Things New and Old

A Gospel Message

The following are extracts from the Gospel Message section of Things New and Old.

Naaman and the Little Maid

Please read 2 Kings 5:1-14

The Little Maid

I want to speak about Naaman the Syrian and I want to speak about the little maid. But the overarching responsibility that I have today is to speak about the Gospel of God's grace, the story of how God is today reconciling sinners to Himself through the Lord Jesus.

But let's start with the little maid. I think there are some little girls, some little maids listening today, so this message is especially for you! The time we have just read about was a very unsettled time between the land of Syria and Israel. There was an uneasy truce, and that truce was upset from time to time by raiding parties who stole across the border to steal away the men and women and sadly, little boys and girls too, to take them prisoner and to make them slaves. Those little boys and girls had a value, a market value, and this little girl ended up in Naaman’s household. She had duties to perform for the lady of the house. We don't know exactly what those duties were; she may have had to make the beds, or to run and fetch things for her mistress. We don't even know what her name was, but like some of you, her name might have been Emma or Lily or Sophia or Kirsten or Elena. Maybe you can identify with this little girl?  She's famous for what she said, and what she did and she had a great impact in her time, and 3000 years later we are still talking about her.

We can be pretty sure she was missing her mum and dad; she'd been stolen away, and now found herself in a land of strangers and foreigners all speaking in a strange language. Suddenly she finds herself having to work for a living, for her bread and jam (if they had jam). Her mistress was married to a great Syrian general. You would imagine that this little girl would be angry and bitter about what had happened to her, stolen away from home comforts, from the love that she had from her parents. But she shows no signs of bitterness or anger and instead shows signs of love and care. It’s as though she was a student of Colossians 3:12, “Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering”. Instead of saying ‘Oh that I was back in Samaria with my mum and dad’, she says ‘Oh that my master was in Samaria before the prophet and he would heal him of his leprosy.’

You know, she had had good parents, parents who loved her. You may ask, how can you say that? What do you know about her parents? Well, just look at the evidence. The evidence is that she knew a lot about the prophet in Samaria, whose name was Elisha. In fact, she knew more than the king of Samaria, having had parents who loved her enough to share with her the stories of the great prophet of God.

Elisha the Prophet

The Scriptures of the Old Testament are for our instruction; in many ways they're setting the scene for the coming of Jesus. They speak of Him. You remember when He spoke to the two on the way home to Emmaus, dejected and fed up and disappointed that the person they believed was the Messiah had not redeemed Israel. He began from Moses and from all the prophets and spoke to them of the things concerning Himself.  He said to them, “Ought not the Christ to have suffered these things and enter into His glory.” (Luke 24:26). The Old Testament prophets show that God was going to send His Son and He would be called Emmanuel, meaning “God with us”. In the meantime, God had provided Himself with representatives and ambassadors, and Elisha the prophet was just one of those ambassadors who stood up for the rights of God and spoke of Him, even though he was neglected, misjudged and marginalised by his very own king.  Elisha was one of the greatest prophets and had done marvellous things and he reminds us a lot of Jesus, who was going to follow him 930 years later. He was preparing the way already and speaking of the One that was to come in his actions and in his behaviour.

Now as I have said, this little maid had loving and caring parents; they had taken the time to tell her about Elisha, to tell her about their God. And parents who love and want the best for their children today must tell them about Jesus. So, girls and boys, ask your parents to tell you about Jesus, and if you know about Jesus, you'll be ready to tell other people about Him; you'll be in a position to do a lot of good. Don't be shy to talk about Jesus—people need Him!

This little girl had heard all about the exploits of Elisha and all the wonderful things he'd done. Did you know that Elisha's name in Hebrew means “God is salvation”? God is salvation! Elisha was known for his healing and saving powers. He healed the toxic spring of water near Jericho, making it safe and pure to drink. He came in for an impoverished widow, providing her and her two boys with a miracle that involved filling stone jars with valuable olive oil that she could then sell to make money to live on. He restored to life a boy at Shunem who was dead. And the fact that the boy had lived at all was only because of Elisha’s earlier intercession with God. He made edible a pot of stew that was found to be poisonous when the sons of the prophets started eating it.  Elisha even got involved with the small and mundane things, even making an axe head to float in the river when somebody carelessly lost it. And then there was a big thing that he did: he led a whole army of blinded soldiers into the middle of Samaria and provided them with a meal when they'd come with no good intentions. He did it all without bloodshed; in all these things, he demonstrated the grace and mercy of God towards men, which was going to be witnessed in full when Jesus came.
Now the little maid, even though she'd been stolen away and made a slave in a faraway place, was tender hearted towards her mistress and aware of the sad, terrible fact that the master of the house was a leper.   It laid hold of her emotions and caused her to cry out this cry: “Oh, would that my Lord was before the prophet that is in Samaria! then he would cure him of his leprosy.”

