Tehillah 2011

Heyo kiddies, and....not so kiddies! :P Herro up from HK. While up here I was attending Island ECC (the church that my ext. Family goes to in HK) and we had a pretty interesting message.

So the passage was 2 Kings 5:1-19, and it’s the story of Naaman! Good ol’ Naaman, a familiar story from our days in Sunday school no doubt. Aaanyway, a bit of a refresher, Naaman, who’s this mighty warrior who serves under the King of Syria, sudden comes down with leprosy, and a slave girl, taken from Israel by Syrian raiders, suggests that her master goes and visits the prophet Elisha to seek help and to be healed. This is all in 2 Kings 5:1-5.

Ok, so now to analyse the passage. I know I know! I won’t go into too much detail :P Verse 1 is basically Naaman’s resume. And man, what an impressive resume it is. With everything there, being a might warrior, a great man, highly respected and captain of the army to the King, this guy is pretty much number 2 to the King of Aram (Syria). So he’s a big shot, basically the equivalent of the Governor General to the Queen (to put it into perspective). However, at the very end, the verse says “BUT” he was a leper. Those 5 words may seem small, but it apparently makes all the difference. We have to remember, that leprosy was one of the worst diseases that one could contract in those days. In modern day terms, it would be equivalent to getting AIDS. You were allowed to stone a leper to death if he walked towards you. Lepers were shunned from society and cast out of their house and homes. Not a nice thing to happen to anyone, let alone a person of Naaman’s calibre. Verse 2 is introducing the little slave girl from Israel, verse 3 is where she tells her mistress that Naman should go and see Elisha and verse 4 is Naaman telling the King of Syria what she said. Finally, verse 5 shows what the king is going to do to help Naaman and the wealth that he leaves with: “tent talents of silver and six thousand shekels of gold and ten changes of clothes”.

Now when you have a look at the numbers, you’ll say: Wow, Six thousand shekels of gold that must be heaps. You’d be right, but in those days, probably even more than you think. Doing the math, in today’s monetary terms, Six thousand shekels of gold goes for $2,727,577.08 USD, the silver goes for $6,872.80 USD and for all you metrosexuals out there, you guys would have a good idea of how much 10 changes of ultra-high class clothes with be. Shoes and everything! :P Basically, in today’s money, approx. $3,000,000 ( I just like putting the zeroes :P) and probably worth even more than that in those days. That is a huge amount of wealth, so you can tell that Naaman and his king weren’t messing around. Apparently, smaller countries nearby and all their wealth combined wouldn’t have been worth that much. Fairly sure that half of us wouldn’t be worth that much even on Facebook!

We’ll jump ahead to verse 9, because I don’t’ want this post getting TOO long (too late). Naaman arrives at Elisha’s house with all his wealth and chariots. Now we have to remember that Elisha is prophet and he doesn’t live in the fanciest of establishments. In all his magnificence, Naaman arrives at Elisha’s house and lo and behold, Elisha’s messenger to him to tell him: “Go and wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh will be restored to you and you will be clean”. To put this into perspective, let’s imagine that 10 black SUVs rock up at you place, and the Governor General is waiting in his car to speak to you personally.......and you send your son to go tell him: Sorry, Dad’s too busy playing Starcraft, but here’s what you should do...”. I don’t know about the rest of you, but as the Governor General, I’d be pretty peeved, such as Naaman is in verse 11: “Naaman was furious and went away and said, “Behold, I thought, ‘He will surely come out to me and stand and call on the Name of the Lord his god, and wave his hand over the place and cure the leper.’” I’ve emphasised the word ‘his’ because the Bible makes it clear that Naaman does not believe in God, as he refers to God as Elisha’s God.

The servants of Naaman manage to coax Naaman in verse 13 into doing as Elisha said, and of course, as the story goes, he did so and was cured of his leprosy. But the main part of this verse is what the servants say to Naaman: “My father (Naaman), had the prophet told you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? How much more then, when he says to you, ‘Wash and be clean’” Interesting...Let’s have a look

This is applicable to our lives today. We can relate to the “Naaman attitude”, the attitude that says: We’re worth something, we’ve achieved something with our lives and we should be worth meeting God face to face and to be put to face something magnificent or be set up to a task that will make use of our great potential. However, the story of Naaman and voice of the servants rings with us. We have no right to be furious with God when he asks us to do something simple instead of something complex. Are we that proud that when we have something simple asked of us, we walk away, furious that we weren’t given a harder challenge? That’s the pride in us talking, and it’s that pride that influences us to question God and his methods, his plans.

In Mark 1:40-42, a leper comes to Jesus and says: “If you are willing, you can make me clean”. Note that in saying “If you are willing”, the leper is in fact acknowledging that Jesus is the Christ, and asking, that if it is in God’s will if he could be healed. The leper is rewarded with the return of his health. This guy had the right idea. It is not up to us to question God’s will or methods, like Naaman, in his pride, tried to do by storming off, even after arriving with his chariots and wealth, but merely to follow his will and reap the consequences of his will, like the humble leper that Jesus healed.

P.S: In Luke 4:27, it says: “And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet; and none of them were cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.”

Why do you think that is? Interesting ne? :3