Transcript
Second Kings, chapter 4, verse 38:
And Elisha returned to Gilgal, and there was a famine in the land. Now the sons of the prophets were sitting before him, and he said to his servant, ‘Put on the large pot, and boil stew for the sons of the prophets.’ So one went out into the field to gather herbs, and found a wild vine, and gathered from it a lapful of wild gourds, and came and sliced them into the pot of stew, though they did not know what they were. Then they served it to the men to eat.
Now it happened, as they were eating the stew, that they cried out and said, ‘O man of God, there is death in the pot!’ And they could not eat it. So he said, ‘Then bring some flour.’ And he put it into the pot, and said, ‘Serve it to the people, that they may eat.’ And there was nothing harmful in the pot.
They live out in the Colony, and they have a large family. They have seven children in that family: Stephanie, fifteen; Laura, thirteen; Michael, ten; Jonathan, eight; Carolyn, six; Isabelle, three; and Anna, who’s just barely a little over one year old. The father’s name is Rick Bucks, who is 43 years of age. But Beth, that’s the entire family.
You see, a little over a year ago, Beth Bucks, with the aid of a midwife, gave birth to her seventh child, which was little Anna. But a few hours later, she checked into a Carrollton hospital with severe abdominal pain. In less than three days, she had passed away as a result of a rare pregnancy-related complication. Her 41-year-old body had been poisoned by abnormal blood clotting. It took place so quickly.
So Rick was bereft about the death of his college sweetheart, to whom he had now been married for 20 years. But, fortunately, they had taken out two insurance policies on each other’s lives. And as a result of the insurance money, Rick didn’t need to pursue a paycheck, and so he settled down into the process of becoming a real live, flesh-and-blood Mr. Mom.
But, obviously, he had his hands full, because not only did he have to take care of the house and the seven kids, but he decided to continue to homeschool the children, like his wife had been doing. And how in the world he keeps them occupied in the evening, I will never guess, because they don’t have a TV in the house. Stephanie, fifteen years old, said, “No big deal. There’s not much worth watching anyway.”
Susan Dolan, a friend of the family, thinks that Beth would be very proud of the job that Rick has done. And even Stephanie says, “Dad has done a fabulous job. I’ve really been amazed at how well things have gone.”
This past Monday was the first anniversary of the death of Beth Bucks, and the family drove out to a hillside cemetery where, under a super-gray sky, they huddled together with a few friends in front of the tombstone of Beth Bucks, on which her favorite words were written, which were these: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart.”
Rick Bucks spoke into the chilling wind some words of praise for family, for faith, for friends, and then he gave what I consider to be a very meaningful Thanksgiving prayer. He said, “We thank You, Lord, for all the living we still have to do.”
Now, I’m going to confess to you that I didn’t tell you this story this morning to make you feel good on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, although there is definitely a feel-good aspect of this story. This is a bittersweet story. Don’t you agree? It’s sweet because the family has adjusted wonderfully to a tragedy. It’s bitter because the life of a 41-year-old woman was swept away by an unusual and rare case of malfunctioning physical processes that poisoned her, that poisoned her within.
And my real reason for telling you this story is so that it may serve as a launching pad, a starting point, for a very important and serious warning. And my warning is this: Beware of the poison. Now, some of you are figuring that my warning is also the title of my message at this point. Well, you can go to the head of the class. You’re exactly right.
And I’m going to repeat it again so I can fasten it on your mind. My warning is, the title of my message this morning is, Beware of the poison.
Now, I’m guessing that just about everybody in my audience this morning had a delightful Thanksgiving meal somewhere on Thursday. And, just to set the record straight, even though I had to turn down some very delicious-looking chicken and ham, I was served a plate of vegetables so scrumptious that it was about five times better than anything you’d hope to get in a cafeteria or in a restaurant.
And I’m guessing that there was nobody, including myself, when the food was passed and when the food was served, I don’t think anybody was thinking to themselves, “I wonder if any of this is poisoned.” That didn’t cross my mind, and I bet it didn’t cross your mind, even though we know that cases of food poisoning are not all that uncommon.
And maybe, just maybe, we are a little surprised that the passage of Scripture that we read just a few moments ago, that at a dinner presided over by the great prophet Elisha, participated in by the sons of the prophets, who were probably his pupils, his disciples, that when they served the food, the people who were eating it exclaimed, “O man of God, there is death in the pot,” or, to put it in language that we would probably use today, “O man of God, the stew is poison.”
Surprising? Yeah, that’s kind of surprising. But let me tell you something that I think is equally surprising. If I should live in the northern kingdom of Israel, which was composed, of course, of the ten tribes that had rebelled against the house of David, and during the two hundred years of this kingdom’s existence, there was not even one king, mind you, there was not even one ruler of the northern kingdom for 200 years, who walked in the paths that God wanted him to walk in, and was truly a servant of God.
