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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 363. Naaman and the Prophet
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Naaman and the Prophet
1. It is certainly to Naaman's credit that he was so ready to act on the hint the little maid had given, more especially as his doing so involved very considerable trouble. It is usual for a physician to go to an invalid, but in this case the invalid had to go to the physician. To a man labouring under leprosy a long journey was a serious undertaking, and yet he at once made the necessary arrangements for setting out for Israel. Unfortunately, Benhadad couched his letter in terms which nearly led to a serious misunderstanding. It did read as though Benhadad required Jehoram to cure Naaman. As the letter came from one with whom he had been at war, and was sent through the hand of the very soldier who was then commander of the Syrian army, Jehoram naturally concluded that Benhadad was seeking an excuse for another quarrel. He feared that war would be proclaimed against Israel as soon as Naaman returned to Syria uncured. It was well that the little spark was quenched before a great fire was kindled. This was providentially accomplished by the prophet Elisha. Somehow he had heard that Naaman had arrived in Israel for the purpose of having his leprosy removed. Ascertaining that he had gone by mistake to the king, he sent word that it was to him, not to Jehoram, that Naaman should have applied. On hearing this, Naaman, in anything but a pleasant mood, ordered his charioteer to drive to the house of Elisha. When the equipage drew up at the prophet's door, we can picture the contrast between the magnificence of the cavalcade and the humbleness of Elisha's abode.
Startling as is the contrast between Naaman's grandeur and his misery, between the gorgeous general's uniform and the corpse-like form it covered, it was but an extreme case of that which we see going on everywhere. The law of our outward life is Compensation; God does not give His gifts altogether unequally to men; the older we grow and the deeper we learn to look below the surface, the more clearly we see that joy and grief go together into most men's lives; that outward prosperity is often darkened by secret misery; that apparent lowliness and privation are often lightened by freedom from and ignorance of the cares that embitter higher state. Naaman would have given all his greatness, all his glory in the field of battle, all his master's love and honour, for the clear skin and healthy flowing blood and painless daily life of the meanest soldier of his guard; many a man to-day whom we are tempted to admire for his wealth or his position or his reputation or his intellect would gladly lay them down, if with them he could throw aside the secret sorrow or infirmity which underlies and poisons them. Mighty Naaman in his palace, lowly Elisha in his cottage! let him who envies those above him, and thinks his own estate unhappy by comparison, ask himself now and then whether of these two he would prefer to be. True human happiness springs not from without but from within, not from eminence and birth and wealth, but from temper and principle and habit; from the genial love of others which puts self out of sight; from the filial love of God which keeps the heart and conscience pure and undefiled.1 [Note: W. Tuckwell, Nuggets from the Bible Mine, 119.]
2. By a discernment instinctive to a mind in constant fellowship with God, the prophet knew that it was God's purpose to save Naaman by the word of an invisible messenger, and he refused to assume a position which might obscure that all-important fact. It was most important that this should be so, and Elisha must needs keep himself in the background. The Syrian religion, in which the unhappy soldier had been bred, was to a great extent dependent upon the senses, and such a religion leaves little room for spiritual views of God and for the exercise of that faith according to which God adjusts the bestowment of His gifts. Naaman wanted to see a process. He was accredited by a sealed and formal letter from the king of Syria to the king of Israel, and he doubtless expected the missive to work wonders. At the first glance it might look like a bit of courtly etiquette for the head of one State to approach the prophet of a neighbouring State through the established diplomatic channels; but there is a deep religious offence in it that does not appear at first. He was going to get at Elisha by dictating to his overlord, or at least that construction might be placed upon the method. From the beginning, Oriental potentates have been flattered into the idea that their sceptre is swayed in some sense over the very gods; for all the gods reign by State decrees, and the mortal on the throne often puts down one and sets up another. The king is the supreme pontiff of the nation and authorizes every cult of the land; and under his sign-manual priests and prophets, soothsayers and magicians alike act. There was an imperious accent in this document which almost put it into the category of an order in council. A healing miracle of unexampled potency was asked, as though it were a common bit of tribute due from a subject territory. To heal a leper was one of the arts of high magic, and it was assumed that the prophet was a mere creature or puppet of the court, and that his oracles could be bought and sold. Perhaps there was a little excuse for that. Naaman's national traditions favoured the idea, and even in Israel itself within recent years bands of prophets had held themselves subject to the court and bound to respond to its wishes. With a royal letter one can surely do great things; and Naaman thought that, possessed of such credentials, he was sure to succeed, and to succeed according to his own ideas.
