Naaman - Demonstration of the Sovereignty of God

Introduction: Transition to Naaman and the Sovereignty of God

0:05 Let us turn together to 2 Kings, chapter 5, as we continue in our studies of the record God has given to us of the fascinating life and ministry of the great prophet Elisha. I have sought to underscore again and again in the expositions of chapter 4 that in each of the miracles performed in that chapter, there is an emphasis upon the love and faithfulness of God to care for the godly remnant in a time when the storm clouds of divine judgment are about to fall upon the ten northern tribes of Israel because, but now as we move into chapter 5, there is an abrupt transition. The passage opens with the words,

1:04 Now Naaman, captain of the hosts of the king of Syria, was a great man. With what we might almost call a rude abruptness, the writer under the impulse of the Spirit takes us from this very intimate, intimate, and very detailed acquaintance with some of the faithful remnant in Israel and the concern of God for their well-being and sets before us a pagan idolater, sets before us a military leader of a warlike and ravenous nation, and causes this entire section, one of the most detailed and lengthy of all of the miracles recorded in the book of Isaiah, to be destroyed. miracles recorded in the life of Elisha, to center in the character, the condition, and then the wonderful power of God manifested toward this heathen military figure.

2:10 And since this is one of the most detailed and lengthy of all of the miracles recorded in the life of Elisha, I will attempt to give to it in subsequent expositions the same care in laying out, the facts of the narrative, and then seeking to discern the message and the abiding implications of the narrative. But in the light of the weather conditions, in the light of the fact that we have a congregational meeting to follow, I want to speak relatively more briefly this evening. And rather than direct your attention to meticulous details in a verse-by-verse exposition of the passage, I want us to stand as it were, just over the passage, and look down upon it, and seek to behold the forest before we start walking through the trees, lest it be said of us, we did not see the forest for the trees. And what I suggest is that you meditate with me tonight, and seek to glean from this passage three very wonderful and fundamental things concerning the character of God, as revealed in this incident which has been read in your hearing. First of all, I would encourage you to see with me in this passage

3:37 a marvelous demonstration of the unrivaled sovereignty of God. Behold, in this passage, a demonstration of the unrivaled sovereignty of God. The scriptures declare that...

God's Sovereignty in Pagan Military Operations

3:56 The God whom we worship is the God who is in the heavens, who has done whatsoever He has pleased, Psalm 115 and verse 3. He is the God of whom Paul writes in Ephesians 1.11 and says He works all things after the counsel of His own will. Well, the God who declares Himself to be that kind of God in such texts as I have quoted in your hearing is the God who demonstrates in the concrete realities of the intricate details of life that that's no poetic flight when the psalmist says, Our God is in the heavens, He has done whatsoever He has pleased. The unrivaled sovereignty of God asserted in such texts, as Psalm 115 and Ephesians 1, is again and again demonstrated in the narratives of Holy Scripture. And I would suggest that you notice with me this unrivaled sovereignty of God, first of all, as it is underscored with respect to pagan military operations. Now, if there's one place you would expect that God would be vacant as far as the exercise of His own,

5:19 for that's what we mean by the sovereignty of God that He governs and He rules, it would be when a heathen nation establishes an army, not for self-defense, but for aggressive conquest, for brutal, ruthless conquest. Surely, God's sovereignty is suspended when men motivated by lust for power, lust for land, lust for influence, and a multitude of other sinful passions engage in the kind of aggressive conquest that marked the Syrian nation. And yet the passage before us says with artless simplicity, this Naaman, captain of the host of the king of Syria, was a great man with his master and honorable because by him, the Lord... by him, the Lord...

6:19 by him, the Lord... had given victory unto Syria.

6:23 And here the scripture asserts that every conquest that was realized under the leadership of this great military figure in the land of Syria was a military conquest that was effected by the hand of Jehovah. The great God of covenant faithfulness, the Eternal I Am, is here said to be the one, who had given victory into the hand of Naaman. And surely we see in such words as these an assertion of the unrivaled sovereignty of the living God in the midst of all of the wicked motives that would move the individual soldiers and their leaders and their king to engage in conquest, in pillage, in rape, in murder. Yet it is said in all of this, the hand of God has not lost hold of the reins of that conquering army. Without in any way being responsible for the sinful passions, each individual soldier, each individual military leader, every lustful king who sent them out in these wars of conquest will answer to God for his sin. And yet the scripture tells us,

7:49 that Naaman was great because by him Jehovah had given victory for Syria.

