Hope From the Word

Guest (Male): Kierkegaard once said there are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true. The other is to refuse to believe what is true. Here is Pastor Bill Luebkemann.

Bill Luebkemann: How many people in the world today are blind and don't know they're blind? It's just a spiritual thing. How many people think they understand it all? "We're going to go to heaven because we're good people, because we're born in America, voted in every election, and God will surely honor that. Never stole pens and paper from work, always got to work on time." This, that, and the other thing, blinded to spiritual things.

Guest (Male): Calvary Chapel of Marlton presents Hope From the Word with Pastor Bill Luebkemann. We're glad you're with us today as we continue our verse-by-verse study through the book of 2 Kings. We're about halfway through our look at chapter six. As we so often mention here on Hope From the Word, faith is a vital component in our relationship with God. In fact, grace through faith is what saves us. Faith in Jesus Christ and His atoning death on the cross. Here in 2 Kings 6, we see a great example of faith in action in the life of Elisha. Here is Pastor Bill to tell us about it.

Bill Luebkemann: And Elisha prayed, "O Lord, open his eyes so he may see." Then the Lord opened the servant's eyes, and he looked and saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha. Elisha prayed and asked God to open this guy's eyes. When He did, the servant looked and saw there were horses and chariots of fire all around the place. Remember what he said: "Those who are with us are more than those who are with them." We've got more on our side than he's got on his side.

These are not pretend, these are not fictitious people on our side. These are real spiritual help on our side in the form of angels, I guess, with chariots of fire on Elisha's side, far outnumbering. And even if they didn't outnumber them, we know that in one case in the Old Testament, one angel killed 185,000 people. So you wouldn't need too many angels to be on your side, and just one would have been enough. But he said they had even more on their side than were on the other side. It’s just that Elisha’s servant couldn't see it.

When you can't see what God's plan is in your life, no amount of reason, logic, or common sense will help you to understand it. You can't use the principles of engineering or science or logic to understand what God's will is sometimes. It just doesn't work that way. Maybe sometimes it does, but not all the time. When God is going to work in your life in a powerful way, sometimes it's a natural way. You may be sick, you may go to a doctor, he may give you some pills, and you may get better. Other times, He may work in a miraculous way that cannot be understood by anything on this earth.

Here, God was working in a spiritual way, and Elisha could have never convinced his servant of this probably if he hadn't shown him. "Yes, there's more people here than they have." "Well, I don't see any." "Well, take my word for it, they're here." "Well, where are they then?" "Well, they're here. They're just all around us. They're in this room right now with us. They're here protecting us, looking after us." "Well, I don't see them. I don't believe that. How do I know that to be true? You're just making that up." Having your eyes opened by God to the spiritual reality of things is the best way to see what's happening.

I think the best proof for angels there is is that on the New Jersey Turnpike, there's 12 lanes of cars and there aren't more accidents than there are. You see all those cars zipping around, weaving in between. Yeah, there's an occasional accident, but not very often. I think there must be angels here keeping them in their lanes because of all the cooks and crackpots out there that don't know how to drive. There should be an accident every 10 minutes on the New Jersey Turnpike, and there isn't. I don't need to look any further than that to say God must have angels on the dividing lines between the lanes here, just kind of keeping the cars in their lanes.

You must have one riding with me, keeping everybody else out of my lane. The way that your eyes are opened to spiritual things, you can see that here also. It's through prayer and through a work of God. You're not going to see spiritual things by going out and getting some degree and then learning how to do it and practicing or chanting a mantra or contemplating your belly button or anything like that. It's by God revealing it to you, which in this case He did for the simple reason that Elisha asked Him. They were there already.

There are angels. They are real. There are demons also; they are real also. But He who is in us is greater than he who is in the world. In this case, He who is with them also outnumbered those that were with them also. The Lord opened this servant's eyes, and he looked and he saw all these hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha. Now the servant said, "Wow, the Lord really is protecting us. Look at all these people." As the enemy came down toward him, Elisha prayed to the Lord, "Strike these people with blindness." So He struck them with blindness as Elisha had asked.

This was the second prayer of Elisha. First prayer: let my servant see what You're doing. Second prayer as the bad guys are moving in: strike them blind. Now, I don't think they were totally blind because they're going to follow him to another city. They must have had partial blindness. It may have been something as simple as the fact that they didn't recognize Elisha. They didn't know who he was. They might have been blind as far as to who he was. So when they came down to see him, they didn't recognize him. But the point was he prayed, they came down, and at a minimum, they did not know who he was.

