Second Kings chapter six. This is the second of three sermons in which we'll be looking at this chapter. Last time we saw the axe head float, God's power to save his people from debt, even trivial debt. And tonight we see God's power in geopolitics. as universality, as you might say. 2 Kings 6 verses 8 to 23. Now the king of Syria was making war against Israel, and he took counsel with his servants, saying, My camp will be in such and such a place. And the man of God said to the king of Israel, saying, Beware that you do not pass this place, for the Syrians are coming down there. Then the king of Israel sent someone to the place of which the man of God had told him. Thus he warned him, and he was watchful there, not just once or twice. Therefore the heart of the king of Syria was greatly troubled by this thing, and he called his servants and said to them, Will you not show me which of us is for the king of Israel? And one of his servants said, None, my lord, O king. But Elisha, the prophet who is in Israel, tells the king of Israel the words that you speak in your bedroom. So he said, Go and see where he is, that I may send and get him. And it was told him, saying, Surely he is in Dothan. Therefore he sent horses and chariots and a great army there, and they came by night and surrounded the city. And when the servant of the man of God arose early and went out, there was an army surrounding the city with horses and chariots. And his servant said to him, Alas, my master, what shall we do? So he answered, Do not fear, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them. And Elisha prayed and said, Lord, I pray, open his eyes that he may see. Then the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha. So when the Syrians came down to him, Elisha prayed to the Lord and said, Strike this people, I pray, with blindness. And he struck them with blindness, according to the word of Elisha. Now Elisha said to them, This is not the way, nor is this the city. Follow me, and I will bring you to the man whom you seek. But he led them to Samaria. So it was when they had come to Samaria that Elisha said, Lord, open the eyes of these men that they may see. And the Lord opened their eyes, and they saw, and there they were inside Samaria. Now when the king of Israel saw them, he said to Elisha, my father, shall I kill them? Shall I kill them? And he answered, you should not kill them. Would you kill those whom you have taken captive with your sword and your bow? Set food and water before them that they may eat and drink and go to their master. Then he prepared a great feast for them. And after they ate and drank, he sent them away and they went to their master. So the bands of Syrian raiders came no more into the land of Israel. as far as the reading of God's word. Let's pray. Almighty God, our Father in heaven, we pray that you would help us to see this text. Help us to see your grace, your mercy, your power, first in sparing Israel, then in sparing Syria. Help us to see this interplay between blindness and sight. We pray, Father, that you would give us the sight to see what's really going on, who's really in charge, where the real power lies, what the real meaning of the surface of yinz of history is. Free us from distraction, open my mouth boldly, and I may preach as I ought to preach in declaring the unsearchable riches of Christ. It's in his name that we pray and all God's people said, Amen. Well, our text this evening is a piece of light comedy in which nobody gets hurt and everyone has a good laugh at the expense of two royal fools, a hapless army, and an ignorant servant. These are the stock characters of comedy. Now, of course, you can contrast it, if you will, with the dark and heavy comedy of the next bit of text, where we have a famine in Samaria so bad that people are eating dove's dung and donkey heads and their own children. We'll get there next week. That's a piece of comedy too, but that's dark comedy. This is light comedy. A comedy is any story that begins badly, that begins in pain, and rises to end in joy and wholeness. So the books of Kings as a whole are a tragedy. They begin with the grandeur of Solomon and then fall to the disaster of exile and despair in Babylon. And yet even the book of Kings ends with a comic note when we hear that Jehoiachin has been released and that David's line will survive. Again, we'll get there in a couple of months. But this text is a comic text embedded in a larger comic text that we call the Bible. It starts with the pain and tragedy of the fall and ends with the joy and glory and wholeness of the New Jerusalem. Our comedy tonight shows us that God surrounds and protects His people and that protection is available not just for God's people, but also for foreigners who fall into God's power. I suppose instead of calling this Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, we could say something like Sinners in the Hand of God the Comic Playwright. Sinners in the Hand of a Merciful God. Well, our text begins by pointing out that God is in charge of the whole Earth. Right? Hilarious scene. Staff officers of Syria are meeting and the king is so upset because his war plans are foiled repeatedly