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Fall Asleep to the Full Story of Elisha _ The Prophet Who Raised the Dead Twice · truthunedited

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  Speaker 1: There is a man in the Bible who raised the dead,
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  Speaker 1: not once twice. The second time he was already dead himself.
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  Speaker 1: To night, we follow Elisha, a farmer who became a prophet,
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  Speaker 1: a servant who became one of the most remarkable figures
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  Speaker 1: in the entire Hebrew tradition, a man whose life was
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  Speaker 1: filled with healing and provision and restoration, and a man
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  Speaker 1: whose bones, lying silent in a sealed tomb, brought a
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  Speaker 1: dead man back to life the moment that dead man's
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  Speaker 1: body touched them, not because of anything in the bones themselves,
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  Speaker 1: but because the God who had worked through Elisha in life,
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  Speaker 1: was making one final statement about the nature of his
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  Speaker 1: own power. That it does not end when the person
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  Speaker 1: carrying it ends, that it is not confined to the
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  Speaker 1: living years of any particular vessel, That even what remains
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  Speaker 1: when everything else is gone, can be the place where
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  Speaker 1: God chooses to remind the living that he has never
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  Speaker 1: stopped being what he is. We will walk with Elisha
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  Speaker 1: from the moment he stood at a river with an
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  Speaker 1: empty cloak in his hands, all the way to the
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  Speaker 1: morning after his burial, and a little further still settle
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  Speaker 1: in the night is quiet, and this story has been
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  Speaker 1: waiting a long time to find you. Chapter one, The
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  Speaker 1: Empty Hands. There is a particular kind of moment that
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  Speaker 1: does not announce itself before it arrives. You are doing
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  Speaker 1: something ordinary, working, moving, living the life you have always lived,
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  Speaker 1: and then something falls from the sky, or from the
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  Speaker 1: hands of another person, or from the slow unraveling of
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  Speaker 1: everything you thought was permanent, and suddenly you are standing
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  Speaker 1: in a place you did not choose, holding something you
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  Speaker 1: did not ask for, wondering if you are the right
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  Speaker 1: person to be holding it at all. Elisha's moment came
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  Speaker 1: on an ordinary day on the eastern side of the
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  Speaker 1: Jordan River, in a field he had been plowing his
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  Speaker 1: whole life. He was not a priest. He was not
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  Speaker 1: a scholar. He had not spent years in the schools
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  Speaker 1: of the prophets, learning the sacred traditions, preparing himself for
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  Speaker 1: a life of holy service. He was a farmer, the
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  Speaker 1: son of a man named Shafat from the region of
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  Speaker 1: abel Mehola. He worked the land. He knew the smell
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  Speaker 1: of turned earth in the morning. He knew the weight
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  Speaker 1: of the plow and the patience required to walk a
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  Speaker 1: straight furrow across a long field he was plowing with
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  Speaker 1: twelve yoke of oxen on the day Elijah found him.
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  Speaker 1: Twelve yoke means twenty four animals, a large operation, a
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  Speaker 1: prosperous family, a life with shape and structure, and a
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  Speaker 1: clear sense of what to morrow would look like. And
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  Speaker 1: then Elijah walked past him and threw his cloak over
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  Speaker 1: him and kept walking. That was it. Speech, no explanation,
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  Speaker 1: no vision of fire or voice from heaven, just an
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  Speaker 1: old prophet walking through a field, dropping his mantle over
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  Speaker 1: the shoulders of a young farmer, and continuing on his way,
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  Speaker 1: as if he had simply done what needed doing. In
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  Speaker 1: the culture of ancient Israel, the mantle of a prophet
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  Speaker 1: was not simply a piece of clothing. The Hebrew word
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  Speaker 1: is adoret, and it carries within it the full weight
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  Speaker 1: of identity, authority, and calling. To Where a prophet's mantle
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  Speaker 1: was to carry his mission to receive it was to
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  Speaker 1: step into a life that belonged to something larger than yourself.
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  Speaker 1: It was not an honor you could decline casually. It
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  Speaker 1: was a claim being made on the rest of your days.
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  Speaker 1: Elijah understood this immediately. He ran after Elijah and asked
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  Speaker 1: only for one thing, permission to say goodbye to his
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  Speaker 1: mother and father. Elijah's response was short and open. He said,
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  Speaker 1: go back, What have I done to you? Some readers
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  Speaker 1: here dismissal in those words, others here a test, But
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  Speaker 1: the most honest reading is probably the simplest one. Elijah
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  Speaker 1: was not commanding Elisha. He was leaving the choice entirely
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  Speaker 1: to him. Go back if you need to. You know
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  Speaker 1: what I have done, you decide what it means. Elisha
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  Speaker 1: went back. He slaughtered his oxen, burned his plowing equipment
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  Speaker 1: to cook the meat, fed the people around him, and
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  Speaker 1: then rose and followed Elijah. Notice what he burned, not
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  Speaker 1: just the oxen, the equipment, the plowing gear, the tools
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  Speaker 1: of his former life. He did not sell them or
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  Speaker 1: store them somewhere in case things did not work out.
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  Speaker 1: He burned them. He made the return impossible on purpose.
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  Speaker 1: He fed his neighbors with what had been his livelihood
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  Speaker 1: and left nothing behind to go back to. This is
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  Speaker 1: not a small detail. This is the first thing that
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  Speaker 1: Tech tells us about the character of Elisha. When he decided,
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  Speaker 1: he decided completely. The name Elisha comes from two Hebrew roots.
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  Speaker 1: The first is l meaning god. The second is Yasha,
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  Speaker 1: meaning salvation or deliverance. Put them together, and you have
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  Speaker 1: a name that is also a quiet declaration. God is salvation.
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  Speaker 1: Compare this to the name of his teacher, Elijah means
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  Speaker 1: something very close. My God is Yahweh. The two names
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  Speaker 1: sit side by side in the tradition like two halves
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  Speaker 1: of the same sentence. My God is Yahweh, and that
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  Speaker 1: God is salvation. Elijah was the prophet of confrontation. He
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  Speaker 1: stood before kings and called fire from heaven and announced
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  Speaker 1: drought in the face of power. His ministry was built
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  Speaker 1: on declaration, on saying the thing that no one wanted
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  Speaker 1: to hear in the place where no one wanted to
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  Speaker 1: hear it. Elisha would be something different, not lesser different,
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  Speaker 1: the same God working through a different kind of vessel.
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  Speaker 1: Where Elijah thundered, Elisha would tend. Where Elijah confronted, Elisha
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  Speaker 1: would restore. The two men together form a picture of something.
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  Speaker 1: The tradition has always known that the God of Israel
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  Speaker 1: is both the God who judges and the God who heals,
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  Speaker 1: and sometimes those two faces of the same God are
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  Speaker 1: given to two different people in two different generations. For years,
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  Speaker 1: Elisha served, He poured water on Elijah's hands, which is
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  Speaker 1: how the ancient text describes the work of a close disciple,
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  Speaker 1: someone learning by staying near. He watched, he listened, he carried,
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  Speaker 1: He did the things that no one records and no
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  Speaker 1: one celebrates. And then the day came when Elijah's time
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  Speaker 1: was ending. The details of that final journey are layered
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  Speaker 1: with meaning. Three times, on the road to the Jordan River,
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  Speaker 1: Elijah told Elisha to stay behind. Three times Elisha refused.
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  Speaker 1: The sons of the prophets in Bethel knew what was coming,
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  Speaker 1: The sons of the prophets in Jericho knew. Everyone seemed
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  Speaker 1: to know. Do you know that the Lord is going
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  Speaker 1: to take your master from you to day? They asked him. Yes,
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  Speaker 1: I know, he said, but do not speak of it.
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  Speaker 1: He knew. He walked anyway, he stayed close anyway. There
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  Speaker 1: is something in that steadiness, in that refusal to let
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  Speaker 1: the coming loss be a reason to pull back, that
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  Speaker 1: tells you everything about the man Elisha had become in
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  Speaker 1: those years of quiet service. At the Jordan Elijah rolled
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  Speaker 1: up his mantle and struck the water, and the water divided,
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  Speaker 1: and they crossed on dry ground. Then Elijah asked Elisha
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  Speaker 1: what he wanted before he was taken away. Elisha asked
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  Speaker 1: for a double portion of Elijah's spirit. This request is
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  Speaker 1: sometimes understood as a desire for twice the power, but
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  Speaker 1: in the Hebrew inheritance tradition, the double portion was what
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  Speaker 1: the firstborn son received. It was not about superiority, it
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  Speaker 1: was about responsibility. Elisha was not asking to be greater
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  Speaker 1: than his teacher. He was asking to be the heir,
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  Speaker 1: the one who carries the work forward, the one who
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  Speaker 1: bears the full weight of what came before. Elijah told
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  Speaker 1: him it was a hard thing to ask, but if
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  Speaker 1: Elisha saw him when he was taken, he would receive it.
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  Speaker 1: The chariot of fire came, the horses of fire came,
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  Speaker 1: the whirlwind lifted Elijah up, and he was gone. And
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  Speaker 1: Elisha tore his own garments in two, which was the
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  Speaker 1: ancient expression of grief so deep it cannot be contained
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  Speaker 1: in ordinary behavior. And then he picked up the mantle
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  Speaker 1: that had fallen from Elijah. And he stood there at
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  Speaker 1: the edge of the Jordan River, holding a cloak that
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  Speaker 1: still carried the shape of the man who had formed
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  Speaker 1: his life. And he struck the water, and he asked
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  Speaker 1: four words that would quietly define everything that followed. Where
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  Speaker 1: is the Lord God of Elijah the water divided? That
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  Speaker 1: was the answer, not in a voice from heaven, not
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  Speaker 1: in a vision or a dream, in the parting of water,
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  Speaker 1: in the quiet, unmistakable signal that the God who had
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  Speaker 1: been with Elijah was with Elisha, not transferred from one
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  Speaker 1: man to another like a property changing hands, simply present
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  Speaker 1: as he had always been, now working through a new vessel,
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  Speaker 1: who had burned his plowing equipment and followed and refused
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  Speaker 1: to stay behind. He crossed over and his life began.
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  Speaker 1: There is something in that moment worth carrying before we
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  Speaker 1: move forward. Elisha had just watched the most important person
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  Speaker 1: in his life disappear into the sky. He was still
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  Speaker 1: and alone at a river. He was holding a cloak
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  Speaker 1: that was not originally his. He had burned his former
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  Speaker 1: life behind him, and there was nothing to return to.
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  Speaker 1: And the question he asked was not am I enough?
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  Speaker 1: It was not will I be able to do this?
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  Speaker 1: The question he asked was about the source of the power,
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  Speaker 1: not the adequacy of the vessel. Where is the Lord
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  Speaker 1: God of Elijah? That is the question underneath every chapter
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  Speaker 1: of this story, not whether Elijah is capable not whether
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  Speaker 1: the circumstances are favorable, but where is God in this?
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  Speaker 1: And the water answered, he is here. He was here
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  Speaker 1: before Elijah, and here after Elijah, and here on the
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  Speaker 1: other side of the Jordan, with a farmer who burned
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  Speaker 1: his plowing equipment and followed and refused to stay behind.
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  Speaker 1: He is here. The story is only beginning, and it
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  Speaker 1: goes to places you will not expected. Chapter two, The
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  Speaker 1: Bitter Water. Every new beginning carries a test inside it,
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  Speaker 1: not because the beginning is false or the calling is wrong,
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  Speaker 1: but because the world into which the new thing arrives
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  Speaker 1: is not a clean slate. It is a world with history,
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  Speaker 1: with wounds that have been there a long time, with
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  Speaker 1: water that has been bitter for so long that the
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  Speaker 1: people living beside it have simply stopped expecting it to change.
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  Speaker 1: Elisha's first act after crossing the Jordan was to face
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  Speaker 1: exactly that kind of situation. The men of Jericho came
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  Speaker 1: to him. They were not hostile. They were honest in
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  Speaker 1: the way that people are honest when they have been
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  Speaker 1: disappointed enough times that they no longer dress up their discouragement.
