"What hast thou in the house?" This was the startling question Elisha asked of the widow who had appealed to him for help when the creditor came to take her two sons as bondmen. Her answer (II Kings 4:2), "Not any thing... save a pot of oil," was not inspired by a knowledge of God's omnipotence, of His infinite bounty and benevolence, or by the realization of an ever-present, loving Father-Mother, but by a sense of widowhood and by the belief that her source of supply was dependent upon provision in a personal way and had been severed.
Elisha, awake to the truth of God as Father, who satisfies all our needs, must have instantly recognized her limited material sense of possession of "a pot of oil" as a very finite conception of her abundant heavenly heritage, which seemed hidden by the material sense of lack, loss, poverty, and limitation. Elisha had made his inquiry doubtless hoping to awaken her to man's rich endowment as a child of God. His work was to arouse her from her sense of widowhood, her sense of incompleteness, of separation from God, to the clear realization that because of God's ever-presence the supply for every need was at hand.
When Elisha commanded the widow, "Go, borrow thee vessels abroad of all thy neighbours, even empty vessels; borrow not a few," he was breaking the extreme sense of lack, fear, self-pity, the personal sense of God and man, by awakening her to see beyond the finite sense to the glorious realization of spiritual being and supply. Regardless of the subtle arguments and disturbing pictures of poverty, loss, and distress, her ignorance of and blindness to spiritual reality were dissipated, and she evidently glimpsed something of God's spiritual creation, existing in ever changless harmony and affluence.
