Ben-hadad has Samaria surrounded, and the city is eating anything — a donkey’s head goes for eighty shekels, and two women have agreed to boil their sons. The king blames the prophet and swears to have his head by nightfall. Elisha’s answer is that by this time tomorrow flour will be cheap in the gate; the officer at the king’s elbow laughs out loud. That night four lepers outside the wall, with nothing left to lose, walk toward the enemy camp — and find it empty. This day is a day of good tidings.
A study in 2 Kings 6:24-7:20 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 9 min read
If The LORD Would Make Windows In Heaven
“Then Elisha said, Hear ye the word of the LORD; Thus saith the LORD, To morrow about this time shall a measure of fine flour be sold for a shekel, and two measures of barley for a shekel, in the gate of Samaria. Then a lord on whose hand the king leaned answered the man of God, and said, Behold, if the LORD would make windows in heaven, might this thing be? And he said, Behold, thou shalt see it with thine eyes, but shalt not eat thereof.”
2 Kings 7:1-2
The famine has reached the place where a mother tells the king, to his face, that she cooked her own child — and his complaint is with the mother next door who is now hiding hers. The king’s response to all of it is to send a soldier for Elisha’s head. Into that, Elisha promises a functioning grain market by tomorrow.
The officer’s objection sounds reasonable: even if God opened windows in the sky, how? It is unbelief dressed as common sense. He is not told he is wrong about the mechanism; he is told he will watch the promise come true and not taste it. Doubt that mocks the word gets to see the word kept — from the outside.
“Never had Israel been brought into so great a strait as during this siege. The sins of the fathers were indeed being visited upon the children and the children’s children.”
Ellen G. White · Prophets and Kings, p. 258
Why Sit We Here Until We Die?
“And there were four leprous men at the entering in of the gate: and they said one to another, Why sit we here until we die? If we say, We will enter into the city, then the famine is in the city, and we shall die there: and if we sit still here, we die also. Now therefore come, and let us fall unto the host of the Syrians: if they save us alive, we shall live; and if they kill us, we shall but die. And they rose up in the twilight, to go unto the camp of the Syrians: and when they were come to the uttermost part of the camp of Syria, behold, there was no man there.”
2 Kings 7:3-5
The lepers are shut out of the city by their disease and shut in by the siege. They do the arithmetic without flinching: stay and die, go in and die, or go to the enemy where the worst case is also death and the best case is bread. When every option but one ends the same way, the one that might not is the only rational move.
God had already emptied the camp — a phantom army-noise in the dark sent Syria running for the Jordan, leaving everything. The deliverance was finished before the lepers stood up. They were not brave; they were desperate, and desperation walked them straight into a rescue that was already done.
“During the night of the flight, four leprous men at the gate of the city, made desperate by hunger, had proposed to visit the Syrian camp and throw themselves upon the mercy of the besiegers, hoping thereby to arouse sympathy and obtain food.”
Ellen G. White · Prophets and Kings, p. 258
This Day Is A Day Of Good Tidings
“And when these lepers came to the uttermost part of the camp, they went into one tent, and did eat and drink, and carried thence silver, and gold, and raiment, and went and hid it; and came again, and entered into another tent, and carried thence also, and went and hid it. Then they said one to another, We do not well: this day is a day of good tidings, and we hold our peace: if we tarry till the morning light, some mischief will come upon us: now therefore come, that we may go and tell the king’s household.”
2 Kings 7:8-9
The first instinct is to eat and then to hoard — two tents looted and buried before conscience catches up. What stops them is not fear of getting caught but the plain wrongness of it: a starving city behind the wall, and the four men who know it can be fed are keeping quiet. “We do not well.”
It is as clean a picture of evangelism as the Old Testament gives. People who were themselves outcasts and starving have stumbled into more than they can carry, and the only honest thing to do with good news that big is to go tell the ones still inside the walls.
“Then they said one to another, We do not well: this day is a day of good tidings, and we hold our peace.”
Ellen G. White · Prophets and Kings, p. 258
The People Trode Upon Him In The Gate
“And the people went out, and spoiled the tents of the Syrians. So a measure of fine flour was sold for a shekel, and two measures of barley for a shekel, according to the word of the LORD. And the king appointed the lord on whose hand he leaned to have the charge of the gate: and the people trode upon him in the gate, and he died, as the man of God had said, who spake when the king came down to him.”
2 Kings 7:16-17
Every word lands exactly as spoken. The price of grain drops overnight to the figure Elisha named. And the officer who sneered is put in charge of crowd control at the gate — where a starving city, stampeding for food, tramples him. He saw it with his eyes and did not eat of it, precisely as he was told.
The chapter is a study in the reliability of God’s word under pressure — the promise and the warning both. In a siege that had reduced Israel to cannibalism, the LORD turned the whole thing in a single night, and made His name known to the heathen army that ran, through a prophet in a city that deserved nothing.
“Once more the name of God was exalted before the heathen ‘according to the word of the Lord’ through His prophet in Israel.”
Ellen G. White · Prophets and Kings, p. 259
