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Sacramento Central SDA Church

Biblical Missionaries

Chris Buttery

The Missionary Nature of God

Abraham: The First Missionary

The Unlikely Missionary

The Jonah Saga

Exiles As Missionaries

Peter and the Gentiles

Background and Call

Paul: Mission & Message

Well, we're going to go right into our lesson here this morning.

And today and this week we've been reading and studying about the unlikely missionary.

And the story that we're going to be following here is found in 2 Kings chapter 5, and so turn in your Bibles to 2 Kings chapter 5 if you'd be so kind.

And we're going to spend quite a bit of time here, and of course, as we do every lesson, we're gonna go around the Scriptures, learn a few other things along the way.

A memory text is found in Luke chapter 4, verse 27, and I'll be reading from the New King James Version.

It says, And many lepers were in Israel in the times of Elisha the prophet, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.

And so we're going to be talking about Naaman and his healing and just all that took place there.

Just to set the stage a little bit, if you're not too familiar with the times, the Book of Kings was the record which records the history of the Kingdom of Israel from about 970 BC to about 550 BC.

It parallels 1 of the most interesting periods in the ancient Near Eastern history.

This was a time when Assyria was rising or had risen to power and its kings went out to conquer the then known world, which included, by the way, Israel and also Judah.

And this was for the time, this was at the same time of the 21st and the 20th through to the 26th dynasty of Egyptian pharaohs.

And of course they were still vying for control, not only of Syria, but also of Israel.

And this was also the time that the Neo-Babylonian Empire rose to power and when they, the Chaldeans and the Medes, defeated the Assyrian army and brought much of that area under their sway.

And so this is the political climate that we we find when we come to this particular story.

During this same time the story of 2 prominent prophets emerges and those prophets are Elijah and Elisha.

If you have a hard time trying to figure out who's Elijah and Elisha, here's just an easy way to remember.

And see, I'm trying to help you, and I'm trying to help myself, you see.

And so Elisha and Elijah were the prophets, couple of the main prophets, prominent prophets that we read about in the book of Kings.

And in the ministry and the life of Elisha, we see also a lot of similarities between his ministry, his life, and the ministry and life of Jesus.

In 1 Kings chapter 4, Elisha's servant asks him, how are we going to feed 100 people with this small portion of food?

And Elisha says, just go ahead and put it before them.

Essentially, the Lord's going to provide.

So Elisha, fed by the miracle working power of God, fed small portions of food to large companies.

Lepers were healed under the ministry of Elisha and of course the dead was raised as well.

And this particular lesson here today, we're going to be focusing on 1 of those stories of a cleansed and healed leper.

And that's the story of a very wealthy, a very powerful army captain who was healed of leprosy.

He was healed because of the witness of an unlikely missionary.

Let's just take it day by day as we normally do.

He had it all but 2 Kings chapter 5, and we're over here in verse 1.

Now it's 1 thing to be an unlikely missionary because of your past life and you may have read about the missionary stories of Anne and Adoniram Judson of the early 19th century.

He was a cynical actor who had rejected the faith of his father and his wife, Anne, she was the town belle or the town beauty and she was indulged by her parents.

But after a powerful conversion experience and then following a strong call to mission work, they, the Judsons, were foremost in helping open up the Far East to others who would then carry out the gospel commission.

If you read their story, their story is simply inspiring.

But they were unlikely missionaries because of their past life.

It's another thing to be an unlikely missionary because you were taken by force from your home country and then done so during fierce international conflict.

And that's the story of the nameless Israelite maiden we find in the second book of Kings.

And so we're going to read 2 Kings chapter 5 and verse 1 as we launch into our study here.

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 had given victory to Syria.

He was also a mighty man of valor, but he was a leper.

Now, he was the captain of the King's army, the captain of Syria.

And Syria, if you know a little bit about that region, Syria was the northern, was a country just north of Palestine and east of the Mediterranean Sea.

And Syria never really did become a very powerful nation when compared with its contemporary nations, but it was to boast 1 of the oldest continuously inhabited cities of the world, and that was the city starting with D, and it was Damascus.

We read about Damascus often, don't we, throughout the scriptures.

Now, although like every ancient city had been repeatedly conquered, it would also rise from the ashes, kind of like the phoenix.

Damascus was 1 of the strongest city-states of ancient Syria.

This is the Syrians or the Aramaeans, and they were always in conflict with Israel, that's why we read about them quite a bit in the Scriptures because they had a lot to do with God's people.

In 732 BC it was conquered, that is Syria, and it was taken over by Assyria, the Assyrian state.

It's interesting that although Assyria conquered Syria, Syria conquered Syria politically, Syria conquered Assyria culturally.

Their culture and their language spread throughout the Assyrian Empire, and in the course of time, the Aramaic language became an international language, and it held sway for quite a long time.

So at the time of this narrative here that we're reading in 2 Kings 5, Ben-Hadad, he was king of Syria, and he had defeated the armies of Israel in the battle that resulted essentially in the death of King Ahab.

And since that time, the Syrians had maintained constant border raids on Israel.

Now we don't know necessarily the name of the king that's connected to this story but many think it was the son of King Ahab and that was Joram.

The Bible says he was a commander of the king's army and he was a very successful 1 at that.

He was an important personage in Aramean society.

The biblical account states that he was great, that he was honorable, and that he was a mighty man of valor.

And if you read verse 5, it's evident that he was very wealthy.

And also in verse 18 of chapter 5, he was the king's right-hand man in the religious affairs of the king's religious affairs.

And so I don't think we can overstate how powerful this man was in the Aramaean society at that particular time.

He was a part of the upper echelons, if we could put it that way.

The Bible says at the end of verse 1, but he was a what?

You know, it's interesting that at essentially at times of need when people are experiencing difficulties or hardship, that they have an opening in their heart for perhaps something more than they're experiencing.

And you notice that throughout the scriptural record and perhaps even in your own experience, God doesn't always protect us from harm coming to us or difficulty or challenges coming to us.

Sometimes that's a way to cause us to look upward and recognize we need strength from on high, recognize our dependence upon God, you see.

And so it's at those particular times that we find a moment, an opening to share the goodness of God because people's hearts tend to be a little more open at those times.

A person can have friends, a person can have a job, a good job, A person can have some money, but if they don't have their health, they can't enjoy any of it.

His thing's worrying him, and it's not a good thing at all.

As a matter of fact, what disease is ideal?

If you had leprosy, the account, this account teaches us several things.

1, no one's wealth, no one's honor, no one's fame can put a person out of the reach of life's calamities.

You can't buy your way out of it, you can't have enough stuff to keep you from it, no 1 is immune.

And number 2, we all have a but, B-U-T, in our life.

We might be bright, but we have a temper.

We might be athletic, but we lack discipline, we might be succeeding in school or in the workplace, but we might be placing all of our confidence in the wrong place in our accomplishments in ourselves rather than the God who's giving us the ability to perform and do well.

The biggest problem, naturally, that we all face has to do with the fact that we are sinners.

That's the big but, if I could put it that way, in our lives.

It is the God's desire, however, that we recognize this problem and then in turn flee to the 1 who is a big Savior and his name is Jesus.

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Series

Biblical Missionaries

The Unlikely Missionary

Transcript

Parent Series

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Recorded

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