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Transcript7 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Hey, this is a year in the Bible with daily grace. I'm Shelby and I'm here with Paul. We're in the book of Second Kings. We're talking through chapters four through six today. Paul, can you break these chapters down for us?
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B
Yeah. So we're getting more of Elisha's prophetic activity. And I think the best way we can describe these chapters is two words, weird and. But also wonderful.
- [00:28]
A
Okay. And I love the alliteration there. Two W's.
- [00:30]
B
Yeah, yeah, good, Good point. Yeah, great, great. Caught onto that. So in chapter four, we have a number of radical miracles of compassion involving Elisha. And the most notable is the resurrection of this woman's son. And there's kind of an interesting note I just want to mention quickly. The boy, when he wakes, he sneezes seven times, which is a little weird. This is the only place in the Bible we get this word for sneeze. But this number seven carries this idea of completeness in the Bible. And we see that again in chapter five, where Naaman, who has the skin disease, he washes seven times. So it's connected partially to the fact that God created The World in 7 Days, has this idea of completeness, of perfection, of wholeness. And so in these healings, this number seven pops up to show, hey, they're being healed completely. Right. And then in chapter six, we have this weird story about a floating axe head, and then we have some of Israel's war with Aram. So again, yeah, weird but wonderful.
- [01:30]
A
Weird but wonderful. Okay, I love that. What do we take away from these weird but wonderful chapters?
- [01:38]
B
Yeah, so we definitely could kind of go into, like, the specifics of each of these miracles. But I kind of want to point us to something a bit broader than that, and that is really the connection between Elijah and Elisha's prophetic ministry to Jesus. So something that, if you've read the New Testament, some of these miracles might have sounded a little bit familiar. And you might also know that in Mark 8, Jesus asks the disciples, he says, who are these people saying that I am? And the disciples say, some say you're John the Baptist. But they say, some say that you're Elijah. And, you know, we know that in the beginning of two Kings, Elijah went up into heaven. So as messianic ideas kind of developed in Israel that there was going to be this figure that comes and saves us, some people kind of theorized that it was going to be Elijah, that he was going to come back, he was going to retake up his prophetic ministry. Right. But then we also see that Jesus has done many of the same miracles that Elisha does. He raises a widow's son from the dead, like Elisha did in 4, 32, 35. He healed lots of lepers like Elisha heals Naaman. And then he feeds crowds of 4 and 5,000 people, just like Elisha feeds a hundred men with only a few barley loaves in chapter four. And so we could say also that Jesus's ministry in a way is weird and, and wonderful. But the thing to take away here is that Jesus's miracles and Elisha's miracles are not one to one. Jesuses are greater. So again, he feeds four or five thousand people, whereas Elisha only fed 100. Jesus raises multiple people from the dead. Right. And so when Jesus asks Peter, who do you say that I am? And he responds and says, I believe you're the Messiah, it's not just you're the Messiah, it's also you're greater even than Elijah and Elisha. Right. And so it's kind of a question to me too, of do I live as if Jesus is just a prophet or good teacher like Elijah or Elisha, or do I really believe he is the Son of God? Do I live as if he's the Son of God that does more than just miracles, but actually saved me from my sins and lives within me through the Holy Spirit?
- [03:58]
A
I love that connection. And my takeaway is going to be a bit different today. I think you've just pointed us toward a really important Bible reading principle, and that's that in any text we can ask ourselves the question, how does this point to Christ? And it's going to be easier to see that how it points to Christ in some texts than others. But you know, as we read the Bible in a year, if we're feeling stuck or lost, and hopefully we'll give you that connection in a lot of these episodes. But tuck that question away. How does this point to Christ? Because I feel like even reading, asking that question, reading through and seeing these miracles, my mind would have remembered some of those really familiar passages from the New Testament where Jesus does similar things. So thanks for breaking down these chapters that are weird and wonderful. And we're going to talk through the rest of the Book of Kings starting tomorrow with a few more chapters. We hope you'll tune in then.