He expected that his pomp and his gold would win him deference and homage, that he would be healed with full display of divination, with solemn word and act and touch, with art formal and conspicuous in proportion to his own greatness and importance. “Behold, I thought, He will surely come out to me, and stand, and call on the name of the Lord his God, and wave his hand over the place, and recover the leper.” Very different and unexpected was his reception. The prophet would not even see him, but sent him out a simple message-“Go and wash in Jordan seven times.” Then his rage burst forth. This was the reward of his toil and his humiliation;-his sickly, suffering, shattered frame had been dragged through roadless wastes in hope of cure; his haughty spirit had abased itself to ask a favour of the conquered king of Israel and to come a suppliant to this mean place;-and now, his sufferings unpitied, his pomp unnoticed, his gold despised, he is turned away like a beggar from the door, with the added insult of a foolish trivial message. He gazed on the yellow mud-stained stream which rolled beneath his feet at the bottom of its deep ravine; he thought of silver Abana and Pharpar, winding through the myrtle and apricot groves of his native home to their far-off inland sea; and, sick with disappointment and anger, he turned to begin his weary, hopeless journey back.
I heard a sermon the other day, which was both beautiful and forcible, on the subject of pride. The preacher said that pride was a kind of disloyalty to God, and that pride was the sin of the man who would not ride with the troop, or be one of the rank and file, but would take his own solitary and wilful way; and that it was in a treasured and complacent solitariness that pride consisted. He said it was as though the mill-stream were too dignified to go through the mill, and that we must be prepared to go through the mill, and do the useful, obvious work. I think that was all true, and that a sort of solitariness, a desiring to do things in one's own way, an incapacity of working with other people, is all a part of pride.1 [Note: A. C. Benson, Along the Road, 315.]
3. To find a leper's unsightly skin hiding a heart of untamed pride surprises us. But it is a part of that profound mystery of evil, parts of which are ever unfolding themselves to us as our knowledge of human nature widens. One might have thought that this commander-in-chief of the Syrian forces would have been humbled to the dust by the dire calamity which was preying upon his life; that his brilliant conquests would have passed out of mind, and that he would have loathed the decorations and costly raiment which seemed to mock the miserable flesh they adorned. But the stab that Fate had given, after smiling upon him in so many other things, only seemed to make him more vain, irritable, and overbearing. Men are reluctant to dwell on what is uncongenial and loathsome in their personal lot, especially when they are surrounded by groups of obsequious retainers. This great general liked to think of his victories, of the skilful strategy and courage he had shown on the battle-field, of the high price put upon his service by the king, of his gorgeous robes; and the face to which his attendants could scarcely lift their gaze without disgust, his half-insensate limbs, his swollen, tainted flesh, were kept out of mind as though they were an evil dream. Naaman had taken many fenced cities; but here, though health, happiness, recovery from leprosy were all at stake, he almost shipwrecked all for a moment's spleen. It is pitiful to think what havoc has been wrought, and is wrought every day, in noble lives by ungovernableness of temper. Just here so often the bravest, the most generous, fail most signally.
It was the knightliest soul of all, who at the close of the Iliad lay on the sea-shore, shedding great tears, tossing now on his side, now on his back, now on his face, and anon rising upon his feet and roaming desolately up and down the beach of the salt sea-Achilles sleeplessly, inconsolably ruing the consequences of the wrath he would not tame. It was Alexander the Great who in a paroxysm of passion hurled his weapon at the man whom he loved best, and robbed life of its dearest joy. They too, like Naaman, with his horses and his chariots, were great soldiers, valiant in battle-they teach us where the roots of passion lie, against what sin we must prevail, if passion is to take her rightful place. The young, the brave, the strong are naturally passionate; it is the sin that we most easily forgive, because it has in it the seed and promise of great things; from the noblest natures it is hardly ever absent. It is an untrained gift of God. The best of us, I am sure, can always remember the times, not once or twice only in his life, when “he turned and went away in a rage.” But passion must be brought to heel.1 [Note: G. H. Rendall, Charterhouse Sermons, 56.]