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  Speaker 1: They told him the city's location was good, but the
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  Speaker 1: water was bad and the land was unfruitful. The word
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  Speaker 1: the Hebrew text uses for unfruitful is specific in a
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  Speaker 1: way that matters. It does not simply mean that crops
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  Speaker 1: were failing. The word carries the sense of miscarriage, of
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  Speaker 1: things dying before they can be born, of potential that
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  Speaker 1: keeps collapsing before it can take form. The water was
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  Speaker 1: not simply undrinkable. It was doing something to the land
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  Speaker 1: around it. It was making the ground unable to bring
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  Speaker 1: forth life. Jericho had a long memory of this kind
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  Speaker 1: of wound. Centuries before Elisha arrived, Joshua had spoken a
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  Speaker 1: specific word over the city after its conquest, the man
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  Speaker 1: who rebuilds Jericho will lay its foundation at the cost
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  Speaker 1: of his firstborn, and will set up its gates at
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  Speaker 1: the cost of his youngest son. In the days of
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  Speaker 1: King Ahab, a man named Heel had rebuilt the city,
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  Speaker 1: and the record says exactly that happened. His firstborn died
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  Speaker 1: when the foundation was laid, his youngest son died when
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  Speaker 1: the gates were set up. Jericho was a that had
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  Speaker 1: been built on loss. The ground carried it. This is
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  Speaker 1: the world into which Elisha walked. Not a simple problem
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  Speaker 1: of water quality, a place with a specific, named historical
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  Speaker 1: weight pressing down on it, a place where the people
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  Speaker 1: had learned to live with bitter water, because bitter water
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  Speaker 1: was all this location had ever given them. Elisha asked
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  Speaker 1: for a new bowl and some salt. They brought it
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  Speaker 1: to him. He went to the spring, the source of
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  Speaker 1: the water, and he threw the salt into it, and
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  Speaker 1: he said, this is what the Lord says, I have
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  Speaker 1: healed this water. Never again will it cause death or
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  Speaker 1: make the land unfruitful. And the water was healed. The
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  Speaker 1: choice of salt deserves attention because it is easy to
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  Speaker 1: read past it. Salt does not purify water in any
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  Speaker 1: natural sense. If anything, adding salt to a water source
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  Speaker 1: compounds the problem. The act was not a practical solution
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  Speaker 1: dressed in religious language. It was a sign, a physical action,
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  Speaker 1: pointing beyond itself. The material used was not the source
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  Speaker 1: of the healing. The god who commanded its use was.
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  Speaker 1: But there is something more in the choice of salt. Specifically,
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  Speaker 1: in the ancient world, salt was associated with covenant and preservation.
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  Speaker 1: When two parties made a binding agreement in the ancient
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  Speaker 1: Near East, they shared salt, a covenant of salt was
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  Speaker 1: a covenant that was permanent, incorruptible, preserved against decay. The
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  Speaker 1: Book of Numbers speaks of a covenant of salt before
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  Speaker 1: the Lord. The second Book of Chronicles speaks of the
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  Speaker 1: covenant of salt that God made with the House of David.
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  Speaker 1: When Elisha threw salt into the spring at Jericho, he
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  Speaker 1: was making a declaration over the source. He was saying
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  Speaker 1: in the language of physical action, that what had been
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  Speaker 1: under the weight of loss was now being claimed by
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  Speaker 1: the God of covenant. The ground, which had been unable
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  Speaker 1: to bring forth life, was being entered into a relationship
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  Speaker 1: with the one who is the origin of all life.
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  Speaker 1: The healing did not begin at the edges of the problem,
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  Speaker 1: It began at the source. That is a pattern you
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  Speaker 1: will see throughout this story. Elisha consistently goes to the
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  Speaker 1: place where the wound originates and does something there, not
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  Speaker 1: at the surface, not at the symptoms, at the source.
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  Speaker 1: Now we come to a passage that has honestly troubled
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  Speaker 1: readers across many centuries, and I want to stay with
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  Speaker 1: it long enough to be fair to both the difficulty
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  Speaker 1: of it and the meaning within it. From Jericho, Elisha
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  Speaker 1: went up toward Bethel. A group of young men came
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  Speaker 1: out of the city and mocked him. They said, go
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  Speaker 1: on up, you bald head, go on up, you bald head.
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  Speaker 1: Two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty
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  Speaker 1: two of them. Many people who encounter this passage feel
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  Speaker 1: genuine discomfort with it. That discomfort is honest and should
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  Speaker 1: not be dismissed too quickly. The response seems far beyond
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  Speaker 1: what the offense appears to warrant, and no careful reader
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  Speaker 1: should pretend otherwise. So let us look at what is
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  Speaker 1: actually happening here, while also being honest about what the
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  Speaker 1: text does not fully resolve for us. The Hebrew word
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  Speaker 1: translated as young men is narem. This word does not
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  Speaker 1: specifically means small children. It covers a range of ages,
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  Speaker 1: from adolescents to young adults. The word that would clearly
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  Speaker 1: indicate small children does not appear here. These were not
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  Speaker 1: toddlers who wandered out of a city gate and said
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  Speaker 1: something thoughtless. The text describes a group large enough to
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  Speaker 1: be described as a company, coming out deliberately to confront
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  Speaker 1: the prophet on the road. The phrase go on up
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  Speaker 1: is the critical detail. The people of Bethel would have
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  Speaker 1: known what happened to Elijah. The phrase go on up
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  Speaker 1: was not a general insight about the prophet's appearance. It
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  Speaker 1: was a specific and deliberate dismissal. Go away, disappear the
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  Speaker 1: way your master disappeared. You have no authority here, and
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  Speaker 1: the God you represent has already removed his most powerful
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  Speaker 1: voice from among us. The baldness mentioned was an additional
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  Speaker 1: mark of public contempt in a culture where such things
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  Speaker 1: carried social weight. This was a deliberate, organized public declaration
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  Speaker 1: that the prophetic witness of Yahweh was unwelcome in their city,
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  Speaker 1: made at the threshold at the very beginning of Elisha's
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  Speaker 1: public ministry. Elisha turned and called down a curse in
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  Speaker 1: the name of the Lord, and the bears came. Now
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  Speaker 1: Here is where I want to be honest with you,
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  Speaker 1: rather than offer an explanation that is neater than the
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  Speaker 1: text allows. This is one of the passages in the
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  Speaker 1: Hebrew scriptures that careful and faithful readers across many generations
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  Speaker 1: have wrestled with without reaching a complete resolution. The judgment
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  Speaker 1: was severe. Whether we can fully account for its severity
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  Speaker 1: through the cultural and theological context alone is a question
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  Speaker 1: that honest interpreters have answered differently for centuries. The text
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  Speaker 1: does not offer us an apology for what happened. It
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  Speaker 1: does not offer us a full explanation either. It simply
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  Speaker 1: records the event and moves on. What we can say
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  Speaker 1: is this The rejection of the prophetic word in Israel
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  Speaker 1: was never treated lightly in the Biblical tradition, and God's
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  Speaker 1: responses in the Hebrew scriptures sometimes carry a weight and
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  Speaker 1: an immediacy that is genuinely difficult to hold alongside our
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  Speaker 1: modern sense of proportion. That difficulty is part of what
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  Speaker 1: it means to read the Bible. Honestly. Not every hard
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: passage resolves into comfort. Some of them remain hard, and
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  Speaker 1: sitting with that honestly, rather than explaining it away too quickly,
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  Speaker 1: is itself a form of faithfulness to what the text
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  Speaker 1: actually is. Take a slow breath, Let that settle. What
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  Speaker 1: happened at Bethel was the last moment of its kind
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  Speaker 1: in the entire recorded ministry of Elisha. Everything that followed
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  Speaker 1: was different in character and tone. From that threshold forward,
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  Speaker 1: Elisha went toward the need, always toward the need, toward
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  Speaker 1: the widow with the empty jar, toward the dead child.
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  Speaker 1: In the upper room, toward the man with leprosy at
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  Speaker 1: the edge of an ordinary river, the last echo of
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  Speaker 1: thunder before the rain began to fall quietly. From Bethel,
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  Speaker 1: Elisha went to Mount Carmel, and then he returned to Samaria.
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  Speaker 1: He was finding his way through the geography of his calling,
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  Speaker 1: learning the shape of the work that had been given
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  Speaker 1: to him, standing in each place long enough to understand
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  Speaker 1: what it needed. He was not rushing. Whatever brought you
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  Speaker 1: to this hour to night, whatever weight you carried into
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  Speaker 1: the this dark room, you do not need to resolve
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  Speaker 1: it all before the morning. You only need to be here, breathing,
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  Speaker 1: present to the story that is still unfolding around you.
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  Speaker 1: He went toward the need. He is still going Chapter three.
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  Speaker 1: Oil that did not run out. There is a kind
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  Speaker 1: of debt that is not born from carelessness, not from
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  Speaker 1: spending too much on things you did not need, not
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  Speaker 1: from poor planning or the slow accumulation of small choices
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  Speaker 1: that add up to ruin. There is a kind of
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  Speaker 1: debt that is born from faithfulness, from doing the right
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  Speaker 1: thing at great personal cost for a long time for
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  Speaker 1: people who needed it, without any guarantee that the cost
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  Speaker 1: would ever be repaid. The woman who came to Elisha
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  Speaker 1: had that kind of debt. Her husband was dead. He
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: had been one of the sons of the prophets, part
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: of a community of men devoted to the prophetic ministry
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: of youth Yahweh. These were not wealthy men. They lived simply,
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: served together and followed the great profits of their generation,
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: carrying the word of God into the towns and villages
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: where ordinary people lived. Her husband had been faithful to
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: that calling his entire life, and the debt he left
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: behind reflected that faithfulness. Some ancient traditions, notably the account
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: preserved by the first century Jewish historian Josephus, suggest this
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: woman may have been the widow of a man named Obadiah,
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: the royal official who had hidden one hundred prophets in
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: two caves and fed them during the years when Jezebel
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: was hunting down the servants of Yahweh and killing them.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: The text itself does not confirm this identification, and we
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: hold it loosely. But the possibility carries its own weight, because,
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: whoever her husband was, the debt he left behind was
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: not the debt of a man who had been careless
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: with money. It was the debt of a man who
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: had given what he had to protect something he believed in,
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: and now the creditor was coming to take her two
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: sons as payment. Debt slavery was a legal reality in
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: the ancient world. When a man died and left unpayable debts,
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: his children could be required to work for the creditor
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: until the account was settled. She had no resources, no
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: path forward that she could see. She had only a
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: small jar of olive oil. Elisha asked her what she had,
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: and when she told him, he did not look at
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: the jar and recalculate what was possible. He told her
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: to go and borrow empty vessels from all her neighbors,
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: not a few, as many as she could find. He
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: told her to go inside with her sons, close the door,
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: and pour the oil from her small jar into all
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: the vessels she had gathered. She did it, the oil
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: began to flow. She poured from the small jar into
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: the first vessel and it filled. She poured into the second,
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: and it filled. Vessel after vessel. The oil kept flowing
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: until her sons stopped bringing containers, and she said, bring
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: me another vessel, and her son said, there are no more.
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: And in that exact moment. The oil stopped, not before,
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: not after, precisely when the last vessel was full. Think
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: carefully about what that boundary means. The oil did not
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: stop because the source was exhausted. It stopped because the
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: vessels were gone. The limit was not on the side
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: of what God was willing to give. The limit was
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: shaped by what she had been willing to gather. Elisha
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: had told her to collect as many empty containers as
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: she could find. If she had gathered more, the oil
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: would have filled more. The miracle was not restrained by Heaven.
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: It was shaped by the reach of her preparation. There
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: is also the detail of the closed door. Elisha told
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: her to go inside and shut it before she began.
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: The miracle happened in private, no audience, no witnesses from
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: the street watching the oil multiply, no creditor present to
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: observe it. Just a woman, her sons, a small jar,
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: and a room full of empty vessels waiting to be filled.
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: This is something you will see again and again in
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: Elisha's ministry. The deep work happens behind closed doors, not
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: because it needs to be hidden, but because it does
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: not need an audience to be real. The God of
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: Elisha is not performing. He is meeting a need. And
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: the meeting of a need, this intimate and this specific,
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: tends to happen in the quiet. When the vessels were full,
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: she went and told Elisha. He told her to sell
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: the oil, pay her debt, and live on what remained.
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: Pay the debt first, then live. There is a kind
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: of grace in that instruction that goes beyond financial advice.
