Lean Not Unto Your Own Understanding

Apr 27th, 2011 Lean Not Unto Your Own Understanding

Today’s Passage – 2 Kinggs 4 – 6; Proverbs 27

(Second Milers also read Luke 9 – 10; Memorize John 11:25 – 26)

“But Naaman was wroth, and went away, and said, Behold, I thought, He will surely come out to me, and stand, and call on the name of the LORD his God, and strike his hand over the place, and recover the leper. Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? may I not wash in them, and be clean? So he turned and went away in a rage. And his servants came near, and spake unto him, and said, My father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? how much rather then, when he saith to thee, Wash, and be clean?” – (2 Kings 5:11-13)

“Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.” – (Proverbs 3:5-6)

In chapter five of 2 Kings, we see the captain of the host of the nation of Syria is diseased with leprosy. He is told that there is a man of God in Israel that might be able to heal him, so he goes with his servants to Israel to see Elisha, the man of God. When he gets there, Elisha does not even come out of his house to meet the man personally, but instead sends a messenger which tells Naaman to dip himself seven times in the Jordan River. Naaman becomes furious for two reasons: first, he thinks the solution is too simple. It was not what he expected from a man of God. He thought that Elisha would have performed some elaborate religious ritual or something. Secondly, Naaman figures that if it is only a matter of washing, he could just as easily have stayed in Syria. He felt that the rivers in Syria were far superior to the river Jordan in Israel anyway.

This story illustrates how we tend to think as humans. Often times we come to God with a problem, and we already have a pre-conceived idea in our mind of how that problem is going to be fixed. However, many times God will fix it in a way that is foreign to our understanding, and we will rebel against it. Sometimes when we go for counsel, we look for someone who will tell us what we want to hear, rather that what we need to hear. God’s ways are not our ways. He does what He wants, not what we want Him to do. By the way, there was nothing special about the water in the Jordan river. The healing came from God, and because Naaman finally believed God and did what God had told him to do.

I have added a link to last year’s post on this passage, “Open My Eyes”. My thought from last year was from chapter 6. http://pastorerickson.com/?p=177