Hope From the Word

Bill Luebkemann: We often have a limited view of the way God works. The only way God could fix it is the way I thought about having God fix it ahead of time. The only way that God could fix this is by getting rid of the army and then we'd have to plant new crops and then it would have to rain and the crops would grow.

It seems like he's saying we're looking to God for a solution, but it's going to be a long-term problem. It's going to take a while, even if God gets involved. How could he act that fast? It seems like this guy has a lack of faith, but at the same time, it seems like his faith is constrained by the method that he thinks God's allowed to work in. It's not going to be anything supernatural.

Guest (Male): There was a time in the history of Israel where God, in his mercy, intervened in a supernatural way, bringing about a great deliverance to the people. Can God still work that way today? I think today's Hope From the Word will encourage us as God is able to save. This is the radio outreach of Calvary Chapel of Marlton with Pastor Bill Luebkemann. Before picking up in Chapter 7 of Second Kings, Pastor Bill gives a little background to set the scene.

Bill Luebkemann: Open up your Bibles to Second Kings, Chapter 7. That's where we left off, and we were in the middle of this siege around Samaria where the Syrians to the north, known as Aram in the New International Version, led by their King Ben-Hadad, were surrounding Samaria, blockading it if you will.

They weren't letting nothing go in or nothing go out. Somehow the King and at least one of his helpers had gotten over to see Elisha. They were blaming God for this catastrophe where everybody in the city was starving. It wasn't an act of God, actually. Probably because of their sin, but God had orchestrated all of these events.

And they seemed to know that God was in this because when they came down to Elisha here, the King said to him at the very end of Chapter 6, "This disaster is from the Lord. Why should I wait for the Lord any longer?" Sort of like what he's saying there is this disaster is from the Lord, and so now I guess I'm going to have to put an end to it myself. It's like God's arranged it, God's caused it to happen, and now I guess I'm going to have to step up to the plate and put an end to it.

He says, "Why should I wait for the Lord any longer?" Now his intention here, he would like to murder Elisha. Elisha commented on that a few verses earlier, but we're not going to go backwards here. Elisha said in Verse 1 of Chapter 7, "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."

So Elisha tells them this is what God has to say about it. You think this is from God? You're right. It is from God. And now God has something to tell you. It's going to be over with tomorrow. About this time tomorrow, in fact, the food's going to become much more plentiful and much cheaper. I don't know what the normal price was here. One commentator suggested these prices still were not really that cheap, but they were a lot cheaper than they were previously.

So what he's saying here is this embargo's going to be over, you're going to be able to get plenty of food tomorrow. That's what God has to say about it. And it's interesting. They blamed God for it. They went to see a prophet of God about it. They said, "Now we're going to have to take matters into our own hands," or the King said that. Presumably what he was going to do was kill the prophet of God.

But instead, the prophet of God told him something that was very favorable. It's going to end. The Lord's going to bring a conclusion to this. And now you think that they would be happy. You think they would say, "Well, praise the Lord. Let's go back and tell everybody to be giving thanks to God. Praise God, we got some good news here. We didn't expect that. We expected we were going to have to kill you, Elisha, but instead you've given us some cause for hope."

"So let's go back, let's make an offering to God, let's make a sacrifice, let's worship him, let's thank him that he's going to be bringing this suffering to an end." But instead, the King's helper there says this really dumb thing. 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." This guy here who the King is leaning on, that doesn't necessarily mean physically leaning on him. It means that this guy was the King's right-hand man, perhaps, or maybe his helper, assistant, chief officer, or something. This guy that was with the King here comes forth with this brilliant statement showing a lack of faith.

"Look," he says, "Look, we know this is from God, but we don't believe God can fix it." That seems to be what he's saying here. "We know it's from God because we just said that a few verses ago, but we don't believe God can fix it." And he's showing forth here some amount of unbelief. He says, "Even if the Lord should open the floodgates of the heavens," some other translations say windows.

If God could open up the windows in heaven and throw bags of food out the window, even if he could do that, could this happen? Could God do that? And this shows a guy that doesn't have very much faith in believing that God can fix the problem. He's willing to blame God when things aren't going right, but he's not willing to trust him to make things better, even when God specifically says he's going to make things better.

