Transcript
In your Bibles, will you turn with me to the book of Second Kings, chapter 6, the book of Second Kings, chapter 6? Second Kings, chapter 6. We want to begin reading at verse 24. Second Kings, chapter 6 and verse 24:
And it happened after this that Ben-Hadad king of Syria gathered all his army, and went up and besieged Samaria. And there was a great famine in Samaria; and indeed they besieged it, until a donkey’s head was sold for eighty shekels of silver, and one-fourth of a cab of dove droppings for five shekels of silver.
Then, as the king of Israel was passing by on the wall, a woman cried out to him, saying, Help, my lord, O king! And he said, If the Lord does not help you, where can I find help for you? From the threshing floor or from the winepress? Then the king said to her, What is troubling you? And she answered, This woman said to me, Give your son, that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow. So we boiled my son, and ate him. And I said to her on the next day, Give your son, that we may eat him; but she has hidden her son.
Now it happened, when the king heard the words of the woman, that he tore his clothes, and as he passed by on the wall the people looked, and there underneath he had sackcloth on his body. Then he said, God do so to me, and more also, if the head of Elisha the son of Shaphat remains on him today!
But Elisha was sitting in his house, and the elders were sitting with him; and the king sent a man ahead of him. But before the messenger came to him, he said to the elders, Do you see how this son of a murderer has sent someone to take away my head? Look, when the messenger comes, shut the door, and hold him fast at the door. Is not the sound of his master’s feet behind him? And while he was still talking with them, there was the messenger, coming down to him; and then he evidently, referring to the king, and then he said, Surely this calamity is from the Lord; why should I wait for the Lord any longer?
Then Elisha said, Hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord: Tomorrow, about this time, a seah of fine flour shall be sold for a shekel, and two seahs of barley for a shekel, at the gate of Samaria.
It was a bad night to be out in your car. In fact, it was a Friday night in May of 1995, when motorists in the Fort Worth area, who were caught by surprise by a severe hailstorm, found themselves trapped in their vehicles while windows and windshields were battered in. Dozens of disabled cars, with their frustrated passengers, were still marooned along I-30 between Fort Worth and Arlington after the worst of the storm had passed.
Phil Finney of Corsicana was clutching a bloody hand towel to a gash on his head, which he had received when the hail crashed through the sunroof of his truck. “It was like I was hit by a baseball,” said Finney. “The line of traffic just stopped. You couldn’t go backwards or forwards.” Christine Nedu of Arlington was elegantly dressed for an evening in downtown Fort Worth, but after the storm she had two bloody gashes on her knees, because she had received them when the hail had crashed through the windshield of the Cadillac in which she was riding. “I thought we were going to die,” said Christine, and she told how she had cowered on the floor of the Cadillac after the windshield was broken.
Eighteen-year-old Casey Dunn was driving to the family ranch near Palo Pinto with his younger brother and a friend, when the hail smashed both of his headlights and crashed through the sunroof of his father’s truck. The three teenagers climbed over the back seat and hid under a camper covering over the bed of the truck until the worst of the storm had passed. Almost all of the vehicles that were parked in the lots or along the curbs in downtown Fort Worth had damage, ranging all the way from fist-size dents to shattered windshields.
One of the luckiest passengers was Joe White. He was driving back home from a dealer in Mid-City with his brand-new Plymouth minivan. He heard the announcement of the coming storm, immediately sought shelter under an overpass, and he remained there for about two hours while the storm passed by. Later on he said to the media, “I had just driven it off the showroom floor. I couldn’t very well take it home and have my wife see our new car all smashed up.”
Well, it was quite an evening, wasn’t it? And it raises the question of how you and I might have responded if we had been caught ourselves in that particular storm. After all, it is in the crises of life, it is in those times of our experience when we’re under severe pressure, it’s in those times that our true character and nature is best revealed. And because that’s true, that leads me to the question that I want to ask each of you this morning, and the question is this: Are you ready to give up? And, yes, you guessed it, that question is also the title of my message to you today, and I want you to be sure and have it fastened on your mind.
So here it is again. My question, the title of my message today, is: Are you ready to give up? Now, of course, the king of Israel was not caught in a hailstorm. In fact, he was trapped in something that was far, far worse than that. You see, after a period of peace with Syria, Ben-Hadad, the king of Syria, had mobilized another army. He had invaded the northern kingdom of Israel, and unlike the last war he didn’t suffer any reverses as his army advanced. And pretty soon his army was surrounding the city of Samaria, and they had placed it under siege.
Now, when a city was under siege like that, you couldn’t bring food in from the villages and the fields all around the city, and as a result the supply of food inside Samaria got smaller and smaller, and a very severe famine began, so severe, in fact, that a donkey’s head, who in the world would want to eat a donkey’s head, a donkey’s head sold for the enormous price of eighty shekels of silver, and worse yet, about a pint of dove’s droppings sold for five shekels of silver. This was a very, very bad famine indeed.
And as the king of Israel was out one day, walking along the top of the wall, he probably wanted to survey his defenses, see what he could see of the enemy out in the field. As he was walking out along the top of the wall, he heard a female voice cry out to him, “Help! Help, my lord, O king!” Now, there were a lot of ways that the king of Israel could have answered a cry for help like that. He could have said, Dear lady, if there is anything at all that I can do for you, rest assured I will do it. Or, if he had wanted to bring the Lord into his answer, he could have said, If the Lord God of Israel gives us mercy, I will most certainly help you in any way that I can.
But no, my friends, the king of Israel did not answer in any way like that. Instead, the king of Israel said to her, “If the Lord does not help you.” That’s pretty negative, isn’t it? “If the Lord does not help you, where will I get help for you? From the threshing floor? From the winepress? Look, lady,” says the king of Israel, “there’s nothing left on the threshing floor. There’s nothing left in the winepress. And obviously God isn’t helping us. And if He doesn’t do it, how in the world do you expect me to do it?”