4. Why was it that Naaman “turned and went away in a rage”? It was a sense of personal slight, of wounded vanity. The great general of Syria stood before the poor abode of the prophet of Samaria. He was used to deference, to punctilious observance and respect, to the prompt, obedient, soldierly salute. He was one of those set in authority. And the position of authority brings its sure temptations. Indignation is prone to flare up out of wounded vanity. Naaman wanted something which would show off his greatness, which would flatter his self-esteem. There is that in human nature which is not only roused by difficulties, but flattered by demands; which craves for display; which seeks to satisfy the sense of inner strength, the capacity of will or of endurance, the independence, of spirit, upon which we plume ourselves. But before God offers us these opportunities, He requires the inward mastery over self.
This hero of many battles made his pilgrimage to Samaria with a mind full of the most detailed preconceptions. Perhaps it was due in part to an idolatrous training. When a man has worshipped graven images which having eyes see not, hands and handle not, feet and walk not, it is necessary that programmes should be arranged on their behalf. Their fête-days must be fixed, their viands chosen, their processions appointed, and their actions predetermined. A devotee in heathen temples naturally falls into the habit of forestalling the wishes of his immobile deity. And Naaman seems to have brought the habit with him and arranged things in detail for God and His prophet. The order and form of the miracle is settled beforehand. Perhaps his ready-made opinions are due in part to temperament also, and to his experience in the campaigns he had led. We can see at once that he has the imagination out of which successful military commanders are made, for he has the whole thing perfectly mapped out before his eye. He has planned the situation as he would have planned a battle, but for once his calculations are at fault. Nothing turned out just as he had expected, for he was dealing with events in which he could not force or control the issue. This famous chieftain had been accustomed to gather up clues and arrange tiny details beforehand, and everything was elaborated within his own fancy, even to the words of thanksgiving he would speak at the fitting moment. But when God works He does not work according to our schemes and programmes. God's methods are always simple, and the simpler the method the greater the achievement. Recoil from the simplicity of God's methods contributes not a little to the sum of the world's unbelief. Those methods are simple beyond our dreams. Our pride is a part of the deep disease that needs to be grappled with, and God cannot deliver us by a complex method that flatters our appetite for distinction and vainglory. We always want to make salvation deep, obscure, abstruse. But God always wants to make it plain. The pathway of eternal life is the pathway in which we go like common wayfarers, and believe when no sign from spiritual worlds gleams about our pathway, and the prophet himself who has given us God's message is far away in the background. Where His word is trusted, God never fails to work.1 [Note: T. G. Selby.]
In 1697 we find Thomas Story (the coadjutor of William Penn) and another friend calling at the residence of Peter the Great, who was in London incognito, where they wished to leave the Latin edition of Barclay's Apology, hoping that it might fall under the notice of the Czar. They had an opportunity of conversing with him on some of the views held by Friends. The following Sunday morning, as Thomas Story was sitting in Grace-church Street Meeting, he saw two gentlemen enter; they were dressed in the usual costume of Englishmen of that period, but this did not prevent him from recognizing the Emperor and his interpreter. A minister named Robert Haydock was preaching about the cure of Naaman, and-entirely unaware of the high rank of one of his hearers-he said, “Now, if thou wert the greatest king, emperor, or potentate upon earth, thou art not too great to make use of the means offered by the Almighty for thy healing and restoration, if ever thou expect to enter His Kingdom, into which no unclean thing can come.” Fifteen years later, when Peter the Great's troops had taken possession of the Friends' Meeting-house at Frederickstadt, he not only ordered the soldiers out of it, but gave notice that he would attend a meeting in it, if the few Friends residing there were inclined to hold one. As his Generals did not understand German, the Emperor, with much seriousness, acted as interpreter in this meeting, remarking that whoever would live in accordance with such doctrine would be happy.1 [Note: F. A. Budge, Annals of the Early Friends, 405.]
