1 Kings 17:17-24
Elijah Revives the Widow’s Son
17 Now it happened after these things that the son of the woman who owned the house became sick. And his sickness was so serious that there was no breath left in him. 18 So she said to Elijah, “What have I to do with you, O man of God? Have you come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, and to kill my son?”
19 And he said to her, “Give me your son.” So he took him out of her arms and carried him to the upper room where he was staying, and laid him on his own bed. 20 Then he cried out to the LORD and said, “O LORD my God, have You also brought tragedy on the widow with whom I lodge, by killing her son?” 21 And he stretched himself out on the child three times, and cried out to the LORD and said, “O LORD my God, I pray, let this child’s soul come back to him.” 22 Then the LORD heard the voice of Elijah; and the soul of the child came back to him, and he revived.
23 And Elijah took the child and brought him down from the upper room into the house, and gave him to his mother. And Elijah said, “See, your son lives!”
24 Then the woman said to Elijah, “Now by this I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the LORD in your mouth is the truth.”
After Elijah had been staying with the widow and her son for some time, providing them with a seemingly bottomless supply of flour and oil to survive the drought, the boy got sick and apparently died. The woman was upset with grief and questioned why this man of God came if he could not have kept her son from dying after all they had been through. Echoes of Jesus hearing the sisters of Lazarus (John 11:21) asking a similar question come to mind after he died and Jesus was not there to keep him from dying. In both these instances, God raised the dead to life as an act of compassion and also of a future hope of the resurrection to come at the end (John 11:24, 5:24) of time. The difference was faith in Jesus by Martha compared to the accusations of the widow here against God’s servant; one trusted in God’s will either to give life in the present or in eternity, while the other blamed God in her grief without faith in God’s ability to give life. Elijah had to cry out three times to God to bring life back to the lifeless boy there until the LORD heard and answered by returning the boy’s soul to him; Jesus as God’s Son simply ordered the soul of Lazarus to return (John 11:41, 42, 43) by a direct divine decree. When Elijah presented the widow’s son to her alive, she believed that he was a man of God with truth in his mouth; when Jesus presented the brother of Mary and Martha alive after four days in the tomb, they had already had the faith to trust He could do it, but the reality before their eyes to see Lazarus alive before the resurrection (John 11:24) must have bolstered their faith to see (Romans 8:24-25, Hebrews 11:1) him come back to life and have a deeper faith of who Jesus is as more than just a man of God (Acts 26:22, 23) like the prophets of old. We know from the word of God recorded throughout scripture from beginning to end that the Man of God is the Son of God and that He alone gives life now (John 5:24) and after the grave in the resurrection to come because He told us and proved it by raising Himself first from His own grave to show us He is more than able to do so for us (1 Thessalonians 4:14, 1 Corinthians 15:20-21) as a man of His word of this certain (Titus 1:2, 1 Peter 1:3) promise. These accounts of the widow’s son and Lazarus and the accompanying promises throughout the scriptures are our certainty of life from death in our souls now and in the rest of our bodies in eternity to come.
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