Now, Israel was a nation that had its religion revealed to it by God Himself, through His servant Moses. But during this two-hundred-year period, my friends, all sorts of false religion crept into the nation of Israel. So now the children of Israel didn’t just worship the Lord their God. They also worshiped two golden calves, and they also worshiped the pagan god Baal, who was the god of the weather, and they also worshiped a goddess named Ashtoreth.
And they built places of worship up on the hilltops, high places, and they even tried to worship the Lord in the high places, even though God condemned that kind of worship. And I want to suggest to you that the religious life, the religious experience, of Israel had become poisoned too. It had become poisoned stew. There was death in that.
Now, please don’t think that we’re only talking about the experience of Israel long, long ago. Let’s talk about the experience of the United States of America, shall we? And let’s forget for a minute, or a minute or two, about people in America who say they’re Buddhists, or Muslims, or some other non-Christian religion. And let’s think only of those who profess to have some form of Christianity in America today.
If you look at American Christianity today, you know what you will find? Do you know what you will find? You will find a little bit of everything. You will find a little bit of everything. You know, I don’t need to tell you, do I, that there are a lot of churches that teach that you can’t get to heaven without good works. We all know that in this congregation.
And I don’t need to tell you, do I, that there are churches that teach that even though you are saved by faith, you can lose your salvation afterwards if you don’t behave. But that’s only the beginning, folks. Do you realize that there are so-called Christian churches where they believe that the Bible has mistakes in it? Do you realize that there are Christian churches that actually believe that almost the entire book of Revelation has already been fulfilled in recent history?
Do you realize that there are people who believe and teach that the God of the Bible doesn’t know the future? He’s working on it, folks, and He has a lot of wisdom, but He’s not quite sure how it’s going to turn out.
And if I really wanted to bore you to tears this morning, I could spend the rest of my message telling you some of the crazy ideas that are part of Christian churches in America today. And I’m telling you that there is death in the pot. It’s a poison stew.
How did that happen? How did it happen that at a dinner presided over by Elisha, and shared by the sons of the prophets, that they wound up with a poisoned pot of stew? Well, the first thing I want to tell you is, it wasn’t Elisha’s fault. This was a time of famine, and Elisha knew that the sons of the prophets had to eat, and so he turned to his servant, whom we had met before, whose name was Gehazi, and he says to him, “Put on the big pot,” the large pot. I’m not going to fast this time, says Elisha. “Put on the large pot, and boil stew for the sons of the prophets.” And that is all that Elisha said. Did you get that? That is all that he said.
But someone in that group, we’re not told who, someone in that group apparently had looked at the cupboards, and maybe he said to himself, “You know, there’s not much in the cupboards to make a real good stew. We’re a little short of some of the herbs we need. If we make the stew with what we’ve got, we’ll have a plain, rather ordinary kind of herb stew.”
So he went out into the fields looking for herbs, and guess what he found? He found a wild vine with gourds on it, and I have to believe that these gourds looked so good, he said that they would really add something to the stew. And so he collected a lapful of gourds, went back to the place where the sons of the prophets were, and the Bible says he came and sliced them into the stew, “though they did not know what they were.”
There were other prophets around here, other sons of the prophets around the pot of stew, and they saw this guy come in with these beautiful gourds, and nobody in the kitchen, if that’s where they were working, nobody in the kitchen knew what these gourds were. But they didn’t stop him, and he sliced them, sliced them. But when they served the pot, there was death in the pot.
Do you see what happened? Somebody did not stick to the instructions of Elisha. When a man added something, added something to the stew, and in adding something to the stew, they poisoned it.
Do you know what man’s biggest problem in religion is? He’s always adding stuff to God’s religion. Do you remember the words of the book of Proverbs? The writer says, “Every word of God is pure.” And then the writer of Proverbs said, “Do not add to His words, lest He reprove you, and you be found a liar.”
But people are not stopped by that. They add to His words. Oh, me. Have you ever prayed to a saint? Who ever told you to do that? That’s adding to the Word of God. Have you ever bowed down before the image, or picture, or statue of the Virgin Mary? Who ever told you to do that? That’s adding to the Word of God. Have you ever burned candles for dead people to get them out of purgatory? Who ever told you to do that? That was adding to the Word.
Now, everybody in this audience knows that I’m not a cook, and what I know about the secrets of cooking could be written on the back of a postage stamp, probably. But I have had the privilege, over the years, of going into the kitchen of one of the best cooks in this particular church, and, of course, as you’re probably guessing, I mean Fela. And I believe everybody will agree with my evaluation of Fela. She’s a very, very, very good cook.