and he doesn't get it. There's got to be a mole. There's got to be a traitor. Someone is feeding information to the king of Israel. Now these kinds of raids that Syria was engaging in were a big problem, especially before the age of quick communication. In any kind of thinly settled territory, there's simply not enough resources to patrol every inch of the border or every inch of the places that are at risk. And so you have to rely on a system of raising levees and raising defenses from various places and it takes a while to gather troops to defend any particular part of the border that happens to be threatened. Well, a flying raid made by a Syrian party or a Viking party or anything else like that shows up at the border, comes across, steals whatever they want, and they're gone in an hour. Well, maybe you can raise forces to defend your property in two to three hours, but that's not good enough. And so these kinds of raids were a big problem, not just for Israel in the ninth century BC, but also for England in the ninth century AD with Vikings and at other places at other times in history. God intervened this time, with, you could almost say, with instant communication, telling Elisha, before it happened, Elisha would send information on to King Jehoram in Samaria. And Jehoram would post troops wherever a Syrian raiding party happened to be targeting. And it got so obvious and so noticeable that the king of Syria decides he's going to find the mole if it kills him. Which one of us is an Israelite defector? Which one of us is a traitor feeding information to Jehoram? Now, a particular officer says, well, it's not any of us, O King. It just so happens to be someone in Samaria who has access to omniscience. Now, none of the commentators said that this officer might have been Naaman. But it seems like a pretty good guess, right? Certainly, whoever it was, there was an officer there who knew that God could hear the words that the king of Syria spoke in his bedroom. That there's no such thing as privacy when it comes to God. That all things are naked and open before the eyes of the one with whom we have to do. And that's a lesson maybe that all of us need to learn. Hopefully none of us are planning to attack God's people in a military fashion. But almost all of us at times plan to do something wrong, even if it's only a little bit wrong. Almost all of us do things that we wouldn't want someone else to see us doing. Guess what? God sees you do those things. God knows your thoughts about doing those things. God is God, not just in Israel, but in Syria too. Not just here in the church building. He's the God of your wallet, of your bedroom, your bathroom, your home, your office, your car, anywhere you might be, God is in charge there. And the author tells us that, how? Through a little bit of comedy. You can get a good laugh at this king of Syria who's so angry at something over which he has absolutely no control. The power of God is against him. And so he could purge his staff officers time and time again. And he would never get at the real source of the problem, which is that God protects his people. How would you live if you truly believed in God's omniscience? Would your life change if you knew that God knew everything you thought, everything you said, everything you did? Well not only is God universal, not only is he in charge everywhere, he's also one who protects his people. King of Syria decides he's going to put a stop to this. He gets the idea that he can control the Word of God, that he can bend it his own direction. Now, is there anything logical about this decision? This man of God knows everything that I'm thinking, so I'm going to try to capture him. Told you before about the psychic in Fort Collins, who had a little shop called Psychic Readings by Kay, who was murdered 10 or 15 years ago by her ex-husband. Of course, you're all familiar with the punchline. She didn't see that one coming. But it's true. Here's this woman who claims to be psychic, murdered. Well, that doesn't add up. And yet, here's the king of Syria planning to murder someone that not only claims to be psychic, but that he knows has access to all his battle plans. Hmm. How does this make sense? And yet, this is what the king of Syria does. I will silence the word of God. I will stop the word of God from interfering with my life. Now, literarily, you should immediately think of 2 Kings 1. Remember Ahaziah and the sevenfold warning that he received that we saw in that chapter, where he received a warning first by falling through his lattice, and then he received warnings from Elijah saying, don't inquire of Beelzebub. And he sent the 50 men to capture Elijah and bring him back, and Elijah called down fire on the 50. And he sent another 50, and Elijah called down fire on that 50. Well, Ahaziah, son of Ahab, thought that he could silence God's word. He thought he could arrest a prophet and therefore stop God's word from interfering with his life and his plans. And now the king of Syria thinks the same thing. Oh, I can arrest this prophet. He's making my life tough. Well, I'll just send an army and problem solved. We laugh, right? But do any of us think that way? The