Start there. Hopefully, everything else will go smoothly.
Let’s start with a word of prayer.
Father, we just thank You, Lord, that You have set us free, and that You paid that price for our freedom. Lord, I pray that we would not waste that freedom doing self-serving things, but that we would use that freedom to serve You.
Father, I pray that You would give us open ears today. I pray, Lord, that the story I am about to share would be meaningful and encouraging to all who hear. I pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.
Okay, I want to talk about Naaman: the principles of the gospel as seen in Naaman. I am having other technical issues with my tablet. Come on. There we go. Okay, and now it is all crazy.
I want to talk about a story in the Old Testament today. It is probably a very familiar story: the story of Naaman, which is in 2 Kings 5.
This story exhibits the principles of the gospel, and it also exhibits the gospel itself through the life of this general from Syria. As I share this, there are a couple of things that I hope you will see.
I hope you will see that the gospel has been in God’s heart all along, from the beginning. This story takes place hundreds of years before Christ came, and it very clearly portrays the gospel.
I hope, going through this story, that you are encouraged about sharing the gospel before you share the gospel. I also hope that you are encouraged about sharing the gospel after you share the gospel. Hopefully, some of these principles in this story will give you the freedom, liberty, and courage to share the gospel.
What I want to do this morning is read through the first nineteen verses of 2 Kings 5. I am not going to read all the verses right at the front. We are going to slowly read through them, work through the verses, and talk about them as we go.
So, who was Naaman? It starts in verse 1:
Now Naaman, captain of the host of the king of Aram, was a great man with his master, and highly respected.
Naaman was a general in the army of the king of Aram. Aram is another name for Syria. It was the Syrian Empire. The passage says that he was a great man.
There are some things we can infer from this verse. One is that Naaman was outside the kingdom of God. He was not part of God’s chosen people. He did not know the Lord and was not brought up worshiping the true God.
We can also see that he was a great man and highly respected. Because of that, he probably had a fair amount of pride in what he had accomplished and in the station he had reached in life.
I would imagine that being a general in a dominant army would lead him to expect some level of deference from other people. So, he was a general, very well respected by his king.
We see in the next part of verse 1 that the Lord had given victory to Aram through him, and that he was a valiant warrior. What is interesting in this verse is that the Lord was already working in Naaman’s life and already using him.
Naaman was not part of the kingdom of Israel or the kingdom of Judah. He was not a follower of the Lord, but the Lord was using him. The Lord’s hand was on his life.
What we can see from this is that, as people come to the gospel and hear the gospel, God is already working in their lives. It is not brand-new, hard soil. God has already been working on that soil.
In Naaman’s case, God was already working in him and using him. Many believers, after they have come to the Lord, can look back and see that God had been working in their lives long before they recognized Him.
He is always preparing His field for harvest. We see that here in the story of Naaman: God was using Naaman, and he was already a tool for the Lord.
But Naaman had a big problem. The last part of verse 1 says:
But he was a leper.
Everybody, no matter how valiant or how well respected, has problems, whether they know it or not. In Naaman’s case, he knew it. Rich or poor, strong or weak, we all have problems, and we all have the same problem. We are all born with the problem of sin.
There was no army and no problem that Naaman could not defeat, except for this one: the leprosy issue that he had. It was undefeatable.
So, what is leprosy? Let’s talk about leprosy for a minute. In Bible times, leprosy was incurable. In fact, until relatively recently, leprosy was incurable.
Many people think it is a skin disease because it shows up on the skin. It appears as fingers and extremities being eaten away, with the body slowly deteriorating. But it is not merely a skin disease; it is a nerve disease.
When a person has leprosy, the body no longer senses damage. It no longer reports damage to the rest of the body, so the body cannot respond and heal that damage. The infected part is cut off from the head of the body and cut off from the life of the body.
Because of that, leprosy grows and spreads. The injured person does not feel the injury, and the body does not respond appropriately to it.
As I said, there is a cure now. You can take a cocktail of antibiotics for about twelve months, and it will take care of leprosy. But in the context of this story, when it was written, leprosy was incurable.
