We were told at the end of 2
Kings chapter 6 that there was a terrible famine because of
a siege that the king of Syria had placed on the city of Samaria. Did I just say Jerusalem there
a few moments ago? Forgive me, I meant Samaria.
So here we are at Samaria and we're going to find out what
becomes of the prophecy that Elisha made when, in verse 1
of 2 Kings 7, he said this, Then Elisha said, Hear ye the
word of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord. Tomorrow
about this time shall a measure of fine flour be sold for a shekel,
and two measures of barley for a shekel in the gate of Samaria. Then a Lord, on whose hand the
king leaned, answered the man of God and said, Behold, if the
Lord would make windows in heaven, might this thing be? And he said,
Behold, thou shalt see it with thine eyes, but shalt not eat
thereof. And verse three says, And there
were four leprous men at the entering in of the gate. And they said one to another,
Why sit we here until we die? If we say we will enter into
the city, then the famine is in the city, and we shall die
there. And if we sit still here, we
die also. Now therefore come, and let us
fall unto the host of the Syrians. If they save us alive, we shall
live, and if they kill us, we shall but die. And they rose
up in the twilight to go unto the camp of the Syrians. And
when they were come to the uttermost part of the camp of Syria, behold,
there was no man there. For the LORD had made the host
of the Syrians to hear a noise of chariots and a noise of horses,
even the noise of a great host. And they said one to another,
Lo, the king of Israel hath hired against us the kings of the Hittites
and the kings of the Egyptians to come upon us. Wherefore they
arose and fled in the twilight and left their tents and their
horses and their asses, even the camp as it was, and fled
for their life. And when these lepers came to
the uttermost part of the camp, they went in They went into one
tent, and did eat and drink, and carried thence silver and
gold and raiment, and went and hid it, and came again and entered
into another tent, and carried thence also, and went and hid
it. Then they said one to another,
We do not well. This day is a day of good tidings,
and we hold our peace. If we tarry till the morning
light, some mischief will come upon us. Now therefore come,
that we may go and tell the king's household. Amen. May God bless
to us this reading from his word. If you remember, Elisha had told
the king of Israel that despite the famine and despite the starvation
in Samaria, despite the army of Syria besieging the city of
Samaria, there would be food plentiful in the gate of the
city that very day. I don't know how that message
got out into the town, but I'm absolutely certain that it would. And I'm absolutely certain that
it did. And I'm sure that the whole city
would be buzzing with this idea, this notion that soon the siege
was going to be broken and soon the famine was going to end.
and there would be talk and there would be conversation and there
would be people wondering and hoping and discussing whether
these things could possibly be true. Could even God do something
like this? And as night fell, Samaria went
to bed, hungry as usual, weak and ill and depressed because
of the circumstances they were in. But what we discover is that
while Samaria slept, while the king of Israel was in his bed,
God was at work in the camp of the Syrians. Look at verse six. For the Lord had made the host
of the Syrians to hear a noise of chariots. Maybe it was the
wind or maybe it was the rain or the hailstones clattering
off the hillsides. Whatever it was, the noise that
God had created sounded to these Syrians like the wheels of chariots
coming closer and closer to them. And in the camp, what started
off as a puzzle suddenly became a cause for anxiety and concern. The noise was getting closer.
It appeared that the wheels of the chariots would soon be upon
the camp of the Syrians. And it says that it sounded as
if the noise of horses, even the noise of a great host was
coming down upon the camp of the Syrians. The Syrians were
quite smart about this. They're thinking, what could
this possibly be? And they're thinking, it's the
Egyptians coming from the south. But the noise is coming from
the north as well. Then that must be the Hittites.
And they're coming from the north. And here is Samaria before us. We're trapped. We've got enemies
to one side, enemies to the other, enemies before us. What are we
going to do? And in the midst of the darkness
of the night, First one, then another, then a whole army turned
on its heels and ran for its life back in the direction from
which they had come, hoping that they might get over the Jordan
and into their own country before the combined forces of their
enemies could fall upon them. And you know what? It was only
the wind. It was God that had made this
fear enter into their hearts. The Syrian army had fled in the
night and they had left their camp just as it was. If somebody
was sitting down to dinner, he'd got up, maybe his chair had fallen
over, but that was all. And he turned on his heels and
ran. And his dinner was still sitting there on the table in
his tent. They left food. They left water. They left wine. They left valuables. They left their horses, even. They didn't even take time to
put the saddles on their horses so that they could ride away.
