12. The Intolerable Compliment
12
The Intolerable Compliment
When the king of Aram planned to attack Israel, God revealed this to the prophet Elisha, who then warned the king of Israel. Thinking a traitor was responsible for the leak, the king of Aram asked who it might be. One of his staff said, “Don’t blame us! Why, you can’t even talk in your own bedroom without Elisha the prophet in Israel knowing what you say!”
“Go and find out where he is,” said the king, “and I will seize him” (2 Kings 6:13 NEB).
Early the next morning Elisha’s disciple saw that the city of Dothan was surrounded by horses and chariots.
“Oh, master,” he said, “which way are we to turn?”
“Do not be afraid,” was Elisha’s reply, “for those who are on our side are more than those on theirs.”
The prophet had long since learned a lesson which was new to the young man: Invisible forces are always at work. The God who made us does not then leave us to fend for ourselves. He is still Emmanuel, “God with us,” even when to all appearances we stand alone against frightening forces.
Perhaps you have left home for the first time. I remember how daunting a prospect that was for me as a fourteen-year-old, about to travel a thousand miles by train to boarding school. I was excited until my parents and younger brothers and sister began almost imperceptibly to slide out of my vision as the silver streamliner, the Tamiami Champion, pulled slowly out of the Philadelphia station, bound for Florida. Suddenly there was a great sickening hollow in the middle of my stomach as I realized how very much my family and my home meant to me. I would not see them again for nine long months.
Perhaps you are just starting college, or have moved to a new town where you know no one. You are a stranger and people scrutinize you strangely. You have a new job, new responsibilities you are not sure you can meet. Maybe you have no job at all because you’ve been fired or are retired. Maybe your situation is that of being the only believer among nonbelievers. Good recipes for loneliness, all of them. For one reason or another you are like Elisha’s servant, in a panic, feeling defenseless and alone, wondering which way to turn.
Our faithful heavenly Father knows what a battle it is for us flesh-and-blood creatures to focus on the spiritual. As long as we live in a material world, it will be a battle. But He is there to help and cheer us if we’ll ask Him to. He will open our eyes to the Unseen if we’ll pray for it. Remember Paul’s encouragement to the Corinthians, how he reminded them that the outcome of human problems is “a weight of glory,” when we fix our gaze on things unseen, which will never pass away, rather than on things seen, which will all pass away.
Is it easier to see Elisha’s disciple as surrounded by chariots of fire than it is to see ourselves so surrounded? Has God, in our case, forgotten to be gracious? Are we at the mercy of the king of Aram, or have we faith to see what the prophet saw?
Last spring I met a young detective from Belfast who has a particularly lonely job. His work takes him into the most dangerous sections of that torn city, and he was afraid. He knew that a bomb or a gun might go off at any moment and he could be killed or “kneecapped” or disabled in some other way. Being a husband and father, he feared not primarily for himself but for his family. Someone gave him the story of the five missionaries in Ecuador. He told me how he would take that book to bed with him at night, read a little, cry over it, pray, and then reread the passage. He had planned to read a chapter a night, but found himself reading and rereading, crying and praying his way through it. “It gave me courage!” he said, his face shining. “I saw that those men did what they did believing that God was in charge of the outcome. I’m not a missionary, but I’m under the same Lord. If those men could do it, I could too.”
Even as I write, I see from my window a baby rabbit dart out from the underbrush, followed by the mother. She chases him in a circle for a minute, so fast it looks as though they forget who is chasing whom. Suddenly they both disappear into the underbrush. A minute later a young woodchuck waddles out, vacuums the grass slowly with his black snout, and waddles back. I scan the slope anxiously for a predatory cat that spends a good deal of his time crouching and creeping along the edges of the rabbits’ playground. He is not there. The word I was about to write just before these furry things appeared take on a wider meaning: “No one of us lives, and equally no one of us dies, for himself alone. If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. Whether therefore we live or die, we belong to the Lord” (Rom. 14:7–9 NEB).
And are we not of much greater value than many sparrows—or bunnies or woodchucks? The life and death of all of us is in the same Hands. We are always surrounded by the Unseen, among whom are the angels, ministers of fire, explicitly commissioned to guard us. He who keeps us neither slumbers nor sleeps. His love is always awake, always aware, always surrounding and upholding and protecting. If a spear or a bullet finds its target in the flesh of one of His servants, it is not because of inattention on His part. It is because of love.
If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.1
Whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. Live each hour of each day with Him as Lord, for “this is why Christ died and came to life again, to establish his lordship over dead and living” (Rom. 14:9 NEB).
If His lordship is really established over me, it makes no difference (I might even say it’s “no big deal”) whether I live or die. I am expendable. That knowledge is freedom. I have no care for anything, for all that I am, all that I have, all that I do, and all that I suffer have been joyfully placed at His disposal. He can do anything He wants.
What do we think He wants? Gerard Manley Hopkins expressed the answer most beautifully in “The Golden Echo”:
See, not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least last lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.
Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept,
This side, that side hurling a heavyhearted hundredfold
What while we, while we slumbered.
O then, weary then why should we tread?
O why are we so haggard at the heart, so care-coiled,
care-killed, so fagged, so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered,
When a thing we freely forfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it)
finer, fonder
A care kept.—Where kept? Do but tell us where kept,
where.—
Yonder.—What high as that! We follow, now we follow.—
Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.2