Would you please tell me what it is you really want me to do?” He intended to study for the exam all night, but sleep overcame him. All seemed lost—until he had a dream: he was alone in an auditorium when a nebulous figure began writing chemistry problems on the blackboard. “When I went to take the test the next morning, it was like The Twilight Zone,” he recalled. “I recognized the first problem as one of the ones I had dreamed about. And the next, and the next, and the next—and I aced the exam and got a good mark in chemistry. And I promised the Lord he would never have to do that for me again.” Ben went on to achieve his goal of becoming a physician. By age 33, he became the youngest director of pediatric neurosurgery in the country, performing pioneering operations at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He separated twins conjoined at the brain, performed the first successful neurosurgery on a fetus, developed new methods of treating brain stem and spinal cord tumors, and was awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Ben Carson believes this is a miracle done by God Himself.
3.3 The Stories Revisited
The widow sells the oil to pay her debts and keeps her sons. The prophets are fed by a poisonous stew made good. And the 100 men were fed by so little but miraculously, there were leftovers.
3.4 The Widow and the Jars
All 3 miracles are noteworthy, but I think it’s the widow’s story that is the headliner here. The woman did as Elisha commanded. She and her sons borrowed as many vessels as they could. Then, they began to pour oil from their little jar. The first empty vessel was filled, then the next, and the next, until all were brimming full—and it was all from that one little jar of oil (2 Kings 4:5–6). The only reason she ran out of oil is because she ran out of vessels. There was no limit on the amount of oil. The only limit was the number of vessels. If that woman had bought a million empty vessels, she would have wound up with a million full vessels.
3.5 The Power of God
A nuclear warhead is a thousandth of the power of a hurricane, and yet the Bible says the Lord sits enthroned over the hurricane (Psalm 29). A hurricane is just a billionth of the power of just one eruption on the surface of the sun, which is just a small star, and the Bible says God scatters stars like sand. Of course, this is nothing compared to the power of a supernova, a millionth of the power of a supernova, and the supernova is just one of the infinite number of points of power in the universe.
What is the power of God? A million universes? Our God is real, and He is living. And He has compassion on the needy and the broken.
3.4 Invitation Time
I invite you to bow your head and silently repeat what I pray if you would like to receive the Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior today.
“The Mosaic law allowed the creditor to take the debtor’s children as slaves in payment for the debt. They would have to work for the creditor until the year of Jubilee when the law required him to free them (Leviticus 25:39–40).” Russell Dilday and Lloyd J. Ogilvie, 1, 2 Kings, The Preacher’s Commentary Series. (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Inc, 1987), 272.
2 William Sanford La Sor, David Allan Hubbard, and Frederic William Bush, Old Testament Survey: The Message, Form, and Background of the Old Testament, 2nd ed (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996), 202.
3 Lifting up his eyes, then, and seeing that a large crowd was coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?” 6 He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he would do. 7 Philip answered him, “Two hundred denarii worth of bread would not be enough for each of them to get a little.” 7 One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, said to him…” (John 6:5-7).
4 http://www.bestplaces.net/economy/city/texas/north_richland_hills; accessed October 1, 2023.
5 “A miracle is a less common kind of God’s activity in which he arouses people’s awe and wonder and bears witness to himself.” Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 355.
6 B. B. Warfield, “Christian Supernaturalism,” Studies of Theology, The Work of Benjamin B. Warfield, vol 9 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), 32-33.