Elisha told them, "These are not the droids you're looking for." No, Elisha told them, "This is not the road and this is not the city. Follow me, and I will lead you to the man you are looking for." And he led them to Samaria, right into the enemy's camp. A little deception here. Some people say, "Was he lying?" Well, he did lead them to himself. When their eyes were opened, he was there. They were just also looking at their mortal enemies. Elisha said, "This is not the road and this is not the city, but I'll take you there." They were like, "Okay." So they were blind. At a minimum, they didn't recognize him, and they didn't seem to know they were blind.

That's often another thing. You could go off on another whole bunny path here. But how many people in the world today are blind and don't know they're blind? It's just a spiritual thing. How many people think they understand it all? "We're going to go to heaven because we're good people. Because we're born in America, voted in every election, and God will surely honor that." "Never stole pens and paper from work, always got to work on time." This, that, and the other thing, blinded to spiritual things, not knowing, not understanding. And these people here, but thinking that they see, and that seems to be the category that these Arameans would fall into. Blind, but thinking that they see.

Like the Pharisees. Jesus said to one guy, "It wouldn't be so bad if you didn't say that you could see." Here are people who think they can see and really can't, and instead make fools of themselves. Weren't we all that way before we got saved? Who wasn't that way? They were blind, they didn't know they were blind to some degree. He said, "Follow me and I'll take you to the man you're looking for." And he led them to Samaria, to Israel, where the king of Israel was, their enemy. He brought them right into the King's house, practically, all these enemy troops. They woke up and there they were.

After they entered the city, Elisha said, "Lord, open the eyes of these men so they can see." Then the Lord opened their eyes and they looked, and there they were inside Samaria. Surprise! Here they were looking for Elisha, and they're inside Samaria and they realize they've been had. When the king of Israel saw them, he asked Elisha, "Shall I kill them, my father? Shall I kill them? Oh, good, great, the enemy is here. Let's wipe them out. We'll kill them all." Elisha answered, "Do not kill them. Would you kill men you have captured with your own sword or bow? You don't kill prisoners."

"Set food and water before them so that they may eat and drink and then go back to their master." So he prepared a great feast for them, and after they had finished eating and drinking, he sent them away and they returned to their master. So the bands from Aram stopped raiding Israel's territory. Instead of killing them all, the king shows them some hospitality, puts a great feast together, lets them eat and drink until they're well-fed, and then he sends them off and they go home to their master. This kindness that he extended to them had a beneficial effect, that the raiding bands, the raiding parties from Aram that kept coming into Israel's land, stopped that.

They went back and said, "They could have killed us all, but they let us go. Maybe they're not so bad after all. Let's not bother those people right now. Let's leave them be for a while." It had some kind of a beneficial effect there, at least for a short time, at least to some degree. But apparently not with the king. The king wasn't there in person, so he didn't feel the same generosity towards the Israelites perhaps that his troops did. Sometime later, Ben-Hadad, king of Aram, mobilized his entire army and marched up and laid siege to Samaria.

There was a great famine in the city. The siege lasted so long that a donkey's head sold for 80 shekels of silver and a quarter of a cab of seed pods for five shekels. What happened was Ben-Hadad here didn't have the same generosity that his army did, and he decided to lay siege on Samaria. The way they did this back in those days was they surrounded the city and blocked off everyone going in and everyone coming out. So the people living in the city had no way to get food or anything else. There was no commerce, no communication with the outside world. They cut off the UPS trucks going in there, and the people in the city slowly starved to death.

It got to be so bad that food was very, very expensive because nobody had any. They had money and no food. Someone would pay 80 shekels of silver just for a donkey's head. Who would want to eat a donkey's head? A quarter of a cab of seed pods, translated in some versions as donkey dung or dove dung or something like that. One commentator said, "Well, at least it might have been moist and had some nutritional value." There was so little in there that these people were starving because of what this guy Ben-Hadad was doing.

