Reliance – When God’s Enemies Are Unblinded
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Now the King of Syria was making war against Israel. And he consulted with his servants saying my camp will be in such and such a place. And the man of God sent to the King of Israel saying, beware, that you do not pass this place for the Syrians are coming down there. Then the King of Israel sent someone to the place of which the man of God had told him, thus, he warned him and he was watchful there. Not just once or twice, therefore the heart of the King of Syria was greatly troubled by this thing. And he called his servants and said to them, will you not show me?
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Which of us is for the King of Israel? And one of his servants said, none. My Lord okaying. But Elisha, the prophet who is in Israel tells the King of Israel, the words that you speak in your bedroom. So he said, go and see where he is. Then I may send and get him. And it was told him saying, surely he is in Dothan. Therefore he sent horses and chariots and a great army there. And they came by night and surrounded the city. And when the servant of the man of God arose early and went out, there was an army surrounding the city with horses and chariots.
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And his servant said to him, alas, my master, what should we do? So he answered, do not fear for those who are with us are more than those who are with them. And Elisha prayed and said, Lord, I pray open his eyes that he may see. Then the Lord opened the eyes of the young man. And he saw and behold the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha. So when the Syrians came down to him, Elisha prayed to the Lord and said, strike this people.
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I pray with blindness. And he struck them with blindness, according to the word of Elisha. Now Alicia said to them, this is not the way nor is this the city follow me. And I will bring you to the man whom you seek, but he led them to Samaria. So was when they had come to some area that Elijah said, Lord, open the eyes of these men that they may see. And the Lord opened their eyes and they saw, and there they were inside some area. Now when the King of Israel saw them, he said to Elisha, my father, shall I kill them?
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Shall I kill them? But he answered. You shall not kill them. Would you kill those whom you have taken captive with your sword and your bow set food and water before them that they may eat and drink and go to their master. Then he prepared a great feast for them. And after they ate and drank, he sent them away and they went to their master. So the bands of Syrian Raiders came no more into the land of Israel. Jesus, we thank you. We bless you. We give you all honor all glory and all praise for you are worthy of it.
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You are permanently faithful, enduring, really merciful, massively graceful, and Lord your forgiveness that you have extended to us through the finished work of Jesus on the cross is an incomparable blessing of infinite magnitude. Lord, you are good and your mercy truly does endure forever. And God, you know, the times that we are in and you have given discernment to many to understand and to comprehend the dangers and the challenges and the persecutions and the trials and the tribulations and everything, the darkness that is coming upon this earth.
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But Lord, you are still God, your throne is intact. Your word is still absolute. And your power, your name is above every other power and name Jesus. We appeal to you. Lord, forgive us, Lord. We repent of being ineffective of being lukewarm, of being cowardly, of being distracted and Lord of being sinful and allowing sinful actions, policies, and strivings to continue.
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Lord, we pray that you would open our eyes as you open the eyes of Elisha’s servant Lord, that you would provide for us a moment of clarity, not just for your people, but for everyone where they would see the options that we have, where they would see the tight tummy of the choices that are on the table for us in our country, Lord, we pray that you would heal our land and that you would give us the right standard in our hearts, fill us with righteousness, justice, peace, joy, patience, resoluteness and faith, because Lord, we are going to need it even more so than ever before, regardless of the choice that this country makes God, I pray that you would lead us Holy spirit in the way that we should go, that you would transform our hearts, that we would fully surrender to you Lord, and to your correction and your reproof, because nothing short of the security of the foundational rock of Jesus, the righteousness that you have one for us and are able and willing to provide to us.
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Nothing else will keep us in these days. I’d show us what you would have us to do. Move our hearts, keep us in your will and let your name be glorified in all things in Jesus name. Amen. Notice in this moment of clarity while it was corporate or national, there is a significant lesson for us to learn even when there is an invasion, even when there is a threat, even when that threat is personal, even when there’s the potential for extremely negative outcomes, it is still true that there are more who are with us than who are against us.
