Grace: Blessing and Judgment. 2 Kings 6:24-7:20

Grace is truly a concept that goes beyond our finite comprehension, we understand it only marginally when we first are saved. There is only one thing that can be free to us and that is salvation as expressed in the Scriptures because Jesus Christ is the one who paid the price, the bill, so that we could have salvation because we trust in Him. It is through our faith in Christ and Him alone that we have this free gift of salvation. As we come to the cross we have just a microscopic understanding of grace, but once we are saved, once we have received God the Holy Spirit, He begins to teach us through His Word and we begin to understand more and more about God’s grace. But one of the things that really challenges every one of us is when we come to those passages of Scripture that encourage and exhort us to deal with other people in grace as well. That just goes completely against our old sin nature and our own self-absorption and we don’t want to deal with those people in grace, especially if they have hurt us in some way and have caused us pain or suffering in our lives. Often when we are in rebellion against God, have rejected God, have moved away from God and we have a consciousness of our own guilt, sin and depravity, it is often hard for us to recognize that God truly and freely forgives us; and that simply and freely admitting our sins to Him clears away the guilt. Grace is difficult for us to understand and yet it is integral to everything in salvation and in the spiritual life.

In 2 Kings chapter six we are going to see another episode that is quite horrible in some aspects but is again a depiction of the grace of God. Again it has to do with Israel’s enemies. We have looked at the Syrians and the fact that they are the military enemies of Israel and that as they were engaged in sending out these raids into the northern kingdom there was a level of frustration on the part of the king of Syria, Ben-hadad, it seemed as if somebody was giving the enemy inside information. We saw Elisha giving a banquet for the prisoners and sending them back to their master. All of that was a picture of God’s grace. We can see the picture of God’s grace from Israel towards her enemies but this was also to teach the northern kingdom about the fact that even as they were in apostasy and enemies of God in their arrogance God would treat them in the same way that he was having Elisha treat the physical enemies of Israel.

Jesus gave a number of examples in the sermon on the mount as to what is required and what should be part of the character of believers. Matt 5:43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR and hate your enemy. [44] But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, [45] so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on {the} evil and {the} good, and sends rain on {the} righteous and {the} unrighteous.’” If we think about verses 44 and 45 we get an interpretation of the Mosaic Law. The reason for emphasizing that is that when Jesus is teaching at this early stage in His ministry He is still in the period of time which we refer to as the age of Israel or the dispensation of the Law. The Mosaic Law is still in effect at this time and so He is emphasizing this principle of loving our enemies. It may be a national enemy or it may be a personal enemy but the responsibility of the individual is to love that enemy, to bless those who curse you and to do good to those who hate you.

The Bible makes it clear in passages like this, passages that are restated later on in the New Testament, like John 13:34, 35 when Jesus said “A new commandment I give to you (speaking to His disciples and to the church as a whole through His disciples) that you love one another, even as I have loved you.” How did Jesus love them? He gave His life as a substitute for them, so that His love that was demonstrated at the cross is to be the hallmark, the key evidence in the life of any believer in the Lord Jesus Christ of the truth of the gospel and of all the truth in Scripture. So we are to love one another as God for Christ’s sake loved us, as Paul writes in Ephesians four. But when we start talking about the application of this in terms of forgiveness a question often comes up. What does it mean when Jesus said to forgive seventy times seven and yet someone still gets abused or maltreated in some way again and again and again? God doesn’t want someone going back into those kinds of situations, does He? No, He doesn’t! This is why it is important to understand the overall context of Scripture, not just the context of a passage, to be able to look at issues from the totality of Scripture. The passages that are talking about loving one’s enemy, blessing those who curse you, forgiving one another, are passages that are talking about individual responses to individual attacks and they are emphasizing the fact that we are to be responding with a mental attitude of love, not a mental attitude that is dominated by hate or anger or resentment or vindictiveness. It does not necessarily mean that we put ourselves back into that position of vulnerability again for the sake of being vulnerable. That is how a lot of people hear it, unfortunately.

If we look at the classic examples in Scripture of how Jesus dealt with His enemies often the emphasis is on what happens at His arrest and at the cross when He indeed does make Himself vulnerable to His enemies. But this is not some kind of willy-nilly vulnerability, this is within the very plan of God to provide for the salvation of the human race. So one principle that we learn is that when Jesus is applying this and illustrating this at the cross it is within the structure of a plan with a purpose, it is not just being vulnerable for the sake of being vulnerable or somehow putting Himself in a position of danger where He is wrongly accused, wrongly sentenced and wrongly executed just for the sake of fulfilling some sort of pacifistic view of love and grace. It is for a purpose. We have to understand that these passages that we read in Scripture are taken out of context and can be twisted to try to show that the Bible rejects war, rejects violence, even self-defense against an attack as some sort of legitimate application of love and grace. That would make much of Scripture contradictory. God does give clear direction towards violence at times, clear direction towards not putting one’s self in danger at times, and he also emphasizes the legitimacy of self-defense. We can’t make the mistake of a superficial interpretation when we come to these kinds of passages. The Bible does not authorize us to foolishly put ourselves in harm’s way for the sake of some superficial or shallow notion of love and grace.