In the Bible, leprosy represents sin. When you see a leper or leprosy mentioned in the Bible, it is usually a picture of sin.
Leviticus and the Levitical law describe what to do if, perhaps, someone is cured of leprosy. They do not talk about how to treat leprosy, because there was no treatment. They only describe what was to happen if someone was cured.
If you read that section in Leviticus, it is a very interesting picture that reflects on the crucifixion of Christ, but we will not go into that today.
So, leprosy equals sin in Scripture. It is incurable. It is a problem that no one can get rid of.
It comes from being disconnected from the Head, essentially having fellowship separated from the Head. It destroys the person. It eats away at them. It gets worse and worse over time.
It can start small and perhaps be hidden, but then it grows. Eventually, it reveals itself for all to see. Lepers are shunned in almost all cultures, and likewise, sin causes separation between people.
Leprosy is a picture of sin in Scripture, and it is a picture of sin here. Naaman is a picture of unredeemed mankind.
We all have pride. Naaman had a lot of pride. We all have an incurable disease—an incurable condition—sin. We are all outside God’s kingdom before we are cleansed of that incurable condition. Our only hope is in the Lord, the God of Israel.
The story of Naaman also shows us how God saves. It is a picture of the gospel, and we can learn a lot about the gospel by looking at this miracle and applying the principles in the miracle to the gospel.
Salvation is a greater miracle than healing from leprosy, but the Lord uses this picture to give us a picture of salvation. For the next eighteen verses, we will walk through them and see what the Lord has to show us about salvation and evangelism.
Naaman’s healing, like these nineteen verses, is a journey. There are a lot of ups and downs in that journey, and we will go through those.
First, I want to jump ahead a little bit. There is a cast of characters in this story. There are seven different people who act in Naaman’s life to affect the gospel in his life.
David Yow shared a couple of Wednesday nights ago that a study had been done about evangelism. The study researched how many contacts someone had with the gospel before becoming a believer. Do you know what that number was? Seven.
On average, about seven contacts happen with a person before they become a believer. In this story, coincidentally, there are seven people involved who contact Naaman in some way.
First, there is the servant girl. We will get into her more, and we will get into all these characters more, but the servant girl who cared about her master kind of kicks things off.
Then there is Naaman’s wife. We do not know a lot about her, but she was instrumental in this story. There is Naaman’s king. Then there is the king of Israel, Jehoram, who was not a good king. He was the son of Ahab and Jezebel, one of the evil kings of the northern kingdom of Israel.
There is Elisha. We often think of Elisha as the one who pointed Naaman to God, but there were a lot of other people in this story who pointed Naaman to God. There is Elisha’s messenger, and then there are Naaman’s servants.
The Lord uses each one of these people in a different way in Naaman’s life. What can we learn from this cast of characters?
First, God uses the unredeemed. When you look at this cast of characters, half of them are not Israelites. Half of them know nothing of the God of Israel.
Also, half of them are of low stature. Stature really has nothing to do with the spread of the gospel. The servant girl, the messenger, and Naaman’s servants were nowhere near equal in stature to Naaman.
We also see that winning souls is not just one person’s work. There is a line of people, a line of contacts, and words spoken to someone that lead them to the Lord, including the Lord working in their life in the background.
All those people need to be obedient to the Lord, or the Lord needs to be using them in this journey. We also see that there is not fruit right away.
The story starts with the servant girl, but Naaman’s healing—the picture of salvation—does not come until many steps and many verses later. So, we will go through and look at each step in the journey.
First, we will look at the servant girl in verse 2:
Now the Arameans had gone out in bands, and had taken captive a little maid out of the land of Israel; and she waited on Naaman’s wife.
This little servant girl starts the whole thing. She was the lowest of the low. She was a child. She was a girl—not that there is anything wrong with girls—but in that culture and at that time, women and females were not valued as highly as males.
She was also a captive, a slave taken from another country. You really could not get much lower in stature than she was.
But in verse 3, she takes a step:
And she said unto her mistress, Would that my lord were with the prophet that is in Samaria! then would he recover him of his leprosy.
