My dad’s funeral was a bit over two weeks ago, and by God’s hand and grace, we are confident of dad’s presence in heaven. After the funereal rattles passed away, I found myself back in Augusta living out the old routines. One of those ordinaries was lesson prep for my weekly class at Curtis Baptist Church, and the upcoming lesson1 had three people on its stage.
Second Kings 8:7 starts with a highly compressed jolt. Down I was lowered almost as from a helicopter into the life of Elisha and Ben Hadad, the soon to be dead King of Aram. Elisha’s trip from Samaria to Damascus was lengthy enough, but a search for his motivations stretches on to the point of futility. Like it or not, in the compression of the Biblical narrative, some things are just not divulged, and so on to other themes I went. It would turn out that long-passed mists don’t hide everything useful; to one of those, we will now turn.
Did Ben Hadad have his own Jehovah experience?
On the one hand: Yes.
The “yes” can pool from a scattering of Biblical droplets. Each of the events merit a pond of their own, but we shall stick to puddles. Think first about the splash made when Naaman rode back into Damascus, his healthy skin shining forth from his chariot, and the allegiance of his heart severed from Rimmon and allied to Jehovah2.
Go next to the cross-border raids that sought not captive girls, but the Israelite king. Time and again he was thwarted until he was told that Elisha/Jehovah was ratting out their plans for an ambush.
“We’ll fix that,” assumed Ben Hadad launching a special forces team to capture the pesky Elisha. This only fostered another More than pesky Elisha proved to be by single-handedly capturing his best troops. They were marched to Samaria, fed, and released. Tail-between-the-legs? It is hard to imagine these troops marching back to Damascus under anything but a cloud.
That led to a period of peace, but Ben Hadad could not leave well enough alone and set his whole army in siege about to Israel’s capital city. That worked, for a while, until Jehovah had enough of Israel’s suffering. An auditory illusion of foreign armies blew into the ears of the Aramean army and confused them tents into an unceremonious flight from their tents to the Jordan River. Embarrassment, financial loss, disgrace.
Ben Hadad surely had his fill of Jehovah by this stage. Those are just 5 “Jehovah Experiences” by this king.
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