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And why is that going to be so it’s because if the Lord is for us, it doesn’t matter how many are against us. If the source of absolute power is on our side, then there is no force that can be marshaled against us. Now, this doesn’t mean that we are going to have this grand escape in every circumstance, the way that Elijah did, but we can rest assured and remain in confidence that the Lord is God.
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And that whatever happens to us, to our families, to our communities and to our country, Jesus is still going to be Lord, but that doesn’t give us an excuse to slip into indifference, to be a people who is content to watch the deterioration of everything around us. We have a moral obligation to stand up into overcome the division in our society by being effective messengers of the word of God and the kingdom of God.
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And there is intense disagreement about how to do this. There are a handful of points that I would like to bring to your attention from this example in scripture, from how a lie Shia operated. This was a prophet who had a double portion of the mantle of Elijah. He walked with the Lord and performed mighty miracles.
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He was sought after for counsel and as a representative of the kingdom of God, he saw many feats performed by the Lord in his generation. So this is a victory. There’s a threat. Elijah first demonstrates that he has insight information. He has supernatural revelation. There is a clarity that he has about the plans of the enemy that the enemy is surprised by in our day, we still have the ability to go to the Lord and to receive from the Holy spirit, discernment and wisdom.
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So many have not had this as a foundation alongside repentance and alongside prayer, many conduct research, and many weave together, different theories and principles and ideas and manifestations about what the future will hold. And many ascribe, far more certainty and probability to those scenarios. Things are extraordinarily complicated.
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What we have to do is go to the Lord and wait on him. And if we are not patient enough to do that, then we will inevitably put together our own plans and deploy them. And they won’t work. It will be like King Saul, not waiting for Samuel to perform the sacrifice and having the kingdom rent from him because of his lack of obedience. We must be obedient in this time with an even greater sensitivity, because when there is a desperation, a desperation to act a desperation, to take things into our own hands, that is when the biggest mistakes can be made.
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When we actually find ourselves outside of the will of God. Now brothers and sisters, if we are honestly and earnestly pleading to the Lord to give us discernment and repenting and allowing his Holy spirit to correct us and bring us along the path that we need to be walking, then the action that the Lord motivates us to do according to his will is going to succeed. It’s going to be fruitful. It’s not going to be wasted because it’s not going to be something that we have put together based on our own understanding.
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This is a time when any action that we are taking has to be done at the direction of the Lord, confirmed through his word or through another brother and sister. If you have spent time with the Lord, then you understand what the Lord does in order to communicate to you and with you doesn’t have to be an audible voice, but there is a resonance with the seed of the Holy spirit in you that you are hearing from the Lord that you are being directed by him.
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And if we stray from that, if we insert instead our own concoctions, if we go ahead with a course of action and do not submit it to prayer and repentance and confirmation from the Lord, then we can find ourselves in a bad situation. And even when we make the right decision to follow through on what the Lord has had us to do, doesn’t mean that there won’t be opposition, that there won’t even be threats, that there won’t even be danger, that there won’t even be challenges.
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And so here, Elisha and his servant have an army marching against them because of what they have done to foil the plans of the kingdom of darkness. Now, is this a proportionate response? No, but because Alicia has been acting and performing his feats in the will of God, because he is walking with the Lord as we can, should and must in our day through the leading of the Holy spirit, he is protected.
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The hand of the protection of the Lord is around him. And the Lord is hearing the fervent righteous prayers of this man. And the servant has a moment of clarity. The servant goes from viewing things in the natural Elijah and the servant against this entire army to understanding that the Lord was on their side, the Lord was fighting for them. Now it is Elisha who prays to strike the people, the army with blindness.
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It is not just something passive Elisha. Doesn’t just sit back and then automatically everything’s everything falls into place. Elisha is following the prompting of the Lord and playing an active role in this process. Even if his active role is simply praying, praying for a solution, praying for the enemies of God to be defeated. And most importantly, here, apart from these principles of being led by the Holy spirit and being active in this battle spiritually, most importantly, for our purposes, at least in my mind, as I see a moment of clarity unfolding, and I see the perspective of a choice, an important choice about the direction of America being it is incumbent upon me and upon us to remember what happens.
