The text confronts us with a question. Why does the widow link the death of her son to the coming of Elijah to reside with her? She says, What have you against me, O man of God?
More literally she says, What have I to do with you, man of God?
She called Elijah man of God,
which indicates that she recognized his prophetic office. Was the connection a thought on her part that prophets of the true God were in the habit of pronouncing or bringing judgment on those to whom they were sent? Could this calamity be understood apart from the plan and purpose of God? She had apparently learned enough, through interaction with Elijah, that the God of Israel was a just and righteous God. So, she concludes that the tragedy that had occurred in her son’s death must have had something to do with Elijah, and she also concludes that it must have been related to her sin.
It is good that we look at the fact that she says that this calamity has brought to her the remembrance
of her sin. The use of that idea would seem to indicate that a sin of the past caused the distress of the conviction, not a present sin. There is no way that we can know for certain to what sin she referred.
Yet we may ask whether she had idolatry and the worship of Baal specifically in mind. She links her son’s death with the remembrance of her sin, perhaps thinking of the second commandment, which speaks of God visiting the iniquity of one generation upon the next three or four. She may have wrongly assumed that her former Baal worship remained unforgiven, even though she no longer practiced it.
It was as if she were saying, What good is your presence to me, regardless of the miraculous provision of bread? it still has led to the death of my son.
She had experienced the grace of God in the preservation of life from the brink of death, but she did not yet understand God’s ability to grant life when death had already taken place.
There is more to be said. In the comment on 1 Kings 17:10, we suggested that Elijah’s interaction with the widow of Zarephath (along with other similar incidents in the Old Testament) is a type of the encounter of Jesus with the woman of Samaria at the well of Sycar. In the present verse, there is a similarity in the statements of the two women. This widow says, You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance.
The Samaritan woman said, Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did
(John 4:29).
Conviction of sin was common to both women, but there was at least initially a different response. The woman of Samaria is led from conviction to the experience of faith in Jesus, who proclaimed himself the Christ, while the widow is first caught up in despair, thinking that God’s judgment is the cause of her son’s death. She had not come to the realization that her son’s death was for the glory of God. The purpose of the glory of God reminds us of another parallel to Jesus as in John 11:4.
18 And she said to Elijah, “What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance and to cause the death of my son!”