And you can think about that. The world is just full of people who don't want to trust God, even though he specifically says in his word a whole lots of things. There's all kinds of promises that he made in his word here, one of which is everlasting life if we just put our faith and trust in the name of Jesus. And yet so many people don't want to believe in that.

They could blame God, use his name in vain, and blame him for every bad thing that happens. But to trust him to make some good happen would seem to be a difficult thing, even though the Bible says God is love, light, and a few other things, always good, by the way, never any bad things. This guy here also, besides some amount of just simple lack of faith, seems like he also is locked into some mindset that if God was going to fix it, he'd have to fix it a certain way.

The only way God could fix it is the way I thought about having God fix it ahead of time. The only way that God could fix this is by getting rid of the army and then we'd have to plant new crops and then it would have to rain and the crops would grow. We're looking to God for a solution here. It seems like he's saying we're looking to God for a solution, but it's going to be a long-term problem.

It's going to take a while, even if God gets involved. How could he act that fast? It seems like this guy has a lack of faith, but at the same time, it seems like his faith is constrained by the method that he thinks God's allowed to work in. God will maybe do something, but if he does, it's only going to be something that I've seen him do before, or it's not going to be anything supernatural.

There's a lot of people in the world today that are willing to admit that God will do things, but only if the things that he does are not supernatural in origin. If we're a farmer and we pray for the crops to grow and it just rains a lot that year and the crops grow well, well, that's kind of a natural process. It rains and the crops grow.

Somebody who's a faithful believer could say we prayed really hard and thank God that he gave us extra rain that year. Somebody who's an atheist would just say it was just the luck of the draw. It was the El Niño. It was the ocean currents and the way the ocean's currents were coming in from the different oceans were forming a vortex, which was causing a water vapor to rise and be transformed through a fourth dimension, which appeared as a rainstorm.

You can come up with the most whacked-out science fiction explanation and people will believe that. They believe evolution, right? That we evolved from nothing. The average person on the street believes that the DNA in your cell, six billion chemical letters. By the way, six billion letters would fill 1,000 books of 500 pages each with type so small you need a magnifying glass to read it.

That's how much information is in one cell in your body. One cell. Six billion chemical letters of DNA. That's what's in one cell. Just one cell. If you took every cell in your body and the DNA out of every cell and put all that information on books, well, I've heard people estimate it would fill the Grand Canyon. That doesn't sound to be too far off. I haven't done the math myself.

But if you say today, "The way that happened is probably, we're not sure exactly, but probably lightning came and hit this mud at just the right angle and caused these proteins to line up and accidentally created life," that's okay. We can teach that in the public schools because it's not religious. But if you say God did it, can't mention that. That's illegal, unconstitutional.

And it seems like this officer here would believe that God might do it, but only if God does it a certain way. Perhaps he had a way in mind. And his penalty was rather harsh. Elisha said to him, "You will see it with your own eyes," answered Elisha, "but you will not eat any of it." It seems like he received instant judgment for his lack of faith here.

You're not going to get to eat any of this stuff. But you're going to see it just before it's lights out for you. He doesn't say that the guy's going to die, by the way. He doesn't really describe what's going to happen, but the guy is going to die. We'll see. Now, back at the city of Samaria where this famine is going on, we're going to switch scenes back there to see what's going on.

Now, there were four men with leprosy at the entrance of the city gate. Jewish tradition, which is unsupported, it's just Jewish tradition of this day, I don't know if it's still true today or not, but at the time the Bible was written, it was tradition for them to believe that this was Gehazi, Elisha's servant, and his three sons. Gehazi being leprous because of what he did in stealing the money from the guy that came to be healed, Naaman.

When Naaman came to be healed, how Elisha didn't turn down the gift and then Gehazi went after him pretending to be representing Elisha and accepted the money from him. Now whether this was Gehazi and his three sons or not doesn't really matter. Now there were four men with leprosy at the entrance of the city gate. They said to each other, "Why stay here until we die? If we say we'll go into the city, the famine is there and we will die. And if we stay here, we will die."

"So let's go over to the camp of the Arameans and surrender. If they spare us, we live. If they kill us, then we die." So these guys are sitting there at the gate and they're going to die anyway. They're going to die from their leprosy. They're going to die a little sooner than they would die if they didn't have leprosy.

