The Flour Jar That Never Ran Empty

Up north, Jeroboam's golden calves were still standing when a new king named Ahab did something even worse: he built a temple for Baal. So God sent a prophet named Elijah to him with bad news. "As surely as the LORD lives, there will be no dew or rain in the next few years, except when I say so."

(Ahab's people prayed to Baal for rain. Now they would find out who really held the clouds.)

God hid Elijah beside a brook in the wilderness, and twice a day ravens came with bread and meat in their beaks. Then the brook dried up, and God said, "Go to Zarephath. I have told a widow there to feed you."

Zarephath was not even in Israel. It was in Sidon, Queen Jezebel's home country, where everyone bowed to Baal. And a widow, a woman whose husband had died, was usually poor.

At the town gate Elijah found her picking up sticks.

"Could you bring me a little water to drink?" he called. She turned to go. "And a piece of bread, please!"

She stopped. "As surely as the LORD your God lives, I don't have any bread. I have one handful of flour in a jar and a little oil in a jug. I'm gathering these sticks to cook a last meal for my son and me. We'll eat it, and then we'll die."

"Don't be afraid," said Elijah. "First bake a loaf for me, then make something for you and your son. For the LORD, the God of Israel, says: the jar of flour will not run out, and the jug of oil will not run dry, until the day the LORD sends rain."

She looked at her son. She looked at the stranger. Then she went home and mixed the very last of the flour.

The next morning she tipped the jar, afraid to look. Flour! Scrape, scrape went her cup, day after day, and there was always enough.

Then the boy got sick. He grew worse and worse, and he died.

His mother turned on Elijah. "What do you have against me, man of God? Did you come to remind me of my sins and kill my son?"

"Give me your son," Elijah said. He carried the boy up to the roof room where he stayed and laid him on the bed. "LORD my God," he cried, "have you brought this sorrow even on the widow who took me in?" Three times he stretched himself out over the boy. "LORD my God, let this child's life come back into him!"

The LORD heard, and the boy's chest rose and fell. He was alive!

Elijah carried him downstairs and gave him back to his mother. "Look," he said. "Your son is alive!"

She held him tight. "Now I know you are a man of God," she said, "and the word of the LORD from your mouth is true."

Still, the boy Elijah carried downstairs would one day grow old and die. Hundreds of years went by, and no prophet could make death stay away.

Then, at the gate of a town called Nain, a crowd came out carrying a dead young man. He was a widow's only son, and his mother was crying. Another man was coming up the road. "Don't cry," he told her. He did not stretch out three times or beg. He touched the stretcher and said, "Young man, I tell you, get up!"

The young man sat up and started talking, and Jesus gave him back to his mother. Later Jesus died too, and on the third day he walked out of his own grave, alive forever.