H. Michael Brewer
Crescent Springs Presbyterian
14 August 2005
BOUNTY FOR BEGGARS
2 Kings 7:3-8
We turn today to yet another Elisha story, wonderful story although it involves Elisha only in a
peripheral way. The Arameans, in an ongoing struggle against Israel, have decided to strike a real blow
at their enemies. The Aramean army encircles Samaria, the capital city of Israel, trapping the inhabitants
inside and forcing them to choose between surrendering to the Arameans—who will surely slaughter
them—or slowly starving to death inside the city walls. The Israelites choose hunger over execution, but
the famine grows so terrible in the city that a donkey’s head sells for 80 pieces of silver. In fact, the
desperate people have succumbed to cannibalism, mothers devouring their own children.
The Jewish king blames God for this suffering, and he decides to put God’s servant Elisha to death.
With an armed guard, the king bursts into Elisha’s home, and says, “I’m sick of waiting on the Lord.
Why should I hope in God any longer?”
Elisha says to the king, “By this time tomorrow, a single shekel will buy a bushel of finest flour or
two bushels of barley. The Lord has spoken.”
Without getting bogged down in currency conversion, suffice it to say that the equivalent of Elisha’s
prediction in modern terms is that tomorrow morning you’ll see gasoline for sale at ten cents a gallon.
The captain of the king’s guard snickers and says, “Even if the windows of heaven opened, such a thing
cannot possibly come true.”
“You’ll see,” said Elisha. “You’ll see it with your own eyes. But you won’t taste a single bite.”
Now listen to today’s Scripture reading:
Now there were four leprous men outside the city gate, who said to one another, “Why should we
sit here until we die? If we say, ‘Let us enter the city,’ the famine is in the city, and we shall die there;
but if we sit here, we shall also die. Therefore, let us desert to the Aramean camp; if they spare our
lives, we shall live; and if they kill us, we shall but die.” So they arose at twilight to go to the Aramean
camp; but when they came to the edge of the Aramean camp, there was no one there at all. For the
Lord had caused the Aramean army to hear the sound of chariots, and of horses, the sound of a great
army, so that they said to one another, “The king of Israel has hired the kings of the Hittites and the
kings of Egypt to fight against us.” So they fled away in the twilight and abandoned their tents, their
horses, and their donkeys leaving the camp just as it was, and fled for their lives. When these leprous
men had come to the edge of the camp, they went into a tent, ate and drank, carried off silver, gold,
and clothing, and went and hid them. Then they came back, entered another tent, carried off things from
it, and went and hid them.
I want to lift up three different aspects of this story. First I want you to take note of the reliability of
God. When things seem hopeless in the story, God comes through. When God promises to provide an
abundance of food, God keeps the promise.
I heard a story from a Baptist minister who was taking flying lessons. He said one day during a
lesson, the instructor told him to put the plane into a steep dive. He did so and the engine suddenly
stalled and the plane began to plunge out-of-control. He looked over at the instructor, but the instructor
was just looking at him. After a few seconds, which seemed like hours, his mind began to function again
and he pulled the plane out of the dive. After the crisis passed, he turned to the instructor and said, “We
almost died. We could have crashed. Why didn’t you do something?” The instructor very calmly said,
“We were in no danger. There is no situation you can get this airplane into that I cannot get you out of.
If you want to learn to fly, trust me and don’t be afraid.”
The angry Jewish king asks Elisha, “Why should I trust in the Lord any longer?” The answer, of
course, is implicit in the story. God is right by our side, and as long as we trust and obey God, we’ll
never get into any situation that our Lord cannot get us out of.
The second thing to notice in this story is the lepers and how they react to God’s goodness. The
lepers abandon the apparently doomed city and they wander without hope into the Aramean camp. To
their amazement the find that God has driven away the Aramean troops, who have fled in such haste
that they leave behind all their provisions, all their animals, all their wealth plundered from other cities.
