Rev. Rodger McDaniel is the pastor at Highlands Presbyterian Church in Cheyenne.
These are excerpts from his sermon last Sunday morning.
2nd Kings 2, “Elisha took the mantle of Elijah that had fallen from him, and struck the water, saying, “Where is the Lord, the God of Elijah?” When he had struck the water, the water was parted to the one side and to the other, and Elisha went over.”
The last prophet for whom God parted the waters was Moses. Now it is for this little known, seldom preached Elisha.
Elisha had many of the same qualities, many of the same powers, much of the same authority as Jesus of Nazareth and but for one especially dark incident in his life, we might honor him in much the same way.
The Gospel of John records the first of many of the miracles of Jesus. It was at a wedding when Jesus changed the water into wine. 2nd Kings records the first miracle of Elisha as the day when he turned polluted water into pure.
” Now the people of the city said to Elisha, “The location of this city is good, as my lord sees; but the water is bad, and the land is unfruitful.” He said, “Bring me a new bowl, and put salt in it.” So they brought it to him. Then he went to the spring of water and threw the salt into it, and said, “Thus says the Lord, I have made this water wholesome; from now on neither death nor miscarriage shall come from it.”
It was the first of Elisha’s many miracles. Elisha is approached by a woman whose husband has died. “Your servant my husband is dead; and you know that your servant feared the Lord, but a creditor has come to take my two children as slaves.” Elisha said to her, “Tell me, what do you have in the house?”
All she has in the world is a single jar of oil. In much the same way Jesus filled the vessels with new wine, Elisha tells her to find all the containers she can and go into her house and fill each with the oil from that last remaining jar which by the word of Elisha provided a never ending supply of precious oil. The oil from that one jar provided more and more oil until the containers were no more. “She came and told the man of God, and he said, “Go sell the oil and pay your debts, and you and your children can live on the rest.”
Then a Shunammite lady befriended Elisha. Described as wealthy and provides hospitality to Elisha.
This kind woman has no son and her husband is elderly. He blesses her with the conception of a son who later dies. “When the child was older, he went out one day to his father among the reapers. He complained to his father, “Oh, my head, my head!” The father said to his servant, “Carry him to his mother.” He carried him and brought him to his mother; the child sat on her lap until noon, and he died.”
When Elisha came into the house, he saw the child lying dead on his bed. So he went in and closed the door on the two of them, and prayed to the Lord... and the child opened his eyes. Elisha said, “Call the woman.” When she came, he said, “Take your son.” She came and fell at his feet, bowing to the ground; then she took her son and left.
Elisha now returns to Gilgal where he finds a famine. The people are starving. This story conjures memories of Jesus feeding the multitudes. Elisha too fed the multitudes.
A man came from Baal-shalishah, bringing food from the first fruits to the man of God: twenty loaves of barley and fresh ears of grain in his sack. Elisha said, “Give it to the people and let them eat.” But his servant said, “How can I set this before a hundred people?” So he repeated, “Give it to the people and let them eat, for thus says the Lord, ‘They shall eat and have some left.’” He set it before them, they ate, and had some left, according to the word of the Lord.
But…Elisha is barely a memory today. Why is that? It’s because we know one thing too many about him.
I am reading an autobiography of Malcolm X who was once asked how he could defend Elijah Muhammed against charges of womanizing in the Nation of Islam. “A prophet, he said, “must be weighed in the balance. Is right to toss out years of good because of one’s indiscretion?”
Elisha’s one discretion? This is a prophet who restored diseased water to purity, raised the dead, fed the hungry multitudes with a few loaves…but one day while walking to bethel, Elisha encountered a group of children. They did what children often do…the jeered him and made fun of his bald head. They called him “baldhead.” Go away Baldhead, they yelled. It seems like an annoying but harmless taunt. But it caught Elisha at an apparently bad moment. The scripture says he “cursed them in the name of the Lord. Then two she-bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.”