There is one example we might go to in the life of Christ to demonstrate this. It happens the night before He goes to the cross within the context of Hs arrest and His execution. Luke 22:36, 38. It occurs as He is preparing His disciples for the future. He gives them new orders that are different from the orders he gave earlier in His ministry when he sent them out two by two to the house of Israel and not to the Gentiles. He told them not to take anything with them, not to take a sword with them, but to proclaim the gospel and God would provide for them. But after His rejection by Israel and now that he knows He is about to go to the cross he gives new marching orders. Luke 22:36 ^NASB “And He said to them, ‘But now, whoever has a money belt is to take it along, likewise also a bag, and whoever has no sword is to sell his coat and buy one...’ [38] They said, ‘Lord, look, here are two swords.’ And He said to them, ‘It is enough.’” These are not verses that we hear liberals talk about very much. Jesus told His disciples that they needed to be armed so that they could protect themselves when they were going out into the world and would be subject to assault and to attack. If He meant by “love your enemies” the idea that you don’t defend yourself and are just passive to the attack, then this would be a major contradiction in His thinking. But it is not because biblically speaking love and grace have multi-faceted concepts that seem contradictory to the shallow liberal view of love. The question needs to be asked as to why did the disciples needed the two swords for protection. It was because anything could happen that night that would possibly lead to the premature death of the Lord rather than allowing Him to make it to the cross. So He is to be protected from an illegitimate personal assault so that He can then be taken advantage of through a false application of the judicial system and be arrested under false charges and go to the cross and die for our sins.

We have to define what grace is. This is important for understanding what happens in 2 Kings 6 & 7.

1. First, we recognize that when we talk about grace we usually define grace as God’s unmerited favor or His unearned blessing. That is great as far as it goes. When we are talking about salvation or about the spiritual life that is often as far as we need to go, but that is a somewhat restricted definition focusing on God and what He has provided for us. We see two verses that give us an example of God’s love as related to God’s grace and the fact that God’s love (which is what lies behind His grace) is given without respect to the deeds, the actions, the thoughts of the recipient. It is not based on who we are or what we have done, grace is based on who God is and it is based upon His character. John 3:16; Romans 5:8. John 3:16 can be translated: “For God loved the world in this way, that He gave His unique Son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” God’s love is for the world, towards unbelievers, those who are in rebellion against Him, a world that is hostile to Him, at enmity with Him, and so it is directed toward those who are friend and foe alike, believer and unbeliever alike. Both verses emphasize the fact that the cross is a demonstration of God’s love. It is a demonstration towards us of kindness and generosity in providing a substitute for our sins, but it is an expression of judgment and horror to the Lord Jesus Christ as he paid the penalty for our sin and had to endure receiving the imputation of our sin to Himself as the perfect, spotless, sinless Lamb of God.

2. Both of these verses use the Greek verb agapao [a)gapaw], a broad term for love, and that love is directed toward all human beings. There is another word that is used for God’s love in the New Testament, the Greek verb phileo [filew], and that is a narrower concept. agapao you could picture as a large circle and phileo you could picture as a subset of that circle. These words are sometimes used synonymously and when they are used in the same context phileo will emphasize a more direct intimate love, like the love within a family, whereas agapao does not bring in those ideas of intimacy and closeness which phileo has. phileo is only used of God’s love for believers, so we have a more intimate relationship with God. Because we are within the family of God we are also subject to family discipline, and that includes punishment. Hebrews 12:5,6 (a quote from Proverbs 3:11, 12) shows that this is a universal principle that is not dispensationally nuanced, it relates to both the Old Testament and to the New Testament. We have to remember that when God’s love is directed to those who do not deserve it, and that includes family members who are disobedient, those actions are described as grace. Grace is the expression of God’s love toward those who do not deserve it, those who have not earned it. Love therefore involves both blessing and discipline, both the good and the harsh that may come into our lives from the loving hand of God in order to train us and discipline us and to bring punishment into our lives because of our disobedience.

