2 Kings 2:23-25
Good morning! Today our main passage is just three
verses of scripture, one briefly recorded event in the life of Elisha, as a
part of our series on Elisha. Following a discussion of this passage, we will
spend time remembering our Lord Jesus through the bread and cup, and then we
will have our monthly sharing time, an opportunity for all of us to share what
the Lord has been teaching us and helping us to do in this past month.
Today’s passage is considered a “hard” passage by
many people – hard to understand, hard to reconcile with our understanding of
God, hard to square with general things we might say about the overall message
of Scripture – and because of this, one might be tempted to kind of “tack it
on” at the end of another message on a longer section of Scripture about Elisha
and only gloss over this passage, claiming that time limits a more detailed
discussion.
I didn’t want us to do this, because I really believe
2 Timothy 3:16-17, which states that all Scripture
is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and
training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly
equipped for every good work. I really like how this is worded in the New
Living Translation, going back to verse 15:
You have
been taught the holy Scriptures from childhood, and they have given you the
wisdom to receive the salvation that comes by trusting in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is inspired by God and
is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our
lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right.
God uses it to prepare and
equip his people to do every good work. – 2 Tim. 3:15-17 NLT
There are several things I love about this. First, it
states that that Timothy had been taught the holy Scriptures from childhood –
by this Paul meant the Old Testament – and in particular it states that these
scriptures make us wise to receive the salvation that comes by trusting in
Christ. That is, by studying the Old Testament, we are made more able to
understand the depths of who Jesus is and what it really means to have faith
and trust in Him. The second thing that strikes me is that all Scripture is
inspired by God – that is the same God we are trusting in for salvation – and
so we can trust Him that all the
stuff in the Bible is “good stuff,” that is, stuff that is good for us. Nobody
knows what is truly good for us more than Him. Third, in the NLT it uses the
phrase “make us realize what is wrong in our lives.” That is, Scripture calls
us to self-reflection, to realize our own sins and failures, and to repent, to
turn away from these things. As it says, “It corrects us when we are wrong and
teaches us to do what is right.” Well, I truly believe all of this and more can
be found in today’s “hard” passage. Here is today’s passage:
From there
Elisha went up to Bethel Samaria
Now, I feel uniquely qualified [by nature of my own
head] to speak on this passage. Seriously, though, at first glance this seems
pretty harsh. Can’t Elisha take a joke? Now by inspecting the passage a little
more carefully, you might note that it doesn’t say Elisha called down the bears
– it only says he called down a curse; it was God who responded by sending the
bears. But doesn’t this create an even greater problem? Now it’s God that seems
harsh! A typical comment by critics (found in Hard Sayings of the Bible) is
this: “How can I believe in a God who would send bears to devour little
children for innocently teasing an old man whose appearance probably was
unusual even for that day?”
Now when I hit a difficult to understand passage, one
of the first things I do is look at it in other translations. Here are the
first two verses in the NASB:
Then he went
up from there to Bethel; and as he was going up by the way, young lads came out
from the city and mocked him and said to him, “Go up, you baldhead; go up, you
baldhead!” When he looked behind him and saw them, he cursed
them in the name of the Lord. Then two female bears came out of the woods and
tore up forty-two lads of their number. – 2 Kings 2:23-24 NASB
Does that change your impression a little? Here is
the same passage in the Amplified version:
He went up from Jericho
to Bethel
Ah – now is your thinking starting to change? Well,
let’s explore this in some detail. Let’s start with the “boys” (NIV), “young
lads” (NASB), “young [maturing and accountable] boys” (Ampl). The King James
Version, which I normally appreciate because it is often quite literal, calls
them “little children.” So which is it? Just how old are these guys?