Leprosy and Sin

Now we don't come across lepers much in the United Kingdom. But the horrid fact is that, even today, there are estimated to be 200,000 lepers in the world diagnosed each year. So, the total number is far, far greater. Someone is diagnosed with the disease every two minutes. Leprosy is far from over; 57% of the lepers today live in India. I've seen lepers in India, their faces eroded by the disease. I've seen fingers missing from their hands and stubs of feet, where their toes have fallen off, because this insidious disease eats the flesh away from the body. It happens because the nerves no longer feel pain, and infection and disease take hold. It was feared and rightly feared, for the horrible, devastating effect it would have on somebody's life. It was ultimately a killer disease in those days, a slow, slow eroding death. It would seem that Naaman’s disease was in its early stages, that it was in one place on his body, but it doesn't stop there; it grows and spreads. Remember, Naaman said in his rage that he thought the prophet would have come out and wave his hand “over the place”. It wasn't all over him yet, but there was a patch of leprosy.

Now in the Bible we have lots of instructions about leprosy. In Leviticus, we have two whole chapters given over to it, and the function of the priest in looking at the patient and deciding whether he was a leper or not.  And there was a whole set of instructions about how a man who had had leprosy and had been cured of it could be brought back into society. Because, you see, the societal effects were horrible too; the leper was excluded from his family and society. He lived outside the town, outside the city, wore torn clothes and had to wail as he walked about in case anybody came near to him. ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ they would cry, and some of them rang bells because their tongues had been eroded away. In Europe, they used to have clappers to warn people and maybe to seek for money. It's a horrible, horrible disease. It makes for hard reading, but you see leprosy in the Bible, in the Scriptures is a metaphor for sin.  It does what sin does - it comes in and destroys life.  It puts man at a distance from his God, it isolates us, and what is the cure? What is the answer to sin?

If I'm in my sins, I am unfit for the presence of God. And the wonderful thing is that God wants us in His presence. He wants to welcome us home. He has a place prepared. Jesus said to His disciples, ‘in my Father's house there are many abodes’ and He says, ‘I'm going to prepare your place.’ You see, God has got a heart that includes lepers. We're all sinners; in that sense we're all lepers and we all need a Saviour. Maybe we think it's just a little patch of sin in our lives, a little thing that we've got under control, but it's never under control.  Not until God deals with it in Christ.  The wages of sin, what is it?  Death!

Now the little maid believed that Elisha had the power to heal Naaman of his disease, so that his wife, her mistress, who was obviously distressed, could get him back sound and well. At this time, he was still able to do his job. There may have come a time when it wasn't possible for him to do his job; he wouldn't be able to ride a horse or hold the reins. He needed healing urgently. And she believed that if only he was before the prophet in Samaria, he would be cured of his leprosy. Do you know what that's called? It's called FAITH. This little maid had faith. She had faith in the power of the prophet. Do you know what faith is?  We are told in Hebrews 11:1: “Faith is the substantiating of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”. Now I'll let you into a secret that you probably know already. And that is that Elisha the prophet had never cured anybody of their leprosy. He'd never done it! And here's this little girl - triggering off a whole cascade of events resulting in a leper turning up at the door of Elisha the prophet, who had never healed leprosy before! She was convicted of this, and something fabulous was going to happen. The chain reaction was, of course, that her mistress told the master, the master told the King, Ben Haddad, King of Syria, then the King of Syria wrote a letter to the King of Israel, (who may have been Jehu at this time), asking him to arrange for Naaman to be healed of his leprosy.  Outrageous! And the King, he gets this letter and he says, ‘Look, he's looking for some opportunity to get at me to start a war!’ The relationships between Israel and Syria were on a knife edge all the time, and here the little maid unbeknown to her was almost stoking a war.