So as we think about grace in 2 Kings we have to think of both sides of grace: both in terms of blessing and in terms of judgment. Two principles that we see throughout the Scripture that must always be in our minds when we are thinking about this concept is a) grace always precedes judgment—before God brings discipline He is going to extend to us grace to woo us back into fellowship with Him before He lowers the boom in harsh discipline; b) grace often comes with judgment (exception, Noah. There was grace before judgment but there was no grace during the judgment to those who were left behind. They had already had their chance and had rejected it). There does come a time when God stops extending the hand of grace and he has to fulfill the judicial requirement of His nature to bring judgment on those who have rejected Him.

When we come to thinking about Israel and her history we have to always remember that what happens to Israel as a nation is a great picture for us of how God deals with us as individuals. That is one of the ways in which we come to application as we study these different events in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament God had experienced a rejection by mankind at the tower of Babel. As a result God judged these people and gave them different languages, which caused them to scatter throughout the earth. From that point on God decided no longer to work through the human race as a whole but only through one particular individual and his descendants—Abraham and his descendants Israel. There was a grace covenant given to Abraham. God freely gave him this promise that He would give him land, he would bless His descendants, and that through his descendants He would bless other people—the Abrahamic covenant. Then when God freed them from their slavery in Egypt God entered into new covenant with them, a covenant designed to be a temporary and conditional covenant, the Mosaic Law. It was designed to teach the people of God—the people He had already called out at salvation—how a saved people were supposed to live. They were to be a kingdom of priests in relation to the whole world. So the purpose of the Mosaic Law was to show the distinctiveness of this one particular people and God’s grace to them. Because of the importance of their role as a kingdom of priests God said there were going to be certain consequences if they were disobedient. God would richly bless them if they were obedient but of they were disobedient there would be consequences. The stages of discipline (Leviticus 26) become increasingly harsh and their purpose is to bring the people back to God so that they will obey Him so He can bless them. It is part of grace. Deuteronomy 28 gives a fuller description, vv. 15, 17ff.

All of that is just background foe being able to understand what happened, starting in 2 Kings 6:24 and on through chapter seven. It is a rather simple episode to deal with and easy to understand. There is a siege. Syria invades and has been sending in these combat teams to attack the northern kingdom for several years but following the last episode Elisha sent one hit team back home, Ben hadad really gets angry and decides to pull his whole army together to lay siege to Samaria, the capital city. 2 Kings 6:24 ^NASB “Now it came about after this, that Ben-hadad king of Aram gathered all his army and went up and besieged Samaria.”

2 Kin 6:25 ^NASB “There was a great famine in Samaria [Cycles of discipline, stages 1-3] ; and behold, they besieged it, until a donkey’s head was sold for eighty {shekels} of silver, and a fourth of a kab of dove’s dung for five {shekels} of silver.” The significance of the donkey’s head was that a donkey was an unclean animal. They didn’t eat a donkey or horse meat under the Mosaic Law. This was no acceptable food but they were so hungry that they would eat a donkey’s head, and there is not much meat on a skull. Eighty shekels is about equivalent to about two pounds of silver—in today’s market equivalent to about $500. So they are starving to death.

2 Kings 6:26 ^NASB “As the king of Israel was passing by on the wall a woman cried out to him, saying, ‘Help, my lord, O king!’ [27] He said, ‘If the LORD does not help you, from where shall I help you? From the threshing floor, or from the wine press?’” You can just sense his desperation. He sees these people and there is nothing he can do. [28] “And the king said to her, ‘What is the matter with 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. [29] ‘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.’”

2 Kings 6:30 ^NASB “When the king heard the words of the woman, he tore his clothes—now he was passing by on the wall—and the people looked, and behold, he had sackcloth beneath on his body.” He is showing that he is in repentance; he is hoping that God would deliver them and he is turning to God. But then something happens and his sin nature kicks in so he blames Elisha. [31] “Then he said, ‘May God do so to me and more also, if the head of Elisha the son of Shaphat remains on him today.’” But he is going to immediately regret this and that shoes his positive volition.

2 Kings 6:32 ^NASB “Now Elisha was sitting in his house, and the elders were sitting with him. And {the king} sent a man from his presence; but before the messenger came to him, he said to the elders, ‘Do you see how this son of a murderer has sent to take away my head? Look, when the messenger comes, shut the door and hold the door shut against him. Is not the sound of his master’s feet behind him?’” Elisha isn’t disobeying the law, he is engaged in defending himself because he knows that the king is going to rescind the order, he is just right behind him.

2 Kings 6:33 “While he was still talking with them, behold, the messenger came down to him and he said, ‘Behold, this evil is from the LORD; why should I wait for the LORD any longer?’” In other words, I know this is from the Lord, why do I have to go through this? How many of us have gone through that? We have gone through suffering and adversity for months, and years in certain circumstances, and our patience in thin, but we know it is from the Lord. So we go back and forth from trusting God and being impatient with God, but God is teaching us something.

