What Does This Mean? ~ Cleansing (sorry no livestream available)

1. Introduction:  What does this mean?
2.   The story and its characters
   • Naaman
   • Servant girl
   • King of Israel
   • Elisha the prophet
   • Servants of Naaman
   • Gehazi, servant of Elisha
   • Summing up
3. Great story! But what does it have to do with Easter?
       Baptism …
       1 Cor 6:11; Heb 10:22; Eph 5:25-26; Titus 2:14; Titus 3:5; Heb 1:3; Heb 9:13-14; Rom 6:3-11
4. So what?

         What do we learn about Easter?

• •  What God does in us
  • Cleansing,” “regeneration”

         Practically for us this week…

• • A need for balance
  • A need for humility

SERMON TEXT 

2 Kings 5 – What Does This Mean? Part 3 - Cleansing

West Van Baptist, March 17, 2024

Reading:  2 Kings 5:1-19

I.          Introduction

Today we come to the third in a series of sermons preparing us for Easter. Each week this March we’re looking at an OT image that helps us to understand the message of the cross and resurrection.

Two weeks ago we reviewed Genesis 3, which speaks of the shame caused by sin, the inability of Adam and Eve to cover their shame, and the gracious way God reached out to provide a covering—at the cost of a life.

Last week we considered one of the most challenging passages in the OT: Genesis 22, where God tested Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his son. In the end, Isaac was spared. God provided a substitute, a ram that would die in Isaac’s place. God was gracious—as He always is. In the process Abraham learned—and taught us—about the need to surrender our most precious things, trusting God who is trustworthy.

So, so far we have talked about divine grace; covering; cost; substitution; surrender; and trust. That’s a pretty good start on our path to Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

This week’s story is a lot more fun than last week’s. Of course, we don’t study Scripture to have fun. We read and reflect on God’s Word to hear what He would say to us, to let Him shape our worldviews, to gain encouragement, sometimes to be challenged when we need it. Every part is precious, and every part has lessons which feed our souls. Still, some parts are easier to preach than others. I always enjoy this account from 2 Kings 5. In fact, if I had to write a play about a Bible story, this is one of the first ones I’d pick.

Not many people here know this, but there were seasons in our lives—long ago—when Diane and I spent quite a bit of time around theaters and drama productions. In fact, before we ever dated we worked together on a college parody of Gilligan’s Island. Then there was a spy thriller, a life raft in the ocean, a Fran Drescher hairstylist, a crazy lady in a home … more roles and stories than we can remember. And we have good friends whose lives are so wrapped up in community theater that we never know what characters they’ll be playing when we visit.

Even today, when I read Bible stories I sometimes find myself thinking about how they might be presented on stage. What kind of set would we build? How would the plot unfold? What sort of actors would we cast for the main characters?

It’s easy to do with 2 Kings 5. Think about what a great set of characters this chapter gives us.

II.        The story and its characters

First, there’s Naaman. Military commander. Valiant soldier. Hero of the Syrian army (Aram was in modern day Syria). Under his leadership his nation becomes a growing world power. He’s famous, loved by the people, respected even by the king, who—we’re told in verse 18—would have Naaman personally accompany him to events and stand next to him. Naaman was literally the king’s “right hand man,” the one who provided security and whatever assistance might be needed.   

Naaman is the very picture of greatness. He is successful, and presumably wealthy. His name means “pleasant,” or “beautiful.” He is a proud man—understandably so—and accustomed to having others listen to him and obey; but he is also willing to listen, so apparently not too obnoxious. He is a man who has the world by the tail—everything is going his way.

Well, except one thing. He is a leper.

Ancient Hebrew used the word “leper” for a variety of skin diseases, some more crippling and contagious than others. It seems like Naaman’s disease is the less disabling sort, since he is still commanding the army and coming into the king’s presence. But this is a serious problem, and it threatens to ruin his career and perhaps his life. So Naaman is desperate. In spite of everything he has and all he has achieved, he can’t free himself from this disease. And he is willing to do anything—even to visit one of the neighboring countries he has fought—if there is a chance of finding healing.  

Naaman stands in stark contrast with a second important character: the servant girl. Naaman is powerful; she is a slave, taken from home and family to serve the wife of an enemy. She is young. She has no accomplishments to boast about, and no status. We don’t even know her name. She is just “the young girl from Israel.”

But she brings 2 things to the story. She is old enough to remember that there is a prophet in Israel who speaks God’s words, and who has God’s ear when he prays. Someone whose ministry is marked by miracles. And she has a kind heart. She sees the pain and desperation this disease brings to her captor’s family, and has sympathy. So she says to her mistress, “If only my master would go and see the prophet who is in Samaria. He would cure him of his leprosy.”

