The Shunammite
As we
begin this story, we hear about Elisha’s foretelling of the drought and the
saving of the Shunammite woman. She is
allowed to escape to Philistia before the drought sets in, but when the drought
is relieved the woman is horrified to need to come back and have to sue for her
land! It makes sense that if she wasn’t
there to tend it that squatters would have moved in wherever possible to take
it.
What is
neat about this story is we can see how God plans to use events in ways that we
cannot expect. We have already spoken
about the raising of her son and how that plays into the demonstration of God’s
power to the Shuanammite woman. But here
we also see how the event in the past plays into the life of the king. Even more importantly, this event plays into
the claim for the Shunammite woman to gain her land back!
Had Gehazi
not been familiar with the case and lecturing the king on the case’s reality,
no doubt this woman would have had a much harder time proving her point. But since Gehazi could not only prove that
this woman owned the land but had been touched by the hand of God upon it, it
is clear that not only is the land hers but that God desires for this woman to
be the master of it. God is so cool in
His ability to use an event in our past to reach forward and have an impact on
a seemingly unrelated event in the future.
Hazael
The next
story we have is a bit hard to fully wrap one’s mind around it. Hazael is sent by the king of Syria to find out
about the king of Syria’s sickness.
Elisha tells Hazael that the king will die and Hazael will reign in his
place. Of course, this spurs on Hazael
to treat the king as though he was already dead until he dies. The question is, how much of Hazael’s action
can be attributed to Elisha’s prophecy?
I don’t
think we should give any blame to the king’s death to Elisha - or God, who gave
the prophecy. It was decided that Ben-hadad
would die and Hazael would reign. We
know that this was known by God for two reasons. First, Elisha sees a vision about how Hazael
will treat the Israelites, so that tells us that God is aware of what will
happen. Second, we actually see this
much earlier when Elijah is told to anoint Elisha. 1 Kings 19:16-17 says this: “And Jehu the son
of Nimshi you shall anoint to be king over Israel, and Elisha the son of
Shaphat of Abel-meholah you shall anoint to be prophet in your place. And
the one who escapes from the sword of Hazael shall Jehu put to death, and the
one who escapes from the sword of Jehu shall Elisha put to death.” This is actually the real time revelation of
an old prophecy spoken by Elisha’s mentor.
Yet, God
is not to blame for Hazael’s treatment of his king in letting him die. Elisha is not to blame either. Just because God is aware of the future does
not mean that people involved are puppets to God. God is aware of the choices the people will
make, not forcing those choices upon them.
We must be
careful not to lay the blame and responsibility at the feet of those who had no
part in choosing the actions of another.
Neither Elisha nor God told Hazael to go and treat his king like he was
already dead. Hazael did that
himself. Hazael could have gone back and
loved the king until he died, knowing that he would rule in his place. Hazael is the one who chose the course of
action that he did.
Why Does Hazael come to Elisha?
In another
interesting point about Hazael, I can’t help but wondering why it is that
Hazael would seek out Elisha. Hazael
wasn’t a Jew. Neither was he a
god-fearer. So why come to Elisha? Surely there were religious prophets and
mystics and seers in the land of Samaria!
I believe
this shows us a deep truth about human beings.
We’re content living the lie so long as things go well. We’re content living the lie so long as we
don’t absolutely need the truth. But
when we are in that moment where we have to know something we turn to God and
His Word. When we’re in that moment
where life is crumbling around us, it is then that we turn to God and cry out
to Him. We as human beings can be
fickle. That’s what I see in
Hazael. He doesn’t want to be a Jew and
he doesn’t want to be a god-fearer. He
just wants to use God for the time being to hear a small amount of truth so
afterwards he can go back to life as he would rather live it.
Judah’s Slide Into Decline
We end
this chapter with the hearing of two kings in Judah. There is not too much to talk about as the
stories are largely anecdotal to move us along the timeline. However, we do note that in the story of
Ahaziah we have it told that he married the granddaughter of Omri, a king in
Israel. This is significant for two
reasons.
First,
daughters (or granddaughters) of kings were married to other kings for
political reasons. So what we see going
on here is a political marriage attempting to bring about peace to two nations
that God had intended to be united in the first place! Here are human beings that are trying to
accomplish God’s will through human means!
They could have accomplished this feat much easier had they simply turned
back to God and followed His ways.
Unwilling to do that, they set out to do it their own way using the ways
of the world. As we shall see, the ways
of the world are a poor substitute to God’s ways.
Second, we
can tell that the insertion of the political marriage into the land of Judah
only helps push them even further from the ways of the Lord. Asa and his son had brought reform to
Judah. But the country begins to slide
away with Jehoram; and they slide away even further once Jehoram’s son,
Ahaziah, marries Omri’s granddaughter.
When we try to accomplish God’s will by human methods, not only do we
fail to achieve our purpose but we end up falling further away from God in the
process.
<><
No comments:
Post a Comment