They imagined that they were being attacked and they abandoned
all their goods as they ran away. Now think about this for a moment,
because just out there in the darkness, if we were in Samaria,
just out there in the darkness is a complete camp. of tents
with food and water and wealth and horses and asses and not
a soldier in it. And it's just sitting out there
in the darkness. And in the city, nobody knew
that it was there. Nobody realised that God had
worked. Nobody realised that God had
acted exactly as he said he would do. Samaria was free, but all the
people were still in there starving. God had done what he had promised
to do, but all the people didn't know about it. The enemy was
gone and Elisha's words were true. And yet the people lay
in their beds, still hungry, still depressed, and still, as
far as they knew, completely besieged. And I think that this is a picture
of the blessings of God's grace and his goodness to his people. This is what we call the gospel. Because here is a picture of
a people who think that they are in a terrible state, And
yet just beyond that, all of the blessings of God's goodness
are there to be experienced. The gospel tells us that the
Lord Jesus Christ came to set the captives free. And that's
what these Samaritan people, that's what these people of Samaria
were. They were captives in their own
city. And he came to feed his people. He who is the bread of
life. And he came to give them living
water. They who needed refreshed. The Lord Jesus Christ says in
John chapter six, I am the bread of life. He that cometh to me
shall never hunger and he that believeth on me shall never thirst. And in Revelation chapter 21,
we see John picking up that same theme and he says, I will give
unto him that is a thirst of the fountain of the water of
life freely. Let him that is athirst come,
and whosoever will, let him take of the water of life freely. The people in Samaria were hungry
and thirsty, but they didn't know, they didn't believe, they
didn't trust that these words of gospel truth that Elisha had
spoken were truly brought to pass in their experience. And as long as they didn't believe,
they couldn't experience the great mercy that God had secured
for them. These people were in need. And
that's the message of the gospel to men and women today. If you feel that need, if there
is a sense in your heart of a need for forgiveness. If you know
that you are a sinner before a holy God, if God has by His
Spirit, by His power, revealed to you that you need a saviour,
that you need forgiveness, that you need peace with God, then
you must come to the Lord Jesus Christ. You must come believing
that he is able to save you. You must come believing that
there is forgiveness with the Lord, that he may be feared.
You must come knowing that he is able to feed you and believing
that there is a refreshment to be had for your soul and your
spirit in him. It is his gift of grace to needy
sinners like you and like me. But look, over there, because
there's something moving there, just in the twilight in the entrance
of the gate of the city, there's something moving. It's a man. What's he doing outside the city?
There's more than one. There's four of them. And they're
lepers. And they're not allowed in the
city. Not at the best of times. They are outcasts. Leprosy in the Bible is a picture
of sin. We've been thinking a little
bit recently about leprosy and how it shows about sin. We've
already seen it in the life of Naaman and the history of Elisha. But these men in the gate of
the city of Samaria are talking and they're starving as well.
They're hungry too. But what can they do? If they
try to go into the city, well, there's no food in there anyway,
so it's not going to be any good going in there. They'll die if
they go into the city. If they stay where they are,
sitting at the gate, no one's going to give them any food.
They'll die there too. And they reason in their own
minds, and they say, we've only got one hope here. We've only
got one option. We'll go to the Syrian camp.
If they kill us, they kill us. And if they show us kindness,
then we'll live. So they get up in the twilight
and they head towards the camp. And as they get closer and closer,
they might expect to see somebody challenging them. like the soldiers
that were on sentry duty saying, halt! Who goes there? But nobody did. So they went
on a little bit more to where they expected the edge of the
camp to be and there's nobody there. They can see the tents,
they can see the horses, but there's nobody there. And they
go through the whole camp, they go to the uttermost part of the
camp. It probably took them quite a
while to do it because I can't imagine they would be running
They would be creeping along, expecting at any moment that
this was a trap and they were going to get attacked. But there was not a soldier in
the whole camp. Everyone was gone. Those four lepers, they went
into the tents and they started to eat and they started to drink.
I imagine they had quite a party. They'd been hungry for so long
and here was all this food. They took what they wanted. They
picked up the valuables that were lying around and they took
them too and they went away and hid them. And all the time, the people
in Samaria are still sitting in there without food on their
table and starving and depressed. And they came back, these lepers,
and they took some more. And they took some more and off
they went and they head back too. And after a while, they
began to feel guilty and they thought to themselves, you know,
we should really tell others. This day is a day of good tidings,
they said, and we hold our peace. We're not saying anything. We're
being quiet when we should be speaking about these good tidings. Now these men were concerned
that something bad was going to happen to them and our motivation
should be different as the people of God. We do not fear some mischief
befalling us, but we do desire to share the good tidings that
we have discovered, the good tidings of great joy, the knowledge
of the Lord Jesus Christ and salvation and freedom and fullness
that come from him. The Lord's people desire to share
the Lord with other needy people because we have discovered that
there is such a plentitude, there is such a fullness in the Lord
Jesus Christ that there is sufficient for all who will come to him
hungry and needy and trusting and believing. And that's why
we preach the gospel. That's why we preach the Lord
Jesus Christ and lift him up and show him to sinners. This is the message of God's
bountiful provision of grace and mercy and forgiveness in
Christ. And it is to be carried to the
people who need to hear it, to those who are hungry and those
who are bound and those who are trapped in their own ignorance
and unbelief. So that sinners, just like us,
hungry and weary and thirsty, might share with us in the blessings
of gospel truth. We shall not lie starving in
Samaria. We shall go to God's mercy in
Christ, and we will find food there for our souls. We shall not keep these saving
truths to ourselves, but we will tell the world, we will tell
anyone who will listen of what we have found in Christ. We will
tell all who will hear that there is plentiful grace in Jesus Christ
for the hungry and the weak and the weary souls of this world
who come to him for life. Amen.