Do you remember Ben-Hadad back in 1 Kings 20? King Ahab, who's dead now, had captured Ben-Hadad and he let him go. He made a deal with him. Ahab brought him up into his chariot. Ben-Hadad offered, "I will return the cities my father took from your father. You may set up your own market areas in Damascus as my father did in Samaria." Ahab said, "On the basis of a treaty, I will set you free." So he made a treaty with him and let him go. Ahab foolishly made a treaty with this guy. He had no right to make a treaty with the guy.

God gave him the victory. He didn't win the victory. So he wasn't in the position to negotiate the terms of the treaty. If it was his victory, maybe he would have been able to negotiate the terms of the treaty. God gave him the victory, and God wanted this guy to be killed and he didn't do it. You remember how the prophet came along and condemned Ahab for that. He said, "You have set free a man I had determined should die. Therefore, it is your life for his life, your people for his people." That was near the end of 1 Kings 20.

So this guy Ben-Hadad shouldn't even be alive. But because King Ahab didn't follow God's instructions, this guy has been left alive and here he is able to torment and kill Israelites to the point here of laying siege to Samaria, causing a great famine. As the king of Israel was passing by on the wall, a woman cried to him, "Help me, my lord the king!" The king replied, "If the Lord does not help you, where can I get help for you? From the threshing floor? From the winepress?" Then he asked her, "What's the matter?"

He's walking by, this woman calls out "Help me," and he's like, "Can't you see we're all starving to death? We're all in trouble. If the Lord's not helping either one of us, He's not helping you, me, or anybody else that's in here. Where can I get help? From the threshing floor? There's nothing left there, it's barren. From the winepress? Nothing left there either, that's barren. We're all in this together, lady. And by the way, what's the matter?" he asked her. She answered, "This woman said to me, 'Give up your son so we may eat him today, and tomorrow we'll eat my son.' So we cooked my son and ate him. The next day I said to her, 'Give up your son so we may eat him,' but she had hidden him."

She said, "This other woman didn't keep her end of the deal." The king said, "What's the matter?" and she said, "This woman and I had a deal. She said we'll eat your son today and we'll eat my son tomorrow. So we cooked up my son—one of the translations says boiled—so we boiled up my son and we ate him. And now it's time to eat her son, she won't deliver her son. She has him hidden away. She's not keeping her end of the bargain." Sick. These people were this desperate. They were so desperate, so destitute, so completely wiped out here. They were completely on empty.

When the king heard the woman's words, he tore his robes. As he went along the wall, the people looked and there underneath he had sackcloth on his body. He said, "May God deal with me, be it ever so severely, if the head of Elisha son of Shaphat remains on his shoulders today." This king was so upset he tore his robes, and the people could plainly see he was wearing sackcloth underneath his clothes. In other words, he was in mourning. He knew this was from God, and he was going to take it out on Elisha. He said, "I'm going to have Elisha's head. If Elisha's head remains on his shoulders today, then may God deal with me, be it ever so severely, if Elisha's head is still connected to the rest of his body."

He's blaming God for this thing. And it very well was God who had orchestrated the whole thing. But guess what? It was because of sin in the land that God brought this upon them. And if Ahab had killed Ben-Hadad when he had the chance, none of this would have been happening. Now Elisha was sitting in his house, and the elders were sitting with him. The king sent a messenger ahead, but before he arrived, Elisha said to the elders, "Don't you see how this murderer is sending someone to cut off my head? Look, when the messenger comes, shut the door and hold it shut against him. Is not the sound of his master's footsteps behind him?"

While he was still talking to them, the messenger came down to him. And the king said, "This disaster is from the Lord. Why should I wait for the Lord any longer?" Look, here's Elisha minding his own business, sitting here in his house. Elisha always knew where Aram's army was going to be, and he told the king. "Aram's army is going to be over there, they're going to be over there, they're going to be over there." Doesn't the king know if he goes down to get Elisha to try to cut off his head, he's going to know he's coming? Did you learn anything here? This guy always knows what's going on. You think you're going to be able to sneak up on him and God's not going to show him?

So there's Elisha sitting at his home, minding his own business. The elders are there, they're probably watching football on TV or something. And the king sent a messenger ahead, but the king is following him. So the king's messenger is going ahead of the king. Elisha knows they're coming and he says to the elders that are with him, "Don't you see how this murderer, he's sending someone to cut off my head? And when he gets here, hold the door shut against him. The sound of his master's footsteps is right behind him." In other words, the sound of the king's footsteps is coming right behind him.

