Faith amid Uncertainty; Or, An Epilogue: Finding Faith in the Stream of Providence
About the author: Dr. Ashish Varma is an Indian American theologian based in Chicago, Illinois. His dissertation work explored theological grounding for virtue ethics. In recent years, his research has sat at the intersection of theological engagement with race and ecology, writing and speaking on both. Additionally, he edited and contributed to A Praying People, a collection of essays on prayer (Wipf & Stock, 2023).
This article is part of a series exploring a constructive theology of divine providence. To follow the arc of the project, you can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, the Interlude here, Part 3 here, and the Epilogue here.
Few things are as fickle as faith. One moment, I can be full of faith, seemingly able to endure anything. The next moment, faith cowers and flees. In faith, the Apostle Peter declared that Jesus was the Messiah and that he would never allow anyone to harm Jesus (Mt. 16:16-22). However, he later fled and denied Jesus after the soldiers arrested him (Mt. 26:50-56, 69-74). Job seemed to have great faith, even after the initial calamities befell him. Yet, one senses the faltering of his faith as the depth of his devastation increases. He does not abandon God but instead wonders if God is as just as he previously thought. One can find the vacillations of faith between extremes throughout Scripture, just as much amid the lives of spiritual giants as among the hidden characters in Scripture.
There is no more interesting character of faith to me than the prophet Elijah. I find one scene particularly inspiring of faithfulness above all others. In 1 Kings 17:8-16, as Israel is amid famine, God instructs Elijah, a prophet in the northern kingdom of Israel, to “go and live” in the Gentile city of Zarephath. One can feel the depths of God’s displeasure with Israel’s unfaithfulness: not only has God delivered famine and drought upon the largest faction of God’s covenant community, but God also directs the chief prophet to leave. Given the circumstances, I imagine that a faithful response came easily to Elijah. Still, he travels to a city afflicted by the same famine, so his new situation hardly seems better, except that God assures Elijah that a widow will be prepared to feed him.
Elijah obeys, though the woman at Zarephath does not seem up to speed. She readily brings Elijah water, only to object at the thought of offering Elijah bread: “I swear by the Lord your God that I don’t have a single piece of bread in the house. And I have only a handful of flour left in the jar and a little cooking oil in the bottom of the jug.” Worse yet, the widow has resigned to using the last of her flour to make one last meal for her son and her before accepting the inevitability of death (16:12). The situation is dire, to say the least. Her food reserves are nearly depleted, and, presumably, most people in the region are equally at the end of their supplies. Yet even then, Elijah appears to remain unfazed. He calmly assures the woman that God will ensure that “there will always be flour and olive oil left in your containers until the time when the Lord sends rain and the crops grow again.” She simply has to demonstrate the same faith by using the last of her flour to make bread for Elijah (16:13-14).
After all that Elijah experienced, faith must have been second nature to him. But what about the woman? Not only is the thought of personal faith distant—she is ready to die—but she also has her son to worry about. As a parent, I cannot imagine not giving my son a fighting chance to live by preparing him one more meal. Furthermore, the promise—“use what little you have left, and trust me, the Lord will provide until the end of famine”—must have been a strain for her to accept, for Elijah specifically appeals by name to the covenant God of Israel. What hope does this Gentile woman have in another nation’s God? The call to faith was a tremendous request of this woman. Who knows how many people had already starved to death around her, for as we saw in the series on divine providence, God’s actions rarely interfere with the effects of the movements of history. Then, like now, people face malnourishment from famine and food deserts alike, and the poor face the effects disproportionately. Few have happy endings, especially outside the seat of global power in the modern West. Similarly, the Gentile widow sat outside the seat of power in the city of Zarephath and outside the supposed jurisdiction of the God of Israel.
Nevertheless, this woman exercised faith. She used the last of her flour and oil to make Elijah bread, demonstrating a kind of faith that I wish I possessed—namely, the type of faith that exceeds even that of Elijah in the narrative. After all, earlier in the same chapter, after delivering God’s message of drought to Israel’s King Ahab, Elijah retreats to a hidden brook, where he has a plentiful supply of fresh water. Meanwhile, God commands ravens to bring him food—“bread and meat each morning and evening” (17:2-6). We have no reason to believe the widow had experienced anything close to such provision before. Unlike Elijah’s, her faith is as blind as it can get, and she places the life of her most beloved at the center of her leap into faith. Her faith was rewarded; she seized the divine promise that she had no natural reason to accept—after all, empty flour and oil jars tend to stay that way, especially for the poor. The woman sat at the intersection of natural (famine and drought) and social (poverty) realities, both of which told her that the end was imminent. Yet, somehow, she heard another music—the music of God—and her faith “cleaved” to it, as St. Augustine would say.