God's Sovereignty in Disappointing Providences

7:59 And then in the second place, see the unrivaled sovereignty of God in what we would call the disappointing providences towards his children. We read in verse 2 that the Syrians had gone out in bands, these marauding, raiding bands who went out in what we would call, sort of commando sorties. This was before the general invasion. It came later in which we had what was called the Assyrian captivity in which the northern tribes went into captivity.

8:33 But at this time, Syria would send out its bands of soldiers and they would come down from the north into the northern kingdoms and they would carry out these commando raids. Well, on a certain day they carried out such a raid and we read, they brought away captives. They brought a small group of captives out of the land of Israel, a little maiden, and she waited on Naaman's wife. And she said to her mistress, would that my Lord were with the prophet that is in Samaria, then he would recover him.

9:06 Try to imagine the picture on that given day when one of these marauding bands came into a little village in Israel. And in that village there was a family that was obviously one of the 7,000 who had not bowed the knee to God. In the midst of that abounding idolatry, they worshipped the living and true God. Furthermore, they instructed their children in the ways of that God.

9:34 They told their children of who this God was. Furthermore, they acquainted their children, if there were children, plural, with the prophets of God. And at that time, the prophet in Israel who was none other than Elisha. And here on that day, when that marauding band comes into a little village, they enter this home and they seize a daughter and off they go and take her captive.

10:02 No doubt there were worshippers of Baal in that village whose homes remained intact. And one can only imagine something of the cloud of heaviness that hung upon that godly household the night after this marauding band had come and had taken away that daughter. And the questions that these true worshippers of Jehovah may have asked in their minds, why, Lord? We've sought to honor you in the midst of all the idolatry.

10:33 We've refused to bow the knee to Baal. We've sought to rear a godly seed to your praise. We've sought to fulfill the mandate of Deuteronomy. Thou shalt speak of my words when you rise up and when you sit down.

10:48 Lord, why? No doubt that godly mother and father in Israel had a host of unanswered questions in the face of a strange providence. Will our daughter be made the slave of some soldier's lust? Will she be made the concubine of some man who's ruled by ungoverned passion?

11:11 What will become of our daughter? Unanswered questions, that which we can only call the dark and the foreboding providence. But surely if the passage teaches us anything, it teaches us to behold with amazement the unrivaled sovereignty of God in the midst of what to us are disappointing providences towards His children. When those men, motivated by wicked passions, under directions of wicked leaders, came and with wicked hands seized that pure young maiden and took her by force back into Syria, God was planting her there in order to be a witness to the truth and livingness of Jehovah. God was setting the stage to perform the mighty miracle in the body and in the soul of this great pagan military leader. That's all very plain to us. Mr. Stripling read the passage in about three and a half minutes.

12:25 And that's all very plain to us. But it wasn't plain to that mother and father the night after the home was bereft of a darling daughter. It wasn't plain to that frightened young woman in the presence of strong military men taken with rude hands and by force carried back into a strange land where there was a strange tongue and strange customs. And foreign deities and all of the manifestations of the ungodliness that is attendant upon pagan religion.

12:58 All of that seems strange. We may look back from the perspective of the completed story and stand in amazement at the sovereignty of God. This disappointing providence was nothing other than a commentary upon that which the same Holy Spirit who recorded this incident would record through the pen of the Apostle Paul. And we know that to them that love God all things work together for good.

13:32 And here in the passage God is teaching us what Romans 8.28 means in the concrete realities of disappointment that is triggered by inequity and injustice and by ungodliness. And in it we are called upon to take into our hearts the truth which we sang a few moments ago. God does move in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.

14:05 He does plant His footsteps in the sea and ride upon the storms. Blind unbelief is sure to err and scan His work in vain. That godly man and woman that godly young woman scanning the work of God could only scan it in vain. God is His own interpreter and He will make it plain even as He made it plain in this incident.