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: She had come because the debt was the threat. It
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: was the thing standing between her and the rest of
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: her life. Elisha did not tell her to hide the
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: oil and figure out the debt later. He told her
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: to settle it, to close that account completely, and begin
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: the next part of her life on ground that belonged
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: to her. Her husband had given what he had to
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: keep others alive. Now his family was being kept alive
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: by a provision that flowed from the same faithfulness he
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: had practiced. What he planted in those years of hidden
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: service had not been erased by his death. It had
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: been growing in ways that no one could observe from
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: outside the story, and it came back to his family
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: in the form of an old prophet standing at their door,
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: asking what they had in the house and telling them
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: to close the door and pour. Now there is a
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: detail worth holding in this story. Elisha asked her what
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: she had, not what she needed, not how much it
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: would take to fix everything. What do you have? Because
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: in the ministry of Elisha, what you have is always
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: the starting point. The small jar of oil, the bowl
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: of salt, the twenty loaves of bread, the thing that
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: seems far too little is always, through the word of
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: the prophet, exactly enough to begin. You may be lying
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: in the dark to night with a version of that
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: small jar, something that remains after a season, that has
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: cost you more than you expected to pay, something that
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: looks nowhere near sufficient for what is required of you.
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: Elisha is asking the same question tonight that he asked her,
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: What do you have? Close the door, start pouring. You
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: may be surprised how many vessels you run out of
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: before the oil does. Chapter four, The woman who asked
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: for nothing. Some people give without keeping a record. They
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: notice a need and they meet it. They open their
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: home and set a place at the table, and do
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: not hand you an accounting at the end of the month.
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: They do not give in order to receive. They give
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: because giving is who they are because they have looked
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: at the world and decided that the most honest response
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: to what they have been given is to pass it
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: forward without conditions. The Woman of Shunam was one of
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: those people. Shunam was a city in the northern part
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: of Israel, in the fertile valley that runs between the
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: hills of Galilee and the highlands of Samaria. The woman
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: of Shunam was a woman of standing in her community.
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: The text describes her as a great woman, which in
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: the language of the ancient tradition does not only mean wealthy,
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: though it includes that it means a woman of substance,
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: of influence, of significance in the life of her town.
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: She noticed Elisha passing through, and she urged him to eat.
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: The word urged is important. Elisha had not asked for
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: a meal. She pressed the invitation, and whenever he passed
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: through Schounum after that, he stopped there to eat. Then
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: she said to her husband that she had come to
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: understand that this man who kept passing through was a
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: holy man of God, and she proposed something practical. She
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: wanted to add a small room to their house, a
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: permanent space for Elisia with a bed and a table,
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: and a lamp and a chair, so that whenever he
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: came he would have a place to rest. Her husband agreed,
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: they built the room. There is no request embedded in
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: that generosity. She did not build the room as an
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: investment in future favor. She did not do it hoping
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: that a holy man under her roof would result in
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: blessings she could not obtain another way. The text gives
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: us no indication that she was in particular difficulty, or
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: that she had a need she was hoping the prophet
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: would address. She simply saw that this man was doing
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: important work, that he traveled constantly, that he had no
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: permanent place to rest, and she did what her perception
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: of the situation called for. She built him a room. Elisha,
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: staying in that room one day, was moved by the
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: quality of her generosity and wanted to do something in return.
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: He called her in and asked what could be done
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: for her. Did she want him to speak to the
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: King on her behalf or to the commander of the army.
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: He was offering the kind of influence a profit in
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: good standing with the royal court could legitimately extend. She
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: said no. She said she lived among her own people.
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: She had what she needed. She was not asking for anything.
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: Elisha turned to his servant and asked privately what could
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: be done for her, and his servant, who had been
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: paying attention in the way that those close to a
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: situation often do, told him the truth. She had no
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: son and her husband was old. Elisha called her back
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: and told her that within the year she would be
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: holding a son. Her response was not joy. It was resistance.
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: She said, no, my lord, man of God, do not
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: lie to your servant. The sharpness in those words was
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: not disrespect. It was self protection. She was a woman
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: who had made peace with the absence of the thing
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: she had wanted most, not easily, the way people make
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: peace with losses. They have stopped expecting to be reversed,
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: because surviving that expectation a second time would be harder
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: than simply living without the hope. She did not want
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: the wound reopened by a promise that might not hold.
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: The promise held the following year, she had a son.
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: Now watch what happens next, because this is where the
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: story becomes something different from what you expected it to be.
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: The boy grew. He was out in the field with
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: his father during the harvest season, and something happened to him. Suddenly,
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: something involving his head. His father sent him home to
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: his mother in the arms of a servant. She held
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: him on her knees from morning until noon, and at
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: noon he died. She carried him up to the room
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: on the roof, the room she had built for Elisha.
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: She laid him on the prophet's bed. She closed the door,
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: and she went out. She told her husband she needed
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: a servant and a donkey and needed to go to
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: the man of God. Her husband asked why she was
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: going to day when it was not the customary time
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: for seeking a prophet. She said, it will be all right.
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: She did not tell him the child was dead. She
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: rode to Mount Carmel, where Elisha was. When he saw
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: her coming from a distance, he sent his servant to
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: meet her with questions. Is everything all right with you,
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: with your husband, with the child? She said to the servant,
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: it is all right. It was not all right. Her
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: son was lying dead on the prophet's bed with the
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: door closed. But she had saved the full weight of
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: what she was carrying for the one she had come
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: to find. She held herself together through the greeting and
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: the questions, and every social convention that could have given
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: her an excuse to slow down. And when she reached Elisha,
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: she fell at his feet, and he told his servant
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: to leave her alone, because her soul was in bitter distress.
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: He had not known until she arrived at his feet,
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: and she said to him the same words she had
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: said to her husband when the boy was first given
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: to her. Did I ask my Lord for a son?
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: Did I not say, do not raise my hopes. This
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: is not a theological argument, It is not a doctrinal statement.
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: It is a human cry from the center of a
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: loss that has no language adequate to it. She had
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: not asked for the gift. It had been given anyway,
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: and now it had been taken, and the thing she
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: had protected herself against by refusing to hope had happened.
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: Regards Elisha. Sent his servant ahead with his staff, with
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: instructions to lay it on the face of the child.
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: But the woman would not leave Elisha's side. As the
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: Lord lives and as you yourself live, she said, I
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: will not leave you, and he rose and followed her.
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: The servant went ahead and laid the staff on the
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: boy's face. Nothing happened. When Elisha arrived, he went into
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: the room and closed the door. Just the prophet and
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: the dead child in the small room on the roof
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: that the woman had built from the overflow of her generosity,
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: and Elisha prayed. Then he lay on the child, mouth
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: to mouth, eyes to eyes, hands to hands, and the
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: flesh of the child grew warm. Elisha rose and walked
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: back and forth in the house, the way a person
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: moves when they are holding something that does not have
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: anywhere else to go. Then he went back and lay
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: down over the child again. The boys sneezed seven times
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: and opened his eyes. The number seven in the Hebrew
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: tradition carries the sense of completion, of wholeness, of something
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: brought to its full form. Something was not simply revived,
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: something was restored to its full state. Elijah called his
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: servant and told him to bring the woman. She came.
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: He said, to her, take your son. She fell at
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: his feet to the ground, and then she picked up
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: her son and went out. Now let us hold this
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: story beside the account of Elijah and the widow of Zaraphath,
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: because the comparison reveals something important about how God works
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: through different people in different generations. Elijah also raised a
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: dead child. He also lay down over the boy. He
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: prayed three times and cried out to God. He was
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: transparent about his distress and his own uncertainty. He was
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: doing something that required everything he had. Elia prayed first,
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: then he acted in silence. The text gives us no
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: record of what he said in the room, only what
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: he did. He lay down, he rose, he walked, He
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: lay down again, and the boy breathed the same God,
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: the same basic pattern. Two entirely different interior textures. Where
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: Elijah was often at the edge of what he could bear,
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: Elisha carried the weight of his calling with a quieter steadiness,
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: not a lesser faithfulness, a different one. There is also
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: something worth holding about what the woman of Schoonham gave
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: and what she received. She built a room for a man,
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: she owed nothing and asked for nothing. In return. She
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: received a son she had not dared to want, and
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: when that son died, she did not accept the death.
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: She placed him on the prophet's bed, rode without stopping
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: to the Man of God, held herself together through every obsit,
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: and did not leave until the prophet came with her.
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: Her generosity was not transactional, but it was not passive either.
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: She gave without strings, and when the gift that had
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: come back to her was threatened, she went after it
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: with everything she had, quietly, without spectacle, without any one
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: knowing what was in the room upstairs until it was over.
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: The power in this story does not belong only to Elisha.
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: A significant portion of it belongs to a woman who
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: built a room on her roof and refused to leave
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: a prophet's side on the worst day of her life.
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: Some people give without keeping a record, but somewhere in
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: the fabric of how the world works, the record is
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: kept for them, in a book that has been read
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: for three thousand years, in a room on a roof
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: in Shunam that no longer stands, but that you can
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: still if you listen carefully, in the quiet almost here
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: being built plank by plank, stone by stone, one act
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: of unhurried generosity at a time, with no expectation of return,
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: in the direction of something wholly passing through. She asked
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: for nothing, and the room she built became the place
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: where her son was raised from the dead. Chapter five,
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: Poison In the Pot, there is a particular kind of
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: danger that does not announce itself. It does not arrive
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: wearing the face of something harmful. It comes in through
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: ordinary channels, gathered by ordinary hands, on an ordinary day,
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: when someone was simply trying to help. And by the
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: time anyone realizes what has entered the room, it is
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: already in the pot, already mixed in with everything else,
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: already being served to the people sitting around the fire,
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: who had every reason to trust that what they were
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: being given was safe. The sons of the prophets were
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: sitting with Elisha at Gilgal. There was a famine in
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: the land, not ashore fage, not a difficult season of famine,
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: the kind of sustained, grinding scarcity that changes the texture
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: of every day, that makes each meal a calculation, that
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: removes the quiet comfort of knowing that to morrow there
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: will be enough. Elisha told his servant to put on
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: a large pot and boil stew for the community. Some
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: one went out into the fields to gather herbs. The
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: fields in a famine are not full of what they
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: should be full of. The familiar plants may be scarce
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: or entirely gone. So the one who went out went
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: further than usual looked harder than usual, brought back things
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: he was less certain about than usual. He found a
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: wild vine and gathered gourds from it. He did not
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: know what they were. The text is precise about this.
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: He did not know. He filled his garment with them
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: and came back and cut them into the pot, without
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: any intent to harm, simply without knowledge. The stew was served,
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: and the men began to eat. They cried out, O,
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: man of God, there is death in the pot. They
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: could taste it. Something was wrong. Elisia called for flower
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: and threw it into the pot. He said, pour it
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: out for the people that they may eat. And they ate,
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: and there was nothing harmful in the pot. Now, the flower,
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: like the salt to Jericho, was not a chemical solution.
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: It was not a natural purification agent. It was a sign,
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: a physical action through which God chose to work. Not
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: because flower possesses any cleansing power of its own, but
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: because the obedience expressed through using it was the channel
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: through which the healing moved. The substance did not save them,
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: the God who commanded its use did. But there is
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: something in the choice of flower worth lingering over. Flower
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: is the primary ingredient of bread and bread from the
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: earliest pages of the Hebrew Scriptures through to the final
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: pages of the New Testament, is the fundamental image of
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: life sustained. It is what you have when you have enough.
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: It is what you lack when the famine has taken everything.
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: When Elisha threw the substance of life into the pot
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: of death, the pot became safe. There is a reading
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: of this moment that the text invites without forcing. The
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: sons of the Prophets were a community. They ate together,
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: they studied together. They carried the prophetic tradition of Yahweh
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: through years when that tradition was under assault. In a famine,
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: you gather what you can find and you put it
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: in the pot, and you trust that the people around
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: you know what they are doing. Sometimes they do not.
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: Sometimes something gets into the pot that should not be there,
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: not because anyone intended harm, simply because the conditions were hard,
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: the knowledge was incomplete, and in the press of scarcity,
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: someone reached for something they could not fully identify. Elisha
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: did not ask who had gathered the gods. He did
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: not stop to assign blame. He went to the substance
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: that represented life, and he put it into the center
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: of the problem. What enters through well meaning hands can
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: still cause harm, and the response is not accusation. The
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: response is to bring something life giving to the source
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: of the problem and let it work. Now the text
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: moves immediately to the next scene, and the placement is deliberate.