We often overlook the third character in the story—the King of Israel. He isn’t named here, but this is Jehoram, son of the most notorious villains in Israel’s history: Ahab and Jezebel. Jehoram’s name means “exalted one,” which is ironic since he is nothing of the sort. His kingdom is struggling and will soon be dominated by Syria. Jehoram himself will be wounded in battle, killed by one of his generals, and dumped in a field, ending his family’s dynasty.

In our story, Jehoram is simply a godless worrier. Naaman comes to town carrying a letter of safe passage and requesting help. Jehoram never considers asking God for a miracle, or consulting with the prophet. He thinks only of himself. He tears his robe in fright, complaining, “Am I God? Can I kill and bring back to life? Why does my enemy send this man to be cured? They are just looking for an excuse to go to war with me!” Syria will attack in the future. But not this time. For now, the king just proves himself to be useless and forgetful that there really is a God in Israel.

Of course, Jehoram is contrasted with Elisha.  You remember Elisha, I’m sure. Successor to Elijah, Israel’s most famous prophet. When Elijah’s ministry was over, Elisha asked God for a double portion of Elijah’s spirit, and he went on to have a powerful ministry marked by many miracles.

Elisha is a character, and a man of contrasts. He can be extremely kind and compassionate: caring for families without children, showing mercy when children are sick, helping colleagues with practical needs, even showing mercy on a band of enemy soldiers who had been struck blind. At other times, he is gruff and maybe even harsh: speaking sharply to his godless king, or—in an early and odd miracle story—cursing a group of mocking youths who were then mauled by bears.  

Elisha shows both sides while dealing with Naaman. When the Syrian commander first arrives at his home, he doesn’t even go to the door. He just sends a servant with instructions: “Go down to the river Jordan and bathe 7 times.” No Middle Eastern hospitality here. Not even a personal greeting. It is, in fact, an insult, and Naaman goes away furious. (Perhaps Elisha knew that in the future Naaman and the Syrian army would do great harm to Israel.)

Still, this man asks for divine help, and help is what Elisha gives. Naaman is healed. Not only that, but he is transformed. He now acknowledges that there is no other God but the God of Israel. He will worship only the true God. Yet Naaman observes that his role as the king’s assistant may require him to enter the temple of the Arameans’ false god. Could the true God forgive such a thing? To this, Elisha surprises us with an unexpectedly gracious answer: “Go in peace.”

Finally, in this story there are 2 more sets of servants.

First, we meet Naaman’s servants. Like the Jewish girl, these aren’t great or famous people, and we don’t learn their names. All we know is this: when Naaman is upset by Elisha’s rudeness, and at the thought of bathing in this piddly foreign river, his servants love him enough to pursue his healing, and they have enough wisdom to calm him and coax him into giving this odd medicine a try. “My father,” they say, “you would have slain a dragon or done some other mighty deed if the prophet had asked. Surely it’s not too difficult a thing to bathe in the river. Why not give it a try?”

Because of their gentle, wise coaxing, Naaman bathes. Because he bathes, he is healed. And so in many ways, his servants become the heroes of the story. There is a happy ending only because of them.

And again we have a contrast, this time with Elisha’s servant Gehazi.

You’d think Elisha would have a servant of the highest quality. But apparently good help was hard to find in Israel. Gehazi is a regular assistant to the prophet. At times he does good things: he suggests a kind reward for a family who had helped Elisha. He is sent to bring healing to a sick child. On the other hand, his efforts at healing do not work, and he is sometimes harsh toward those who seek Elisha’s help.

Most serious, when Naaman offers a vast reward after his healing, Gehazi proves to be both greedy and a liar. (This comes later in the chapter, after the part we read this morning.)

The reward is princely: 750 pounds (340 kg) of silver and 150 pounds (69 kg) of gold coins along with rich changes of clothing. When Elisha rejects these gifts, it must have seemed absolutely crazy. So Gehazi follows Naaman’s company away from Elisha’s house and pretends that Elisha has changed his mind. In this way, Gehazi hopes to keep some of the riches for himself. When Elisha confronts him about this, he lies. And in the end, Gehazi and his whole family are struck with leprosy, even as the Syrian rides north fully cleansed.

Summing up the story…

You see what I mean? Wouldn’t this make a great stage play?

• A proud, noble man with an urgent need is helped by a lowly servant.
• He goes to the kingdom of his enemies, where the king (who doesn’t know God) is no help at all.
• But God is alive and present, and God will help through His prophet.
• The prophet’s treatment and directions are humiliating.
• Still, Naaman is desperate, so he goes to the river, bathes, and comes up clean.
• Thrilled, he rides back up to the prophet’s house and offers a giant reward, which is rejected.
• Instead of leaving treasures, he returns to Syria with a new faith, as a worshipper of God.
• So the story ends happily—for the most part. Except that Gehazi, Elisha’s servant, is more interested in the riches than the miracle, and gets leprosy for his trouble.

