Today, I am reading and commenting on  2 Kings 5-7.

I want to look at the lessons we should learn from three of the accounts in today’s passage.  First, we have the story of Naaman, a commander in the army of Aram.  Naaman was an enemy of Israel and had wrought significant damage against it and its people.  Yet, when he came to Elisha for healing, Elisha healed him.  However, that is not the lesson I want to focus on.  Elisha told Naaman that in order to be healed he needed to wash in the Jordan River.  Naaman was angry about this, but his aides asked him if he would not have undertaken some “great quest” in order to be healed.  In the same way, we often look for the great deeds we can do in order to serve God, when what God is asking us to do is more mundane.  Are we willing to do the mundane tasks to which God calls us?

Second, we have the story of the king of Aram sending an army to capture Elisha because God revealed the king of Aram’s plans to him and Elisha passed that knowledge on to the king of Israel.  When the forces of Aram surrounded the city in which Elisha was living, Elisha’s servant panicked.  Elisha told his servant that there were more on their side than those mustered against them.  Some translations render what Elisha said as, “Greater are those who are for us than those who are against us.”  Elisha then asked God to open his servant’s eyes to those who supported them.  In the same way today, we often think there are more opposing us in our attempts to serve God than there are supporting us.  However, not only are there more supporting us than we realize, since one of those supporting us is God, they are greater than those opposing us.

Finally, we have the story about the famine in Samaria caused by Samaria being besieged by the armies of Aram.  When Elisha told the king of Israel that by the same time the next day, the prices for food would go from being completely unaffordable to practically free, one of the king’s officers said that even if God opened the floodgates of heaven, that was not possible.  Elisha told him that he would see it happen, but not get to eat any of the food.  When the residents of the city discovered the next day that the army of Aram had fled in the night, the officer in questioned was trampled by the crowds.  The officer’s sin was not in his failure to believe what Elisha said.  His sin was in thinking that God was unable to do it.  I struggle with having faith that God will do miraculous things in my life, but I pray that I never doubt that He can do them.  Let us never doubt that anything is possible for God, and pray that we have the faith to believe, and to act on that belief, that He will perform miracles around us.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.