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: The famine has not lifted, the scarcity is still real.
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: And into that same famine something arrives. A man came
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: from Baal Shalisha, bringing the Man of God bred of
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: the first fruits, twenty loaves of barley and some fresh grain.
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: This was not a casual offering. In the tradition of
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: ancient Israel, the first fruits belonged to God. They were
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: brought to the priests, to the levites, to the House
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: of God. The fact that this man brought them to
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: Elisha tells us something about how he understood the presence
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: and authority of God. In this prophet, he had traveled
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: through a famine to bring bread to a man of God.
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: Elisha told his servant to give it to the people
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: to eat. His servant said, how can I set this
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: before a hundred men? Twenty loaves of barley one hundred men.
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: The arithmetic does not work. His servant was not being
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: faithless in a simple way. He was looking at the
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: physical reality in front of him and naming what any
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: honest observer would name. There is not enough here, Elisha said,
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: give it to the people that they may eat. For
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: thus says the Lord, they shall eat and have some
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: left over. And they ate, and they had some left over.
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: One hundred men fed by twenty loaves of barley in
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: the middle of a famine, and food remaining when the
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: meal was done. If you have read the Gospels, this
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: moment should feel familiar in a way that is not accidental.
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: Writers of the Gospel accounts knew this story. Their original
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: audience knew this story. When they described a hillside, a
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: hungry crowd, a small amount of bread and fish, a
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: disciple naming the same gap between what is available and
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: what is needed, and then the bread broken and multiplied,
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: with baskets of fragments remaining afterward. They were writing inside
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: a tradition that had already told this story once before.
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: They were saying something specific to people who would hear
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: the echo, that what God did through Elisha in part
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: and in shadow, pointing forward across centuries, he was now
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: doing in person and in fullness through the one who
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: would say I am the bread of life. That the
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: hunger addressed in a famine in Gilgal was itself an
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: image of a deeper hunger, and the provision given there
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: was itself an image of a deeper provision that was
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: still on its way. Elisha was not the fulfillment. He
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: was the announcement in an earlier chapter of the same
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: long story, pointing forward to something that had not yet
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: arrived but was already coming. In both stories, the bread
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: behaves the same way. It is not enough by ordinary calculation.
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: It is given anyway, in trust, in obedience to a
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: word spoken. It feeds the people, and something remains when
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: the meal is done. The famine was still in the
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: land when both of these things happened. The scarcity was real,
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: the arithmetic of insufficiency was real, and inside that unchanged reality,
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: a pot of poison became safe, and twenty loaves became
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: a meal for a hundred men with food to spare.
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: This is what the ministry of Elisha looked like from
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: the inside, not the removal of difficult circumstances, but the
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: transformation of what is possible within them. The poison is gone,
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: the people are fed. The famine has not ended, and
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: their is food left over. Bring what you have to
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: the pot. Trust what has been spoken over it. The
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: people were fed, and there was food remaining. Chapter six,
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: The General and the River. Every person in this story
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: has a wound they cannot fix themselves. The widow has
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: a debt she cannot pay. The woman of Shunam has
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: a son she cannot keep alive. The sons of the
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: prophets have a pot they cannot make safe. And now
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: we come to a man who has everything that power
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: and achievement can give a person, except the one thing
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: that matters most, and who almost missed his healing because
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: the path to it looked too simple for someone of
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: his standing. His name is Nayman, and his story is
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: one of the most carefully constructed passages in the entire
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: Book of Second Kings. The text introduces him with a
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: sequence of titles that accumulates deliberately. He was commander of
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: the army of the King of Syria. He was a
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: great man with his master, he was in high favor,
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: he was a man of valor. And then a single
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: word follows all of that. In the Hebrew, the word key.
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: It functions as a hinge, as a turning point in
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: the sentence, It means, but or however, or except for
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: this one thing, and what follows it is this. He
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: was a leper, common, dear, great man, high favor, man
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: of valor. But he was a leper. The ancient condition
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: called leprosy in the Biblical text covered a range of
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: skin diseases. Whatever the specific condition, it was visible in
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: a way that rank and reputation could not conceal. It
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: was there on the surface of him, where every one
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: could see it, And in the ancient world no physician
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: could treat it, and no military victory could resolve it.
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: He had everything that human at chrement can give a person,
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: and this one thing that human achievement could not take away. Now,
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: notice who sets this story in motion. Not Naumann, not
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: the king of Syria, not a general or a diplomat,
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: or any one of standing. A young girl, a girl
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: who had been taken captive during one of Syria's raids
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: on Israel, who now served in Naman's household. The text
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: does not record her name, It does not mention her family.
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: She had been removed from her home, from her people,
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: from everything familiar and brought to a foreign country to
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: serve in the household of the military system that had
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: displaced her. And she said to her mistress, would that
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria,
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: he would cure him of his leprosy. That is all.
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: She did not elaborate. She did not negotiate. She did
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: not make her generosity conditional on any acknowledgment of what
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: had been done to her from her captivity in the
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: house of the people connected to her displacement. She offered
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: the one piece of information she had that might help.
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: There is no bitterness in her words, no trace of
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: the arithmetic of grievance that would be entirely understandable given
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: everything she had lost. Only this, I know some one
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: who could help. The King of Syria sent Nayman to
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: Israel with a letter and with substantial gifts, silver and
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: gold and changes of fine clothing, the kind of payment
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: that assumed this transaction would happen at the level of kings,
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: with the full weight of diplomatic protocol behind it. The
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: King of Israel read the letter and tore his clothes.
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: He understood it as a demand he could not meet.
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: He said, am I God to kill and to make
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: alive that this man sends word to me to cure
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: a man of his leprosy. Elisha heard that the king
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: had torn his clothes. He sent Vord, send the man
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: to me. Let him come and know that there is
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: a prophet in Israel. Namon came with his horses and
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: his chariots, and he stopped at the door of Elisha's house,
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: and Elisha did not come out. He sent a messenger
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: with a simple instruction, go and wash in the Jordan
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: river seven times. Your flesh shall be restored, and you
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: shall be clean. Nayman was furious. His anger tells us
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: precisely what he had expected. He had come with an
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: enormous retinue. He had brought wealth representing the full diplomatic
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: weight of the Syrian court. He had made the long
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: journey from Damascus to Samaria, which was itself an act
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: of significant personal humility for a man of his position.
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: He had done all of that, and the prophet did
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: not even come to the door. He said, behold, I
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: thought that he would surely come out to me and
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: stand and call upon the name of his God, and
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: wave his hand over the place and cure the leper
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: He had a very speci zific picture of how this
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: was supposed to work. There was supposed to be a
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: ritual appropriate to the occasion, something visible, something proportionate to
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: who he was and what he had brought, something that
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: looked like the healing of a great man. Instead, there
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: was a messenger and a river. He said, are not
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: the rivers of Damascus better than all the waters of Israel?
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: Could I not wash in them and be clean? And
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: he turned and went away in a rage. His servants
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: came to him carefully. They said, my father, it is
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: a great word the prophet has spoken to you. Would
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: you not do it? If the prophet had told you
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: to do some great thing, would you not have done it?
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: How much more then when he says to you, only
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: this wash and be clean. This is one of the
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: wisest observations anyone makes in the entire story, and it
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: comes from unnamed servants speaking quietly to a powerful man
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: who is about to let his expectation cost him his healing.
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: If the instruction had been difficult, you would have done it.
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: You came all this way because you were willing to
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: do something hard. What you are not willing to do
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: is something that looks too easy, too ordinary, too unworthy
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: of the occasion, as you understand it. But what if
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: the simplicity was not an insult to Naman's dignity. What
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: if it was an invitation to lay that dignity down
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: long enough to receive what he had come for. Naymon
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: went down to the Jordan. He dipped himself seven times,
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: exactly as the man of God had said, and his
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: flesh was restored like the flesh of a little child clean.
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: The Jordan river was not chosen at random. It was
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: the same river where the mantle had fallen and the
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: water had divided, the same river where Elisha had asked
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: his question and the water had answered. It was not
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: an impressive river by the standards of the ancient Near East.
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: The rivers of Damascus were, by most accounts, more beautiful
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: and more worthy of a general's dignity. But the Jordan
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: was the river where God had been acting in this
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: land for generations. And the instruction was not about the
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: quality of the water. It was about whether Nayman was
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: willing to do a plain thing in a plain place,
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: because the word spoken to him said to do it.
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: He was willing. In the end, he was willing. Naman
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: returned to Elisha and stood before him and said, behold,
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: I know that there is no God in all the earth,
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: but in Israel. He offered gifts, Elisha refused them completely.
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: Naman pressed, Elisha held firm the refusal was not false modesty.
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: It was the integrity of the message itself. Naman had
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: come carrying wealth as the currency of the exchange, because
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: that is how the world he lived in worked. Everything
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: of value had a price. Elisha's refusal was a declaration
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: that what had happened that the Jordan was not commerce.
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: It was grace, the action of a god who heals
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: because healing is his nature, not because the person being
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: healed could afford it. To accept payment would be to
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: say that the healing had a price, and it did not.
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: Then Naeman asked for two mule loads of Israelite earth
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: to take back to Syria so that he could stand
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: on it when he worshiped the Lord. His understanding of
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: the geography of God was still shaped by the ancient
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: assumption that a god belonged to a specific territory. He
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: believed the God of Israel was real and the only
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: true God, but he also believed at this early stage
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: that proper worship required standing on his soil. Elisha did
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: not correct him. There is a tenderness in that response
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: worth sitting with for a moment. Naemon was at the
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: beginning of something. His understanding was partial and his theology
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: was incomplete, and he was standing at the very star
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: of a new way of seeing the world, still carrying
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: old frameworks that would need time and grace to be reshaped.
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: Elisha let him go with what he had. He did
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: not demand more understanding than Nayman was ready for. He said,
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: go in peace, two mule loads of earth heading back
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: to Damascus, a general with new skin and a faith
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: that was only just learning to walk. Elisha, let the
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: beginning be a beginning. Now, before we leave this story,
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: let us return one final time to the girl, the captive,
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: the servant, the one whose name is not recorded and
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: whose future the text does not follow. She is in
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: the story for two sentences, and then she is gone.
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: She said one thing, and it set everything in motion.
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: She offered what she knew from a position of complete powerlessness,
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: and received nothing in return. That the text records. We
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: do not know if she ever learned what happened at
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: the Jordan. We do not know if any one came
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: back to say that it worked, That the prophet she
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: remembered had done what she said he could do. She
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: may never have known. But you know you are hearing
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: her story in the dark to night, and you know
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: that the one sentence she offered from her captivity changed
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: the life of the most powerful man she was in
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: contact with. She spoke what she knew. She went back
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: to her work, and the Jordan kept flowing. Some of
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: the most important things said in any generation are said
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: by people whose names are not recorded, from positions of
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: no power, without any way of knowing whether the words
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: will matter, or reach any one, or change anything at all.
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: Hers mattered. He went home with new skin and two
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: mule loads of earth and a faith that was only
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: beginning to learn what it was. And the river kept flowing,
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: and the story kept moving towards something none of them
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: could yet see from where they were standing. Chapter seven,
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: The Price of Greed. Every story has a character who
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: almost makes it, not a villain in the obvious sense,
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: not some one who arrives wearing the face of opposition,
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: announcing their intentions, giving you time to prepare. The most
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: quietly dangerous character in any story is the one who
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: is close to the center of something holy, who has
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: watched the power move from the inside, who has seen
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: miracle after miracle with his own eyes from a position
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: of proximity that most people never get, and who still,
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: in the end, reaches for the wrong thing. Gahazi had
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: been there for all of it. He was there in
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: Shunam when Elisha promised the woman a son. He was
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: the one who noticed what the woman herself would not say,
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: that she had no child and her husband was old.
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: He had paid that kind of attention. He had been present.
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: He had laid Elisha's staff on the face of the
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: dead boy. He had stood in the house while the
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: impossible happened. He had called the woman and placed her
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: living son back in her arms. He had seen more
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: than most people are given to sea in a lifetime
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: of faith. And now he was standing at the edge
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: of the road, watching Naymon's chariot disappear into the distance.
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: And something was moving in him that he had not
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: yet named out loud, but that had been accumulating quietly
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: for longer than this moment. Elisha had refused everything the
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: ten talents of silver, the six thousand shekels of gold,
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: the ten changes of clothing. He had stood before the
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: most grateful man in Syria and said no to all
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: of it, and sent Naeman away with nothing but his
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: healing and the words go in peace spoken over him.