Naaman visits the house of Elisha

The King of Israel seemed to be ignorant of the existence of God's prophet and thought it was a trap. He knew that he was out of his depth and just as he's wondering what to do next and tearing his clothes, he gets a message from Elisha who says, ‘Send him to me, let him discover that there's a prophet in Israel.’ You know, God is good, God is near, don't ignore him! Naaman turns up at the door of the prophet, and he arrives with his chariots and his mules, laden down with gold and silver and fine garments. And if you work it out, it looks as though the total value of the goods in our day with inflation is almost a quarter of a million pounds. You imagine that, imagine who this man was and he is out in front of the prophet's house. I don't think it would have been a smart house; he must have thought, what am I doing here? And where's the prophet? There was nobody! And then out of the house comes Gehazi the servant with a message for him. Isn't that interesting? No prophet!

Naaman clearly thought that it was going to be expensive. His mules were laden down with all this silver and gold. But you know, God is inviting us to come and buy something without money and without price. You can't put a valuation on what God is offering in the glad tidings: offering to forgive sins, to forgive sinners, and to bring them into a relationship with Himself based on the precious blood of His Son, who died at Calvary.  There are those, of course, as we're told in Psalm 49. who depend upon their wealth and boast themselves in the abundance of their riches. “None can by any means redeem his brother nor give to God a ransom for him, for the redemption of their soul is costly and must be given up forever.”  In Isaiah 55:1, God says. “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters; and he that hath no money, come ye, buy, and eat: yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price!”

What God is offering you comes to you freely but at great cost to Himself. He's giving it as a gift. God has already paid such a high price in sending His own beloved Son to die for our sins. How can we propitiate God with our puny offerings? And even if it's worth a quarter of a million pounds, He's not interested. The value He places on the blood of Jesus is so, so high. The only way to approach God is with humility and in repentance, in acknowledging that Jesus is that one and only Saviour.

Naaman is on a steep learning curve; when he arrives at the prophet's house with his chariots and gifts, there is no prophet only a message, and I'm afraid we're in the same position today. There's no prophet, only a messenger, but the message comes from God Himself and I'm privileged to be the messenger. It's my job today to tell you about Him, to tell you the terms. The terms involve your obedience to His word, and my message is to urge you to submit to God. What was the message that Naaman received? He had to wash himself in the Jordan seven times.

Now Naaman is in a rage; it wasn't what he wanted to hear. He expected some respect; don't we like a bit of respect? Don’t we like people to make way for us? To say ‘Oh here comes the great Naaman the Syrian, look at his retinue and his chariots, look at what he's done as a great warrior’. But this is a lesson for Naaman of going down and down and down until he comes eventually to the waters of the Jordan. I'm not saying that he was a proud man, but he behaved a bit like it to my reading; however I think people liked him, underneath the power and the office, I think there was something eminently lovable about this man. Because if it wasn't so, I don't think the servants would have bothered two hoots. They might have said, ‘Look at him, he's in a rage and serve him right, he's not going to get the healing, he can't even do what he's told.’ Saul of Tarsus was like that, you know; he says: ‘I was an insolent and overbearing man’, insolent and overbearing! But God, in His mercy, He humbles us; He brings us to a place where we have to acknowledge that we need a Saviour. And if it involves going into the Jordan seven times, so be it, I want it. I'm hungry for it. I'm thirsty for salvation.