Word of God says X. The Word of God is messing with my plans, my schemes, my desires, my hopes, in such and such a way, and I want it to stop, so I'll bend it more in my favor. Now, of course, there's the really open, explicit way of twisting scripture that my brother engaged in at one time. Mom said, Abel, you're pinching your brother. What does scripture say about that? Abel says, children, pinch your brother in the Lord. Well, that's one way of twisting scripture. Just the open, bold-faced, defiant, the Bible tells me to do the wrong thing that I want to do. Or we've talked about the more subtle ways of twisting scripture whereby you sit and you write a 500-page book that has the full armor of footnotes and endnotes and appendices and excursuses and all kinds of things so that based on the fact that you wrote this 500-page book, you decided that scripture okays whatever wrong thing it is that you want to do. That's the sophisticated, subtle way of trying to bend the Word of God in your favor. I don't think anyone here is too tempted by that approach. What's our favorite way of bending the word of God? Just to ignore it, right? Leave it on the nightstand. Let it sit there buried under a stack of remote controls. Don't open it, or if you do, don't read the parts that talk about that thing you want to do that you really know you shouldn't be doing. Read the parts about grace, mercy, forgiveness, love. Those parts are great. We can twist scripture our way just by selectively picking what we're going to read. And yet that's as silly as the king of Syria saying, well, I can make the word of God bend in my favor through sheer military force. I'll send an army and then the prophet will stop revealing my plans." It doesn't work that way. The king of Syria sends horses and chariots, a great army, they come at night and surround the city, verse 14, and the servant of the man of God freaks. He comes out in the morning and there he is in a besieged city. You can imagine. You wake up one morning and there they are, Nazis, goose-stepping down the sidewalk in front of your house. You say, how did this happen? Oh no, I didn't know I was, whoa. Well, the servant freaks out. What does Elisha say? Don't fear, most common command in the Bible. Do not fear. There are more with us than with them. Well, the servant can't see what his master sees. Again, another common stock trope of comedy. Ignorant servant who's unaware of some key detail that we, the audience, and that the higher ranking people on the stage are perfectly well aware of. It's funny in one way, but we don't laugh too hard because we're a lot like this servant. Something goes wrong. Something surprising happens. And we say, alas, what are we going to do? Oh no, I didn't plan on this. So Elisha asks for God to open his eyes and he sees the horses and chariots of fire. What is that? Our best guess is that it's God's angelic hosts surrounding and protecting us. Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who will inherit salvation? Ask the book of Hebrews. So we have seeing here. Do you live in fear or do you trust God's power surrounding you? It's all too easy to make decisions based on fear. I confronted somebody one time and said, why are you lying to me? And he said, I was afraid. Brothers and sisters, you don't have to make decisions based on fear. Because those who are with us are more than those who are with them. Now at times, if you're really afraid, if something really bad is happening, I think it's perfectly appropriate to pray like Elisha prayed. to say, Lord, I need some sight to reinforce my faith. Show me the horses and chariots of fire. Show me your protection. But even if he doesn't, trust that it's there. You don't have to live in fear. You don't have to make decisions based on fear. Alexa and I try to have a no fear policy where we don't do anything just because we're afraid. That's a really bad motive. How can you live in no fear policy? Well, ultimately by trusting God that He protects His people. That as the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds His people from this time forth and forever. Well, of course, the horses and chariots of fire were there, but they didn't stop the Syrians. The Syrians came on into town. So Elisha prays for blindness. And this doesn't appear to have been a full-on literal blindness, more of a mental blindness. They were able to walk all the way to Samaria, which is like 15 or 20 miles if I'm remembering correctly. But they lost the power to make decisions. They were filled with mental confusion. What the same God who gives seeing also gives blindness. God can intervene to protect you at any time in any way, ordinary or extraordinary, remarkable or unremarkable. One of the commentaries that I read on this passage told about an interrogation of an underground house church pastor somewhere behind the iron curtain back in the 1970s. This particular pastor was being interrogated and the interrogator was so fed up with him that the interrogator just pulled out his duty sidearm, put it right in the pastor's face, cocked it and pulled the trigger and the gun jammed. So the man reloaded it, tried again, the gun jammed three times in