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: At the end. Gehazi watched this and thought something that
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: the text records with careful precision. He said to himself,
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: my master has spared this Naman the Syrian in not
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: a accepting from his hand what he brought. As the
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: Lord lives, I will run after him and get something
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: from him. As the Lord lives. He swore an oath
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: in the name of the God whose power he had
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: watched move through his master for years. He invoked the
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: living God as the witness and guarranteur of his plan
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: to take what his master had deliberately refused, and then
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: he ran. When Nayman saw someone coming after him, he
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: climbed down from his chariot and walked toward Gahazi to
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: meet him. This detail matters. Naymon had just had his
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: life changed at the Jordan. He was in a state
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: of gratitude large enough that when he saw someone from
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: Elisha's household approaching. His first instinct was not suspicion. It
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: was welcome. He stepped down and came forward. This is
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: Naeman in this moment, a man with new skin and
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: an open heart, moving towards someone he assumed was bringing
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: him more connection to the source of what had healed him.
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: Gehazi told him that Elisha had sent him, that two
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: young men had just arrived from the sons of the Prophets,
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: and that Elisha was asking whether Naman could provide a
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: talent of silver and two changes of clothing for them.
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: Every word of this was false. Elisha had not sent him,
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: No young men had come, there was no request, there
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: was no need. There was only Gehazi standing on the
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: road with an invention in his mouth, speaking it in
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: the name of a master who had specifically and deliberately
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: refused exactly what Gahazi was now asking for. Nayman did
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: not hesitate. He said, be pleased to accept two talents.
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: He insisted on giving more than had been asked. He
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: bound two talents of silver in two bags, added two
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: changes of clothing, and gave them to two of his
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: own servants to carry for Gahazi on the road back.
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: When they came to the h ill near the city.
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: Gahazi took the things from the servants, stored them in
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: the house, and sent the men away. Then he went
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: in and stood before his master, as if nothing had happened.
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: Elisha said to him, where have you been, Gehazi? He said,
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: your servant went nowhere. The second lie standing in front
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: of the man who had perceived the state of a
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: grieving woman's heart before she spoke a word, standing in
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: front of the man who had known things at distances
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: that no messenger had traveled. Standing in front of that man,
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: Gahazi said, he had gone nowhere. Elisha said, did not
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: my heart go with you? When the man turned from
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: his chariot to meet you, he had known, he had
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: seen it in the way the tradition of the Hebrew
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: prophets consistently describes not through ordinary channels of information, but
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: through the awareness that moves beneath the surface of visible
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: events and arrives at the truth by roots that cannot
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: be fully explained. And then Elisha named the consequence the
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: leprosy of Nayman shall cling to you and to your
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: descendants forever. Gehazi went out from his presence, white as snow. Now.
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: We need to stay with this honestly, because the response
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: feels severe, and careful readers feel that severity for good reason.
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: A man took silver and clothing and lied about it,
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: and the consequence reaches not only to him, but to
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: those who come after him. The weight of the judgment
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: seems to extend further than the offense by any ordinary measure.
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: I want to be straightforward with you here, rather than
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: offer an explanation that is cleaner than the text actually allows.
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: This is one of those passages in the Biblical record
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: where faithful readers across many centuries have not arrived at
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: a complete and universally satisfying resolution. The text does not
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: provide a neat answer to the hardest questions it raises,
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: and rather than pretend otherwise, I want to sit with
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: you in that difficulty for a moment. What we can
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: say with confidence is this, The healing of Naeman had
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: been a declaration of something specific and important. Elisha had
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: refused every gift, not from personal austerity, but because the
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 1: healing was meant to communicate something precise, that the grace
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: of the God of Israel cannot be purchased. That what
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: had happened at the Jordan was not a service rendered
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: for appropriate compensation. It was the free action of a
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: god who heals, because healing is who he is. Gehese's
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: act did not simply take some silver. It went back
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: to the man who had just been shown that grace
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: is free and charged him for it after the fact.
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: It retroactively placed a price on what Elisha had deliberately
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: and specifically offered without one. It took the message of
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: the entire miracle and corrupted it from the inside. And
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: it was done by the man who was closest to
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: the source. There is a particular weight to that proximity.
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: Gadsy had access. He had seen enough to know precisely
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: what he was undermining. The lie he told Naemon was
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: not simply a lie about where he came from. It
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: was a lie about the nature of the god whose
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: name he had invoked when he swore his oath before
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: running down the road. As the Lord lives, he had said,
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: and then he went and charged the Syrian general for
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: the free gift of God. Elisha asked where Gehazi had been.
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: Not because he did not know, He asked because a
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: question in the pattern of this text is sometimes the
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: last opening given before a consequence arrives, the same pattern
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: as the question in the garden Long before this, where
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: are you not from ignorance, From the last offer of
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: the chance to speak truthfully? Gehazi chose the second lie
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: over the first honesty and something closed. As for the descendants,
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: I will say what I said earlier about the passage
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: at Bethel, some things in the Biblical text remained genuinely difficult.
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: The ancient understanding of how a person's choices shape the
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: lives of those who come after them is not the
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: same as the modern understanding. Whether that ancient framework fully
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: satisfies the moral questions this passage raises is something each
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: honest reader must sit with for themselves. I will not
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: pretend the difficulty is not there, and I will not
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: offer a resolution tidier than the text provides. What I
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: will say is this, Gahazi had been positioned to carry
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: the ministry of Elisha into the next generation. He was
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: the closest person to the most important prophetic voice in
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: Israel at that time. What he chose to do with
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: that proximity was not a private matter contained entirely within
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: his own life. It shaped what he would pass on
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: passed on leprosy. Now hold this story beside the story
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: of the woman of Shunem, because the contrast is not accidental.
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 1: She gave without keeping a record and received what she
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: had not asked for. Gehazi was given access without earning
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: it and reached for what had not been offered. She
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: built a room for the prophet and asked for nothing.
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: He ran after the prophet's guest and charged him in
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: the prophet's name. She received a son, he received leprosy.
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: This is not the symmetry of a simple moral lesson
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: arranged to make the point obvious. It is the portrait
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: of two entirely different orientations toward the world, one person
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: who operated from generosity without calculation, one person who operated
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: from acquisition without restraint, and one God responding to both
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: with a consistency that is, in its own way, a
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: form of faithfulness to what each of them had chosen.
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: The road back from the Jordan is long, and what
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: you carry it matters more than you can see in
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: the moment of the carrying tonight, wherever you are, whatever
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: you are holding. The question underneath this story is a
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: quiet one, not an accusation simply a question worth carrying
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: into the dark. Is what I am reaching for? Something
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: I have been given, or something I am taking? That
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: is enough to hold for now? Let the question rest
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: with you gently as the night continues. Chapter eight, The
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: axe Head and the Invisible Army. Not every wound announces
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: itself with thunder. Some of the most significant moments in
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: a life arrive quietly in the middle of ordinary work,
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: in the press of a practical problem that has nothing
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: dramatic about it, no grand stakes, no one watching to
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: see how it resolves, just a person and a loss,
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: and the specific immediate distress of having broken something that
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: was not theirs to break. The sons of the Prophets
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: came to Elisha with a practical concern. The place where
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: they were living with him had become too small. They
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: wanted to go to the Jordan River and build a
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: larger space, cutting timber from the forest there. Elisha told
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: them to go one of the masked if he would
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: come with them. Elisha agreed. They went to the Jordan
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: and began to cut trees, and as one of the
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: men was cutting, the iron axe head came loose from
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: the handle and fell into the water. He cried out
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: to Elisha. He said, Alas, my master, it was borrowed.
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 1: That is the whole weight of the situation. In four words,
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: it was borrowed. The loss was not simply the loss
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: of a tool. In the economic reality of these men,
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: iron was not cheap, and tools were not easily replaced,
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: And this one did not belong to him. He had
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: borrowed it from someone who was going to knead it back,
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: who trusted him with it, who would notice its absence
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 1: and would have a right to ask where it had gone.
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: The specific distress of the borrowed thing that is now lost,
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: not just the object itself, but the layer of obligation
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: and trust underneath it, the person you will have to face,
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 1: the explanation, you will have to make, the restitution you
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: cannot afford. Elisha asked where it had fallen. The man
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: showed him the place. Elisha cut a stick and threw
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: it into the water at that precise location, and the
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: iron floated. He said to the man, take it up.
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: The man reached out his hand and took it. Now,
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: there is something about this miracle that sets it apart
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 1: from almost everything else in the Elisha narrative. There is
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: no great external weight to it. There is no dying child,
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: no desperate widow, no military commander with an incurable condition.
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 1: There is a young man who lost a borrowed tool
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 1: in a river and was afraid of what that meant,
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 1: and Elisha threw a stick in the water. By any
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: external measure, this is the smallest miracle in the entire
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 1: ministry of Elisha. It healed no one. It reversed no
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: military threat. It did not feed a hungry community, or
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: raise the dead, or deliver a nation from siege. It
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: returned a borrowed tool to the man who had lost it.
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: That is all it did. And the fact that the
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: text records it, that this small act of restoration sits
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: in the same narrative as the healing of Naemen and
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 1: the resurrection of the Schoonemite Woman's son tells you something
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: important about the God moving through this ministry. He is
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: not only present in the large things. He is not
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 1: only moved by the crises that affect nations or the
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: losses large enough to be recognized as tragedies by any
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: outside observer. He is also present with the borrowed axe
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: head at the bottom of the river, with the specific
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: anxiety of a young man who has broken a trust
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: he cannot afford to repair. With the small private distress
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 1: of the ordinary loss that no one else would think
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: to write a story about. The iron floated, the man
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: took it up. That is the whole miracle, and it
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: is enough. There is something in the texture of Elisha's
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: response worth carrying forward. He asked where it had fallen.
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: He did not immediately produce a result. He asked the
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 1: man to locate the precise place of the loss, and
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 1: the miracle, when it came, was positioned exactly there, not approximate,
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: not in the general area, at the place when something
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: is lost. You go back to the place of the loss.
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 1: You stand at the specific location, not the broad category
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: of things that have gone wrong, but the exact place
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: where the thing went down. And then you watch for
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: what the god who cares about borrowed axe heads may
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: choose to do at that precise spot. The iron may
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: not be as far down as you think. Now we
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: move from the smallest miracle in this narrative to one
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: of its most vivid. The King of Syria was at
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: war with Israel. He would make his military plans in private,
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: and every time Elisha would send word to the King
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: of Israel, warning him of the Syrian positions. The King
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: of Syria was troubled by this. He gathered his officers
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: and accused them of having a traitor among them. One
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: of his servants told him the truth. There was no traitor.
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 1: It was Elisha, the prophet in Israel, who was telling
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: the King of Israel. The words that the King of
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: Syria spoke in his bedroom, not in his war councils,
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: in his bedroom, the most private space available to him,
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: and those words were reaching the prophet of Israel. The
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: King of Syria sent a great army to the city
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 1: of Dothan, where Elisha was staying. They came by night
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: and surround did the city. When Elisha's servant rose early
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: in the morning and went out, he saw the army,
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: horses and chariots surrounding the city on every side. He
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: came back inside and said, Alas, my master, what shall
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 1: we do? Elisha said, do not be afraid, for those
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: who are with us are more than those who are
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: with them. And then he prayed a single, short prayer,
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see.