And they're going to die even sooner still because they're hungry and they have no food. And the reason they're out at the city gate is they're not allowed to commingle with the people in the city because nobody wants to get leprosy. So they're ostracized and they're out there at the city gate. And they get to thinking, "You know what? If we just stay here, we're going to die because we don't have any food. There's no food coming."

"And so what are our options? Well, let's see. We can stay here and we're going to die because ain't no food here. Now we can go into the city where we're not supposed to be anyway, but that doesn't matter because they don't have any food in there either. So we go in the city, we're just going to, besides the fact someone may kill us for going in there, we're not going to get any food anyway because they don't have any."

"Now, we could go over to the enemy's camp who's surrounding the city here and we could surrender and maybe they'll spare us and we'll live. Maybe. If they don't spare us and they kill us, well, we're no worse off. We're going to die anyway. So we could stay here and die, we could go in the city and die, we could go over there, we might survive." So actually their reasoning here is pretty logical.

They don't really have anything better to do. There's only four of them. They don't actually have the benefit of numbers, and God uses them. Isn't it amazing how if somebody commented that if you took out of the Bible every time when God used somebody who was sick, somebody who wasn't well. I think Greg Laurie's program on the radio yesterday or today started out with all the different people God used.

He used this guy that was sick, this guy that had this problem, this guy that had that problem. In fact, the last thing he said was he used Lazarus and he was dead. So what's your problem? And if somebody said if you take out of the Bible every instance where God used somebody who was sick, not well, depressed, down on their luck, out of chances, or whatever, if you removed all those things from the Bible, everybody with bad circumstances, somebody said it wouldn't be a very thick book.

And here these guys were about to be part of a plan of God and they were about to be a part of saving the whole city. So they must have hemmed and hawed and thought about this and batted it around and kicked the idea back and forth among themselves and they finally decided to get up the nerve and go for it. "Well, we might as well do it. We're going to die here, we're going to die there. We'll go over there, maybe we'll be lucky."

It doesn't say they prayed or asked God or anything, but you can see that God is about to work through them. At dusk they got up and went to the camp of the Arameans. When they reached the edge of the camp, not a man was there. For the Lord had caused the Arameans to hear the sound of chariots and horses and a great army, so that they said to one another, "Look, the King of Israel has hired the Hittite and Egyptian kings to attack us."

So they got up and fled in the dusk and abandoned their tents and their horses and donkeys. They left the camp as it was and ran for their lives. So these guys got up here, these four guys with leprosy. They waited until dusk. I guess they figured maybe they'd sneak into the camp first at dusk, spy it out, see what was going on. Maybe that would give them a chance to change their mind. "You still want to do it? You want to change your mind? You want to do it? Should we go? Should we stay back?"

And when they got there, the only problem was they got out to the camp of the Arameans. This was the enemy. This was a big, busy, thriving camp where thousands probably of Arameans were. They had their food and supplies and they were besieging and surrounding all of Samaria from this camp. It was a major operation center.

They got to the edge of the camp and somebody has suggested that the wording here, the way it's presented in the original language, the wording for the edge of the camp might mean that they actually got to the far edge of the camp. In other words, they walked all the way through it. Getting to the far edge, they had really surveyed the whole camp and they found there was no one there.

The lights were on but no one was home. Why? Because even though the people inside of Samaria didn't have an army big enough to rout these bad guys, and even though there was nothing that could be done from a worldly sense, God had a plan and a purpose. And it was that somehow he made these Arameans hear the sound of a great army.

Now I don't know if he actually made a sound come in on the air and they all heard it, or if he just did something in their brain that made them think they were hearing it. And it doesn't matter because God did it. They heard everything. They heard horses. "Is that horses you hear? Did you hear chariot wheels squeaking? That's the sound of a lot of horses, Harry." And they were scared to death.

Now you remember just a few chapters ago when Elisha and Gehazi were in the city there and they woke up in the morning and the Syrians had completely surrounded the city. Remember that? Because they wanted Elisha. The King said bring him back here. In those events of that day, God made the Syrian army blind so they couldn't see what was really there. They couldn't see that they had Elisha and Elisha led them somewhere else and dropped them off in the middle of Samaria, remember?

Now God does the opposite here. There, in that story, he made the Arameans or the Syrians blind to what was really there. Here, he made them hear something that was not there. He made them imagine something. And they imagined or heard the sound of this giant army. Maybe they really did hear it because maybe God set up a big loudspeaker system outside the camp there and was playing a movie over it and it had lots of chariots and horses jumping.