This little girl, the lowest of the low, remembered the power of God. She remembered the prophet Elisha. She also cared for her mistress’s husband.
I infer from this that this little girl was of good character, because she had a pretty good job as far as slaves went. She was caring for the mistress of a prominent person. She was probably of good character and did good work.
Despite being forced into that work, she still loved her captors and cared for them. She loved her enemy.
That love must have touched Naaman’s wife and Naaman enough for them to take that word to the king and act on it.
This is the Spirit of God at work in this little servant girl. It is a great picture of what Christians should be in spreading the gospel and in life in general.
We should be of good, trustworthy character, so that people trust us enough to listen to us, even though they may not agree with us. Christians are often abused, misunderstood, lied about, and oppressed in many countries. Yet a good Christian wants the oppressor to be forgiven and healed of sin.
When we obey the command of the Lord and love our enemies, we display the Spirit of God. This display is essential for the gospel to go forth.
If we did not love someone, how would they ever trust us when we shared the gospel with them?
Her position—the fact that she was a slave girl—shows that status does not matter when sharing the gospel. The only thing that mattered was the Spirit of God.
Just like Peter at Pentecost, she was not highly placed. Peter was an uneducated fisherman who had recently betrayed his Master, yet he stood up and, through the Spirit of God, thousands were led to the Lord.
Verses 4 and 5 continue the story:
And one went in, and told his lord, saying, Thus and thus said the maid that is of the land of Israel.
And the king of Aram said, Go now, and I will send a letter unto the king of Israel.
Once Naaman was introduced to the possibility of a solution to his problem, he was curious. He wanted to pursue that possibility. He was looking for a solution because he knew that he had a problem.
So he went to his master, the king, and said, “Hey, I need to go take care of this leprosy thing. There is some hope in Israel. Can you write me a letter so I can go talk to the king there?” His king did that.
I think his king was eager not to lose one of his top generals and was willing, in a way, to cross enemy lines. These two nations were not on friendly terms.
The Bible does not explicitly say who the king was, and I do not think it really matters what the geopolitical setting was in this story or in Naaman’s journey.
Verse 5 says:
And he departed, and took with him ten talents of silver, and six thousand pieces of gold, and ten changes of raiment.
Naaman’s action in verse 5, once he had permission to go, betrays a lack of understanding—an ignorance of how God works and what was really happening in his life and in his journey.
He took a bunch of silver, a bunch of gold, and a bunch of clothes. Ten changes of clothing does not sound like much. Probably a lot of y’all take ten changes of clothing for a weekend. But in those times, ten changes of clothing was a lot.
The gold was about 150 pounds of gold—two donkeys’ worth, two fully loaded donkeys—and probably several other fully loaded donkeys of silver.
The principle we see from this is that many people, when first introduced to the Christian faith, assume it works like every other religion: they must pay some price for their healing or forgiveness.
Those who are not as well off as Naaman can be discouraged, thinking, “I will never be good enough. I cannot even try. There is no hope for me.”
Thankfully, Naaman’s healing from leprosy and our forgiveness come without payment. It was foolish for Naaman to think that he could pay for what was impossible.
Likewise, it is foolish for us to think that we can pay for the impossible act of forgiveness. There is no amount of money that someone can pay for the impossible. Thankfully, that impossible thing has been done for us.
Once Naaman got approval from the king, he traveled to Israel to find this prophet. Verses 6 and 7 say:
And he brought the letter to the king of Israel, saying, And now when this letter is come unto thee, behold, I have sent Naaman my servant to thee, that thou mayest recover him of his leprosy.
And it came to pass, when the king of Israel had read the letter, that he rent his clothes, and said, Am I God, to kill and to make alive, that this man doth send unto me to recover a man of his leprosy? Wherefore consider, I pray you, and see how he seeketh a quarrel against me.
First up was King Jehoram, the king of Israel. A little background: Jehoram and the king of Aram had been battling for quite a while. Scripture records about eight different conflicts between these two kingdoms. They were not on friendly terms.