III.     Great story! But what does it have to do with Easter?

It’s a great story! But you might be asking yourself, what does any of this have to do with Easter?

At one level, nothing at all. No sacrifices are offered. No sin or shame is covered. Nothing dies. The only mention of forgiveness is a request for future leniency. There is no substitution.

But if we look more carefully, there is a connection—though it is subtle and indirect. This passage leads us to Easter through the imagery of baptism.

This isn’t the first time the OT talks about bathing. There are plenty of places in the Law where Israel is commanded to wash for this or that or the other thing. But Naaman’s bath is quite different from all of these. Naaman doesn’t go to the temple or to an alter. He rides down to the Jordan river. He doesn’t wash as a symbol of cleansing; in this case actual healing comes when he obeys and takes the bath. And Naaman isn’t part of the family of Israel—he is a foreigner, an enemy, a person the Jews would consider a sinner.  Yet he goes into the water diseased and angry, and comes out clean, and a believer whose heart is changed.

Eight hundred years later, a man named John will wade into the same Jordan river and shout out to the people along the bank. His message? “You have turned away from God. You are like a pit full of snakes. You’ve sinned, and you keep sinning, and your sins make you unclean in God’s eyes and sick in your own souls. You need to be cleansed. You need to humble yourselves and admit the desperate nature of your situation. You need to walk into this river and wash—and let this physical bath be a sign that you want God to wash you clean of your sin.”

When people heard John preach, and saw him baptize men and women in the river, what do you think came into their minds? There is only 1 OT story that looks anything like this. It’s the story of a Syrian commander whose life looked good, but who desperately needed to be cleansed, who humbled himself and took a bath in the Jordan—and came out a new man.

John started a baptism movement. Jesus and His disciples carried the practice forward, so that it became a core part of Christian tradition—which is why we are “West Vancouver Baptist Church.”

Christian baptism includes the same ideas John preached at the Jordan river. When Peter gave the first Pentecost sermon in Acts 2, he called those who listened to “repent and be baptized” (Acts 2:38)—to humble themselves, acknowledge their need for forgiveness, turn from sin, and walk in a different direction. The point—then as now—is not about washing in water. It is that we need a change of heart, turning from self-sufficiency and pride to reliance on God. For us, the water of baptism is like the Jordan river was for Naaman: it is a sign of willingness to do what God tells us.

This goes hand-in-hand with the understanding that we, like Naaman, need to be cleansed. We don’t need the disease of leprosy to be taken away. But we are wounded and scarred by the disease of sin, and we need that sin to be washed clean. Water doesn’t do the washing. Baptism—by itself—doesn’t remove sin. Jesus is the One who makes us clean. And we celebrate that cleansing work by going down into the water and coming up again. This is illustrated in many NT passages. For example, we are told:

You were cleansed; you were made holy; you were made right with God by calling on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Cor 6:11)

Let us go right into the presence of God with sincere hearts fully trusting him. For our guilty consciences have been sprinkled with Christ’s blood to make us clean, and our bodies have been washed with pure water. (Heb 10:22)

[Jesus] gave his life to free us from every kind of sin, to cleanse us, and to make us his very own people, totally committed to doing good deeds. (Tit 2:14)

Jesus made our cleansing possible by giving His life for us. By His death and resurrection. By the things we remember at Easter. And because our cleansing is so closely tied to Jesus’ death and resurrection, it is only natural that baptism was quickly understood to be a symbol of those things—and of our own dying to old ways and rising to new life in Him. This is why in Romans 6 Paul says:

When we were joined with Christ Jesus in baptism, we joined him in his death. ⁴ For we died and were buried with Christ by baptism. And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives. (Rom 6:3-4)

Christian baptism is a physical symbol of a profound personal experience of cleansing from sin and the beginning of a new life, made possible by Jesus, who died and rose again for us. And that personal experience of cleansing and a new life, of leaving pride and selfishness behind for obedience, was powerfully pictured more than 800 years earlier when a Syrian soldier named Naaman took a bath in the Jordan river.

IV.     So what?

(1)          What do we learn about Easter from the story of Naaman?

This week’s passage adds a very important element in our preparation for Easter. For the past couple weeks we’ve talked about what God does for us through Christ’s death. He provides graciously when we are helpless. He covers our sin and shame when we can’t. He does so even though the cost is great. He offers a substitute: a ram for Isaac, the Son of God for the world.

All these things are true, and important. But if we stopped here, we might think that Easter is only about things that happen outside of us. Things that God does to change our situation.

This passage reminds us that Easter is also about what God does in us.  

When the Bible speaks of sin and salvation, it uses 2 types of language.