And while he was still talking to them, it happened that fast. The messenger showed up there and the king showed up there, and the king said, "This disaster is from the Lord. Why should I wait for the Lord any longer?" Lack of faith here on the part of this king. No repentance. He doesn't come in and say, "Man, I am repenting. I want to call this nation to repentance. I want to tell this nation to turn away from their idols and to turn back to the living God. I want to call these people to set aside their improper way of living, their sinful lifestyle, and turn back to the living God. What can we do to make this right? How can we make things right and please God? What can we do here?"

He doesn't say anything like that at all. He just says, "I've been waiting long enough. I'm not going to wait any longer. I'm sick and tired of waiting. I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired." Elisha had an answer for him that quick. Elisha said, "Hear the word of the Lord. This is what the Lord says: 'About this time tomorrow, a seah of flour will sell for a shekel and two seahs of barley for a shekel at the gate of Samaria.'" The officer on whose arm the king was leaning said to the man of God, "Look, even if the Lord should open the floodgates of the heavens, could this happen?" "You will see it with your own eyes," answered Elisha, "but you will not eat any of it."

So Elisha says to them, "Look, about this time tomorrow, this whole thing's going to be over. You're going to be able to buy flour or barley for cheap. There's going to be plenty of it, no problem." And the officer on whose arm the king was leaning—and that doesn't mean the king was a cripple, by the way. It could just mean that this was the guy's right-hand man, his assistant, his helper—and this officer didn't believe the prophecy spoken by this prophet. This officer said, "Look, even if the Lord should open up the floodgates in the heavens, could this happen?" Like, he's questioning whether it's going to really happen or not.

He's questioning whether it's really possible or not. He's questioning whether God Almighty can do this. "Even if God opened up the floodgates of heaven, how could He give? We're so bad off, how could He solve this problem?" And sometimes we're faced with problems today in our lives that look like they're unsolvable. And we say, "How could the problem ever be solved? How could God solve this crisis that I'm facing? Lack of a job, medical problem, problems at home, with a marriage maybe." It's not uncommon to hear someone say something like this.

"Even if God, you know, turned on all the spigots and opened all the faucets and, you know, I stood under the spout where His glory comes out and got washed in the blood and all that stuff, even if He did that all day long, how could it possibly make this situation right that's so messed up here?" Don't question God's ability to perform a miracle. That's what this guy was doing, speaking from a lack of faith here. "How could this happen?" And Elisha replied, "You're going to see it with your own eyes, but you're not going to eat any of it."

Too bad this guy had to open his mouth. If he had kept his mouth shut and said, "Well, praise God. Oh, thank God. Thank You, Lord, for bringing us our salvation tomorrow," this guy might have seen it and eaten of it. But because he doubts here, he's going to wind up seeing it just before he dies. We don't really have time to finish the story here, so I guess we'll stop, but you can read ahead if you like and find out what happens. But this guy dies in the stampede to get all the food. He sees all the food and all the people stampede out to get it and trample the poor guy. And that's the end of him. Just like he said here: "You'll see it with your own eyes, but you'll not eat any of it." Doesn't get a speck of it. He dies a hungry man, trampled over because he made the mistake of standing in the way where the crowd wanted to go. So the Lord does bring salvation to this camp.

Guest (Male): You've been listening to Hope From the Word. We're currently in a study of 2 Kings. You can hear this message and more Hope From the Word with Pastor Bill Luebkemann by going to ccmarlton.org. Pastor Bill's messages can also be found by downloading the Hope FM app on your smartphone or tablet. Or if you prefer to listen via podcast, you can find Hope From the Word wherever you find your podcasts.

We'd love to have you join us at Calvary Chapel of Marlton, either in person or online. Our Sunday service begins at 10:00 AM, and there's a Wednesday evening service at 7:00. To catch us online, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel at Calvary Chapel of Marlton, or just go to our website for the link at ccmarlton.org. And if you'd take a moment to write to Pastor Bill, it would be such a blessing to us. We're thankful each and every time we hear what God is doing in our listeners' lives, and we want to pray for you too. Either email us through the website at ccmarlton.org or call 856-983-1662. We'll continue our study in 2 Kings next time on Hope From the Word with Pastor Bill Luebkemann, a presentation of Calvary Chapel of Marlton.