The servant girl had obviously been taken by a raiding band. So King Jehoram’s response was not based on any knowledge of God. He responded out of fear.
His fear was that there was going to be war. He thought, “He is trying to start a war by giving me this impossible task.” Jehoram completely forgot about God and completely forgot about the prophet of God in his kingdom.
He forgot about the power of God and the power of God that was at his disposal. This typifies the reaction of people when they are faced with the problem of sin.
When people are faced with sin and realize their impotence against that problem, they resort to a trained response. That response usually comes from the predominant way of thinking in the current culture.
In Jehoram’s life, that predominant response was war. If something goes wrong, if there is a hard problem with another kingdom, they go to war.
When he was faced with this impossible problem, he reverted to his trained response and thought of war. How does that apply today to our current culture and philosophy in the world?
When I was growing up here in America, the big thing was to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. If you had a problem, it was your responsibility to fix it.
When confronted with an impossible problem, the solution was, “You have to work your way out of this. You have to fix your problem.” It is like saying that you have to scrub hard enough to get rid of leprosy. We all know that does not work.
But the predominant philosophy in our country has changed. The philosophy now is that it is someone else’s fault.
When it comes to our struggles or our sin, we are told to blame it on someone else. Someone else oppressed you. The man is holding you down. We all become victims. Somebody is being mean to you—that is your problem. Society taught you how to sin. It is not your fault.
Identifying our sin as someone else’s problem is just as useless as trying to work our way out of sin. It is a futile exercise.
Imagine going to the doctor and saying, “Doctor, doctor, I have this leprosy-looking stuff on my hand.” The doctor says, “Well, who have you been hanging out with?”
You say, “Well, Bob has this too. I have been hanging out with Bob.” The doctor says, “Well, it is Bob’s fault. You blame Bob for your leprosy.”
If a doctor did that, you would think, “What good is that to me?” We can blame Bob all day long for my leprosy problem, but it does not fix my leprosy problem.
Blaming someone else for your sin and being a victim may feel good for a few minutes, but you are still a sinner. You are still broken, no matter who you blame. No matter what has actually happened to you, the problem is still your problem to take care of.
The old way of thinking—being self-sufficient—is exhausting and defeating. You end up defeated. The new way of thinking—being a victim—leaves you isolated, bitter, and just as defeated.
Thankfully, God provides a way out of these traps of human philosophy. At the end of this passage, we see the king tearing his clothing, distraught because he cannot do anything. He thinks he has to go to war.
Verse 8 says:
And it was so, when Elisha the man of God heard that the king of Israel had rent his clothes, that he sent to the king, saying, Wherefore hast thou rent thy clothes? Let him come now to me, and he shall know that there is a prophet in Israel.
The Bible does not say how Elisha knew so quickly about the situation—that the king was distraught and Naaman was visiting—but he knew pretty quickly, because Naaman was still there. He sent this message to the king.
Elisha did not rebuke or provoke the king. He gently corrected him and said, “Remember, there is a prophet. Send him my way.”
I think, in God’s wisdom, Elisha was choosing his battles. He knew that the king, being an evil king, was pretty much a lost cause, and he chose to focus on Naaman.
So he sent this message to remind the king that there was a prophet and to send Naaman there. Maybe he could help avert the war.
Verses 9 and 10 say:
So Naaman came with his horses and with his chariots, and stood at the door of the house of Elisha.
And Elisha sent a messenger unto him, saying, Go and wash in the Jordan seven times, and thy flesh shall come again to thee, and thou shalt be clean.
Jehoram gave Naaman Elisha’s address, and Naaman looked it up on his GPS and went there. He took his whole entourage.
Showing up at Elisha’s house were all these donkeys and horses, gold and silver, and changes of clothes. It was quite a sight. Imagine if that showed up at your door: some high-ranking person with a bunch of gold, a bunch of silver, and they want to talk to you.
I think I would come out and greet them. I would treat them with honor. I would invite them in for a meal and show great hospitality. But Elisha did not do that.
Elisha stayed in his house and sent out a messenger—probably a hired hand—to talk to this bigwig. He did not lavish Naaman with praise or treat him as anything special. He treated him like the UPS man. He actually treated him pretty poorly.