5. The words of his serving men to Naaman were full of better insight: “If the prophet had bade thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? how much rather then, when he saith to thee, Wash, and be clean?” and it is pleasing to see that, although the remonstrance came from his own servants, Naaman saw that it was a reasonable remonstrance. At once he resolved to acquiesce in their suggestion, and do what Elisha had prescribed. It required the restraining and repressing of his pride to go down at all to the water, and as he had to dip seven times this would be a trial also of his faith and his perseverance. God meant the process to curb Naaman's pride as well as to cure his leprosy. In all likelihood there would be no sign of a cure until the seventh bath had been taken. Accordingly, the wonder was that he did not desist at one of the previous plunges. He would have done so had his pride still prevailed; but a better spirit was now in him, and so he persevered through all the prescribed number.
In truth the shock of rage and indignation was the beginning of his cure. His mind was leprous like his body, crusted over with pride and arrogance, diseased with haughty self-consciousness and contempt for others. It needed the rude plainness of the prophet to tear away this covering of self, to teach him, as years of suffering had not taught him, his own true littleness. Flattered and caressed and feared and waited on, he had seemed to himself more than man; now for the first time he met a fellow-man who had looked him through and through; had cast aside as trifling and of no account his splendour and his fame; had laid bare his inmost self and tested it to see if it were true or false.
Burnand has an excellent picture in which he represents with great success a well-known character in Bunyan's Holy War. This is Mr. Loth-to-Stoop, and the artist has given him that superior look and erect back which are the outward and visible signs of the inward possession of the heart by pride. Mr. Loth-to-Stoop, Bunyan tells us in his own inimitable way, was a very stiff and proper gentleman, who was not averse from making terms with Emmanuel as long as his claim to superior treatment was observed. If he was to give the pilgrimage the benefit of his countenance he must not be expected to do any stooping. The configurement of his spine did not permit so unbecoming an attitude for a person so uprightly superior as he. If the Prince would have him to give alms, that he could do with dignity and condescension; or if salvation were offered at a purchasable price he would do himself the honour of entertaining the offer. But when Mr. Loth-to-Stoop was told that salvation could only be gained by bending the back, and humbling the knee, by no trust in any merits of his own, but in casting himself as utterly worthless upon the mercy of God in Christ, he was sadly put to it. It meant nothing less than a revolution of his whole life, the abandonment of his most cherished convictions, the relinquishing of that love which had become second nature in him-the love of self, and it is this still which hinders so many from accepting Christ. They cannot stoop. They want to receive Christ and His salvation in an attitude of condescension, and they refuse to receive Him on the only terms on which He can be received-by self-prostration and self-abasement. One of the hardest things in life is for a proud heart to jettison its pride, and receive salvation on the merits, not of self, but of Christ. In the realm of redemption we must stoop to conquer.1 [Note: J. Burns, Illustrations from Art, 265.]
6. Naaman was a fine man, one worthy for the great king to lean upon, not so much because he was captain of the host, and had done deeds of war, but because he at once got the better of his temper, and stamped so quickly upon his pride, and “went down, and dipped himself seven times in Jordan, according to the saying of the man of God: and his flesh came again like unto the flesh of a little child, and he was clean.” Health quivered through every nerve, and rushed through every vein of his body, and the healed man knew the touch of God. And with the healing there came a great spiritual enlightenment in which he saw it all. His healing was not through the prophet, as he thought; it was not the Jordan that had wrought the cure. It was all of God; and he had but got into the line of obedience and faith. Naaman hastened back to the prophet, not thinking of him at all. “Now I know that there is no God in all the earth, but in Israel.” And he prayed that he might have given him two mules' burden of earth; for his altar should stand upon soil from this goodly land, the land of Israel; and henceforth would he sacrifice to the God of Heaven only.
Obedience, though it may look at first sight like a mere abandonment of our will, is for that very reason capable of becoming the very highest act of will. For-
Can peach renew lost bloom,
Or violet lost perfume;
Or sullied snow turn white as overnight?
Man cannot compass it, yet never fear:
The leper Naaman
Shows what God will and can;
God who worked there is working here;
Wherefore let shame, not gloom, betinge thy brow,
God who worked then is working now.