2 Kings 7:5-7: “At dusk they got up and went to the camp of the Arameans. When they reached the edge of the camp, no one was there, for the Lord had caused the Arameans to hear the sound of chariots and horses and a great army, so that they said to one another, ‘Look, the king of Israel has hired the Hittite and Egyptian kings to attack us!’ So they got up and fled in the dusk and abandoned their tents and their horses and donkeys. They left the camp as it was and ran for their lives.”
For the Israelites, this was the kind of thing worship sprang from. Worship songs, which we call Psalms, were written about these things, and the elders talked of them while the village listened. God was very real to them, because these were the stories of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers.
They’re still the stories of our God, though. That’s precisely why they were dictated by the Holy Spirit to men who wrote them down for us. They are part of what we need to know about God.
Sometimes when I read these stories – stories like Elisha making the ax head float, or multiplying the oil and the flour – there’s a part of me that wonders if they’re just fables. It would be easy to dismiss them as tales that teach a moral but didn’t actually happen, but that’s because our little minds struggle to fathom the least of what God can do.
The truth is, for our God these things are nothing, the equivalent of parlor tricks. Pulling an ax head from the bottom of a river and making scary noises in the tree tops impress us, but I’m thinking those things would be relatively simple to God.
A more amazing miracle, in my mind, is my salvation. Somehow God, through the cross and Jesus’ sacrifice, made it possible for me to have a relationships with him. Somehow, he moved my heart to want one. And somehow, he helps me every day to resist the pull of the world and turn to him. That’s an accomplishment that takes planning, effort and daily attention, yet God does it for millions.
Look at the things our God has done, and, like the Israelites, we will be moved to worship.
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