I think God had a reason for having Elisha do that: to break through Naaman’s pride.
Naaman was a very accomplished man. He had a lot to be proud of. But that pride was a major hurdle for him to come to healing. Our pride is also a major hurdle for us to come to the Lord and continue to follow the Lord.
Many people are too proud to admit that they have a problem or have sin. They are too proud to admit that they may have followed the wrong gods all their lives.
For someone to come to the Lord, the Lord has to invade their life. He has to break through that pride.
Elisha provided Naaman with a stark choice: you can keep your pride and keep your leprosy, or you can put down your pride and put down your leprosy.
That same message comes to us as we consider following Christ and as we follow Christ. You can keep your pride and your sin, or you can put down your pride and lose your sin. We cannot have both.
To truly enjoy salvation and the fruits of salvation, we have to set down our pride and humble ourselves before God.
How can we accept the fact of our own sin and remain proud? How can we accept the fact of our own salvation and not be humbled by that? I do not think we can.
Verses 11 and 12 say:
But Naaman was wroth, 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 recover the leper.
Are not Abanah and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? May I not wash in them, and be clean? So he turned and went away in a rage.
Naaman’s response was not a good response. He was offended. People often get angry and offended when their pride is attacked. His pride clouded his judgment and his response. It was an obstacle to him being healed.
Likewise, our pride is an obstacle to following the Lord and being cleansed of our sin. I think we all have an endless supply of pride, and the Lord continually works through our lives to remove it.
I think if He took all our pride at once, we would probably die of shame from seeing the amount of pride we have.
Naaman had two major complaints about Elisha’s instructions. First, he expected to be a bystander in his own healing. He expected someone to come out, wave a hand, and cure him of leprosy.
But in the picture of salvation, there are no bystanders. Salvation is an intimate interaction between the Savior and the saved. There is no third-party involvement in that interaction.
A third party may introduce you to the Savior. They may tell you about the Savior. But the step of faith—following the Lord and humbling yourself before Him—is something that no one else can do for you, and no one else can do for the person considering following Christ.
The second complaint was about the rivers. They were not like the rivers back home. He knew that they had special rivers back at home, the Abanah and Pharpar, and he thought he could do much better than the Jordan River.
In this case, Naaman was leaning on his own understanding. He had his own experience with those rivers and thought they were better. Why was this instruction defying his own logic by requiring him to wash in this little river?
In relation to salvation, the simplicity of salvation defies people’s understanding. They expect to have to do a lot for it—good deeds, sacrifices, or giving something up for Lent for forty days. But that is not the way the Lord works. Salvation is much simpler than that.
The Jordan River is symbolic of the separation between life and death, and that is part of the picture here. But for what I am going through, I do not consider it the main part of Naaman’s journey or the central picture of salvation. Still, it reinforces the symbolism of the river.
Naaman brought his own way of thinking, and his own way of thinking about those rivers did not fit God’s way of thinking. Salvation was too simple for him.
We all know that salvation is the simple belief that Jesus died and rose from the dead for our sins, accepting that as fact.
The water was not really the issue. Where he bathed was not the issue. The issue was taking that step of faith in something that did not make sense to him.
Elisha gave him an act of faith: believe that you are going to be healed by the Lord by washing in the Jordan River. He could have said, “Sprinkle sand on your head,” and that would have made as little sense as washing in the Jordan River. But it was a meaningful step of faith.
Naaman was pretty angry. He stomped off in a rage. He was mad at the simplicity of things, mad at having his pride offended, and mad that the whole situation did not fit his preconceived ideas.
A lot of people, when presented with the gospel, initially reject it because it does not fit their preconceived ideas. It is so new and different.
Then God brought along a couple of other unsuspecting evangelists in Naaman’s life. Verse 13 says:
And his servants came near, and spake unto him, and said, My father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? How much rather then, when he saith to thee, Wash, and be clean?
These were Naaman’s servants—again, people of low stature. Their pride had probably not been offended. They were not being insulted or disrespected by the prophet, so they were thinking more clearly about it.