a row. God can protect His people. God doesn't always will to protect us and deliver us. Sometimes His way of delivering us is through death. But sometimes His way of delivering us is something like this, to send mental confusion on the people who are trying to hurt His people and His church. So we need to trust Him, that He's the God of the whole earth, He's the God who protects. He's the God who has power to give sight and to give blindness. And then finally, He is a magnanimous God. He is a God who spares and protects those in His power. Elisha brings the Syrian army up to Samaria. He asked God to remove the confusion from their minds and, whoa, here we are in the enemy capital. This is not a good day. And the king of Israel is all excited, this drooling little puppy. Can I kill him? Can I kill him? And Elisha says, no, you can't kill him. Would you kill POWs? Would you kill someone that you personally had managed to capture? with apparently the implication that even the son of Ahab wouldn't be that low and dirty and cruel. And Elisha says instead, feast them. Show them what it's like to be under the power of Israel and Israel's God. Show them how Israel's God treats people that he could really hurt. Feast them and send them home. Is there any better way of saying we don't fear you You don't terrify us. We don't consider you a threat. We consider you a potential friend. Or at the very least, someone to annoy by showing kindness. That's what it's like to fall into the hands of our God. Again, remember, this whole book tells us, it's full of anecdote after anecdote after anecdote, that describes what our God is like. What is our God like? He feeds those who are trying to bend His word. Those who are trying to hurt His prophet. We should also contrast this again with 2nd Kings chapter 1. There Elijah called down fire from heaven on the Israelite soldiers that were trying to take him in. Here Elisha doesn't even use pepper spray or a taser, never mind fire from heaven. No one's hurting the slightest. They're just a little confused for a few minutes, that's all. What is the text trying to say? Well, I think the implication is pretty clear that if you're part of God's people and you openly disregard and attack his word, the punishment is much greater for you than if you're an outsider. These Syrians didn't know the God of Israel. And so when they attempted to attack and silence the prophet, they were treated well and let go. God said, well, you don't know what you're doing. I forgive you. I'll feast you and send you home. Have a nice day, Syrians. But the Israelites who came to attack Elijah knew exactly what they were doing. They were aware that they were throwing off the truth of God's word and that they were allies of Ahaziah in trying to silence the prophet. And they were okay with that and their idolatry killed 102 of them. Punishment is stricter for those who were part of the faith and then forsake it. But God's invitation to those outside is come back. Or come join yourself to me. Right? We saw that with Naaman. And now the whole Syrian army gets a chance to see it. God blesses foreigners and strangers. God uses His power for them, not against them. But His word to apostates is, beware. If you persist in fighting against the word of God, if you won't listen to what you know is true, judgment is coming for you and it's coming quickly and it's coming soon. So look to the good news that God surrounds His people as the mountains surround Jerusalem. Do you know this God? Do you trust Him? Do you see the protection and safety He offers to everyone who listens to His word and to the words of His prophet? And then think about the fact that throughout these stories Elisha is called the man of God. He's almost never called a prophet in these first several chapters of 2 Kings. The emphasis is on his role as someone who's sold out to God, dedicated to God, the man of God. We have a greater man of God, the God-man, the Lord Jesus Christ. He protects us. His story is the ultimate comic tale, and he truly does invite us to share in his happy ending, his resurrection life. So trust Him in His protection. Fear not. God is in charge of the whole earth. God gives sight. God gives blindness. God is magnanimous to everyone that seeks Him, everyone that comes under His power. We'll see what a just and generous God He is. Let's pray. Almighty Father, open our eyes, we ask that we might see the horses and chariots of fire that surround us. We pray that you would sustain our faith at crucial moments when we're tested, when we're tried, when we're hurt, when times are bad. Show us, Father, that those who are with us are more than those who are with them. Help us to imitate you. Thank you for preparing a table for us in the presence of our enemies. Not only that, but inviting our enemies to share that table and saying to them, you don't need to be enemies. You can be friends. You can submit to the power and the wisdom and the grace and the justice of the God of the whole earth. Father, we pray that that good news would go forth to us and then through us. Bless us, we ask in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, and all God's people said, Amen.