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man,
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: and he saw the mountain was full of horses and
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: chariots of fire all around Elisha. Now notice carefully what
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: Elisha did not pray. He did not pray for the
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: chariots of fire to appear. He did not ask God
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: to send a protective army. He asked God to open
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: the young man's eyes so that he could see what
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: was already there. The army on the mountain was not
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: called into existence by the prayer. The prayer opened the
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: capacity to perceive what had been present all along. The
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: crisis was not changed. The Syrian army was still surrounding
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 1: the city. The circumstances were exactly what the servant had
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: seen when he went out in the morning. What changed
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: was what the servant was able to see within those
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: unchanged circumstances, And what he saw was that the thing
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: surrounding his master was itself surrounded by something larger. The
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: Syrians came toward the city, Elisha prayed that they would
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: be struck with blindness. They were. He led them blind
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 1: into the city of Samaria. Then he prayed that their
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: eyes would be opened. They found themselves inside the capital
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: city of their enemy, entirely at the mercy of the
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: King of Israel. The king asked whether he should strike
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: them down. Elisha said no, Feed them, set bread and
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: water before them, and when they have eaten and drunk,
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: send them home to their master. The king fed them
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: and sent them away. The Syrian raiders did not come
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 1: again into the land of Israel. The army that had
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: surrounded a city in the night was given a meal
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: and released. The military problem was resolved not by military means,
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: but by an act of hospitality so unexpected that it
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: removed the will to continue the conflict. You cannot easily
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: make war on people who have just fed you, when
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: they could have destroyed you. Elisha had prayed three different
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: prayers across this story. Open his eyes, strike them blind,
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: open their eyes. The sequence is deliberate. See what is
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: really present, surrender what you think is your advantage. See
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: clearly again, and then go home. Now hold these two
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: stories side by side, the axe Head and the Invisible Army,
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: because the text places them together with intention. In the first,
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: a young man loses something small in a river and
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: afraid of what that means. In the second, a young
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: man sees something large and threatening surrounding his city and
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: is afraid of what that means. Both stories involve a
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: cry to Elisha, and in both cases the response reorients
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: how the person in distress is seeing the situation. In
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: both cases, Elisha does not change the external reality first,
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: he changes what is perceived within it. The iron floats
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 1: at the exact spot where it sank. The army was
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: on the mountain before the servant saw it, and remained after.
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: The miracle in both stories is a miracle of revelation,
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 1: things made visible that were present all along, but hidden
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 1: from ordinary perception. The problem, as often as not, is
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 1: not the absence of provision or protection. The problem is
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: the absence of the ability to see what is already there.
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: The night that surrounds you is not only what it
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: appears to be from inside the distress of the moment.
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: Something else is present, something that was there before you looked,
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: and will remain after you stop looking, and that does
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 1: not require your perception of it in order to continue
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 1: doing what it does. The mountain was not empty when
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: the servant was afraid, and it is not empty now.
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: The same God who opened one frightened servant's eyes on
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: a hillside at Dothan is the god of this room,
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: this night, this breath, and what surrounds you, if you
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: could see it clearly, is larger than what surrounds the
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: thing you are afraid of. Rest in that for a
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: moment before we continue Chapter nine, The Siege and the
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: Impossible Promise. There are moments when the world narrows to
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: a single street, a single gate, a single question about
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: whether tomorrow will come at all. The people of Samaria
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: were living inside one of those moments. Syria had come again,
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: not a raiding party, a full zieger ben Hadad, King
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 1: of Syria, gathered his entire force and surrounded Samaria. And
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: the siege held long enough to do what sieges are
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 1: designed to do. It pressed the life out of the
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 1: city from the outside inn The text records what that
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 1: looked like in specific terms. A donkey's head was selling
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: for eighty shekels of silver, a measure of doves dung
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 1: for five shekels. These were not items that appeared in
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: an ordinary market. A donkey was a working animal, not food.
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 1: Its head, the least desirable part, was selling for significant wealth.
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: The city was eating what nothing in its history had
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: prepared it to eat, and paying prices that nothing in
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: its economy had prepared it to pay. The King of
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: Israel was walking along the wall of the city when
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 1: a woman cried out to him. He said, if the
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: Lord will not help you, how shall I help you.
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: He had nothing. He was a king without a resource,
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: walking the walls of a dying city, unable to do
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: the one thing a king is supposed to be able
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: to do. And then the woman told him what she
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: had done. She had made an agreement with another woman
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: they would eat her son to day and the other
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 1: woman's son to morrow. They had eaten her son, and
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: now the other woman had hidden her child and would
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: not give him up. The text does not linger on
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 1: this detail, and neither will we. It records it plainly
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: because it is the honest measure of how deep the
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 1: siege had driven the city into desperation. This is what
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: sustained scarcity does to ordinary people who have run completely
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: out of options. It is one of the hardest details
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: in the entire Book of Kings, and we hold it
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: not as something to sensationalize, but as the true measure
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 1: of the darkness into which Elisha was about to speak
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 1: a word of light. The king tore his robes. Underneath
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: them was sackcloth, which meant he had already been morning
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: in private what he was now confronting in public. He
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: swore that Elisha would die for this, as if the
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: prophet of Yahweh was the reason the Syrian army was
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: outside the walls. Grief became rage, and rage needed somewhere
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 1: to go. Elisha was sitting in his house with the
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: elders of the city when the messenger came. He told
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: them before the messenger arrived that someone was being sent
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: to take his head. He told them to shut the
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 1: door and hold it when the man came. The messenger
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: arrived and the king arrived behind him. The king said
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: to Elisha, this trouble is from the Lord. Why should
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 1: I wait for the Lord any longer? This is one
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: of the most honestly human things anyone says to a
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 1: prophet in the entire Biblical record. Not simple defiance, not
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: simple unbelief, something more raw than either. A man at
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: the absolute limit of what he can endure, standing in
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: front of of the only person he can think of
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 1: who might have access to something beyond the present reality,
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 1: and saying aloud what despair always says, when it has
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: been pressed long enough, why should I keep waiting? What
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 1: is the point of the waiting. When the waiting has
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 1: come to this, Elisha said, hear the word of the Lord.
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: Thus says the Lord, tomorrow, about this time, a measure
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: of fine flower shall be sold for a shekel, and
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: two measures of barley for a shekel at the gate
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 1: of Samaria. Let us understand what that promise meant in
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: the context of the moment it was spoken. Fine flower
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 1: was not emergency rations. It was not the desperate substitute
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: the city had been surviving on. It was ordinary, high
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 1: quality grain, the kind that appears in a functioning economy,
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: and it was going to sell at ordinary prices, not
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 1: famine prices, not crisis prices, normal prices at the gate
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: of Samaria, the public market, the place of ordinary daily commerce.
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 1: By to morrow, about this time, the siege was outside
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: the walls. The Syrian army was still encamped. Nothing in
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 1: the visible world had changed between the moment the king
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 1: arrived at Elisha's door and the moment Elisha spoke these words.
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 1: The same walls, the same army, the same famine, the
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: same city eating what it should never have eaten. And
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: into that unchanged visible reality, Elisha spoke a specific measurable,
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: verifiable promise, not a vague assurance that things would improve,
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 1: not a general encouragement to hold on a little longer,
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 1: a price, a product, a location, a time to morrow.
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 1: About this time one of the king's officers heard it.
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: He said, if the Lord himself should make windows in heaven,
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 1: could this thing be? It was a verdict dressed as
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 1: a question. Even if God opened a miraculous channel of
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: supply directly from the sky, the arithmetic of what Elisha
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 1: had just promised was impossible. There is no scenario in
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: which what he has just described happens to morrow. Elisia
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 1: said to him, you shall see it with your own eyes,
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: but you shall not eat of it. He would see,
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 1: he would not eat. The promise was confirmed, and a
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 1: boundary was placed on the man who had closed himself
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 1: entirely to receiving it. Now we come to the four
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: men who changed everything. They were lepers. They sat outside
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 1: the gate of the city, which was where the ancient
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: social structure required them to sit. Inside the walls, people
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 1: were dying of famine. Outside the walls, the Syrian army
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 1: was encamped. The four men were caught between two kinds
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 1: of death. Belonging fully to neither world. Excluded from the
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 1: refuge of the city by the condition of their bodies,
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: they said to one another, why are we sitting here
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: until we die? If they went into the city, they
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 1: would die of famine there. If they stayed where they were,
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: they would die where they sat. So they said, come,
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: let us go to the Syrian camp. If they spare us,
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: we will live, and if they kill us, we will
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 1: only die. This is not courage in the heroic sense.
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: This is the logic of people who have run out
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: of reasons to stay still. They did not have a strategy,
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: they did not have a plan. They had the decision
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: to move when every alternative had become a form of dying.
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: They rose at twilight and went toward the camp. Stay
• 1:23:43
  Speaker 1: with that image for a moment, four men at the
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: edge of the city that would not take them in,
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: standing up in the failing light and walking toward the
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 1: thing that frightened them, because the only other option was
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 1: to sit still and wait for the end. No certainty,
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 1: no guarantee, no reason to believe it would go well,
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: just the decision that staying was no longer possible, and
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 1: that moving even toward danger was the only remaining form
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 1: of hope available to them. That is what courage so
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 1: often looks like from the inside, not the absence of fear,
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 1: not certainty about the outcome, just the decision to move
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 1: when staying still has become its own kind of dying.
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: And when they arrived at the camp, no one was there.
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 1: The lord had made the Syrian army hear the sound
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: of chariots and horses and a great approaching force, And
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 1: they had said to one another that the King of
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 1: Israel had hired armies to come against them. And they
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: had fled in the twilight, leaving everything, their tents, their horses,
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: their food, their silver and gold. The entire camp intact
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 1: abandoned because they had heard a sound attached to no
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: visible army. The four lepers went into a tent and
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 1: ate and drank, and took silver and gold and clothing
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: and hid them. They went into another tent and took more.
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 1: And then one of them said to the others, we
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 1: are not doing right. This is a day of good news,
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 1: and we are keeping it to ourselves. Come let us
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 1: go and tell the king's household. The people who could
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 1: not enter the city were now carrying the news that
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 1: would save every one inside it. The people who could
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: not eat in the famine had found the feast that
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 1: would end it. The ones the city had kept outside
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: its walls were the first to know that the walls
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: were no longer necessary. They went to the gatekeepers and
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 1: told what they had found. The gate keepers told the
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 1: king's household. The king was cautious, suspecting a trap, he
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 1: sent riders to verify the report. They followed the road
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: all the way to the Jordan and found it scattered
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 1: with garments and equipment that the Syrians had thrown down
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 1: in their panic. An entire army had abandoned everything it
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 1: needed to function in order to move faster. The people
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 1: went out and plundered the camp, and fine flower was
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 1: sold for a shekel at the gate of Samaria, and
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: two measures of barley for a shekel, exactly as Elisha
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 1: had said at the time he had said at the
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 1: place he had said, the king appointed the officer who
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 1: had doubted to manage the gate. The people pressed through
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 1: it to reach the food, and the officer was trampled
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: in the gateway and died there. He had seen it
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: with his own eyes and had not eaten of it.
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 1: Exactly as Elisha had said. Now let us stay with
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 1: the sound that emptied the Syrian camp. God made them
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: hear something that was not there. No army of allies
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 1: was coming. There were no additional chariots or horses. There
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 1: was only a sound perceived by an encamped army in
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 1: the twilight that carried within it enough reality to move
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: an entire military force of its position and send it
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: running in the dark. The God who had opened the
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 1: eyes of a frightened servant on the hillside at Dothan
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 1: to see the army that was already there here made
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 1: an absent army audible to the ears of the besieging force,
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 1: two demonstrations of the same underlying truth. The visible world
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: is not the whole of what is real, and God
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: can work through what the eye cannot see and the
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: ear cannot verify in either direction to accomplish what the
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 1: visible world said was impossible. Elisha had spoken the promise
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 1: into the worst moment of the siege. He had spoken
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: it with nothing in the visible world to support it.
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: He had spoken it into the face of a grieving
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: king and a doubting officer, and a city that had
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: gone past ordinary desperation, he had spoken it anyway, and
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: it was true by tomorrow about that time, at the gate,
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 1: at the price, in the place. The word of God
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: spoken into an impossible situation is not diminished by the
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 1: impossibility of the situation. It arrives at its own time,
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 1: in its own place, carried sometimes by the most unlikely hands.
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 1: The word came true at twilight, carried by four men
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: who stood up when staying still had become dying through
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 1: a camp that a sound had emptied in the dark.
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 1: Whatever has been spoken over your life that the visible
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 1: world has given you no reason to believe. It has
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 1: its own time, its own gait, its own price, and
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: the hands that carry it to you may not be
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: the hands you were expecting tomorrow about this time. Chapter ten,
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 1: The Death of a Prophet. Every life has a last chapter,
• 1:28:51
  Speaker 1: not always the chapter the person would have written for themselves,
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: not always the ending that the quality of the life
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 1: seems to call for. By n any measure of justice,
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 1: we can calculate from where we stand just the last chapter,
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: the one that arrives when the body has given what
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 1: it has to give, and the years have run to
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: their appointed length, and the work that was given to
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 1: one particular person in one particular generation reaches the place
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 1: where it must be set down. Elisha reached that place.