And they heard this army, the Arameans, and they said, "Oh my gosh, the King of Israel is up to no good. He's went out and hired the Hittites and the Egyptians to attack us." He got himself some hired soldiers. What's the word for hired soldiers? Mercenaries. Thank you. He went out and got some mercenaries like the Hessians who were working for the British during the Revolutionary War.

"And we better get out of here." Because they knew the Jews didn't have such an army and the Jews were there sitting helpless. But God made this whole thing come about. And they fled in the dusk. Now these lepers had went there in the dusk and these people had fled in the dusk so maybe somehow as the four guys were walking, God amplified the sound of their footsteps and made it louder also.

They abandoned everything: their tents and even their animals, their horses and their donkeys. They left the camp as it was. They left the lights on, the TVs on, the fires burning. They took off and they ran for their lives. The men who had leprosy reached the edge of the camp and entered one of the tents. They ate and drank and carried away silver, gold, and clothes, and went off and hid them.

They returned and entered another tent and took some things from it and hid them also. So these guys, these lepers, they go into a tent and they help themselves. They open up the fridge, it's loaded. They're starving, these guys, starving. They eat and drink and they have their full and then they decide, "Hey, finders keepers, losers weepers. Let's ransack this place. We may be the first ones here, but we're not going to be the only ones here. Other people are going to find this place eventually."

So they carted off some of the booty, some of the gold, some silver, and some clothes, and they hid them. And they came back and they got some more and they hid them also. Just looking out for themselves. And then it dawned on them, "You know, there's a whole city of starving people back there in Samaria, and here we are taking all this booty and how much could four guys take from a whole camp?" Obviously they didn't take that much.

Then they said to each other, "We're not doing right. This is a day of good news and we are keeping it to ourselves. If we wait until daylight, punishment will overtake us. Let's go at once and report this to the royal palace." So dusk here was evening, and they said, "Oh boy, we can't keep this news to ourselves. We got to share it with the rest of the city. All those other people are hungry and starving also."

Isn't it amazing, a hungry and starving city and they didn't even know their salvation was near at hand? Right outside their city was a whole camp full of food that was empty, and they didn't know it. They were inside the city starving to death and right outside, not too far away, was this camp loaded with food, gold, silver, clothes, all stocked up, no one there, free for the taking. They didn't know it.

They were starving to death while their salvation was right outside. They were unaware of it. Just like the world today is unaware, it seems, that their salvation is just a short distance away or so many people seem to be unaware they even need any kind of salvation. They realized we got to spread this good news. If we don't do it, punishment's going to come back. It's going to come back to us somehow. Let's go tell the King about this.

So they went and called out to the city gatekeepers. Now remember, they're not allowed in the city, so they hang out by the gate, but they could call out to the city gatekeepers. They could call out to the city gatekeepers. So they went and called out to the city gatekeepers and told them, "We went into the Aramean camp and not a man was there. Hello, gatekeeper, can you hear me? Hello, I'm out here."

You'd think the gatekeeper probably say, "Shut up, you leper. Get lost." But they told them, "We went into the Aramean camp and not a man was there. We went into their camp and there was no one there. Not a sound of anyone. Only tethered horses and donkeys and the tents left just as they were." The gatekeeper shouted the news and it was reported within the palace.

Guest (Male): You've been listening to Hope From the Word. We're currently in Pastor Bill Luebkemann's study of Second Kings. If you'd like to hear this message again, you have several options. Visit our website at ccmarlton.org, download the Hope FM app to your smartphone or tablet, or look for us wherever you find your podcasts.

If you've been thinking about visiting Calvary Chapel of Marlton where Bill serves as pastor, we'd love to have you. Our service times are on Sunday mornings at 10:00. We also meet midweek on Wednesdays at 7:00 PM. You can also livestream from home whenever you visit our YouTube channel at Calvary Chapel of Marlton. For more information, go to ccmarlton.org. We hope to see you soon.

Before the day is done, we'd like to connect with you. Share a praise report, prayer request, or what you're learning from this series. You can easily email us from our website, ccmarlton.org, or just call us at 856-983-1662. There's more to come from Bill's study of Second Kings, and we'll have that for you next time on Hope From the Word with Pastor Bill Luebkemann. This program is brought to you by Calvary Chapel of Marlton.