Again, we have little information in the narrative of 1 Kings to explain the widow’s faith, but in light of the circumstances, we likely feel that she is justified when, later in chapter 17, her faith falters. Despite the deliverance that she experiences in the ever-replenishing jars of flour and oil, she confronts, undoubtedly, her greatest fear when her son grows ill and eventually dies. She blames Elijah, and probably Elijah’s God as well.
Faith is fickle and not without reason. Life too often delivers tragedy and causes for despair; sometimes, it does so in succession.
The end of the widow’s part in this narrative offers cause for renewed faith (17:24), but many around her, facing the same famine and drought, likely could not say the same. The widow experiences the miracle of her son's rejuvenation, but what about others in ancient Israel and even Zarephath? What about people today who lose loved ones to famine and drought, to war, to natural disasters, to disease, or senseless violence? What hope do these others receive? What experiences do they have to spark faith? What about me and my more trivial problems that cloud me in despair?
While the widow's faith and the divine provision for her, her son, and Elijah grip me, the fickleness of Elijah’s doubt grips me more than the widow’s doubt.
Elijah witnessed everything: ravens brought him food twice per day while a secret brook provided water (17:2-6); jars of flour and oil miraculously kept refilling (17:8-16); a dead boy returned to life through his agency (17:19-23); 850 prophets of Baal and Asherah lost a demonstration of power to the God of covenant Israel at Mt. Carmel in his active presence (18:1-39); and the end of drought followed his divinely-mandated prediction (18:41-46). The textual clues suggest that these are only highlights; Elijah had great confidence in God, and he had good reason for it. And then the queen threatened his life (19:2). From my perch in a climate-controlled room in twenty-first-century Chicagoland, having read the previous two chapters in 1 Kings, it is obvious to me that Elijah should have laughed. Instead, Elijah “was afraid and fled for his life” (19:3).
Why? Why was Elijah afraid? Why did he run away? Why is it hard to grasp Elijah’s fear and decision to run? Again, he experienced miracle after miracle and demonstration of divine power after demonstration of divine power. Unlike the widow of Zarephath, Elijah had no dearth of direct experience upon which to fall back. Yet, Elijah was little different from the Apostle Peter, who, one minute, proclaimed that Jesus was the Messiah and the next ran from the guards who arrested Jesus.
In truth, Elijah is little different than me. At the advice of those more seasoned with grey hairs than I, I have kept a log of the many provisions of God through drought-like seasons of my life. Short of presenting the log, the provisions are astounding, even if absent refilling jars of grain and oil themselves. Like Elijah, though, the entirety of the log is too easily dismissed in the latest walk through the wilderness. Again, why is this?
My best guess is that the frailty of faith simply belongs to the lot of human existence, or so one of the aforementioned grey-heads in my life wisely tells me. My second-best guess is that there is a chasm between what Barth would call the subjective experience of faith and the object of faith. That is, what makes faith the powerful Spirit-produced theological virtue that it is (see 1 Cor. 13:13) is the One in whom I exercise faith, not the fact of my having faith. After all, I can have faith in any number of things—for example, the stock market, the power of basketball to create endorphins in me, the sprouting of seeds in my garden—but I also must face the reality that my faith cannot affect the fulfillment of any of these things. My retirement account might flounder due to the effects of a burst housing bubble or a tariff war on the stock market. I could tear ligaments in my shoulder and lose the ability to play basketball. Rabbits and squirrels could eat seedlings in my garden right as they sprout. My faith simply is not efficacious in itself, never mind its inability to affect natural and social processes. The point is not my faith but the One in whom I exercise faith.
The reality of the God in whom I exercise faith is that God’s work of providence cannot be reduced to natural or social forces in history. Faith will be fickle, whether you are a widow from Zarephath, a prophet of God, or a theologian in twenty-first-century Chicagoland. But the good news is that the same God who worked outside the natural effects of famine and drought remains providentially at work today. The same God who hid Elijah when social forces sought his destruction provides refuge today. In either case, or any other, we can have faith in the God of Jesus Christ to give the grace of a little more grain and oil in the jars precisely because God is not constrained by the natural and social forces at work around us. The point is not our faith but rather the object of faith. The goal of faith is to strain our ears a little longer to hear God’s providential music in creation.