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 1: The text does not give us a long account of
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 1: his final years. There is no tracing of the slow
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 1: withdrawal from public life, no careful naming of a successor,
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 1: no formal transition. There is, simply, after all the stories
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: of healing and provision and restoration and feeding and raising,
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 1: and revealing, a brief and quiet statement. Elisha had fallen sick,
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 1: with the illness from which he would die. He was
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 1: not taken up in a whirlwind of fire. There was
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 1: no chariot, no horses of flame descending from the sky
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 1: to carry him out of the world in the way
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 1: that matched the grand of his ministry. He got sick
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: the way ordinary people get sick, the way people who
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 1: have spent themselves completely in a long work sometimes gets
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 1: sick when the work has taken everything the body had
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 1: to give. He lay down, and he did not get
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: up again. Sit with that for a moment before we
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 1: move forward. Elijah was taken in fire. His departure was
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: visible and final, and left no physical remains in any tomb.
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 1: He went up and was gone, and the only thing
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 1: he left behind was the mantle falling and the question
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: it provoked in the man who picked it up. There
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: was no burial, there was no grave. There was only
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 1: the whirlwind, and then the silence, and then Elisha alone.
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: At the Jordan, Elisha died quietly in a bed from
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 1: an illness, and he was buried in a tomb the
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 1: way ordinary people are buried. The God who took Elijah
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 1: in fire let Elisha go in sickness. The God who
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: gave Elijah a chariot gave Elisha a sick bed. The
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 1: God who made Elijah's departure a visible act of divine
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 1: power made Ilia's departure as quiet and ordinary as the
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 1: death of the farmer he had once been. Both were
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 1: his servants, Both were held by the same love, Both
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 1: were given the same God, two utterly different endings. This
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 1: is something the tradition of the Prophets does not resolve
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: or explain into something comfortable. It simply records both one
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 1: after the other with the same quality of attention and care,
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: and leaves the reader sitting with what cannot be neatly
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 1: accounted for. Some people are taken in fire, some people
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 1: are laid in the ground. The manner of leaving tells
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 1: you nothing precise about the measure of the life that
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 1: preceded it, or the depth of the love that held it,
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 1: or the significance of what was accomplished through it. The
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 1: manner of leaving tells you very little at all. In
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: the end, the life is what matters, and the God
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: who held the life. Now, before Elisha died, a king
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: came to visit him. Joash, king of Israel, came down
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 1: to the prophet's sick bed and wept over him. And
• 1:32:14
  Speaker 1: what he said in his weeping is worth staying with
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 1: carefully because of where those words had come from. He said,
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: my father, my father, the chariots of Israel and its horsemen.
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: These are the same words Elisha had cried out when
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: Elijah was taken from him. Standing at the Jordan, watching
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: the whirlwind carry his master away, Elisha had called out
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 1: exactly those words. It was his way of saying that
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 1: Elijah had been worth more to Israel than any military force,
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 1: that the presence of the prophetic word was a more
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 1: real protection than horses and weapons and trained soldiers. And
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 1: now those same words were being said over Elisha by
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: a king at the bedside of a dying man. The
• 1:33:02
  Speaker 1: cry that Elisha had given at the departure of his
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: teacher was being returned to him by the next generation.
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 1: At the threshold of his own departure. The circle was closing.
• 1:33:13
  Speaker 1: What Elisha had said about Elijah was now being said
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 1: about Elisha. He had become in the years of his ministry,
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 1: the very thing he had mourned, the loss of the
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 1: chariots and horsemen of Israel for his generation, just as
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: Elijah had been for his. But before the circle closed completely,
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: Elisha had one more thing to give. He told the
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 1: king to get a bow and some arrows. The king
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 1: took them. Elisha put his hands over the king's hands,
• 1:33:43
  Speaker 1: the hands of a dying man covering the hands of
• 1:33:45
  Speaker 1: a living king. And he told the king to open
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: the east window towards Syria, toward the direction of the
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 1: enemy that had besieged Samaria and raided the land and
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: troubled Israel throughout the long years of his ministry. Open
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: the window, face the direction of what has been threatening you,
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 1: and shoot. The king shot, and Elisha said, the Lord's
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 1: arrow of victory over Syria, for you shall fight the
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 1: Syrians in Aphek until you have made an end of them.
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 1: Then Elisha told the king to take the arrows and
• 1:34:19
  Speaker 1: strike them against the ground. The king struck three times
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: and stopped. Elisha was angry. He said, you should have
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 1: struck five or six times. Then you would have struck
• 1:34:32
  Speaker 1: Syria until you had finished it. But now you will
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 1: strike Syria only three times. Think about what is happening
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 1: in this scene, a dying prophet, using what remains of
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 1: his strength, giving a king the shape of his future,
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: the dying man's hands covering the king's hands, the direction
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 1: of the enemy, clearly named the promise of victory already
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 1: spoken over the arrow that had just been loose through
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 1: the east window. And the king struck three times and
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: looked up the way a person looks up when they
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 1: believe they have done what was asked of them to
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: a reasonable degree, when the action has been performed and
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 1: the obligation seems to have been met, and it feels
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 1: like enough to stop. And the dying man on the
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 1: bed was angry, not because the king had refused the instruction.
• 1:35:21
  Speaker 1: He had done the instruction he had struck. He had
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 1: simply stopped at what felt like sufficient, at the number
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 1: that seemed reasonable at the point where he believed the
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 1: action had been completed to the extent that was being
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 1: asked of him, and Elisha, with whatever days he had
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 1: left running down, was grieved by it in the particular
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 1: way that someone who can see what something could have
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 1: been is grieved when it becomes something less. Not because
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 1: the king had failed morally, not because he had done
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 1: wrong in any deliberate sense. Because the window was open,
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 1: and the arrows were there, and the dying man's hands
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 1: were covering the king's hands, and more was possible. Five
• 1:36:03
  Speaker 1: times was possible, Six times was possible. The king stopped
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 1: at three. He would win three times against Syria, exactly
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: three times, not the end of Syria, not the full
• 1:36:17
  Speaker 1: completion of what had been possible. Three victories, exactly what
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 1: the three strikes of the arrow against the ground had
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 1: measured out. Joash carried three victories and might have carried six,
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 1: And the difference between those two things was decided in
• 1:36:33
  Speaker 1: that room at that moment, when a king decided that
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 1: three strikes felt like enough and put the arrows down.
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 1: Then Elisha died and they buried him. The narrative simply
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: continues into the next season of Moabite raids, the ordinary
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 1: violence of the region, the regular rhythm of a world
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 1: that does not pause for any departure, however significant. The
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: man was in the ground, The ministry was finished, and
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 1: the story had one more thing to say. Before you
• 1:37:03
  Speaker 1: sleep to night. Carry this question lightly with you, not
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: as a burden, simply as something worth holding in the dark.
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 1: How many times would you have struck? Not as judgment?
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 1: The king did not know the rules. No one told
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 1: him there was no fixed number, that what was being
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 1: measured was not compliance but desire, not performance, but the
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 1: depth of the wanting. He struck what seemed sufficient and
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 1: put the arrows down. Most of us do the same.
• 1:37:33
  Speaker 1: The arrows are still available, the window is still open,
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 1: the direction of what you are facing is still ahead
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 1: of you, and the hands of something much larger than
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 1: you are still if you are willing to feel them
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 1: covering your hands. Do not put the arrows down. At three,
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 1: Chapter eleven, The Bones that Raised the Dead. There is
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 1: a question that every person who has ever stood at
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 1: a grave has asked, not always in words, sometimes only
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 1: in the particular quality of silence that settles over you
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 1: when the ground has received someone you loved and you
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 1: are still standing there after everyone else has walked away,
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 1: looking at the place where they are now trying to
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 1: understand how something so full of life and presence and
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 1: weight in the world can become so entirely still. The
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 1: question is this, is that it is that where it ends?
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 1: Is the grave the final word on everything that person
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 1: was and carried and gave. The story of Elisha answers
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 1: that question, not as a proposition to be argued, not
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 1: as a doctrine to be debated in a room full
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 1: of scholars, as a scene, a specific, physical, unrepeatable scene
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 1: that takes place in a cemetery in Israel, involving a
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 1: dead man, a marauding band, a borrowed grave, and the
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 1: bones of a prophet who had been in the ground
• 1:38:59
  Speaker 1: long enough for there to be nothing left of him
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 1: but bones. Elisha was dead, he had been buried. The
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 1: ministry was over, and the man was gone, and the
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 1: land had moved on into the next season of its history.
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 1: And then one day some people were burying a man.
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 1: We do not know his name. He is introduced to
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 1: us only in this moment. He had died and was
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 1: being carried to his burial by people who cared enough
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 1: to carry him, and as they were in the process
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 1: of lowering him into the ground, they saw a band
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 1: of Moabite raiders coming. They were frightened. They threw the
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 1: dead man into the nearest available tomb, which happened to
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 1: be the tomb of Elisha, and they ran. Notice what
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 1: is not in this scene No prayer. No one stood
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 1: over the tomb and cried out to God. No one
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 1: laid hands on the dead man, or spoke a word
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: of faith over him, or performed any ritual at all.
• 1:39:56
  Speaker 1: No one did anything that any of the other stories
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 1: in this long narrative described ibe as the human side
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 1: of an encounter with divine power. There was no Elisha
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 1: to ask where the thing had fallen, no instruction to
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 1: wash in a river, no word spoken over the situation
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 1: at all. There was only panic and a convenient tomb,
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 1: and a dead man dropped into it because the people
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 1: carrying him needed their hands free to run. And when
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 1: the man touched the bones of Elisha, he revived and
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 1: stood on his feet. Now, let us be careful and
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 1: precise about what this miracle means and what it does
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 1: not mean, because this is where honest theology matters most.
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 1: The bones of Elisha were not the source of the
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 1: power that raised the dead man. This cannot be said
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 1: too clearly. Bones are bones. They do not possess life
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 1: giving energy. They do not carry sacred force of their own.
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 1: The power that raised the dead man did not reside
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 1: in the physical remains of the prophet. The text not
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: say that Elisha's bones had power. The text says that
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 1: when the dead man touched them, he revived. The reason
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 1: he revived was not because of anything resident in the
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 1: remains themselves. It was because the God who had worked
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 1: through Elisha in life, was present in that place and
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 1: chose that moment to make one final and definitive statement
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 1: about the nature of his own power. He was not
• 1:41:25
  Speaker 1: in the bones. He was present where the bones were,
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 1: and his presence was sufficient to raise the dead, even
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 1: after every other channel of his working through that particular
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 1: life had been closed by death and burial and the
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 1: settling of the ground over a sealed tomb. This distinction
• 1:41:43
  Speaker 1: matters enormously. If the bones themselves possessed power, the story
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 1: would be about Ilisia. But the bones did not possess power.
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 1: The story is about God. It was always about God.
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 1: It was about God at the Jordan. When the water divided.
• 1:42:02
  Speaker 1: It was about God in the widow's house, when the
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 1: oil flowed. It was about God in the room on
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 1: the roof, when the boy sneezed seven times and opened
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 1: his eyes. And it is about God in the cemetery,
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 1: in the borrowed grave, in the moment when the presence
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 1: of the One who works through human vessels chose to
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 1: demonstrate that he is not finished. When the vessels are
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 1: the miracle was God's declaration about God. The bones were
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 1: the location he chose to make it. Now let us
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 1: think about what this means in the structure of the
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: whole story. The ministry of Elisha began with a question.
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 1: Standing at the edge of the Jordan River, holding the
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 1: mantle that had fallen from Elijah. Elijah struck the water
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 1: and asked, where is the Lord, God of Elijah. The
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 1: water divided? That was the answer. The God who had
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 1: been with Elijah was still present. The departure of the
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 1: one who had carried his work did not terminate the
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 1: work itself. That was the question at the beginning, and
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 1: the cemetery is the final answer. Not the power continuing
• 1:43:09
  Speaker 1: through a new vessel, the power of God present in
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 1: the complete absence of any vessel at all through what remained.
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 1: When the vessel was gone and the ministry was finished,
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 1: and the burial was done, and the mourners had gone home,
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: and the ground had been quiet for a year, God
• 1:43:25
  Speaker 1: still present in the ground, not because the ground was sacred,
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 1: not because the bones were holy objects, but because there
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 1: is no place where He is not. There is no
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 1: depth to which the work of his servants can go,
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 1: including the depth of the grave itself, where his presence
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 1: does not reach, and where he cannot choose to act.