And so, his servants come to him and they say, ‘If the Prophet had bidden thee do some great thing, wouldn't you have done it? Isn’t this much better? He's just asked you to go and wash in the Jordan.’ Sometimes we need a bit of reason, don't we? Thank God for friends who may reason with us, show us the way more exactly. God invites you to come and to reason with Him. “Come now, let us reason together, saith Jehovah: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18).  That would have been balm to the ears of somebody like Naaman, to see the red patches in their skin disappear. God has the power to heal sinners, to separate them from their sins, for them to float away in the Jordan. Part of Naaman’s indignation is that the Jordan is a slow and turgid kind of river, but the Abanah and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, are crystal clear, flowing down from the mountains. They're cold, they're pure, they're bright. And he says ‘the Jordan!, but what about my rivers at home? I could have stayed there!’ But you see he needs God in his life, he's persuaded by the appeal of his servants, he humbles himself, and he goes down to the river Jordan.
By the way, I was a little bit shocked to discover that it was quite a journey.  I thought in my mind's eye that the Jordan maybe ran down the street near the prophet's house. But he had to go 25 miles to find the Jordan and probably fuming all the way. When he gets to the Jordan, what does he do? Now I've checked 29 different versions of the Bible, using the BibleHub it was easy enough. And 27 versions of the Bible, including the King James and the New King James use the word “dip”. He dipped in the water seven times. But the International Standard version and the Darby version use plunged; it's much more a Naaman thing to do, I think, to plunge.  You see him diving into the Jordan. It says that when he came out, his flesh was as the flesh of a little child, isn’t that wonderful! That God can so separate you from the disease of sin that it's as though you had never sinned! I like to think that when he went home, he would have probably rolled up his sleeve and compared his arm with the arm of the little maid. Bless her! Are we ready to share the message? Are we ready to plunge into the river of God's grace? Friend, plunge into the river of God's grace, choose life, turn your back on sin, surrender to the Saviour.

We've read about Jesus in type, now let's read about Him in actuality: Read Luke 17:11-19

Isn't that wonderful? Isn't He a wonderful Saviour? You think of these ten men standing afar off crying “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” He has compassion, He has love in His soul for every one of you listening today, the youngest to the oldest. He cares about you and He wants to deliver you from the sin that so easily defiles us. He wants to set you free so that you can stand in the presence of God, cleansed, clean, made fit for His presence; only Jesus can do that. And these ten men, I suppose they'd heard on the outside, on the fringes of society, that the great Jesus had come, the great Saviour. And they cry out to Him, ‘Master’. Is Jesus the Lord of your life? Have you given Him that place? Have you surrendered your throne to Him?

They were standing afar off, they had to, It was the law, and whether they had a bell or whether they had clappers, we don't know. But they had voices and they shout out to Him across the gap, “Jesus, Master, have compassion on us”.  And He said to them, “Go shew yourselves to the priest.”  You know, the priest would have to get the book of Leviticus down from the shelf and blow off the dust and try and find out what they were supposed to do. Perhaps it hadn't been taught them at seminary because it never happened; people who had leprosy didn't get cured of it. It was a disease that ended at death. But on the way to the priest, one of them who was a stranger, a Samaritan, was probably thinking to himself, ‘Why am I doing this? Why am I going to the Jewish priests when I'm a Samaritan?’ Remember, in John 4, the woman says. ‘Jews have nothing to do with Samaritans.’  And now Jesus had told them to do something which seemed ridiculous because they were still lepers as they went.  It was as ridiculous as plunging into the Jordan seven times when it was murky and dark and sluggish, but you see it's obedience to the Lord’s word that’s required, the obedience of faith. They went, they all got healed, they all got cured on the way.

But one man discovered something. It didn't matter if he was a Samaritan, he knew who Jesus was; he returns and he throws himself at His feet giving Him thanks with a loud voice.  I’d love to have been there, wouldn't you? To see this man healed of his disease, thanking his Saviour. How happy he would be. It's as though he knew Jesus was the great High Priest. The One who stands to make intercession for us before His God, he knows where to go. I trust you've made that journey. Find yourself at His feet, ask Him to save you from your sins, ask Him to save your soul, ask Him to make you fit for sharing the portion of the saints in light, ask Him to make a home for you.

And Jesus says ‘Were not the ten cleansed? But the nine, where are they? Where are they?’  I trust, friend, that you're going to be a real believer, a true believer. Not like the nine who disappeared into history, but like the one who is able to rise up and go his way with the knowledge of the blessing of the Saviour resting upon him.  “Thy faith has made thee well.”  It is simple, I hope I haven't made it complicated, it's so simple. And John 3:16 always comes to mind; it's a great passage to remember and as Luther said: ‘it’s the gospel in miniature’. So, if you don't understand what I've been saying, go and read John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believes on him may not perish but have life eternal.”

You see, the dark side is that some will perish. If you leave God out of your reckoning, if you don't come to the Saviour, I have to tell you there's no other way to life. But there is a certain place where people will perish - an eternal death. Friend, choose life. For His name’s sake.
 
Peter Mutton
Gospel preaching broadcast on Zoom, Warrenpoint, Dec 2020