• Some of its language might be described as external, or objective, or legal. We have broken God’s laws. We are guilty, and deserving the consequences of our sin. So God offers “forgiveness,” and “justification.” He “pays our penalty” and makes us right again.
• Some of the Bible’s language is more subjective and internal. It talks about how we have become unclean, twisted, mortally sick. So God “cleanses,” “sanctifies,” “transforms,” and “regenerates.”

We need to pay attention to both types of language. If we stop at “covering” and “substitution,” as some people do, we might think that it’s OK to go on sinning as long as we’re under the blanket. There are people who really do think that way. That because God has provided a substitute for us, we can go ahead and live any way we like, and live for ourselves.

But the Bible also tells us that sin affects what we are, and who we are. It is a deep, penetrating, disabling, fatal disease. Sinners need a substitute. They need covering. They also need cleansing—they need the disease to be scrubbed away and replaced with healthy life.

Naaman didn’t need a new coat. He needed a new body. He needed a miracle that would cleanse and change him from the inside out. And that’s exactly what happened. That day in the water, God washed his body clean, and changed his whole life.

We need more than a new coat. We need more than just forgiveness—as precious as that is. We need to be new creatures, with a whole new life growing in and transforming us. That is exactly what the Bible says God does through Jesus. Jesus’ death and resurrection and ascension and the outpouring of the Spirit make it possible. They offer forgiveness—and cleansing and transformation—in what Titus 3:5 calls “The washing of rebirth and renewal by the Hoy Spirit.”

(2)          Practically for us this week…

What does this mean for you and me this week? There are a whole lot of practical implications. Let me name two.

(a) First, this is a reminder of our need for balance.

The Bible’s description of our sin and God’s solution is both situational and internal—both objective and subjective. We need to keep both strands together, in a healthy union.

I’ve suggested already that it is possible for us to put all our focus on the situational, objective side: the fact that God covers us and declares us “not guilty.” A lop-sided emphasis in this direction can lead—and has led—people to the very unhealthy idea that “I’ve got my ‘ticket’ to heaven, now I can live any way I like and still be safe.” Nowhere in the Bible is this mindset given the OK. In fact, both Jesus and the apostles have some very strong warnings against it. We always need to pair it with the balancing truth that God’s desire is to transform us.

It's possible to fall off the fence on the other side, as well. Sometimes—both in the past and today—Christians have placed all their emphasis on the need for us to be transformed. This can be a fast road to legalism and judgmentalism, where we become experts in criticizing others, and ourselves, for every little fault and failure. “You sinned again today. What kind of Christian are you? How can God ever be pleased with you?”

It's healthy to strive for holiness. It’s neither healthy nor helpful to spend all our time judging ourselves and others because we are not yet fully perfect. We need to remember that the Holy Spirit’s transforming work in us is a life-long process, and that it rests on the fact that He has first embraced us and loved us in our unworthiness. We are saved by grace. We must embrace God’s grace, and extend it to others, even as we seek to be made new by the Spirit.

In short, we need Genesis 3, and Genesis 22, and 2 Kings 5, and all the other biblical stories that teach us about salvation. We get in trouble when we become so preoccupied by one truth that we forget all the others. So we must be continually remembering the entire message.

(b) Second, the story of Naaman teaches us the essential importance of humility.

The heroes in this story are the humble characters. The young Jewish slave girl who suggested coming to Israel. Naaman’s servants, who coaxed him to go to the Jordan. They weren’t proud or powerful, but they made a difference.

Naaman himself had to learn the lesson of humility. He came in search of healing as a leader and a bearer of wealth. He expected to be treated with honor, and was furious when that didn’t happen. Yet only when he was willing to take direction, to humble himself and bathe in that unimpressive river, did God touch his body. And the change in attitude was more than skin deep; Naaman went away committed to serve Israel’s God, even when it wasn’t the popular thing to do.

Humility has always been a part of baptism. The people who came to John in the river were willing to acknowledge their sin and ask for forgiveness. The proud stayed on the bank and mocked. The same has always been true of Christian baptism. It takes humility to stand in the water and say, “I need help. I’m broken and fallen, and I need God’s forgiveness and grace. I need to die to myself so that God can give me life.”

Jesus’ death on the cross was the ultimate humiliation. Philippians 2 tells us our Lord “humbled Himself” when He suffered for us. No one ever really participates in the death of Jesus—or the resurrection that follows—without adopting the same attitude of humility.

So again, as we prepare for Easter, it’s good to place ourselves in the story. We all naturally like to be the hero—the strong, triumphant commander admired by everyone. Are we willing to acknowledge how deeply wounded we are by sin? Are we willing to go to the Lord’s door to ask for help—even if we aren’t received with the respect we think we deserve? Are we willing to take whatever humiliating bath God asks us to take, in order to receive His cleansing and new life? Are we willing to let Him transform us into someone completely new?

No one really understands Easter without laying down their pride. May God give us the grace to do so again and again.