A life dedicated to God, doing good, healing and feeding and teaching…lost in memory to a single regretful incident. We do that, don’t we? We do that all the time to celebrities. Tiger will not be remembered for his unparalleled ability to play golf. Greg Mortenson will be remembered, if at all, not for building schools in Afghanistan but for the embellishments he included in his bestselling book. For all the good Elisha accomplished…the she-bear incident is what he is remembered for if at all.
Perhaps we have trouble weighing their lives in the balance of the good they’ve done because we can’t weigh our own lives in the balance.
Our lives can become a reflection of our regrets…those moments we’d like over, the things we said we wish we hadn’t, things we did that stung someone we love then…and us even now. Regrets over things we didn’t do, choices we wish we had made, lives we wish we had shared. My guess is that to his dying day, Elisha was not able to see the face of the boy he raised from the dead, or the smiles of those he fed but not a day went by when he didn’t relive the mauling of those children by the bear set upon those boys by his own curse.
Was he good or bad? It’s important to go back to the theme with which we started out Bible study. If you don’t know the Old Testament, you will never understand Jesus. Jesus came to announce God’s covenant…we are all sinners and fall short…not any of are all good or all bad. But we are all forgiven.
We can let go of our regrets and be thankful for those times in our lives when we did what God called us to do when we loved a neighbor like ourselves, fed the hungry, comforted the grieving, celebrated Jesus in our lives. That is the mantle Jesus left for us. In God’s eyes, we are never defined by our regrets, but by the faith that allows us to move forward, to try again, to be redeemed.
“Little children” is naar or nahar in Hebrew. It is used of Isaac when he was twenty–eight, of Joseph when he was thirty–nine, also for the Sodomites who attacked the home of Lot. You will find it used in other places in Scripture, and it does not refer to little children as we think of them.
ReplyDeleteFor example, 1 Kings 12:8 says, “But he forsook the counsel of the old men, which they had given him, and consulted with the young men that were grown up with him, and which stood before him.”
This verse is speaking about the time Rehoboam forsook the wisdom of the older men, the wise men, and consulted with the younger men who had grown up with him. The word translated “young men” is the same word translated “little children” in 2 Kings 2:23. I am sure no one believes that Rehoboam was consulting with little children, or that he went to nursery school and talked things over with the little ones. They were young men.
When Samuel came to anoint as king one of the sons of Jesse, you will remember that his sons were grown. As they passed by Samuel one by one, he said to Jesse, “Are these all thy children?” Well, the word children is the same word used in 2 Kings 2:23. It is used to describe Jesse’s grown sons. The youngest son, David, was not even there. The hoodlums who were taunting Elisha were young men, not little children. You will find this word used in many places in Scripture, and in every other place it is translated “young men.” This was a crowd of young fellows.
They were students of the false prophets. They were a gang that mocked and ridiculed Elisha. They said, “Go up, thou bald head.” What did they mean by that? They were telling him to do the same thing Elijah had done. They were saying, “Why don’t you take off like Elijah did?” They were ridiculing the truth in Scripture that God will take a people out of this world.
This is the same attitude, Peter says, that will appear on the earth again in the last days. This incident in 2 Kings is given to us to let us know that God intends to judge those who ridicule the second coming of Christ. Second Peter 3:3–4 says, “Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.”
During the last days on earth there will be those who will ridicule believers about the coming of Christ. They will say something like, “Well, what is the matter? You haven’t gone up yet. You are still hanging around. I thought you were going to leave us.” This is the type of thing scoffers will say to believers. Many are already saying, “Where is the sign of His coming?” For this reason we ought to be careful today in the way that we teach the second coming of Christ. We should not go out on a limb. We should not become fanatics on the subject. We should handle it with care, even in a manner in which the Word of God handles it. So 2 Kings is just a little picture of the judgment that will come upon those who will ridicule Christ’s return to earth. It is a fearful judgment.
Perspective is everything!
Marc