Have you been hearing the news, lately? Out west there were fires out of control, destroying an enormous amount of property. In Indiana and Iowa, there was severe flooding, with people losing their lives. In Japan, a major earthquake, killing a number of people.
Have you pulled up to the gas pumps, lately? It seems an almost daily news item that gas prices have once again reached a record high.
Who ever heard of a government in deep deficit, sending out money to try and stimulate a staggering economy? I will not endeavor to pass any judgement on whether or not that was a good idea, nor will I try and make a public guess of how much that little check will cost us, who pay taxes, in the long run, because that’s not my area of expertise, and it’s not the responsibility placed upon me by my calling as a preacher of the gospel. What I do wish to do, however, is call your attention to the fact that things are going on, and I believe they have biblical significance. It is not business as usual.
All of the events that seem to be increasing in their intensity, like a huge snowball rolling down a mountainside, are in my judgement pieces in a puzzle that are bringing us to the end of the age in which we live.
While this message is not really about the end of the age and the return of the Lord, I would not have you ignorant, brethren, that the end of the age and the return of the Lord are going to happen.
I turn your attention to our text, 2 Kings 6:24-7:20. This text is a biblical reminder that it doesn’t take long for people to get into serious trouble, but it is also a reminder that our God is EL Shaddah, the God who provides, and He is able to do exceeding, abundantly above all that we can ask or think! When you don’t know what the world is coming to, you know who has come into the world!
I have outlined this passage into four simple points, and I will attempt to show you how this passage of Scripture, penned down so many years ago, is relevant to our lives today.
First, there is the condition they faced.
Talk about high prices! A donkey’s head was sold for eighty shekels of silver. Judas sold Jesus for thirty shekels of silver, and here people were buying an old donkey’s head for almost three times that much. The cap on top of dove’s dung was being sold for five shekels of silver! That makes gas prices seem not so bad!
What will people do when they really get desperate? How low can people sink? Here is the account of two women agreeing to eat their babies, and they ate one, but then the other mother backed out of the deal when it came time to eat her child. It’s hard to imagine that a mother would allow the child of her womb to be killed by an abortion doctor, but this even takes it to a lower degree than that.
We have taken luxury for granted for so long in this country, that we think we are entitled to it. We’re not, and all that would have to happen is for Almighty God to withdraw His hand of blessing, and in just a very, very short time the ugly nature of desperation and depravity would rise up in a society that, more and more, knows nothing of a personal relationship with the One who clothes the lilies, feeds the sparrows, holds the future, and came that you might have life, and that you might have it more abundantly.
Secondly, what they considered to be the cause of their deplorable conditions.
If it wasn’t so sad, it would almost be comical to observe the perspective people have on our current conditions.
This king, in our text, said in verse 31, “It’s that preacher’s fault.” A reading of the verses leading up to our text shows that Elisha, God’s preacher, had been giving the word of the Lord to the king of Israel, and had, in reality, been the kings greatest asset. What the king could not see, in his short-sightedness, was that God allowed a time of famine in order to accomplish His own purposes. He was going to show His hand of power to His people, Israel, and He was going to show them, one more time, the necessity of their dependance on Him.
Before you get to caught up in the fervor of this political season, I want to remind you that Nahum 1:3 tells us that “...the Lord has His way in the whirlwind and in the storm...” Daniel 2:21 says of the Lord, “...He removes kings and raises up kings...He knows what is in the darkness...”
When you hear tragic news, when you begin to ponder what you are going to do in the face of current conditions, and you wonder how you can live if those gas prices keep climbing, you need to remember one thing: depend on God, because, if you are saved, you are His!
The cause wasn’t what the king thought, at all. God had never stopped loving His people, and He wasn’t one little bit out of control; as a matter of fact, He was in perfect control.
That brings us to the cure for this desperate situation.
To put it quite simply, the cure was God, and God sent the cure in a most unlikely way. All of the great minds could have gotten around a table somewhere and tried to figure this thing out, and they could have never come up with what God did to give them relief and blessing.
Four lepers are introduced in chapter seven, verse three. No telling how many times they had entertained the question of why they had to have leprosy. I can almost hear the cry of their hearts: “Lord, why did this happen to me? I try to be a good person, I care about others, and yet You’ve allowed me to suffer this misery. Why, Lord?”
Just a little amount of thought on our part, allows us to see the bigger picture, a little inkling of what God saw all the time. If these men had not had leprosy, they would not have been out there at the city gate with nowhere to go. They would not have had the motivation to go and surrender themselves to the Syrians.
Verse 6 says that God had done a miraculous thing before they even got to the Syrian camp. Verse 8 tells how they immediately struck it rich and went from famine to feasting, and from rags to riches.
God was the cure, and He is always the cure. He’s the cure for anguish you are going through in your personal life today. He’s the cure for your doubts and fears about your future. He’s the cure!
Lastly, I want you to see how God uses people’s care to carry His cure.
These four lepers had come into a life that was beyond anything they’d ever been able to even dream about. They were hiding stuff and storing it up, and they were getting ready to say to their soul, “Take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry, because you have much goods laid up for many years.” They were getting ready to say that, but God punched them in the heart.
Look at verse 9. This is a great verse. They said, “We are not doing right. This is the day of good news, and we remain silent.” There was such a sense of urgency, they said, “We can’t even wait until morning, we’ve got to go tell the good news to those who need to hear it.”
According to statistics, every single second three people die who have never even professed to know Jesus as their Savior. Some of them are on the other side of the world, but some of them are right here in our town. We’ve got a world-wide responsibility, but it begins right here in our town. It begins with your own self-examination.
When you look at the condition of your soul before our Holy God, what do you see? Are you saved and sure? When you look at what you are doing with what you have, what do you see? Are you doing right?