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Yeah. At the end of this, many have commented that the enemies of God and the enemies of America and the enemies of freedom, that they are irredeemable, that they are totally lost, that they are completely captive to an ideology that has poisoned them at every level of their being. And truth be told the enemies of God would say the same thing about those who profess to be Christians in many cases.
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And so with this rigid framework of ideology, if that is something that remains fixed in our minds, then it justifies retaliation. It justifies dehumanization, it justifies writing people off. And may I suggest brothers and sisters is inconsistent with the word of God. And with the character of God in Proverbs, we are not supposed to rejoice when our enemy falls.
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That is a specific scripture that we should not rejoice when our enemy falls and here the blinded army, when the King of Israel asks the licensees, his enemies in a weakened state, he says, shall I kill them? And Elijah says, no, we will not do that. That will not be the way that we respond.
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That’s not going to be how we lift up the name of the Lord after God has performed this miraculous intervention. Instead, Alicia instructed the captives, the defeated army, the enemy to be given nourishment, to be given a chance, having seen the power of God to be transformed and to respect and honor the power of God that they had witnessed and the mercy of God that they had received.
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It is incredibly tempting in our time to look at the scenarios that are unfolding and to see groups of people who are ravenous in their ideology. And to say, there is no hope for them. There is no saving them. This deception, this delusion is too deep and too great brothers and sisters, even if that may be true for some subset of people, that attitude I want to suggest is going to be something that we need to overcome in the days ahead.
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This is not to suggest that nothing should be done to quell the violence that people should be allowed to roam unchecked. That justice should not be done, that the law should not be enforced, that we should simply turn away from addressing the chaos that is unfolding. I simply mean to suggest that we perennially anthropomorphize our own understanding of what people are capable of onto God.
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We use people, quote, unquote will never change. There’s no redemption. There’s no possibility of reform or a change heart or a change of mind. These people are fanatics. There’s no place for them. That perspective is in many cases going to be dangerous. And I would argue antithetical to the will of God. There are people right now who are cursing the name of God who want nothing more than to tear down everything that the Lord has built in this country and in this nation.
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And there are people who want nothing more than to obtain power for the purpose of enacting vengeance and accomplishing a Holy war of sorts that they are waging. And I tell you, this brothers and sisters, there are people of that persuasion right now who given a moment of clarity and an opportunity to respond to divine mercy, to the transforming power of the gospel, who would give their lives to Jesus Christ and enter into the kingdom of God, for who can say that the example of the apostle Paul is not capable of being replicated in this generation who is to limit the Lord and his ability to redeem his ability to save to the uttermost.
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We have all been separated from him. We were all enemies of the cross enemies of God, even if we weren’t doing so actively before we were born again, we were citizens of another kingdom, but now as citizens of the kingdom of God and children of the most high, we have to represent and understand the will of our father to magnify and glorify the name of his son through his redeeming work on the cross, through the saving power of his blood.
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And we should not unnecessarily and arbitrarily restrict that we should not be bitter. If there are people who transform, if there are people who are saved, if there are people who have a moment of clarity and who respond to the Lord, we must not rejoice. When our enemies fall, we must instead represent the kingdom of God. Pray always for his will to be accomplished and for salvation and a great revival to come to this land.
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When you stay in a state where you are bathed in negative information, bathed in conflict, bathe in the rage of the news, quote, unquote, it is critical of course, to understand what’s going on. But when you bathe in that, when you don’t follow the advice of the new Testament to think on the good things, if you don’t have your time balanced appropriately, then you can allow this poison inside of your soul, that sours your view of humanity and limits the scope of what God can accomplish in your own mind.
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There is none like our God, none as graceful, none as merciful, none as forgiving, none as able to set free. And there are people who are lost and who are dire enemies of the cross and dire enemies of freedom who will come to the Lord in this generation. What will our response be when those who were blinded finally have their eyes open and recognize that they aren’t where they thought they were they’re in a different place.
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What will our response be? Will our response be the one echoing from the King of Israel? Shall we kill them? Or will it be Alicia’s response? We shall not. We shall instead nourish them and show them the mercy of God so that they too can be empowered to go out into the world and to carry out the great commission, ask yourself a hypothetical question.
