Where There is a God
3/4/26 Bible Thought (2 Kings 7)
Main Idea: There is nothing too hard for the Almighty and all-knowing God.
A Look at the Text:
To understand the setting of our story today, we must look back to the middle of chapter 6. There, we saw that the king of Syria besieged Israel’s capital city of Samaria. As it was customary with siege warfare of that day, the inhabitants of Israel remained safe within the walls of their city—that is, until they ran out of food. In the meantime, the attacking army just had to play the waiting game.
That is exactly the situation we see in this story.
Israel’s circumstances had grown so grim that people were paying twice the normal cost of a living horse to eat a donkey’s head, something that wasn’t normally eaten anyway.[1] Even more, people would pay five shekels for a cup of dove’s dung, and at least one woman ate her own child. Israel was starving for food and starving for hope.
To remedy their plight, the king of Israel concluded that killing Elisha would do the trick. Yet, when Elisha was brought before the king, he promised that within a day their circumstances would be fully reversed.
Rather than five shekels for a cup of bird’s excrement, people would be able to buy multiple quarts of flour or barley for just a single shekel (2 Kings 7:1).
Certainly, naturally speaking, this was an utter impossibility. So much so that the captain of Israel denied that even the Lord Himself could pull off such a feat if He opened the windows of heaven (2 Kings 7:2).
To this, Elisha assured him that he would see it but not enjoy it.
The next day, a few lepers determined to go to the Syrian camp to possibly find food, and they discovered that it was abandoned. In the night, Yahweh caused them to hear the sound of innumerable chariots, probably from His own host.
As a result, the Syrians’ possessions were freely plundered by the starving Israelites. Even more, just as Elisha predicted, the influx of goods was such that prices plummeted. Then, as the people gathered to buy and sell, the captain was trampled to death at the very gate where he doubted God.
Bringing it Home:
Let us never forget that nothing is impossible for the One who flung the stars into the night sky. The One who spun the earth like a top and set it in motion around the sun. The One who engineered both galaxies and the ant, the mountains, oceans, and the snowflake.
The Israelite captain thought not even the storehouses of heaven could have supplied enough to reverse their starving circumstances and economic plight—but where there is a God, there is a way.
The Lord of Heaven has never been found in dire straits. The Almighty is never caught between a rock and a hard place. If He wills it, there is always a way—no matter what man may think.
Challenge:
Do I ever doubt God’s ability to do the seemingly impossible in my life?
God is never in a bind. He is never out of options, and there are no limitations that can be placed upon Him.
[1] John H Walton, Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary (Old Testament): 1 & 2 Kings, 1 & 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009), 138.