2 Kings 5.
THERE are few portions of the Old Testament that show more plainly than this chapter how a sinner is brought to God. We leave the land of Israel here, for the country of their northern neighbor and enemy, Syria. There were, the Lord said in His brief address to the people in the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4:27), many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet, and none of them was cleansed saving Naaman the Syrian. The way of power was there, but none would take it. To remind them of this, was to stir the depths of their wicked hearts; the Jew would have confined all blessing to himself, but God purposed to overstep all barriers that He might bless the needy. Naaman’s case, and Ruth’s, and Rahab’s (Joshua, chapters 2 and 6, and Matthew 1:5) were but foreshadowings of the grand “whosoever” of John 3:16. Grace can reach even an open enemy.
Naaman was a great man, a mighty man of courage, and highly thought of in his own land, but there was something about him that whenever he thought of it, took away the enjoyment of the king and people’s favor, —he had an incurable disease; he was a leper.
So indeed it is with all who are strangers to God’s grace. They may try to forget that all is not well, may live in the pleasures and satisfaction of “today”, occupying their minds so fully that for the eternal “tomorrow” is left no thought whatever, but it is all a pretense and a failure, for the conscience again and again whispers, “Prepare to meet thy God!”
God uses the great and the small to further His ends. Sometimes it is a tract that is used to bring a lost one to realize his soul’s need, and to pillow his head on the loving bosom of Jesus. Here, the means that He used to send the leper on the most important undertaking of his life, was a little slave girl, a little Hebrew maid who waited on Naaman’s wife. She knew the power of God, and though she might have felt very bitterly toward Naaman and the Syrians because they had taken her away from her home, she thinks only of the poor man’s need, and the One Who could alone meet it.
The king of Syria, ignorant of God as Naaman was, proposes to send a letter to the equally godless king of Israel, and a present of worth, for he thinks much of his great soldier. It was all in vain; man may in his pride think to offer much for the favor of God, but what God offers is free. The kings, and the letter, and the present, are all set aside by Elisha, the man of God; nay more, the pride of man exhibited in Naaman as he stands at the prophet’s door, is thoroughly rebuked. At first indeed, Naaman was angry, very angry. He would not accept God’s way of cleansing a poor leper; he wanted something to be done that would preserve him his pride.
But God will not bargain with the sinner; He has stated the way to deliverance (see among many passages, Romans 4); will the sinner, as pictured by Naaman the leper, receive or refuse? It is one or the other; what say you, my reader? Are you for receiving or refusing the grace of God?
At length Naaman is brought by the very hopeless case in which he realizes he is, to take the one way of God’s providing. Notice that when once he is humble enough to be a receiver at God’s hand, it does not take long before he is the healed, the blessed, the happy man. How changed is Naaman; a short while ago his language was, as he fumed over the disregard of his greatness which Elisha showed: “Behold, I thought he will surely come out to me,” etc. Now he can say, justifying God as he seeks the prophet,
“Behold now I know that there is no God in all the earth, but in Israel.”
Gratitude is welling up in the Syrian’s heart; his great burden is gone, and he thinks of his infinite debt; will Elisha let him give him something? No, all is of grace, and not the least opportunity may be given to let it appear as though the sinner paid aught for his salvation. Neither offering nor urging will move the prophet, for he knows that what has taken place is a part of God’s free and limitless grace.
Naaman is henceforth to be a worshiper of the true God, though he may be alone in that respect in his own land; and how intelligent he is, this newly converted soul: can he have learned that God long before had declared that an altar of hewn stones He would not accept, because it contained man’s handiwork; or is it the intelligence of faith, as yet untaught? Naaman has a lively conscience too; he thinks of his associations in his own land, and is disturbed in his mind, but as to this, the Holy Spirit will enlighten him when the occasion arrives.
Gehazi’s sin was not so much in the double lie, as that he was spoiling Naaman’s return to Syria with full unbroken measure of his intended present. The leper had received without money and without price (Isaiah 55:1), and he should have gone back to his country to exhibit the proof of a free salvation. So the judgment of which Naaman had been freed, falls upon him who would misrepresent the Saviour God.
Reader, if unsaved, delay not; now is the accepted time. Tomorrow is not yours.
ML 10/30/1927