God's Sovereignty in Dispensing Grace and Deliverance

14:35 And then behold in this passage the unrivaled sovereignty of God not only in pagan military operations in disappointing providences toward His children but in dispensing grace and deliverance to men according to His own will. Why should Naaman be singled out among all the lepers of Syria? Why should this godly girl be in his home? Why should she have cultivated a relationship of confidence with Naaman's wife?

15:16 Why should Naaman and his wife be on such good terms that they obviously communicate freely and trustfully and respectfully so that the intimations from the lips of a little girl coming through a wife are passed on with credibility to a husband? There are couples here who don't even have that and are Christians in whom communication is so broken down that this never would have happened in your home. Why? Why?

15:46 Well, our Lord Himself gives us the answer to that question in Luke's Gospel, chapter 4. Luke's Gospel, chapter 4. Our Lord has come back to His hometown of Nazareth. He enters into the synagogue.

16:04 He stands up to read. The book of God is given to Him. He reads from the prophecy of Isaiah. He then declares that that prophecy is now fulfilled in their presence.

16:18 Then He says this, verse 22, and Luke says, And all bear Him witness and wondered at the words of grace, which proceeded out of his mouth. And they said, Is not this Joseph's son? And he said unto them, reading their thoughts, Doubtless ye will say unto me this parable, Physician, heal thyself. Whatsoever we have heard done in Capernaum, do also here in thine own country.

16:46 Excuse me. They say, now look, we're your kinfolk. You've done great things in other places. Don't we have a little niche on your miracle-working power?

16:54 We're your friends. We're your long-time companions. We played ball with you out in the schoolyard. You remember us, Lord?

17:01 I played first base, remember? They did a little name-dropping. And he read their minds. Surely if you've done these mighty works in other places, we have some claim upon them.

17:14 You're one of our hometown boys. Do your stuff. Then our Lord answers, first of all, with another parabolic saying, No prophet is acceptable in his own country. There is not that groundwork of confidence and expectation of faith.

17:32 They allow the previous acquaintance to blur the true identity. But then he goes on to say, and this is the part that is relevant to our text, But of a truth I say unto you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, who was an Israelite, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when there came a great famine over all the land, and unto none of them was Elijah sent. The Israelites' prophet in the presence of a multitude of starving widows in Israel is not sent to one of those Israelites. They have no special claim upon the prophet of God because they have blood ties. But our Lord says, He was sent only to Zarephath, outside the borders of Israel, a Gentile Phoenician town in the land of Sidon. And there our Lord underscores it. And they knew their geography well.

18:37 In the land of the... The prophet is sent to a woman that was a widow, and there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elijah, an Israelite, laboring in the midst of his fellow Israelites.

19:00 There were many lepers. But our Lord says, None of them was cleansed but only Nahum in the Syrian. And they were all filled with wrath in the synagogue as they heard these things. You see what our Lord was saying?

19:17 Our Lord was saying that God is absolutely sovereign in the dispensing of His mercy and of His grace. Blood ties and physical associations in geographical proximity have nothing to do with the basis upon which God shows mercy and has compassion. And this, you see, angered them as it angers people today. They don't want a God on His throne with reference to pagan, military, godless endeavors.

19:56 They don't want a God on His throne in the dark providences that come to the people of God and the last place they will have God on His throne is in grace. But God occupies a throne of unrivaled sovereignty in the government of men and nations and armies and in the dispensing of His grace and His mercy to sinners. The language of Romans 9.15 is really the language of our passage.

God's Sovereignty in Governing Hearts and Minds

20:28 I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy. And when God willed to show mercy to Naaman, a pagan worshiper of the god Rimen, a military man, and there's nothing to indicate but that he was the embodiment of all that the Syrian military might and the Syrian military machine was known for, cruelty and all of the rest. And God says, I will make him a vessel of mercy. And then behold, in the fourth place, the sovereignty of God, the absolute sovereignty of God in governing the hearts and the minds of men. Why was this little girl's report received as credible? I have no answer but that God disposed the pagan wife of this pagan man to believe her. Why did Naaman so believe the report as to risk his own relationship to the king to stake all upon it?

21:41 I don't know except to say that God was governing the judgment and the decisions of these men. Further on, when Naaman flies into a rage at the end of verse 12, so he turned and went away in a rage. He had a temper fit. He blew his cork.