In Hebrew the phrase is na’arim k’tanim. Na’arim means young people and k’tanim means little, but this phrase
does not only refer to little children. The two words together are used to
describe the young adult Hadad the Edomite in I Kings 11:14, 17, the (adult)
rebel who fled Solomon’s kingdom and went to Egypt
And, in
case you are thinking Elisha was some crotchety old man in this passage, you
should know that Elisha was probably about the same age as these na’arim k’tanim. This is an event in the
very beginning of Elisha’s ministry. He had just come from his first miracle –
healing the waters of Jericho
Now
how many young people were there? The passage doesn’t say, but I presume it was
a lot more than 42, the number that were mauled by the two bears. Actually, I
have wondered how two bears managed to maul so many people. Perhaps they were
backed up in some kind of dead end, at the end of a canyon or something, or
perhaps the crowd was so large that they couldn’t get away easily. Either way,
this whole scene was not just a few bored youths getting into mischief. It was
more like a riot.
What
were they all doing there? Why weren’t they working, each with their families?
I believe something was very strange, something was “off,” for them to be
together like this at all. The passage doesn’t give us the context, but this
reminds me of urban gangs of young people today. I grew up in the Los Angeles
area and I know what these gangs were and are like – I saw them recruit young
people from broken families, initiate people into the gang by having them do
serious illegal activities for them, and become like new families for them, not
families characterized by love, but by violence, drug use, wild living, and so on.
I had a few friends in school that eventually went into these gangs. None of
them finished high school, and I don’t know what became of them. I wouldn’t be
surprised if all of them either ended up dead or in prison. Maybe I am reading
something into this passage to presume that a similar situation was going on
here, but this behavior, youths congregated together, up to mischief, was not
supposed to be a part of life of those who followed God. Another example you
see of similar behavior, large groups of people gathered together with nothing
but mischief in mind is in Genesis 19 in Sodom, and you know how that all
turned out.
Now
their taunt to Elisha, somewhat obscured in the NIV, is literally “go up,
baldhead!” As for the baldhead epithet, perhaps Elisha had early male pattern
baldness, like me, or perhaps (more likely in my opinion) he had shaved his
head as a part of mourning for Elijah; Ezekiel 27:30-31, for example, lists
head shaving along with wearing sackcloth and sprinkling dust on your head as a
pattern for mourning. As for the “go up” part of the epithet, it may have just
been a taunt for him to pass them, but it may also mean that they knew who
Elisha was – the “disciple” of Elijah. They may have heard the stories of how –
supposedly, in their minds – Elijah was taken up in a whirlwind. They believed
none of it, and called on Elisha to do the same. If Elisha had in fact shaved
his head, and if the old man Elijah had naturally become bald, they may have
even thought that Elisha was shaving his head trying to be a “new” Elijah,
trying to imitate him, and so they ridiculed him based on this. In any case,
they showed no respect to the prophet or to his God.
Elisha
responds by speaking a curse. Now this seems strange and harsh to us. But this
is in part because we forget the history of blessings and curses. We can go all
the way back to Abraham, to whom God said,
“I will make
you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and
you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses
you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” – Gen.
12:2-3
I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses
you I will curse. This exact pronouncement repeated in Isaac’s blessing on Jacob
in Genesis 27:29. And this is in fact what had happened both in this incident
with Elisha and the one previously in Jericho Jericho
Now
recall the blessings and curses of the Mosaic Law, given in Lev. 26 and Deut.
30. God Himself pronounced blessings on those who kept the Law, loving the Lord
their God and keeping the various commandments, and curses or punishments on
those who rejected Him. I find Lev. 26:21-22 particularly interesting:
If you
remain hostile toward Me and refuse to listen to Me, I will multiply your
afflictions seven times over, as your sins deserve. I will send wild animals against
you, and they will rob you of your children… - Lev. 26:21-22a
So
it seems that today’s passage was a direct fulfillment of God’s warning in the
Mosaic Law. Now we aren’t told exactly what Elisha’s curse really was –
probably it was something like “May God deal with you if you do not respect the
Lord God and His servants.” There is no reason to think Elisha specifically,
himself, asked God for two bears. But two bears did come, and they did their
damage. We don’t know how many of the people died; the Hebrew word is very
specific, referring to being clawed but not killed. But probably some did die.