But they took a risk in approaching their master. He was already angry, and they were going to correct him in his anger.
I can imagine them very meekly going up to Naaman and saying, “But, boss, it is just so simple. I do not know why you do not do it. If it were hard, you would have done it. Why not do this simple thing?”
Their plea was for him to set aside his emotions, set aside his anger, and think about it rationally.
This act of the servants displays another truth about the gospel: spreading the gospel and telling someone about the Lord involves personal risk.
These servants could have been killed by Naaman in his rage for trying to correct him. That was Naaman’s stature, his place, and the way the military worked. They were taking a pretty big personal risk to correct him.
When we share the gospel, there is always some personal risk. Someone may laugh at us. They may reject us. They may think we are fools, and they may do far worse things to us.
There is always a risk in showing the love of God. These servants loved their master and wanted him to think rightly, so they took that risk.
Do we love others enough to take that risk, to follow the Lord and tell others about the Lord?
I am sure they were afraid. The way they approached him appeared to be fearful. You may have fearful emotions and be nervous when talking to someone about the Lord.
I know that at work, when I share the Lord, I get very nervous. There could be repercussions for that. But we should not be condemned because of that nervousness.
There is a natural risk there, and we would naturally be nervous. But we need to take the Lord’s life, take the courage of the Lord, work through our fear, and share the gospel regardless of our fear.
Do not be condemned by that emotion, but lean on the Lord and work through it.
Verse 14 says:
Then went he down, and dipped himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the saying of the man of God; and his flesh came again like unto the flesh of a little child, and he was clean.
Naaman did what Elisha directed. He acted in faith contrary to his own understanding. He did the simple thing and was healed of this incurable disease.
Notice that he did not merely return to the flesh of a middle-aged man. His flesh became like the flesh of a little child. He was much better than restored.
He received new life. This is such a great picture of salvation. It is not just restoring an old man to being an old man. It is new life as a new creation—a new man, with skin like a baby.
Verse 15 says:
And he returned to the man of God, he and all his company, and came, and stood before him; and he said, Behold, now I know that there is no God in all the earth, but in Israel: now therefore, I pray thee, take a present of thy servant.
Naaman returned to Elisha healed and cleansed. This time Elisha came out to meet him. I think the picture is that there was no more pride to deal with.
Naaman had taken a step of faith. He put down his pride and did the foolish thing, and now he had been healed. It was like a meeting of two brothers in the Lord.
Before salvation, there is a separation between the evangelist and the evangelized because there is a spiritual difference between the two. But after salvation, there is an immediate bond between the evangelist and the one who has just come to the Lord.
Naaman’s response was very encouraging. The first thing he did was confess that the only God in all the earth was Israel’s God.
He confessed this publicly before his whole entourage. All of his servants and staff knew that he had found God. It was a very public confession, and I am sure it would get back to his king one day.
Then he showed gratitude to Elisha for his healing. This offer had a very different intent than his first offer. His first offer, when he packed all his belongings, was to pay for his healing. Now, his offer was in response to his healing.
People often think, “I need to pay for my salvation,” and then try to pay for it with good deeds. But after they become saved, they realize that those good deeds are a response to salvation.
What was once thought to be a requirement becomes a response after someone is saved.
Verse 16 says:
But he said, As the Lord liveth, before whom I stand, I will receive none. And he urged him to take it; but he refused.
Elisha refused the gift. If you read further in the chapter, one of Elisha’s servants decided he wanted the gift, and that became a whole different story. But Elisha refused it.
I think Elisha did this because he wanted Naaman to know where his healing came from. His healing did not come from a gift, either before or after. It was not anything Elisha expected to be given.
Elisha wanted Naaman to know that the Lord, and the Lord only, was his healer.
The same thing is true with new believers. We need to be careful that they understand their salvation was not something they paid for. It was not something that happened because of an institution, a teacher, or any other earthly thing. It comes from God and from God alone.
Verse 17 says:
And Naaman said, If not, yet I pray thee let there be given to thy servant two mules’ burden of earth; for thy servant will no more offer burnt offering nor sacrifice unto other gods, but unto the Lord.
