“And when he came to the gate of the city, indeed a widow was there gathering sticks.”
(1 Kings 17:10, NKJV)
The fact that Elijah is specifically sent to a widow and her orphaned son, is also of great importance in us understanding the nature of spiritual fatherhood and sonship and the acquiring of mantles.
In Jesus Christ God manifested his Eternal Fatherhood according to his eternal resolution (Eph. 3:11). This means that only those who are born-again from Jesus can be part of this incorruptible seed or Godly offspring (1 Pet. 1:23). This brings forth a new lineage after Jesus (Matt. 1:17), of descendants who would know Him as Father.
Thus, as Eph. 1:4-5 suggests, “just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will”. This eternal resolution is nestled in (spiritual) fatherhood and sonship.
God voices this deep desire of His for the first time in 2 Sam. 7:14: “I will be his Father, and he shall be My son.” These words are used for the first time in the entire history between God and man when Yahweh ties himself to David. Spiritual sonship is presented here as the absolute precondition of rulership, as it is for instance later said to David, Solomon’s son, in 1 Chr. 22:10: “He shall build a house for My name, and he shall be My son, and I will be his Father; and I will establish the throne of his kingdom over Israel forever.” Added to this is God’s everlasting goodness, or as the Message aptly articulates it: “I will never remove my gracious love from him as I did from the one who preceded you.” – 1 Chr. 17:13.)
Spiritual fatherhood teaches us to understand the heart of the Father, and that is the heartbeat of the entire spiritual realm, as it reflects the Father heart of God. Elijah is the prototype that should teach us about that. It is very important to understand that the spirit of Elijah initiates this new dispensation of the new covenant (Luke 1:17), and that it will primarily be concerned with spiritual fatherhood, perhaps the most important responsibility that the eternal priesthood needs to facilitate. Spiritual fatherhood forms the core of the new covenant. Somewhere along the way the contemporary church lost this core principle, and reverted to the Levitical system of priests (reverends, pastors, etc, not fathers). 1 Cor. 4:15: “After all, though you should have ten thousand teachers (guides to direct you) in Christ, yet you do not have many fathers.”
All people who are born from the first man, Adam (1 Cor. 15:45), have the devil as father (Rom. 5:12), and are born from the nature manifested in the seed of the snake (Gen. 3:15; Matt. 3:7; Matt. 13:38; Acts 13:10). It is a terrible reality, but is alas true, even of newborn babies (Job 14:4). Jesus states it as follows in John 8:44 (CEV): “Your father is the devil, and you do exactly what he wants. He has always been a murderer and a liar. There is nothing truthful about him. He speaks on his own, and everything he says is a lie. Not only is he a liar himself, but he is also the father of all lies.”
In this light it is clearly understood why it is so important that a new priesthood of fathers need to father us in understanding God as Father. With the fall Satan managed to achieve something terrible – he removed us from the heart of the Father, and in so doing caused a father wound in all people. This even happened with Jesus on the cross. Remember: Jesus IS God (John 10:30) – his father cannot forsake him, yet this was exactly Jesus’ experience: “And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’ which is translated, ‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?’” (Mark 15:34).
Based on this, humanity bears a massive wound that we received during the fall, especially by being driven out of Eden (Gen. 3:24). The term driven out, in the original language, means “expatriate or divorce, to be tossed, to be thrust out”. The opportunity of becoming one with God was taken away from man, and he was torn away from the Father’s bosom by the power of sin, worse than the atomic bomb. This rendered man an orphan, and left a collective wound of orphanhood. Also consider the fact that the Hebrew word also means divorce, which again has connotations of aloneness, or widowhood. Man inherited the spirit of the widow and the orphan. Job 4: 19-21 spells out the desperation of man’s vulnerability: “How much more those who dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, who are crushed before a moth? They are broken in pieces from morning till evening; they perish forever, with no one regarding. Does not their own excellence go away? they die, even without wisdom.”
The model of His Fatherhood that God wanted to present to man, of earthly fathers, did not work out as planned. In David Fincher’s cult film Fight Club the character Tyler Durden famously asks the rhetorical questions: “Our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers bailed, what does that say about God?”
The entire human race is faced with the spirit of the widow and orphan. In all the years I was involved in the restoration of individuals through counselling and deliverance this was certainly the issue that caused the deepest wounds: fathering, or the lack thereof, or the misunderstanding thereof. Therefore we can understand that the deepest root cause of the spirit of fear in believers is that we have not come to know God as Father. Fear makes it impossible to love God – 1 John 4:18 – “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love.” (The title of Bilquis Sheik’s book, a Muslim woman who had become born again, encapsulates this perfectly: I dared to call Him Father.)
Back to Elijah. In 1 Kings 17:10 it states, “And when he came to the gate of the city, indeed a widow was there gathering sticks.” The widow has an orphaned son, we read in verse 12. Typologically understood, Elijah finds the widow at the gates of the city. Dealing with the spirit of the orphan and the widow WITHIN YOU is absolutely necessary for gaining access to the Body of Christ, for it is there where you learn about fatherhood and sonship. Interesting enough she is busy gathering sticks for a fire. Within Scripture wood is always a symbol of the flesh (Job 13:28; 2 Tim. 2:20), and fire of the consuming character of God (Heb.12:29; Isa. 66:15), here specifically manifested as the Father. A precondition for receiving your mantle is that you need to deal with the spirit of the widow and the orphan within yourself.
- Selah: Handle the spirit of the widow and the orphan within yourself.
- Read: 35-40; Ps. 74 and Ps. 79.
- Memorise: 74:2.