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What if there was someone who is participating in riots and actively burning down property and cursing the name of God and who is dead set on destroying America. People who are committing crimes, even dangerous, even violent crimes in the name of an ideology that seeks to fundamentally obliterate the norms of freedom in this country.
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And they’re doing it knowingly. They’re doing it because that’s what they desire. They want to see that outcome. They’re not just people who passively want to see more equal outcomes. They’re actively people who are trying to tear something down. Would you be comfortable? And in fact, would you celebrate someone like that? Having their eyes opened, giving their lives to Jesus and working great miracles and bearing much fruit for the kingdom of God in this generation.
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There are many people, unfortunately in Christian spheres, who would be not just uncomfortable at that, but angry at that Lord. How could you use this person when I’m right here? I have been devoted to you. I have been there for you. I have been a consistent part of your body. I’ve served in your church. I’ve done what you have told me to do. How, how can you use this person and bring them to prominence in glory while I am still here in obscurity and not necessarily bearing as much fruit as I feel like I could for your kingdom, that kind of question, betrays something.
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And unfortunately, as we think through this hypothetical, I’d imagine that there are many professing, Christians, even many professing, Christians who have done much to bear fruit for the kingdom who would fall into that trap. It’s an extraordinarily subtle trap. What matters is your obedience to the will of God? And we, even as we look at the apostle Paul now through the lens of the scriptures that he wrote and the transformation we should even celebrate the potential for that to happen, we should earnestly desire it.
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Now, how do we get there? Well, it’s up to God, but first and foremost, I would encourage you to think through that scenario. What if one of the arch enemies of God suddenly becomes a more prominent and seemingly more effective Christian than you? Someone who has been faithful to the Lord for some time, would bitterness enter your heart? Would you allow the Holy spirit to give you a framework and a mindset of rejoicing because of that, because that brothers and sisters is where we need to be in order for the harvest of God to come about properly, to come about fully.
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That is what it means to be a labor in the field of the harvest. And we pray in jesus’ name that the Lord would send forth laborers because those who are equipped to do this right now, there are few I fear, but everyone can get there. Everyone can get there by repentance, by prayer, and by allowing the Holy spirit to show us the will of God for our lives and to give us the faith and the strength to be obedient in every circumstance.
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So consider Alicia, consider the moment of clarity, consider how he treated the enemies of the people of God and consider the result, and then consider our own time and consider your own heart. Ask yourself these thought experiments, these hypothetical questions. How would you respond in that situation? Would you allow the Lord to pull out of your heart, expose and remove any vestiges of bitterness, any vestiges of unforgiveness, any vestiges of the old man, would you do that?
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Because if that can be accomplished in your life and my life in the lives of many brothers and sisters, then we will be as the body in a stronger position to win this victory. I can’t say, but I’m not so sure that Elijah would have won this victory. If the Lord had not already put in his heart, how to respond to that victory, not to rejoice and to conquer and to destroy, but rather to show mercy and to celebrate and to send forth with a message, a message of the power, the grace and the forgiveness of all mighty God, Jesus soften our hearts, soften our hearts in a trying and troubling time.
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Bring about a moment of clarity in each and every one of our lives that we would look to you as we look out and understand the signs of the times that are around us, give us clarity of thought, clarity of purpose, and cause us to understand Lord more about the extent and the scope of your forgiveness, of your mercy, of your grace.
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Jesus. We love you. And we adore you knowing God that you are a righteous judge, all mighty and powerful and glorious, and we worship you. God, thank you for speaking this to our hearts. Thank you for showing us Lord, how even in difficult, dangerous and challenging times, there is still mercy available at the cross.
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There is still tenderness in the heart of God, towards his people, and there’s still an answer for each and every one of us that we Lord would be led by your Holy spirit to be transformed in our hearts and minds and bodies and souls, to be perfectly aligned with your will and to come into obedience, to the principles of your kingdom Lord, for the sake of others, for the sake of the loss in this generation and for the sake of your mighty name, help us, Jesus, give us eyes to see in this pivotal moment in your precious name, amen.