After Elisha refused his gift, Naaman did a really peculiar thing: he asked for two mule-loads of dirt. It is kind of a weird thing to ask for.
Some commentators think Naaman was going to take the dirt and build an altar in his homeland, where he could worship the Lord. That may be true.
But it offers an interesting picture of the change of heart that happens when someone becomes a believer. Remember, when Naaman was first told what he needed to do, he ranted because things back in Aram—back in Syria—were so much better.
Those two rivers, he said, were better than all the waters of Israel. He despised the things of Israel. But now, after salvation, those things became valuable to him.
We see that in salvation. Things that were once despised—fellowship with believers, reading the Word of God, and singing hymns—become treasured by believers. There is a change of heart. It is evidence of a new creation.
There is an immediate change that Naaman shows here, and then there are long-term changes that occur as a person walks with the Lord.
We see that in the next two verses:
In this thing the Lord pardon thy servant: when my master goeth into the house of Rimmon to worship there, and he leaneth on my hand, and I bow myself in the house of Rimmon, when I bow myself in the house of Rimmon, the Lord pardon thy servant in this thing.
And he said unto him, Go in peace. So he departed from him a little way.
This is an interesting request by Naaman to Elisha. Naaman’s king worshiped a false god called Rimmon. When the king went to worship in the temple, he took his general with him.
It was the responsibility and role of his general to go with him. It was a sign of loyalty to the king that the general was there with him and appeared to worship the same god.
Naaman knew in his heart that Rimmon was not a god and was not anything to bow down to. He knew that was wrong.
But in his new faith, he could not bring himself to make the sacrifice of refusing to bow to Rimmon. It could require sacrificing his position and potentially even his life, if the king believed the leader of his army was not loyal to him.
That was a step Naaman was not ready to take in his new faith. Likewise, there are steps that new believers may find impossible to take in their new faith. There may be sacrifices that they are not ready to make.
But God will train them in His time to take those steps. He will mature them into sons who are ready to make those sacrifices.
We should not be disappointed if new believers are not ready or are not as spiritually mature as we are. The Lord will train them in His time.
Notice that Elisha’s response was also very kind. He did not say whether it was okay or not okay to go into the temple and bow down to Rimmon. He simply said, “Go in peace.”
Elisha knew that Naaman’s heart was pointed in the right direction and that he was not ready to take that step or make that sacrifice. So Elisha left the door open for God to work in his life.
If Elisha had said, “Nope, do not do that. You cannot do that,” Naaman may have said, “I cannot follow the Lord then. This is too much to ask.” It could have destroyed his spiritual life just as it was beginning.
If Elisha had said, “Yeah, it is okay. I understand. God will understand,” Naaman may have thought that it was okay to continue doing this. It may have dampened his conscience, and he might have gone through life thinking it was acceptable to worship other gods.
But Elisha’s response was, “Go in peace.” God would direct him. It was not an immediate demand for maturity. Elisha was going to let the Lord do the work in Naaman.
Likewise, if people are not ready to make a sacrifice, we should let the Lord work in them through the Word of God and through fellowship. The Lord will work in them and bring them into maturity.
In conclusion, to wrap up the story, I think it is a beautiful picture of salvation and repentance. It shows us that even the lowest can spread the gospel, and that God will work through many people and many situations to bring someone to salvation.
It also shows that sharing the gospel entails personal risk. It shows that salvation cannot be purchased at any price and that salvation is impossible outside the act of grace—the grace of Jesus Christ.
If anybody wants to follow the Lord, they must have their pride destroyed to truly follow Him.
Being healed of sin will produce gratitude. What was thought to be a requirement will become a response to the Lord.
Let’s pray.
Father, we just say thank You, Lord, for Your gift of forgiveness for us. Thank You, Lord, that You worked in our lives before we even knew You, to bring us to salvation.
We thank You, Lord, that it was a free gift that requires no payment.
Father, we pray that You would give us the freedom and the courage to share Your Word and to share Your life with others. We pray this in Your name.