Oh, oh, oh, the king of Israel has become impatient, and he is impatient with God. Remember that during the last war with Syria, God had helped Israel a lot. Several times God had revealed to the king of Israel, through Elisha the prophet, exactly where the Syrian armies were going to have their camp. And when the king of Syria sent an army to capture Elisha, God had struck the whole army with blindness, and Elisha had led them into the city of Samaria, and the king of Israel had captured the whole lot. He had had a lot of help from God. And now where is that help? The city was surrounded and suffering from an awful famine, and the king of Israel is virtually saying, Where is the help of the Lord?
Did you ever ask yourself that question? Did you? You were going through a hard time. You were going through a very trying experience. And you’d done a lot of praying, and you prayed and you prayed and you prayed, and nothing seemed to happen. And finally you began to lose your patience. You began to say, Where is the Lord? Why isn’t He doing something? Where is the help of God?
There was a man one time who was pushing a shopping cart through a supermarket, and in his shopping cart he had a baby that was screaming its head off. And a lady who was nearby was able to overhear him saying over and over again, in a very soft voice, “Be calm, Albert. Be calm, Albert. Be calm, Albert.”
So finally she walked up to him, and she said, because she had so much admiration for him, she said, “You know, I really admire your patience with the baby Albert.” And the man drew himself up to his full height and he said, “Madam, I am Albert.” He was asking himself to be patient. And you know what? When we are going through a trying time and we are tempted to get impatient with God, it’s good advice to say to ourselves, Be calm. Be patient.
Now, I don’t think for a single minute that the king of Israel expected to receive the kind of request from this woman that he actually received. You see, when he said to her, “What’s troubling you?” this is what she says. She said, “This other woman said to me the other day, Give up your son, and we will eat him today, and tomorrow I will give up my son and we’ll eat him tomorrow. So,” says the woman, “I gave up my son, and we boiled him, and we ate him. And the next day I said to this woman, Now it’s your turn. Give up your son, that we may eat him. You know what? This woman has hidden her son.”
Wow. She didn’t need to finish that request, did she? Obviously she is saying to the king, Make this lady keep her side of the bargain. Did I say this was a bad famine? This was an awful, horrible, terrible famine. And it was also a fulfillment of the prophecy in the law of Moses that if Israel sinned they would have famine so severe that they would eat their own children. And it was happening. It was happening.
What could the king do? In a typical expression of Middle Eastern despair, he tears his royal garments and continues his walk along the top of the wall. And lo and behold, after he has torn his royal garments, people are able to see that underneath his royal robes he has on sackcloth. The king has been engaged in prayer and fasting. That’s why you wore sackcloth. He had been engaged in seeking the help of God. And when he tore his robes, that fact was revealed.
We might have expected him to say, It’s dreadful, but it’s a fulfillment of the prophecy of the law of Moses, and it is a call to us to be more deeply repentant. We need to really, really repent before God, if it’s reached this kind of a stage. No, no, no, no, no, he didn’t say that. Here is what he said. He said, “God do so to me, and more also, if the head of Elisha the son of Shaphat remains on him today.” “I swear by God,” says the king of Israel, “that before this day is over, I will execute Elisha the prophet.”
His impatience with God has turned to anger, and he will strike out at God, he says, by killing God’s prophet. And you know what happens, you know what happens when we lose patience with God? Sometimes that impatience grows and it grows and it grows, and pretty soon we’re not only impatient with God, we’re mad at Him. Why doesn’t He help me? I deserve His help. And the next thing you do, you’re striking out and doing something that you know He doesn’t want you to do, maybe just to get back at Him, just to do something that He won’t like because He’s not helping you the way you think He ought to help you. And that’s always a dangerous proposition.
In 1898 the steamer Portland sailed out of Boston harbor against the harbor, even though all of the danger-signal flags were flying. She left the harbor even though the government agent had advised all outgoing ships to remain in port. She left the harbor even though the owners of the ship had ordered the ship to remain at dock. No one knew why she left, but apparently the captain of the Portland was worried, and he said to the lighthouse keeper, “Keep your light burning brightly tonight, because we may be back.”
But he was wrong. They didn’t come back that night. They didn’t come back the next day. They never came back. No one ever really knew what happened to the Portland, except it had defied all of the warnings against sailing. My dear Christian friends, if we become angry with God and we make up our minds that we’re going to defy Him, despite all of the warning flags of His word, despite all of the commands that He has given us, if we make our mind up that we’re going to defy Him nevertheless, then we’ve begun a trip that can lead us to personal and to spiritual disaster.
So where was Elisha while all this was going on? Well, Elisha was at home, and he was with the elders of Israel, and the word of God was working with Elisha, so as it so often did. And Elisha said, before anybody had reached his house, Elisha said, “Do you see how this son of a murderer has sent a man to take away my head? Look, the messenger is coming to the door. When he gets to the door, block him so he can’t get in, because his master will be right behind him.” And that’s exactly what happened. Apparently they blocked the messenger at the door, and the king arrived.
And the king goes in, and the king says, “This disaster is from the Lord. Why should I wait for the Lord any longer?” Hey, wait a minute, wait a minute, Your Majesty. I thought just a few moments ago you swore by God that you were going to execute the prophet Elisha. But I guess you were expecting the messenger to do that, and Elisha would be dead by the time you got there. But now, when you come in before Elisha, and you are face to face with God’s prophet, you can’t quite pull it off.
So mark it well, my friends. The king of Israel does not say, “Elisha, you’re dead. I’m ordering your execution today.” This is what the king of Israel says. Listen closely. The king of Israel says, “I give ... " [the audio ends here].