So, brilliance or blessing?
Some people, like me, want everything to be compartmentalized all so nicely. We don’t want fuzzy borders, but exact, squared up, neat packages. Along comes a situation like Naaman’s and how does it get categorized. Was he brilliant, commanding the armies well? What if that Rabbi is right and his prowess derived from a random, king-killing bow-shot? Is that brilliance or “right-place-right-time”? Or, even more specifically was it a God-directed arrow? Surely the victory over Ahab was not the only thing listed under professional exploits in Naaman’s curriculum vitae. So presumably Naaman was capable, able, a man making anti-Israel waves at the right time. God had his punishing hand in play and Naaman came out ahead.
I propose that Naaman was both brilliant and blessed. As the chapter proceeds we will see that he is blessed all the way into God’s kingdom, but that is another story for another time.
Can the exploits of Naaman be extrapolated?
Way down deep in my mind is something which might be called the fairness doctrine. Perhaps you are more familiar with the fairness doctrine in light of U.S. legislation levied upon radio broadcasters, that is not quite what my mind does with the fairness doctrine.
See, I want all people all over the world to have some choice in their eternal destiny. In the Gospel of John1 Jesus is quoted as saying when I am lifted up I will draw all men to men. I want that to mean that every person who has ever lived is given some option to respond to God. That is “fairness” as my likely errant mental reflexes call it.
I then take that to Naaman and want to say, “Through this (and the events relating to his leprosy) Naaman was given a chance to understand who God was. That was, he could respond. That is fair.” Then I want to extrapolate and inflate it into a model for my own take on spiritual fairness.
The problem is that we cannot answer “does everybody get a chance or a bunch of chances?” questions from passages like this. We can say that some people who seemingly should be beyond the pale do get chances. Don’t forget Saul of Tarsus, the Ninevites, the woman at the well, and others who are also on this list.
So, it does not seem that we can extrapolate from Naaman to everyone. That is not a safe, spiritually true, conclusion.
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