After healing the man born blind, Jesus said, “I have come into this world for judgment, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.” In saying that, he was playing a variation on a theme which appears in a number of places in Scripture—the section often called “Second Isaiah,” chapters 40-55, is one prominent example—but nowhere more importantly than in two psalms, 115 and 135. These are, I believe, the key for us in understanding the language of blindness and sight in the word of God. Listen—this is Psalm 115:2-11.
Why do the nations say,
“Where is their God?”
Our God is in the heavens;
he does whatever he pleases.
Their idols are silver and gold,
the work of human hands.
They have mouths, but cannot speak;
eyes, but cannot see.
They have ears, but cannot hear;
noses, but cannot smell.
They have hands, but cannot feel;
feet, but cannot walk;
nor can they make a sound with their throats.
Those who make them become like them,
and so do all who trust in them.
O house of Israel, trust in the Lord!
He is their help and their shield.
O house of Aaron, trust in the Lord!
He is their help and their shield.
You who fear the Lord, trust in the Lord!
He is their help and their shield.
Do you see? We become like what we worship. Idolatry produces spiritual blindness. This is what Jesus is on about: simply by being who and what he was, he revealed the truth of people’s hearts as they either drew near to him or clung hard to their idols. We don’t think of the Pharisees as idolaters, but they were; their religion—and their place in it—was their idol, and they unhesitatingly chose it over God, and so they were blinded to what was happening right in front of them.
That same reality underlies the story of Elisha and the Syrian army and God’s most remarkable act of deliverance. Please open your Bibles to 2 Kings 6, and let’s walk through that passage this morning; we’ll be looking at verses 8-23. It’s an odd story, really, as most of the stories of Elisha are. One of the odd things about it is that Elisha’s actually on pretty decent terms with the king of Syria. Not long before this, Elisha had healed Naaman, Syria’s greatest general, of leprosy. Not much later, Elisha will visit Damascus, where the king will ask him for a message from the Lord. The king obviously respects him as a true prophet; we see that in this passage as well.
Another odd thing is that Elisha is operating as part of the army of Israel—he’s essentially their intelligence department, warning the king of Israel whenever there’s danger of an ambush. That might seem like a reasonable thing to do, but it wasn’t the way God’s prophets normally operated. It wasn’t the work for which God sent them. And yet, here, we have God showing Elisha Syrian troop movements so that the prophet can pass them on to the king of Israel.
There is one respect in which this is typical of God and his prophets, however: God is leading Elisha into trouble. A mentor of mine once observed that prophets are people who carry God’s word in their mouths, and that God’s work for them is often to carry his word into situations where it will cause all Hell to break loose. We see something of that here, as the Lord is using Elisha to destabilize the situation between Israel and Syria. As surely as day follows night, Elisha will feel the backlash from that work.
You have to respect the Syrians for how quickly they figure it out. The king logically assumes one of his officers is spying for Israel and calls them all together to unmask the traitor. Impressively, one of them immediately says, “Um, Your Majesty, it isn’t us, it’s—remember Elisha, that prophet in Israel? Your Majesty, he can even hear what you say in your sleep and report it to the king of Israel.” I wonder if that was Naaman speaking? In any case, the king immediately agrees and says, “Go see where he is”—here’s the first time we have that language of blindness and sight—“so I can capture him.” It’s interesting that the king doesn’t say anything about killing Elisha—he just wants to get him away from Israel. They find him in Dothan (which is, as a side note, the city where Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery), and off goes the army to drag him away.
Come the morning, Elisha’s servant goes out, and he freaks. He comes running back in with the report: “We’re surrounded!” All he can see are his circumstances, and they’re terrifying. We can sympathize with him as he wails, “Now what do we do?” After all, he’s us, at least most of the time. When we look out at the world around us, what do we see? Not the chariots of the king of Syria, to be sure, but doesn’t it look like the Four Horsemen are gathering? War we have always with us, but now Plague snorts and paws the ground, with the shadow of Famine over his shoulder—why else are people stockpiling? And then we have all our struggles closer to home—conflicts at work, conflicts in our families, money problems, cancer and heart disease, addiction and depression . . . most of us, I think, can put ourselves in the servant’s shoes with very little effort at all.
But though the servant could only see his circumstances with the eyes of the flesh, Elisha could see deeper. He didn’t always—the very next story shows us that—but on this occasion he was looking at the world with the eyes of faith, and he comforts his frightened servant with this luminous statement: “Don’t be afraid, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them.” As Don Francisco rendered it in the song he wrote on this passage, “There’s more that stand on our side, no matter what you see.” No matter what stands against you, no matter who wants to bring you down, God is with you, and he has the upper hand.
Elisha says that, but he doesn’t stop there—he asks the Lord to give his spiritually-blind servant sight. The young man’s eyes are opened to see more than just the chariot and horse of Syria—he sees the hillside full of the fiery horsemen and chariots of God which had been Elijah’s escort to heaven. No need to wait for the cavalry to arrive, because it’s already there.
And yet—what does it do? Here’s where the story starts getting really odd. God’s army is there, we would expect him to deliver Elisha and his servant by destroying the Syrians . . . but he doesn’t, and Elisha doesn’t seem to expect any different. The Syrian forces had traveled through the night to encircle Dothan, and now that there’s enough light for the horses to handle the slope, they start to move, and God’s army doesn’t stop them, and Elisha doesn’t ask it to. Instead, he asks God to strike the Syrians blind. Here we see him prefiguring Jesus; in formal theological terms, he is a type of which Jesus is the anti-type—he’s foreshadowing the reality to come. Through Elisha’s prayers, his servant who was blind can now see, while the Syrians who could see are blinded. The servant’s faith is lacking, but it’s pointed the right direction, so God gives him the faith to see the truth of his situation; the Syrians, as worshipers of false gods, have their ability to perceive the world accurately taken away.
