Daily Manna 9 November
KEY VERSE: “Then he said, God do so and more also to me, if the head of Elisha the son of Shaphat shall stand on him this day.” – 2 Kings 6: 31
TEXT: 2 Kings 6:24-33 (KJV)
24 And it happened after this that Ben-Hadad king of Syria gathered all his army, and went up and besieged Samaria. 25 And there was a great famine in Samaria; and indeed they besieged it until a donkey’s head was sold for eighty shekels of silver, and one-fourth of a [a]kab of dove droppings for five shekels of silver.
26 Then, as the king of Israel was passing by on the wall, a woman cried out to him, saying, “Help, my lord, O king!”
27 And he said, “If the Lord does not help you, where can I find help for you? From the threshing floor or from the winepress?” 28 Then the king said to her, “What is troubling you?”
And she answered, “This woman said to me, ‘Give your son, that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow.’ 29 So we boiled my son, and ate him. And I said to her on the next day, ‘Give your son, that we may eat him’; but she has hidden her son.”
30 Now it happened, when the king heard the words of the woman, that he tore his clothes; and as he passed by on the wall, the people looked, and there underneath he had sackcloth on his body. 31 Then he said, “God do so to me and more also, if the head of Elisha the son of Shaphat remains on him today!”
32 But Elisha was sitting in his house, and the elders were sitting with him. And the king sent a man ahead of him, but before the messenger came to him, he said to the elders, “Do you see how this son of a murderer has sent someone to take away my head? Look, when the messenger comes, shut the door, and hold him fast at the door. Is not the sound of his master’s feet behind him?” 33 And while he was still talking with them, there was the messenger, coming down to him; and then the king said, “Surely this calamity is from the Lord; why should I wait for the Lord any longer?”
Read yesterday’s Daily Manna here
Many people have been misled into taking wrong decisions with terrible consequences because they easily run out of patience and blame an innocent individual to be responsible for their predicament. From the text, Israel experienced a great famine in the days of Elisha. The famine was so intense that food became scarce and very expensive. When a woman narrated how they resorted to cannibalism due to the extremities of the time, the king was infuriated. He thought God was punishing the nation unnecessarily and decided to vent his anger on Elisha, the prophet of God.
To facilitate his threat, the king sent an executioner to Elisha who held a meeting with the elders of the land. The king eventually came to the place where Elisha was, expressing his frustration, after the executioner was stayed through the spiritual authority of Elisha. It is quite unclear why the king of Israel thought Elisha was responsible for the famine that ravaged the land during his reign. It is hard still to understand why he thought killing the prophet would be a solution. He appeared to forget or minimise his own contribution to the crisis, and did not acknowledge the sins of Israel which brought the displeasure of God in the first place.
Many times, we look away from our faults and begin our search for a scapegoat that can be blamed for our own inconsistencies and failure. The Syrians who imposed economic blockade on the nation were not the problem; neither was it Elisha. The sins of the people made God turn these enemies loose on them. We get our relief faster when we repent than when we continue in our rebellion and blame others for the consequences.
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: Stop searching for scapegoats; look inwards.
BIBLE IN ONE YEAR: Lamentations 1-3
Thank you for studying today’s Daily Manna – Blame Game – by Pastor Enoch A.
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Daily Manna 9 November 2021