• 1:43:46
  Speaker 1: The dead man stood on his feet. Now, let us
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 1: return to all the people we have walked with in
• 1:43:51
  Speaker 1: this story and hear what the bones mean for them.
• 1:43:55
  Speaker 1: The widow who had a small jar of oil and
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 1: a debt she could not pay. Her husband had given
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 1: what he had to protect the prophetic community and died
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 1: before seeing what that faithfulness was worth. The debt looked
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 1: like the final word on his legacy. The oil said otherwise,
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 1: what he deposited in the world through his hidden faithfulness
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 1: continued working after he was gone, in ways he never
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 1: saw and never knew. The woman of Schoonam, who built
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 1: a room on her roof for a man. She owed nothing,
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: She asked for nothing, and received a son she had
• 1:44:29
  Speaker 1: not dared to want, and lost him, and rode without
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 1: stopping to the man of God, and did not leave
• 1:44:35
  Speaker 1: until her son was in her arms. What she gave
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 1: from the overflow of her generosity continued working in ways
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 1: she could not have anticipated when she first asked her
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 1: husband about the room. The young girl in Damascus, who
• 1:44:50
  Speaker 1: said one sentence from her captivity, she offered the one
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 1: piece of information she had from a position of complete powerlessness,
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: with no way of knowing what it would matter, or
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 1: reach anyone, or change anything at all. She went back
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 1: to her work, and a Syrian general came home with
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 1: skin like a child's. The four lepers who stood up
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 1: at twilight and walked toward the thing that frightened them
• 1:45:14
  Speaker 1: because the only alternative was to die sitting still. They
• 1:45:18
  Speaker 1: found an empty camp full of food, and then said
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 1: to each other, this is a day of good news,
• 1:45:24
  Speaker 1: and we cannot keep it to ourselves. Every one of
• 1:45:28
  Speaker 1: them did the thing available to them in the position
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 1: they occupied, and the thing available to them done in
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 1: faithfulness became part of something larger than any of them
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 1: could see from where they were standing. This is the
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 1: testimony of the whole ministry of Elisha, not that one
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 1: remarkable man did remarkable things through his own strength, but
• 1:45:49
  Speaker 1: that the God who moved through that man was moving
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 1: through every one around him too, through the unnamed girl,
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 1: through the woman who built a room, through the four
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 1: men the gate, through the flower that made the pot safe,
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: through the salt that healed the spring, through the borrowed
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 1: axe head at the bottom of the river, and through
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 1: the ground where the prophet lay after everything else was finished.
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 1: He was moving through all of it. He is moving
• 1:46:16
  Speaker 1: through all of this. Whatever you have given without knowing
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 1: what it would produce, whatever room you have built on
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 1: the roof of your life for something wholly that passes
• 1:46:26
  Speaker 1: through and needs somewhere to rest, whatever sentence you have
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 1: offered from your place of limitation, with no way of
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 1: knowing whether it would matter, whatever decision you have made
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 1: to stand up and walk toward the thing that frightened you,
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 1: because staying still had become a form of dying. It
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 1: is in the ground, and it is still going. You
• 1:46:48
  Speaker 1: are not at the end of your story. You may
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 1: be at the end of a chapter. You may be
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 1: at the place where something went into the ground that
• 1:46:56
  Speaker 1: felt permanent and necessary and irreplaceable, and you are standing
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: at that place wondering whether what looks like ending is
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 1: actually ending. Listen to what happened in the cemetery. God
• 1:47:10
  Speaker 1: was present in the tomb, not because of the bones,
• 1:47:13
  Speaker 1: but because He is present everywhere, and in that everywhere.
• 1:47:17
  Speaker 1: He chose that particular ordinary day and that particular borrowed
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 1: grave to remind the living that he had never stopped
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 1: being what he is. The dead man stood on his
• 1:47:27
  Speaker 1: feet not because of anything in the bones themselves, because
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 1: God was there, and God is here. We began tonight
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 1: with a question, can the power of God continue after
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 1: the person who carried it is gone? We have walked
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 1: through eleven chapters to hear the answer. And the answer
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 1: did not come in a lecture or a vision or
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 1: a moment of grand spectacle. It came in a cemetery
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 1: on an ordinary day, in the panic of a burial
• 1:47:59
  Speaker 1: party popping a dead man into the wrong grave, in
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 1: the quiet and unremarkable moment when a body touched what
• 1:48:06
  Speaker 1: was already in the ground and stood up. That is
• 1:48:09
  Speaker 1: the answer, not a proposition. A person standing in a
• 1:48:15
  Speaker 1: place that was supposed to be the end of something.
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 1: The ark of this story runs from an empty cloak
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 1: at the Jordan to a sealed tomb in a cemetery,
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 1: and what the ark says in both places is the
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 1: same thing.
• 1:48:28
  Speaker 2: He is here. The God who was present at the
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 2: river is present in the ground. The God who answered
• 1:48:35
  Speaker 2: the question in the parting of water answered it again
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 2: in the standing up of a dead man. And the
• 1:48:41
  Speaker 2: answer in both places is the same. Where is the Lord,
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 2: God of Elijah. He is here, He has always been here,
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 2: he will always be here. Now let us come quietly
• 1:48:53
  Speaker 2: to the end of this long night with the prayer
• 1:48:56
  Speaker 2: that this story asks for Father. We have walked tonight
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 2: through the life of a man who began with a
• 1:49:02
  Speaker 2: question at a river and ended with bones in a
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 2: tomb where the dead did not stay dead. We have
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 2: seen oil that did not run out until the vessels
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 2: were gone. We have seen a dead boy sneeze seven
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 2: times and open his eyes in a small room on
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 2: a roof. We have seen a pot of poison made
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 2: safe with flower. We have seen twenty loaves feed a
• 1:49:24
  Speaker 2: hundred men with food remaining. We have seen the skin
• 1:49:28
  Speaker 2: of a proud man restored to the softness of a
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 2: child's in a river he almost refused to enter. We
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 2: have seen a mountain full of fire that only one
• 1:49:37
  Speaker 2: frightened young man was given eyes to see. We have
• 1:49:41
  Speaker 2: seen a city saved by four men who had nothing
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 2: left to lose. We have seen a dying prophet angry
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 2: on his deathbed because a king stopped at three when
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 2: more was possible. And we have seen a dead man
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 2: stand on his feet in a borrowed grave, not because
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 2: of any power in the bones he touched, but because
• 1:50:01
  Speaker 2: you were present in the place where the bones were,
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 2: Because you are present everywhere, because there is no depth,
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 2: not even the ground itself, where you are not Lord.
• 1:50:12
  Speaker 2: Some of us to night are at the Jordan, standing
• 1:50:16
  Speaker 2: in the place of something we have lost, holding what
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 2: fell when the person we needed was taken. Asking where
• 1:50:22
  Speaker 2: you are now, let the water answer us. Let the
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 2: ordinary surface of the world we are living in part
• 1:50:29
  Speaker 2: for us, as it parted for the man with the
• 1:50:31
  Speaker 2: empty cloak, to show us that you were never contained
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 2: in what we lost, that you were always present beyond
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 2: the vessel, that you are still here. Some of us
• 1:50:42
  Speaker 2: tonight are in the widow's house. We have a small
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 2: jar and a debt that seems larger than anything the
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 2: jar could possibly address. You are asking us to gather
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 2: empty vessels and close the door and pour. Give us
• 1:50:55
  Speaker 2: the courage to gather more than seems reasonable. Give us
• 1:50:59
  Speaker 2: the faith to close the door and let the oil
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 2: flow until there are no more vessels, and not one
• 1:51:06
  Speaker 2: moment before. Some of us to night are in the
• 1:51:09
  Speaker 2: room on the roof in Schoonam. We gave something, and
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 2: then the thing we received from the giving was taken back,
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 2: and we have placed it on the bed and closed
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 2: the door, and we do not know what comes next.
• 1:51:22
  Speaker 2: We have said it is all right when it is
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 2: not all right. We have held ourselves together through every
• 1:51:28
  Speaker 2: question because we were saving the full weight of it
• 1:51:31
  Speaker 2: for you. Here we are. We are not leaving until
• 1:51:35
  Speaker 2: you come with us. Some of us to night are
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 2: outside the gate. The city will not take us in,
• 1:51:42
  Speaker 2: and the threat is on the other side, and the
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 2: only logic available to us is the logic of people
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 2: who have run out of reasons to stay still. Let
• 1:51:51
  Speaker 2: us stand up at twilight, Let us walk toward what
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 2: we are afraid of, and let us find in the
• 1:51:57
  Speaker 2: place we feared what you have already prepared there for us.
• 1:52:02
  Speaker 2: Some of us to Night are standing at a grave,
• 1:52:05
  Speaker 2: at the place where something went into the ground that
• 1:52:08
  Speaker 2: we needed, something that carried weight and presence in the world,
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 2: something we built our understanding of the future around. And
• 1:52:16
  Speaker 2: we are standing at that place in the dark, asking
• 1:52:19
  Speaker 2: the question that people at graves ask, is that it
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 2: is that where it ends. Father, Let the answer come
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 2: the way it came in the cemetery, not with a
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 2: resolution that erases the grief, not with a theology that
• 1:52:35
  Speaker 2: makes the loss feel smaller than it was, but with
• 1:52:38
  Speaker 2: the quiet, unmistakable evidence that you are present in the
• 1:52:42
  Speaker 2: place where what we loved has gone, That you do
• 1:52:45
  Speaker 2: not become absent when what you worked through is laid down,
• 1:52:49
  Speaker 2: that you remain active and present in every place, including
• 1:52:53
  Speaker 2: the places that look most like silence, most like ending.
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 2: And if we are the dead man to Night, placed
• 1:53:00
  Speaker 2: in confusion somewhere we did not choose on a day
• 1:53:03
  Speaker 2: that was moving too fast for anyone to handle with grace,
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 2: let us feel what he felt when his body touched
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 2: what was already in the ground. Let us receive the
• 1:53:13
  Speaker 2: life that comes not from anything we contain, but from
• 1:53:16
  Speaker 2: you present, where we are active, where we are unwilling
• 1:53:21
  Speaker 2: to let what looks like an ending, be the last word.
• 1:53:24
  Speaker 2: You were present where the bones were. You are present
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 2: in this room. You are present in this breath. You
• 1:53:32
  Speaker 2: are present in the quiet that is settling over this
• 1:53:34
  Speaker 2: long night as it moves toward morning. Keep us through
• 1:53:38
  Speaker 2: what remains of the dark. Let the question, Elisha asked
• 1:53:42
  Speaker 2: at the Jordan stay alive in us, not as doubt,
• 1:53:46
  Speaker 2: but as the honest prayer of people who have lost
• 1:53:49
  Speaker 2: the visible and need to know whether the invisible is
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 2: still present. It is you are, you have been, you
• 1:53:58
  Speaker 2: will be. Where is the Lord, God of Elijah. He
• 1:54:02
  Speaker 2: is here to you be all glory now and in
• 1:54:06
  Speaker 2: every morning that follows this one. Amen. The cemetery is
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 2: quiet now. The marauding band has long since passed. The
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 2: dead man is standing somewhere in the morning, not entirely
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 2: sure what happened to him, only knowing that something did,
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 2: that he was in the ground, and then he was not,
• 1:54:26
  Speaker 2: that something in the place where he was laid was
• 1:54:28
  Speaker 2: sufficient to return him to the light. You have been
• 1:54:32
  Speaker 2: in the company of that man to night, not because
• 1:54:35
  Speaker 2: you are dead, but because you know what it is
• 1:54:38
  Speaker 2: to be placed somewhere difficult on a day that was
• 1:54:40
  Speaker 2: moving too fast, carrying something you were not sure how
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 2: to carry. And you have heard tonight what the bones
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 2: said in the cemetery, that God was there, that He
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 2: remained when everything else was finished, that the ending that
• 1:54:55
  Speaker 2: looked final was not the final thing. He is here
• 1:54:59
  Speaker 2: in this room, in this breath, in the space between
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 2: the darkness that brought you to this night and the
• 1:55:06
  Speaker 2: morning that is already on its way to find you.
• 1:55:09
  Speaker 2: And He is not finished. Good Night,