Were they physically blinded? Maybe, maybe not. The word here isn’t the usual word for blindness; it only occurs one other place in the Old Testament, in Genesis 19:11, where the men of Sodom are blinded just before God destroys the city. Some commentators believe it literally means “bedazzled,” which would mean they were blind not because they could see nothing but because they could see too much. It seems likely to me that this is a spiritual blindness: they were physically able to perceive their surroundings, but couldn’t accurately interpret what they were seeing. That would parallel the gift of spiritual vision given to Elisha’s servant; it would also have made it a lot easier for Elisha to lead them away.
And lead them away he does. He didn’t ask God to destroy them, and he doesn’t destroy them himself; instead, he humiliates them. He tells them, “You silly people, you’re in the wrong place. Follow me, and I’ll take you to the man you’re looking for.” They follow him willingly, and he leads them to Samaria, the capital city of Israel. Once he gets them there, Elisha prays the same prayer over them that he prayed over his servant, and suddenly they realize where they are. The whole thing is a military farce on the level of Catch-22, Mister Roberts, and The Phil Silvers Show: the king of Syria sent an entire army to capture one man, and that one man has captured them instead.
The king of Israel has to have been stunned to see the Syrian army coming through the gates led by Elisha, but he recovers quickly. He responds with logic which is militarily admirable but morally flawed: “Can I kill ’em? Can I kill ’em?” Elisha gently reminds him, “No, we don’t kill prisoners in Israel”; plus, they aren’t really the king’s prisoners anyway, they’re God’s. He tells the king instead to feed them and send them home, reinforcing their humiliation. The king follows his instruction, and the Syrian raids into Israel come to an end, for a while.
There are three things from this story I’d like us to think about for a moment this morning. First, there’s more to our circumstances than our circumstances. No matter what or who may be against us, if we’re following the Lord, those who are with us are more than those who are with them. We are never abandoned; we are never alone; we are never outnumbered; we are never lost; we are never without hope; we are never doomed to fail; because the God of angel armies is with us, and he is on the move, and he has never been and never will be taken by surprise, let alone defeated.
It’s easy to look at your situation here, where the last year or so didn’t exactly go according to plan, and feel like things are going wrong. The same is true of the church I serve part-time, Valley Springs Fellowship; my friend Kent left over a year and a half ago, and the elders have managed the interim period quite well, but a number of folks have left because they don’t see the kind of circumstances they want, and they conclude that means the church is failing or floundering. You know what? You have no reason to fear, and no reason to worry, and no reason to second-guess yourselves, and neither does VSF. Yeah, there are challenges ahead, and yeah, the enemy is at work trying to take us down, because he’s always at work trying to take down any church that’s actually trying to be the church. Take that as a badge of honor—it means you’re in the right place, going the right direction—and remember: those who are with us are more than those who are with them.
Two, that doesn’t necessarily mean God will give us victory in the battle we think we’re fighting. We have to acknowledge this. If it were otherwise, I wouldn’t be here this morning, I’d still be working a couple miles down the road. God is winning his victory, not ours. He rescued Elisha and his servant, but he preserved the army that threatened them, and that army would eventually besiege Jerusalem and drive the city nearly to its knees. We need to trust God to be faithful; we also need to let him define what that means. He makes his promises on his terms, and he keeps them on his terms, not on ours.
This brings us to point three, which is that deliverance, rescue, we might even say salvation, doesn’t always look how we expect. If you had asked me six years ago—and I knew this six years ago—what victory would look like, I would have told you it would look like full-out revival in the church I was pastoring, with the whole congregation filled with the Spirit and focused on the gospel of Jesus Christ with joy in God the Father. That’s what I was praying for. Didn’t happen. Was that defeat? Was that failure? Well, by the standards of my plan, yes; but God was on about something different. The road I’ve been walking the last five years isn’t any road I would ever have chosen, but there’s no doubt in my mind it’s the road God had for me. He’s taught me a great deal, and grown me quite a bit, and expanded my understanding of the church in several ways. I will admit, I still can’t see where my plan would have been a bad one, but I trust God knows what he’s doing.
So what does that look like for you? I have no idea. One thing I know is that God doesn’t do repeats. Whatever his deliverance will look like for you, whatever victory he’s winning in you and through you, it will be in some way something no one’s ever seen before, and very likely nothing you ever expected. It may be better than you could ever have hoped for, or it might be . . . not. But here’s the thing: whatever it is, God will be in it, and he will be with you, and that will be enough.
You see, the God of our rescue is the God of sight and blindness. He’s the one who lived among us and declared, “I have come so that the blind may see and the sighted may go blind.” Power doesn’t produce sight. Wealth doesn’t produce sight. Success doesn’t produce sight. Instead, all these things produce idols, because John Calvin was right: the human heart is a factory of idols . . . and idols produce blindness. When God gives us the victory we desire, it’s all too easy for that victory to become an idol, for us to worship it instead of the one who gave it. In this season of my life, I’m not getting the results I want, or any victory for which I had hoped; but slowly, my eyes are being opened, a little more and a little more. I won’t wish you my frustration, or my uncertainty, but this I do pray for you: that whatever God’s work of deliverance may be in you, and whatever his victory may look like, that through it all, he would open your eyes that you may see. Amen.
Photo by Erkut2.