The lepers are joyful beyond all expression. They eat and drink their fill, then they gather up armloads of
gold and silver and hide the money away. God has been good to them and they relish that goodness.
You know the story about the guy who dreamed he was in heaven? An angel took him by the arm
and said, “Let me show you around. We’ve got quite an operation up here.” The angel took the fellow
to a huge warehouse where thousands of other angels were bustling around with bags of mail, and the
angel said, “This is where we process all the prayer requests we get—and we get a lot.” Then the two
of them went to another room, equally large and equally busy. “This is the blessing distribution center,”
the angel explained. “Form here we ship out all the answers to prayer and the blessings.” They
proceeded down a corridor and past a tiny room about the size of a closet, where a single angelic clerk
was dozing behind his desk. “What’s this office?” the newcomer asked. His angel guide seemed
embarrassed. “This is where we receive and file the thank you’s for blessings received. It’s not a very
busy office. A lot of people forget to thank God after they get what they need.”
That’s the lepers—at first. In the beginning they are so caught up in their own good fortune that they
think only of themselves. Only a little later do they realize how selfish they are acting to keep all this
good fortune to themselves. So they set out to say thank you in the most concrete way possible—by
sharing God’s goodness with others. They go into the city and spread the word that food and
abundance and life is available for all who will receive it.
It has always seemed to me that this story is a wonderful parable about the Christian life in general
and evangelism in particular. God gives us so much in life, and we can hoard that or we can share it with
a world in need. We can take God’s gifts for granted for ourselves or we can say thank you by
spreading that grace around.
Someone has said that evangelism is one beggar telling another where to find bread. That’s a pretty
good definition of what God calls us to do as children of Christ. We have this unspeakable grace God
has poured into our souls. How selfish, how hard-hearted, how loveless if we don’t tell others how to
find what we have found—and how disappointing for God.
There’s one more aspect of the story to consider. We can’t leave this passage without sparing a
thought for the captain of the king’s guard. He’s the fellow who scorned Elisha’s prophecy, the one
who said, “This kind of bounty couldn’t appear even if God opened the very windows of heaven.” In
the face of his skepticism, Elisha assured the captain that he would indeed see barley selling two bushels
for a shekel, but he wouldn’t taste God’s providence.
Sure enough, the captain was on guard duty the next day at the city gate, and when the people of the
city heard of the food in the abandoned Aramean camp, there was such a stampede that the captain
was trampled to death.
I hope you don’t think the moral of the story is that God will strike all doubters dead. I suspect a
more subtle lesson. As long as we doubt that God will provide for us, then we will have to provide for
ourselves. I don’t just mean working for a living. No, I mean the danger that life will turn into a
relentless struggle to amass enough money to see us through any emergency, enough insurance to see us
through the worst disaster, enough medical coverage to provide for any illness or injury, enough
resources to protect us from…life.
That’s how we have to provide for ourselves if we can’t count on God. And as long as we’re trying
to provide for ourselves by ourselves, we can never be sure we have enough. And as long as we’re
afraid we don’t have enough, we will be uneasy about the future and unwilling to share in the present.
That’s the problem with the captain. He just doesn’t believe God will come through in the clinch.
And because he doubts God’s providence, there’s no way for this fellow to participate in God’s
generosity, neither as a receiver nor as a giver.
God is generous and there is a place at the banquet table for each of us, a place saved just for you
with your name on a place card on the table. But our place at the table remains empty as long as we live
tight-fisted lives serving a tight-fisted image of God. Our place remains empty not because God turns us
away, but because fear and doubt and selfishness prevent our coming to the table.
So many Bible stories and so many of Jesus’ parables end with a great party. Indeed, when we get
to the book of Revelation, we discover that the whole, long story of creation and redemption ends with
a party. This story of the siege and the hunger and the desperate beggars is no exception. The story
ends with laughter, singing, dancing, the ringing of cups, the smell of bread warm from the oven and the
taste of sweet wine, a great banquet where everybody has enough and so nobody is afraid to share.
Soli Deo Gloria!