So grievous had these abominations of the Sidonians become, that God was about to visit the nation with judgment. But, as He always sends warnings, and gives a season to repent, so he sent Elijah, the Tishbite, from the hill country of Gilead down to Ahab in Samaria, with this message, “As the Lord God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.” And James tells us, “it rained not upon the earth for the space of three years and six months.” During these years of famine, the Lord directed Elijah to a widow in Sarepta, after the waters of the brook of Cherith had dried up. Sarepta (or Zarephath) was a city of Phœnicia. But the distress of the famine in Israel was felt even here, for Israel was the great grain field for Phœnicia. And this explains why Elijah, when he came to the city gate of Sarepta, found a poor woman, a widow, gathering a few sticks, that she might bake the last morsel of bread and share it with her child, after which there was nothing more to hope for. The famine was doing its awful work among the cities of the coast. The hills back of Sarepta were scorched, and the beautiful valleys on either side of the city were cracked in great fissures. In her distress this widow, in her person had wasted to a skeleton, faltering, trembling, as she staggered out to gather a few sticks to bake her last cake for self and child, and then to die. Her cheeks were sunken, her eyes hollow, and her nerves seem never to have known what rest meant. As she walked she staggered; when she stood she reeled. She was leaning against her gate, the sticks in her arms when the Tishbite saluted her with the request, “Fetch me, I pray thee, a drink of water.” In a moment she was going toward her water pot. “Bring me, I pray thee, a morsel of bread in thy hand,” the prophet called after her while on the way to get the water. “Bread!” Distressed and sorely tried, the poor woman breaks down, and discloses the sad condition of her home in the ever-memorable words, “As the Lord thy God liveth, I have not a cake, but a handful of meal in a barrel and a little oil in a cruse, and behold, I am gathering two sticks that I may go and dress it for me and my son, that we may eat it and die.”