How Quickly

Love you all, praying for you.
 
I just love God’s Word.  It is the written record of the infinite power and unmerited love of God – for you.  It tells the truth, it doesn’t sugar coat, not even the depravity of man.  It’s not revisionist history, it tells the good, the bad and the ugly.  Some so horrific, it is hard to even read. In one of Israel’s lowest moments when they were at the brink of destruction, people choose what they will do, and what they will believe. I Kings 6 – Some time later, Ben Hadad king of Aram mobilized his entire army and marched up and laid siege to Samaria (the capital city of the divided tribes of Israel).  There was a great famine in the city; the siege lasted so long that a donkey’s head sold for eighty shekels of silver, and a quarter of a cab of seed pods for five shekels.  As the king of Israel was passing by on the wall, a woman cried out to him, “Help me, my lord the king!”  The king replied, “If the LORD does not help you, where can I get help for you?  From the threshing floor? From the winepress?  Then he asked her, “What’s the matter?”  She answered, “This woman said to me, ‘Give up your son so we may eat him today, and tomorrow we’ll eat my son.  So we cooked my son and ate him.  The next day I said to her, ‘Give up your son so we may eat him, but she had hidden him.”  When the king heard the woman’s words, he tore his robes.  As he went along the wall, the people looked and there, underneath, he had sackcloth on his body.  He said, “May God deal with me, be it ever so severely, if the head of Elisha son of Shaphat remains on his shoulders today!”  Now Elisha was sitting in his house, and the elders were sitting with him.  The king sent a messenger ahead, but before he arrived, Elisha said to the elders, “Don’t you see how this murderer is sending someone to cut off my head?  Look, when the messenger comes, shut the door and hold it shut against him.  Is not the sound of his master’s footsteps behind him?”  While he was still talking to them, the messenger came down to him.  And the king said, “This disaster is from the LORD.  Why should I wait for the Lord any longer?”  In desperate times people do unthinkable things, utterly foolish things.  And as the king demonstrates, they blame the innocent, and give up on the LORD, they accuse Him instead.  We think we have problems and struggles, but you’ve never faced something this horrific in your life.  An entire city starving to death, only waiting to die by the sword.  II Kings 7:1  Elisha said, “Hear the word of the LORD.  This is what the LORD says:  About this time tomorrow, a seah of flour will sell for a shekel, and two measures of barley for a shekel, at the gate of Samaria.” The officer on whose arm the king was leaning said to the man of God, “Even if the LORD opened the windows of heaven, could this really happen?”  “You will see it with your own eyes,” replied Elisha, “But you will not eat any of it.”  People in desperate times, do unthinkable things, they blame the innocent, they blame God, and they disbelieve the Word that God speaks.  They don’t believe the promise of God.  If nothing else, God said “Even in death the righteous have a refuge.”  Like the three young men before the King, Our God is able to save us, but even if not, we want you to know O King, that we will not bow down to your image or serve your god.”  What do you do when trials come, even desperate times?  Do you do unthinkable things to provide for yourself – how foolish, this woman just killed her son for nothing.  A day later God was about to turn things around.  God can change everything in 24 hours.  In a moment of time.  His suddenly can turn certain death into complete victory!  When everything is lost, He can turn it around.  The servant opened his mouth with unbelief, and his words were held to him.  Verse 3, now there were four men with leprosy at the entrance of the city gate. They said to each other, “Why stay here until we die?  If we say ‘We’ll go into the city, the famine is there.  And if we stay here, we will die.  So let’s go over to the camp of the Arameans and surrender.  If they spare us, we live; if they kill us, then we die.  At dusk they got up and went to the camp of the Arameans.  When they reached the edge of he camp, not a man was there, for the LORD had caused the Arameans to hear the sound of chariots and horses and a great army, so that they said to one another, “Look the king of Israel has hired the Hittite and Egyptian kings to attack us!  So they got up and fled in the dusk and abandoned their tents and their horses and donkeys.  They left the camp as it was and ran for their lives.  The men who had leprosy reached the edge of the camp and entered one of the tents.  They ate and drank, and carried away silver, gold and clothes, and went off and hid them.  They returned and entered another tent and took some things from it and hid them also.  Then they said to each other, we’re not doing right.  This is a day of good news and we are keeping it to ourselves.  If we wait until daylight punishment will overtake us.  Let’s go at once and report this to the royal palace.  So they went and called out to the city gatekeepers and told them “We went into the Aramean camp and not a man was there – not a sound of anyone – only tethered horses and donkeys, and the tents just left as they were.  The gate keepers shouted the news and it was repeated in the palace.  The king got up in the night and said to his officers, “I will tell you what the Arameans have done to us.  They know we are starving; so they have left the camp to hide in the countryside thinking, ‘They will surely come out , and then we will take them alive and get into the city”  One of his officers answered, “Have some men take five of the horses that are left in the city.  Their plight will be like that of all the Israelites left here – yes, they will only be like all these Israelites who are doomed. So let us send them to find out what happened.  So they selected two chariots with their horses, and the king sent them after  the Aramean army.  He commanded the drivers, “Go and find out what happened.  They followed them as far as the Jordan and they found the whole road strewn with the clothes and equipment of the Arameans, that they had thrown away in their headlong flight.  So the messengers returned and reported to the king.  Then the people went out and plundered the camp of the Arameans.  So a seah of flour sold for a shekel, and two seahs of barely sold for a shekel, as the LORD had said.  Now the king has put the office on whose arm he leaned in charge of the gate, and the people trampled him in the gateway, and he died, just as the man of God had foretold when the came cam down to his house.  It happened as the man of God had said to the king: “About this time tomorrow, a seah of flour will sell for a shekel and two seahs of barley for a shekel at the gate of Samaria.  Whatever you face, you haven’t faced anything like this.  What do you do when you face a trial in your life?  Do you try to provide for yourself? If you do you will sink to unthinkable depravity.  Who do you blame for the problems you face, or predicament you are in?  Do you blame others? The innocent? Do you blame God?  And when a man of God speaks faith or prophesy.  What do you say?  Be careful, your words will acquit you or condemn you.  David was different, He made it a habit to declare the Salvation of God – even when He was still waiting for it.  As for me, I will always have hope, I will praise you more and more, my mouth will tell of your righteousness, and of your salvation all day long, though I know not it’s measure.  David didn’t know yet, the full measure of God’s Salvation – so He kept speaking of the Salvation He has already seen and heard about – until God delivers Him now.  God in a day – can turn your entire situation around.  Praying that you will praise and believe, that you will believe what God says, through whatever person or means he chooses to say it.  That your words will always be faith, that your testimony of Salvation would continue all the way up to the moment – when God comes through again!  He surely will, He’s the God who Saves!  You haven’t seen all of His Salvation yet, but you will, if your words agree.  Give your testimony of the Salvation you know, and the Praise He deserves - until He can reveal again – what He can do in just one day! 
 
Love you all,
dad