2 Kings 7:1 ^NASB “Then Elisha said, ‘Listen to the word of the LORD; thus says the LORD, ‘Tomorrow about this time a measure of fine flour will be {sold} for a shekel, and two measures of barley for a shekel, in the gate of Samaria.’” He is saying it is time now, we have pushed everybody to the limit and now grace is going to come in action—the positive side of grace, the blessing side. The measure of barley was the equivalent of about seven quarts of barley; a shekel would be around a couple of dollars. We can see how the prices have changed because of supply and demand. Obviously some big supply of flour and barley is going to come in to their possession. But there is an officer there who doubts this. [2] “The royal officer on whose hand the king was leaning answered the man of God and said, ‘Behold, if the LORD should make windows in heaven, could this thing be?’ Then he said, ‘Behold, you will see it with your own eyes, but you will not eat of it.’” Because of his lack of faith he will be judged. He will see it and then die: divine discipline.

Now from verse three to the end of the chapter we learn that the Syrians fled during the night. But they are discovered by four lepers, unclean and living outside the gates of the city. They are starving to death as well and they decide to go down to the Syrians. They may kill them but it is better for them to just kill them than to slowly starve to death.

2 Kings 7:5 ^NASB “They arose at twilight to go to the camp of the Arameans; when they came to the outskirts of the camp of the Arameans, behold, there was no one there. [6] For the Lord had caused the army of the Arameans to hear a sound of chariots and a sound of horses, {even} the sound of a great army, so that they said to one another, ‘Behold, the king of Israel has hired against us the kings of the Hittites and the kings of the Egyptians, to come upon us.’ [7] Therefore they arose and fled in the twilight, and left their tents and their horses and their donkeys, {even} the camp just as it was, and fled for their life.” God miraculously caused them to have this group hallucination and to hear the assault of an army, and they all fled. [8] “When these lepers came to the outskirts of the camp, they entered one tent and ate and drank, and carried from there silver and gold and clothes, and went and hid {them;} and they returned and entered another tent and carried from there {also,} and went and hid {them.}” Then they think better of it and realize that it wasn’t right. [9] “Then they said to one another, ‘We are not doing right. This day is a day of good news, but we are keeping silent; if we wait until morning light, punishment will overtake us. Now therefore come, let us go and tell the king’s household.’ [10] So they came and called to the gatekeepers of the city, and they told them, saying, ‘We came to the camp of the Arameans, and behold, there was no one there, nor the voice of man, only the horses tied and the donkeys tied, and the tents just as they were.’ [11] The gatekeepers called and told {it} within the king’s household.”

We see the fulfillment of the prophecy. 2 Kings 7:16 ^NASB “So the people went out and plundered the camp of the Arameans. Then a measure of fine flour {was sold} for a shekel and two measures of barley for a shekel, according to the word of the LORD.” We have prophecy and we have exact literal fulfillment. But there was also a little judgment with that. [17] “Now the king appointed the royal officer on whose hand he leaned to have charge of the gate; but the people trampled on him at the gate, and he died just as the man of God had said, who spoke when the king came down to him.” He saw but he did not eat and so the judgment on him was fulfilled.

The lesson is that, first of all, God’s grace continues to be extended to this disobedient people. He continues to do that which He can do in order to cause them to turn back to Him, so that then He can richly bless them. But their heart is hardened. Again God is showing that He is the source of food and life in a culture that has chosen death and is worshipping nature and the nature gods, sacrificing their children to idols; and again they turn their back on God’s grace. How many times we have seen these miracles in chapters 4 through 7 that God is doing different things to show He is the God of life, the source of blessing, and yet again and again they have turned their back on Him! God’s grace and His judgment doesn’t just fall on us the instant we are disobedient. He gives us many, many warnings, extending grace to us again and again to cause us to come back to fellowship.

Grace is hard for us to understand. It is hard for us to understand how to deal with those who oppose us, who hate us, those who have done us wrong, those who have treated us in an ill manner, because we can only operate on this finite experiential, empirical level on the earth. But we have to operate on faith and not by sight, and so what God gives us in these little vignettes, these little pictures, these little scenes of His grace, in order to understand what grace is really all about and begin to implement that in our own lives in the way we think and the way we respond to God. But at the core we have to be in fellowship. We have to respond to what God brings into our life in judgment as well as blessing and not become arrogant and self-sufficient. We have to remember to turn back to Him and to walk closely with Him.

We show that we love God by keeping His commandments, by staying in fellowship and walking in fellowship.

Illustrations