Beneath the greater storyline of Ben Hadad II and Field Marshall Naaman and war and rumors of war, there is another storyline. I will have more to say about this later. But don’t miss it. It is the story of a Hebrew maidservant to the wife of Naaman. She had been taken captive. And she tells her mistress about the great prophet Elisha. We must understand that this girl believes in God and that God is moving and speaking through Elisha. She tells Mrs. Naaman about the power of God residing in the prophet Elisha. He can heal the disease of Naaman.

So the Field General asks the King, Ben-Hadad, about this matter. People rush today to Mexico for special drugs they can’t get here and Naaman was also desperate. So the King, wanting his All-Star General to keep the victories coming, sent a letter to the King of the Northern Kingdom, Jehoram. Now in the letter he mentions a whole lot of money:  ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold and ten changes of clothes. Scholars who study such things believe that the amount offered by the Syrian King to the King of Israel was equivalent to three-quarters of a billion dollars. Obviously, this Field General was a moneymaker for Syria and was worth the amount.

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The story then moves to Israel. And the healing goes like this:

The King of Israel gets the communiqué from the King of Syria, but he mistakenly thinks that he is the one who is expected to heal. The money looks good, but he knows that he has no such power. He thinks it is a trick and that soon, once again, the Field General Naaman and the mighty Syrian army will come marching into his country. So he tears his clothes. That is, in ancient style, he lets everyone know that doom is coming. It is an ancient way of raising the terror alert. The Man of God, Elisha, hears about it, so he sends word through the King of Israel to reply to the letter and tell the great General Naaman to come on over. He tells him to come to his place.

Taking your burdens to the Word of God is the right thing to do. And God still welcomes us to bring our pain to Him. Would that many suffering from sin’s horrible blight on their families and their lives would come into the House of the Lord and just sit under the preaching of God’s Word. They would be healed.

So the long and short of the story is that Naaman gets his directions, which seem odd to him. In fact, Naaman doesn’t like the prescription. He is to wash himself seven times in the Jordan River. Archeology has revealed through discovered artifacts that in ancient Mesopotamia, there was a ritual where purification was secured by dipping seven times in the river facing upstream and seven times facing downstream and then releasing gifts into the river to appease the local god. So Elisha gave a prescription for cure that would have likely been familiar to Naaman. The reason that Naaman doesn’t like the prescription is that it is to take place in the Jordan River, not one of his rivers. It would be ac act of faith in the God of Israel, not the pagan gods of Syria. So he gets upset. Sinners frequently buck at God’s exclusive claims and demands on their lives. But the military leader’s servants spoke sense to him and he ate his pride and did as Elisha commanded. And the text says that his skin was “restored like the flesh of a little child, and he was clean.”