This is an amazing chapter that illustrates God’s marvelous GRACE in “delivering a foreign nation” AND in “delivering a man named Naaman, the commander of the Syrian army.” I will give you a summary of that chapter and the spiritual lesson we can glean from it.

In verse 1 we read “Now Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Syria, was a great and honorable man in the eyes of his master, because BY HIM THE LORD HAS GIVEN VICTORY TO SYRIA. He was also a mighty man of valor, but a leper.” In God’s sovereign grace God gave Naaman and Syria the victory over their enemies but in all likelihood, they never gave the God of Israel the credit He deserved. Though Naaman was a mighty warrior and well-respected, he had a dreadful and incurable disease known as leprosy (see Leviticus chapter 13). It left him weak and helpless.

In verses 2-7 we learn that Naaman raided villages in Israel and took a young girl captive to serve his wife. This little girl was a nothing in the eyes of Naaman, but she knew the Lord and His power to heal, and she told Naaman’s wife that there was a prophet in Israel who could heal her husband of his leprosy (vs. 2-3). Naaman then told the king of Syria and he sent Naaman, along with many gifts, to the king of Israel, and asked him to heal his servant. This troubled the king and thought he was using this to start a war with Israel (vs. 4-7).

In verses 8-14 the godly prophet Elisha heard of this and sent word to the king to send Naaman to him for healing (vs. 8). Naaman came to Elisha’s house and Elisha sent a messenger out with a simple message, ‘Go and wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored to you, and you shall be clean’ (vs. 9-10). In PRIDE Naaman became furious, thinking the prophet himself should come to him and call upon the name of the LORD his God instead of making him bow down in one of the inferior rivers of Israel (vs. 11-12). But his servants finally persuaded him to do as he was told and in humility “he went down and dipped seven times in the Jordan, according to the saying of the man of God; and his flesh was restored like the flesh of a little child, and he was clean” (vs. 13-14).

In verses 15-19 we see an even greater healing by God’s grace, for Naaman was so humbled and grateful for being healed of leprosy, that he acknowledged that “there is no god in all the earth, except in Israel.” In other words, he was CONVERTED; His body had been healed and now his soul was healed and he became a worshipper of the true and living God! This is borne out in his desire to take some soil from Israel back to Syria so he could “offer sacrifices to the LORD.”

This is a beautiful story of God’s grace which illustrates His desire to “save sinners.”  Like Naaman, each of us is an “ENEMY of God” with a “malady of SIN” (pictured by the LEPROSY).  SIN renders us HELPLESS and without any STRENGTH in ourselves. Yet in God’s love and grace He provided healing through the death of Christ on the cross which can heal us of our sinful disease. I will end by quoting scriptures that confirm this. “For when we were still WITHOUT STRENGTH, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love for us, in that while we were still SINNERS, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him. For is when we were ENEMIES we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life” (Romans 5:6-10). “The blood of Jesus Christ His Son. CLEANSES US FROM ALL SIN…By His stripes we are HEALED” (1 John 4:7 and Isaiah 53:5).  (DO)  (638.1)