22:05 He said, look, first of all, I come with all these gifts. I come in the name of my king. And that prophet doesn't even come out and say howdy. Doesn't even give me a handshake.

22:16 He sends some little lackey out to tell me to go down and duck in a dirty river. Treat a hotshot general that way. I'm used to people clicking their heels and throwing salutes. Yes, sir.

22:34 If you're going to insult me by telling me to go wash in rivers, send me back to my own. They got it all over your Jordan. He's mad. And yet, though he's in a rage, in the presence of the man upon whom all his hopes are pinned and he won't listen to his words, some lowly lackey of his comes along and says, now, my father, let's be reasonable.

22:59 And lo and behold, he talks him back into sanity. Now, how did those words prevail? I have no explanation but the absolute sovereignty of God. The words of a prophet throw him into a temper fit and the words of a little underling bring him back to sanity.

Pastoral Application of God's Sovereignty

23:17 Behold in this, dear people, the people of God, the absolute sovereignty of God governing the hearts and the minds of men. And you see, this God is our God. And you say, well, what does all of that say to us? Well, my friend, it says worlds to us.

23:37 We live in a day in which there is savor rattling around the world. It's enough to make your flesh stand up when they start giving the statistics in conjunction with the salt agreement. And when they start talking about hundreds of missiles and missiles with 10 or 12 or 15 warheads and every warhead more explosive power than all the bombs dropped on Berlin in the Second World War, my mind blows and my flesh crawls. And I say, oh, God, where will it all come to?

24:12 And then I read a passage like this and say, thank you, God. No one can push a button to activate a missile. No one can join what needs to be joined to fuse a warhead without the hand of Almighty God in absolute control. Dear child of God, that gives me comfort.

24:37 And when I see God allowing a wicked, cruel man like an Idi Amin to come to power, then I see him top. I bless and praise the God who is upon his throne. Living in the day in which we live, you and I better have an unshakable confidence that the unrivaled sovereignty of God extends to the military decisions and operations of the most godless of men and of nations. Without it, you're going to become one of those who joins the society of the Christian paranoids. You're going to go get you a hunk of land up in the mountains of North Carolina, and you're going to stock it with dry foods, and you're going to bury some gold coins in the earth and sit there and tremble and be worth nothing to God or man. Or you're going to look at all of this as a Christian and say, Our God is in the heavens. He hath done whatsoever he pleases in the language of Daniel.

25:54 He does according to his will among the armies of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth, and none can stay his hand and say unto him, What doest thou? That's our God, dear people. This doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of God is not an abstraction. It's the bedrock basis of our peace living in times such as these.

26:21 Then we can have absolute confidence in the sovereignty of God in our disappointing providences. Dr. Williams was sharing some of the kind providences God gave him in coming here. It reads like a storybook.

26:37 I hope sometime he's here long enough that in an informal church meeting he could tell the story. It reads like something out of a storybook. He said nothing like that ever happened to him before, and I doubt it'll ever happen again. He'd be so spoiled rotten he couldn't live with the rest of us.

26:52 Cancelled flights all around the world, and yet when he gets on the flights that he shouldn't get on, time after time a Christian right next to him, giving him a name of another Christian. Instead of staying in hotels, staying in the homes of Christians, being taken from one place to another, being given the name of a Christian congressman, spending a day in Washington, eating with him, sitting in the Senate. Unbelievable. Well, as a Christian, when I hear all of that, it's easy for me to say, look at the providence of God, pulling all the strings with the airline attendants and with the computers and all the rest.

27:29 But my friend, has God vacated his throne with the disappointing providences? Does he just pull the strings when everything's gooey-gummy? Sweet and sugary? No, no.

27:43 When God allows what seems to be an evidence, why water drags those ruthless soldiers into a land of paganism? God says, my answer will come in its own time, trust me. Faith is never more true to itself than when it is vigorously exercised in the dark. The dark, thick cloud of a providence that brings grief, a providence that seems to shatter our understanding of what is right and good and rational. It is then, child of God, that we learn what it is truly to trust. Even ungodly people, when everything's going well, they'll make a little flippant acknowledgement, I must be in good with the man upstairs. You've heard that kind of language, haven't you?

