A Supply to Meet the Need

2 Kings 4:1-7
    1 A certain woman of the wives of the sons of the prophets cried out to Elisha, saying, "Your servant my husband is dead, and you know that your servant feared the LORD. And the creditor is coming to take my two sons to be his slaves."
    2 So Elisha said to her, "What shall I do for you? Tell me, what do you have in the house?" And she said, "Your maidservant has nothing in the house but a jar of oil."
    3 Then he said, "Go, borrow vessels from everywhere, from all your neighbors—empty vessels; do not gather just a few. 4 And when you have come in, you shall shut the door behind you and your sons; then pour it into all those vessels, and set aside the full ones."
    5 So she went from him and shut the door behind her and her sons, who brought the vessels to her; and she poured it out. 6 Now it came to pass, when the vessels were full, that she said to her son, "Bring me another vessel."
    And he said to her, "There is not another vessel." So the oil ceased. 7 Then she came and told the man of God. And he said, "Go, sell the oil and pay your debt; and you and your sons live on the rest."

Similar to Elijah in 1 Kin. 17:14–16, Elisha met the need of a woman in great need.  This miraculous work of the LORD was similar in that a needed supply of oil was required.  With Elijah, the long term need went unending for years to sustain a widow and her child from starvation, but here the immediate need was to fill enough available containers to sell to pay the widow’s debts and keep her children.  Both also had children in need, which we will look at next time.  Here we find that God can meet needs in ways that defy logic and the known natural laws of physics; a small source of oil in a single jar simply cannot fill more containers than it contains itself, but that is precisely what happened here.  She took that one jar of oil and, at God’s command through the messenger, filled many vessels until they had no more to pour into.  Then she sold the oil, paid her debts, and saved the family from slavery and ruin.  The lesson of this event is that God can do whatever He wills and tells, just as Jesus did while incarnate on the earth.  Such miracles cannot be demanded nor expected as due to us by God, but when He moves to do them, nothing is impossible for His working outside of the known and observable laws of the universe as we see them.  He is above and outside of His creation, able to make and change or override the rules of how things work.  He is absolutely sovereign over all the work of His mighty hand.  He was even able to take the dust of our being (Genesis 2:7) and fix what is broken by inherited sin of this fallen world as with the blind man using dust of the earth and water from His own mouth to fix the sightless eyes (John 9:6), using the same created materials He made the ground from.  He has power over life and death which we do not.  When He does things like this through the hands of others such as Elijah and Elisha, it is still His work and not man’s, a miraculous event which is possible only by Him (Mark 10:27).  We also find that God is involved in our lives to preserve in His grace and deliver those He chooses from bondage and debt, just as with our debt of death earned by our sin (Romans 6:23) and by His work of grace we are freed from bondage to sin (John 8:32-36).  He supplies what we need, including freedom from enslavement to sin and from starvation of body and spirit.  These accounts of His work through Elijah and Elisha are shadows of the work to come in Christ Jesus our Lord and by His working through us.  He is the unending supply of all our true and desperate needs. We find this demonstrated to the apostles for our learning as well in the accounts of the baskets of fish and loaves of bread feeding the needs of so many (Mark 8:19-21) from our own inadequate supply apart from His provision.