All
this took place right outside of Bethel
I
would like to say that the people of Bethel , and
indeed, all of Israel Israel
Now
as we go through this series on Elisha, we will see many ways in which his life
and ministry foreshadowed that of Jesus. Elijah was a foreshadowing of John the
Baptist; Elisha, who followed Elijah, represents a picture of Jesus. Elisha did
greater things than Elijah; Jesus did greater things than John the Baptist.
Elisha starts with miraculously changing “sick” water into “healthy” water;
Jesus starts by miraculously changing water into wine. And as we continue this
series we will see many more parallels between Elisha and Jesus.
But
in today’s passage, Elisha responds to curses by pronouncing judgment. What
about Jesus? There is no similar passage in the accounts of Jesus’ life in the
gospels. There almost no “cursing” by Jesus at all except for the “woe”
passages and the cursing of the fig tree (a symbolic act), but Jesus does not
do anything like Elisha has done. I think of these passages:
For God did not send His Son into the
world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him. – John 3:17
“For I did
not come to judge the world, but to save the world.” – John 12:47b
Elisha
was in many ways a foreshadowing of Jesus, but only Jesus could sacrifice
Himself for the sins of the world, to save the world. Only Jesus was perfectly
holy, sinless, and could be that sacrifice. God responded to Elisha’s curse by
bringing the bears, to send a dire warning to the people to turn from their
selfish ways and false Gods and turn to God. And there have been other times
that God has used blunt, even shocking, events to draw people’s attention to
the reality of a Holy God, that He sees and He judges with all
righteousness.
Jesus
too was mocked, and much, much more than mocked. He was spit upon, savagely
beaten, and ultimately crucified. And in it all, he did not curse. He came to,
in effect, be our curse, to take away
the punishment that we deserve. And by putting our faith in Him, we enter into
a New Covenant, a covenant sealed by His blood for our sins, a covenant of love
that promises that not even death will have a hold on us; that we will be with
Him in perfect fellowship forever.
And
as Jesus has led the way in responding to mocking in non-retaliation, in love,
so are we called to do likewise. Consider the following three verses; one is
Jesus’ own words, one is Paul relaying a command from the Lord, and one is Paul
describing his own life as an example:
“Love your
enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who
mistreat you.” – Luke 6:27-28a
Bless those
who persecute you; bless and do not curse. – Rom. 12:14
When we are
cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; when we are slandered, we answer
kindly. – I Cor. 4:12-13a
We are called not to be like Elisha, but like Jesus.
And so at this time we want to remember the Lord in the manner He taught His
first disciples, to take the bread, a symbol of His body, and the cup, a symbol
of His blood, given for us. As Paul wrote, inspired by the Holy Spirit,
For I received from the Lord what I
also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night He was betrayed, took
bread, and
when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in
remembrance of Me.” In the same way, after supper He took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my
blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of Me.” For whenever you eat this bread and
drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes. – I Cor. 11:23-26
I think about
those young men taunting Elisha, not realizing that God was (and is) real and
holy, so holy that we would be undone before His full presence. They treated
Elisha in a manner entirely unworthy of this servant of God whom God had Himself
chosen to represent Him. Along the same lines of thinking, Paul warns us:
So then, whoever eats the bread or
drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning
against the body and blood of the Lord. Everyone ought to examine themselves before they eat
of the bread and drink from the cup. For those who eat and drink without discerning the
body of Christ eat and drink judgment on themselves. – I Cor.
11:27-29
We
do not need to be afraid of coming before the Lord with the bread and the cup,
but we do need to do so taking seriously the holiness of God and our utter
unworthiness, apart from the saving work of Christ, to come before Him. If we
do understand and believe this, we can come to Him confidently, knowing that He
welcomes us in Christ’s name, showering us with His infinite loving kindness.
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