28:51 Somebody must be looking down on me and smiling. You see, even the most godless are willing to acknowledge there's something bigger than themselves pulling the strings when everything meshes well. But what's the first thing they do when things don't go well? They come to the Christian and say, where's your God of love?

29:11 Look what happened to me! Where's your God of love? Look what happened to him! And it's the child of God who alone is able to say in the midst of dark providences, that's my God.

29:24 I will love him when his hand seems to be against me in the language of Job, though he slay me. Yet will I trust him. It was easy to trust when the hand of God was putting out all those goodies for Job. Richest man, all those kids, all those sheep, all those cattle, all those camels!

29:48 He says, if the same hand that conferred all of those things upon me comes to me with a clean hand, a gleaming sword, and says, this is to be plunged in your breast, though he slay me! Yet will I trust him. Dear child of God, that's the message of this passage. Behold the absolute sovereignty of God in the dark providences.

30:14 Behold his sovereignty in the matter of dispensing grace and deliverance to men. As we see God introducing a pagan, after all of this intimate insight, human interest, shaded with beautiful coloring of the tenderness of Jehovah to his own in chapter 4. There we are! Naaman the Syrian!

30:42 And then our Lord's comments upon it. Many lepers in Israel in the days of Elisha. Why did God pass them all by? Because he willed to.

30:53 No leper had a claim upon God that God should heal him. To heal any leper was all of grace. And he chose to magnify his grace by healing a pagan leper. And you know if you and I don't come to grips with this, it could drive us to distraction.

31:15 We see that son or daughter, we see that child, that man, that woman, under the most wonderful influences, calculated to produce sensitivity to God and his truth and his salvation. And then God reaches down to an utterly uninstructed, unsensitized, raw American pagan who couldn't quote one verse of the Bible if he was stood at a wall and with a firing squad saying, quote the verse or you've had it. Couldn't quote a verse. God will bring a Christian in his path and in a half an hour of opening up the gospel, his heart is subdued and he's brought into a genuine experience of the grace of God turned around and becomes a pillar in the church. And you stand back and say, God, this doesn't make sense. Yes it does. Now Naaman the Syrian, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy.

32:20 And that ought to give us hope as we pray for the conversion of sinners. You think of that person in your place of business, on your block, in your school, you'd say the last person in the world that I can ever think having the praises of God upon his or her lips, sitting here with eternity hymnal in his hands or her hands, singing the praises. That's the last person. I cannot conceive of that one becoming a Christian.

32:46 That may just be the one in which the Lord magnifies his grace. So you see Christian, we have no grounds to despair of any sinner. Because when God wills to have mercy, he can have mercy on the Naaman's of our generation. Sunk in the darkness of paganism, hearts filled with unscriptural and ungodly attitudes and motives, he is able to lay hold of them and transform them and to bring from their lips the confession such as we find in the lips of this man.

33:19 I know that there is no God but Israel's God. And he says, let me take back some earth. Because in his uninstructed mind, you see, the deity was tied to the nation of that deity. And he says, I want to worship only him.

33:37 Let me take some of your land back to Syria so that I can erect an altar and offer sacrifices only to that true God. You see, that not only is the basis of hope as we pray for sinners, it should also be the basis of striking fear to the hearts of some of you who are privileged. My friend, has it ever gripped you that God may magnify his grace by bypassing you in your indifference and insensitivity? And if he does, you'll be damned for your own insensitivity.

34:11 The overtures of grace and mercy that go forth to you in this place, that go forth from your home, from your family altar, are sincere and bona fide overtures. Some of you have the mistaken notion that these influences will continue to distill upon your spirit and keep you, as it were, from being utterly abandoned by God, so that you can sin with a high hand and curse God and trample underfoot all laws of decency and morality. My friend, listen! Don't you presume upon the grace of God.

34:51 God owes you nothing but damnation. You better take the place of a humble suppliant and cry to God to have mercy upon you and to magnify his grace in your salvation. And then we ought to take comfort from the fact that God's sovereignty is exercised in governing the hearts and minds of men. So often, as the people of God, in the midst of the little details of life, you're going to apply for a certain job, and you've prayed, and you go to the personnel agent, the personnel manager, and you seek to present yourself in your best light, and you know that four other men or women are applying for that job.

