The local, evening news tells us of two shootings in a large city. We listen with half an ear to the first report. It involves a street corner, a drug deal gone badly, a gun, and a dead body. Later, another reporter tells us about a mother in her kitchen, her daughters at the table doing homework, and a bullet fired from a gun from a moving car. No one was the target. That was just a random bullet from a random drive-by shooting that killed one of her daughters.
Our emotions are different with the second news report. For the first murder, we think, “Play with big-time evil and you die by big-time evil.” The first murder was a man reaping what he sowed. But the second murder makes us sad and angry. The mother was playing by the rules, working hard, and trying to do what was right. This is unfair and unjust. Didn’t all the mother’s struggles to live right count for anything?
How can we trust a God who lets something like that happen? This isn’t just a theoretical prospect. Such downturns in life happen all the time, if not to you then to someone else, just like what happened in our Old-Testament reading for today.
With idolatry running rampant in Israel under King Ahab, the Lord announced through Prophet Elijah that, until further notice, no rain would fall from the sky. And as the drought continued, the Lord sent Elijah to the region of Sidon.
It was in Sidon where God told Elijah to go to the home of a widow. When Elijah first met her, he asked her for food and drink. She told him that she was down to her last supplies: A smidgen of flour and a dash of oil. After making one more meal for herself and her son, she planned to die of starvation. She considered herself as good as dead.
Yet, when Elijah spoke the Lord’s word of promise to her, she had faith (that was last week’s Old-Testament reading). She made Elijah a loaf of bread, and she still had a little flour and oil left. For days stretching into weeks stretching into months, just enough flour and oil remained for another meal—just as the Lord had said.
This woman took Elijah in. She provided him lodging in her home. Elijah lived through the rest of the drought in the company of this woman and her son. No doubt, he proclaimed to her the Lord God of Israel.
For her part, the widow was taking care of God’s prophet–and life was going well. She and her son were not thirsty or hungry. The jar of flour was never empty. The jug of oil never became dry. You might say that this widow was going with the program, playing by the rules as Elijah had given them to her.
Then one day her son died. Suddenly, it didn’t look so good to have the Lord’s prophet nearby. This God was now costing her. In her grief, she lashed out at Elijah, “What do you have against me, man of God? Did you come to me to confront me with my sin and kill my son” (1 Kings 17:18). Have you ever felt that way toward God?
New converts to Christ often find their first few months or years in the faith relatively easy and trouble-free. But, in time, the Lord sends them more difficult challenges to handle. As we mature in the Lord, we soon realize, all the more, the depth of our sin. When the Apostle Paul realized this, he said, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners–and I am the worst of them!” (1 Timothy 1:15). The widow in our Old-Testament reading was also feeling the depth of her sin.
We don’t know if one individual sin bothered the widow or if it was the cumulative weight of all her wrongdoings. It’s hard to tell. But this much is sure: She knew the Lord must punish sin, and she assumed that her son’s death was God punishing her. How could she trust such a God? If anything, she wanted to run away from Him.
We cannot deny that God lets terrible events take place in this world. And often, we have no idea why except that our sin (that is, the sin of mankind) is behind it.
Here’s what Luther wrote speaking about trying to understand all the “whys” of evil in this fallen world. “God must therefore be left to himself in his own majesty, for in this regard, we have nothing to do with him. . . . God hidden in his majesty neither deplores nor takes away death but works life, death, and all in all” (LW 33:139-40). Let the world sneer or roll its eyes as it will. For, no matter what, God is still in charge and we are still answerable to Him.
But God is not answerable to us. Did you notice that Elijah didn’t apologize for God or try to explain His ways to her? Elijah knew that the only answer to God is God. We can have nothing to do with God in His own majesty. However, as Luther wrote, “We [do] have something to do with [God] insofar as he is clothed and set forth in his Word, through which he offers himself to us” (LW 33:139).
Elijah took the dead boy into his room, laid the body on his bed, and prayed that God would let this child live once more. Three times, the prophet stretched himself on the body as he prayed that life come back into it.
Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes, “The spirit returns to God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12:7). But Elijah also knew that this same God could give it back–if He wanted to do that. God had not previously done so on the pages of Scripture, but Elijah was praying for Him to do it anyway.
Elijah asked God to give the widow life in the sadness of death and comfort in her fear and anguish. Elijah wanted God to assure her of His love and salvation even amid her many doubts. No amount of explaining could have been better than the moment when the prophet went downstairs–not carrying her dead son, a corpse–but with his arm around a living child. Elijah told the widow, “Your son lives” (1 Kings 17:23)!
This event becomes a little Old-Testament “Easter.” The son was dead, but then he lived. So we find that the widow’s son rising from the dead points forward to Christ rising from the dead. However, unlike Jesus, the widow’s son eventually died again in this world.
Indeed, God did much better with His own Son. After Jesus rose from the dead, He died no more. Jesus still lives! And in His Son, God also punished sin. He punished it fully when He laid it all on the back of Christ. Yet, through His Spirit, God raised Jesus from the dead and now “death no longer has mastery over him” (Romans 6:9).
How can you trust the Lord? How so? Because you also live! Baptized into Him, “you have been raised with Christ” (Colossians 3:1) as you go through this world. In the end, the God who raised the Lord “will also raise [you] up by his power” (1 Corinthians 6:14). You live now, and you will live to all eternity!
God the Father has planted this new life in you by giving you the life-creating Word of Life, Jesus Christ. So, here is a sure and definite Word of God for you, as sure as Christ’s resurrection is sure and true: God forgives you. He is not angry with you. He is not stringing you along, only to spring some punishment for sin on you when you least expect it.
The Lord God of the universe forgives you of all your sins; after all, Jesus nailed them to His cross and left them there when He rose from the dead. With this forgiveness comes assurance, comfort, and life, all through God’s powerful Word. How can you trust this Lord? It’s because you live!
The widow told Elijah, “Now I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the LORD in your mouth is truth” (1 Kings 17:24). In faith, she had received God’s assurance, comfort, and life through Elijah. She was alive.
You and I also live. We live by faith. When tragedy strikes, don’t get stuck in the mire about how unfair it may be. Don’t tell yourself that you were playing by the rules, or wrack your brain trying to figure out how you slipped up. Even more, don’t run away from God. Instead, run to the God who has clothed Himself in His Word. Run to the Lord who is more than able and ever-so-willing to take care of His people.
Like the widow, this Lord has given you new birth in the one, true faith through His Word. He has kept you in His keeping every step along life’s way. Whatever happens in this world, God stands ready to keep giving you life, now and forever, through the Son He raised from the dead, in the Holy Spirit.
After all, salvation is not simply a one-time event. Every week, Jesus keeps coming to you in Word and Sacrament to enliven and strengthen you in the faith. And God is faithful. He will keep you even in death.
As a poet in the 1800s said:
No longer must the mourners weep, nor call departed Christians dead; for death is hallowed into sleep, and every grave becomes a bed. Now once more, Eden’s door open stands to mortal eyes; for Christ hath risen, and men shall rise! Now at last, old things past, hope and joy and peace begin; for Christ hath won, and man shall win! [John Mason Neale]
That’s the God you have. Jesus Christ lives. And because of Him, so do you. Amen.