And many times when I’m going into her kitchen, she’s been cooking something, and you know what I’ve never done? Never, to the best of my recollection. Fela can correct me if I have slipped up. But to the very best of my recollection, I never said to Fela, “You need to add more salt there. You should add some extra Crisco. It’ll fry better. You need to add some vegetable oil to what you’re preparing.” What nerve. I don’t have that kind of nerve, folks.
What do I know about cooking? Nothing. What does Fela know about cooking? A whole lot. What do you and I know about religion? I mean, what do we ourselves personally know, apart from God? Nothing. What does God know about religion? Everything, everything. “And add not unto His words, lest He reprove you, and you be found a liar.”
“O man of God, there is death in the pot.” So did Elisha say, “Throw the stew out, for all who eat this kind of stew will be sick before morning. Throw the stew out”? You know, there are a lot of people who look out at religion in America today, and they see that there are a hundred different churches teaching a hundred different things, and they say, “What we need to do is throw religion out. What good does religion do anybody? Everybody says something different.” Throw it out.
But that’s not how Elisha responded. Instead, he said, “Then bring me some flour. Then bring me some flour.”
Now, folks, I just said I don’t know very much about cooking, but I do know that flour is a basic ingredient of bread. Am I right? And if I had a really accomplished cook up here with me, she could probably tell you quite a few things that flour can be used for in cooking. And is it any wonder that when we get to the New Testament, bread, which is the product of flour, is presented as the secret of spiritual life and nourishment?
Have you ever sung with us, “Break Thou the bread of life, dear Lord, to me, as Thou didst break the loaves beside the sea”? And it was Jesus who said, “I am the bread of life. He that cometh to Me shall never hunger, and he that believeth in Me shall never thirst.” And it was the Apostle Paul who advised the Corinthian Christians to observe their worship time “with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”
And, my good Christian friends, this morning, what the poison stew needs is an extra dose of the truth of God, an extra dose of the Word, an extra dose of the person of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, as He is revealed to us by God. And, yes, if Israel was eating a poisoned pot of stew in its religious experience, the Word of God could correct that process. And, yes, if there’s poison in the religious experience that we are participating in, the solution is always the truth, the Word.
So they brought in the flour, and he dumped the flour into the poisoned pot of stew. And then he said, “Serve it to them that they may eat.” And they passed the stew around, and they ate it, and the Bible says, “There was nothing harmful in the pot.” A miracle? Yes, a wonderful miracle that illustrates to us the wonderful truth that when religion is poisoned by things that have been brought into it from the outside, the antidote to that poison is the Word of God.
Many years ago, when I was still a student at the seminary, and if I tell you I was still a student at the seminary, that was many, many years ago, and in those days the seminary used to have its annual Founders Day at local churches. It was still a small enough observance to be hosted by a church. And one particular year, the host for the annual Founders Day banquet was the First Methodist Church right in downtown Dallas over by Ross.
And as I remember it, we had a nice turkey dinner, and we had a good time, and we all went home. And I was living in the dorm in those days, and in the middle of the night I woke up, and my tummy hurt, and when I got up to go to the restroom at our end of the hall, I discovered I was far from being the only seminary student who was up, and I had to wait my turn because lots and lots of the single guys had the same problem, and we found out later so did married couples who had attended the banquet.
And then we found out that what had happened is that they had served us spoiled turkey. Now, you know how seminary students make jokes out of everything, and we knew that the Methodist Church didn’t quite agree with everything in Dallas Seminary’s theology, so we joked that the Methodists had tried to poison Dallas Theological Seminary.
But I’m sure that the Methodists were every bit as embarrassed and sad about it as we were. They felt bad about it, I’m sure, but not quite as bad as we felt about it. And I’ll have to say it, you’ll forgive the pun, that that particular Founders Day banquet was a real turkey.
Now, I wish I could tell you this morning that if you go into a church, the worst thing that can happen to you is to get a bad case of physical food poisoning. But that is far from the worst thing that could happen to you in a church.
You remember the words of Jesus Christ our Lord. He said, “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Many, many shall say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, done many mighty miracles in Your name?’ And then I will say to them, ‘I never knew you. I never knew you. Depart from Me, you who work iniquity.’
What does that mean? That means, listen closely, that means that when you walk into a church, including this one, any church, you must walk in with your eyes open. You must walk in prepared to test what you hear by the Word of God, and if you find something being taught there that is not according to God’s Word, here’s what you need to do: beware of the poison.
Shall we pray.
Father, teach us that not all religion is good religion. Teach us that not all Christianity is biblical Christianity. Teach us to account for the poison. We ask this through the Lord Jesus Christ.