35:35 What do you do? You cut your nails and fret, and then if you lose the job, go back and rake over all your sins. What a wonderful thing to know when you walk into the office of the personnel manager. The heart of kings is in the hand of the Lord.

35:51 And in this area, the whole matter of housing, especially if you've got kids. Everyone assumes kids are terrors, because most are. And they assume if they turn their house loose to little terrors, all they'll have is a little messed up house, and it won't be a little house on the prairie, or a little house in Bloomfield, that nobody will want, or a little house in Montclair. What do you do?

36:13 These things in which we must have favorable decisions based upon the judgments of men's minds who are not influenced by Christian principles. We live with it all the time. Who'll get the promotion with the increase of pay that will help put the kids through the Christian school? Who?

36:32 You could ask a thousand questions. My friend, see how practical this doctrine is? Do you believe that Almighty God governs and disposes the minds and the judgments of men as He did in this passage? Giving the wife of a pagan general the heart to listen to a little Hebrew girl talking about a prophet who heals leprosy?

36:55 Something utterly unheard of! Leprosy is a living death! Everybody knows that! But she says back in Israel there's a living God who can cancel the living death of leprosy.

37:05 And she believes her! Believes her enough to tell her husband! And he believes her! Enough to tell the king!

37:12 And he believes it! Enough to send the letter of introduction! And then when he's about to blow the whole thing through his own pride, God uses one of his little lackeys to bring him back to sanity. Can you read that without standing back in amazement?

37:28 This is our God, dear people! That's the God who's got His hand upon that landlord, upon that personnel, that personnel manager who has His hand upon anyone with whom we have dealings as the people of God. Christ is head over all things to His church with respect to His church and the well-being of the people of God. Well, I had hoped to touch on looking at this passage and seeing the unfathomable wisdom of God and then the unbounded love of God, but that'll wait for another night.

Conclusion and Prayer

38:06 I've vowed to myself I'd preach for only half an hour in that vicinity. So to be true to my own conscience, I'm going to stop right here, and I hope you have enough upon which to meditate, upon which to reflect with joy and with faith. It's a wonderful thing to be a Christian, isn't it? To know that the God who is our Father is the unrivaled King of the universe with a kingship that impinges on all of these aspects that we've seen in this simple little story, that most of us heard when we were in Sunday school.

38:41 Little did we know how rich it was in the great doctrine of the sovereignty of God. May the Lord make these meditations meet and drink to our souls for His praise and for our good. Let us pray. O our Father, how good it is to contemplate who You are, to meditate upon the grandeur and the glory of Your absolute sovereignty.

39:16 We praise You that You are an enthroned God. None can stay Your hand or say unto You, What are You doing? We thank You that You need not give account of Your ways to men. For who has known Your mind or first taught You or given to You?

39:35 O Lord, we acknowledge the wickedness of questioning that You do reign, the ungodliness of chafing against Your dark providences in our lives, the wickedness of questioning Your right to show mercy to whom You will show mercy, the unbelief that has left us trembling and fretful when there seems to have been an unfair judgment made against us by men in the world. Lord, forgive us that we've not believed that You were governing and controlling the dispositions and minds and judgments of men. O God, write upon our hearts, work into the very fiber of our souls this living confidence in Your present and all-pervasive sovereignty that will cause us to walk surely in the midst of an age of uncertainty. Be pleased to trouble those who have never embraced the overtures of Your mercy. O may the thought that You could justly pass them by, but that You yet extend mercy, make them anxious. O may it make them earnest.

40:52 May they become suppliants, crying with that poor blind beggar, Son of David, have mercy upon me. Silence the raging of their pride and their unbelief as You did in the case of Naaman. And may they be willing to accept of Your way of deliverance by plunging into that fountain open for sin and uncleanness that is found in the Lord Jesus. We thank You again for this day, for Your presence, for the blessing and joy of being with You in the midst of Your gathered people.

41:31 Receive our praise and may the fragrance of our day together rest upon us and abide with us and make us more useful as light and salt in this generation. We ask with thankfulness in Jesus' name. Amen.