He Wanted a Gesture and Got an Errand

A commander of an army came a long way for a miracle and nearly went home over how it was delivered.

He arrived at the prophet's house with horses and chariots and a fortune in silver and gold and clothing, and he stood at the door. And the prophet did not come out.

He sent a messenger instead. And the message was: go wash in Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall come again to you, and you shall be clean.

And the commander was furious, and the reason he gives is the most human sentence in the chapter.

Behold, I thought, He will surely come out to me, and stand, and call on the name of the Lord his God, and strike his hand over the place, and recover the leper.

Behold, I thought. He had a picture. He had rehearsed how it was going to go, and the picture had a ceremony in it: a man coming out, standing there, calling on the name of God, a hand moving over the spot.

What he got instead was an errand. Go down to a river he did not respect and dip in it seven times, delivered by a servant who did not even come out with the prophet.

There was nothing spiritual about it at all, and that is exactly what nearly cost him everything.

The picture was the obstacle

Read his complaint, because the whole problem is in the first two words.

But Naaman was wroth, and went away, and said, Behold, I thought, He will surely come out to me, and stand, and call on the name of the LORD his God, and strike his hand over the place, and recover the leper. (2 Kings 5:11, King James Version)

Behold, I thought.

He was not refusing to obey God. He was refusing to obey God in a form he had not imagined. And he had imagined a good form, honestly. Everything in his picture is reverent: calling on the name of the Lord, a deliberate gesture, a moment.

The thing standing between that man and what he came for was not pride about washing. It was a picture he had made in advance and grown attached to.

You are not resisting God, and a picture in your head has never once been the same as a conviction from Him. That is not me being harsh on a proud man. 2 Kings 5:11 has him name his own expectation as the reason for his anger, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a person see the difference between what God said and what they had pictured.

The plainer it is, the less it feels like faith

Here is the mechanism, and I have felt it in myself.

An instruction that involves a ceremony feels significant. An instruction that involves getting in a river feels like nothing. And a person who wants their obedience to feel meaningful will unconsciously discount the plain instruction, because it does not produce the internal experience they were expecting.

That is why so many people are waiting. Not because they have not been told anything. Because what they were told was too ordinary to feel like it counted.

Make the call. Go to the appointment. Have the conversation. Show up on Tuesday. Apologize. None of that produces goosebumps, and all of it is usually the actual next thing.

You have already been told something plain, and its ordinariness has never once made it less of an instruction. 2 Kings 5:10 sends a message about a river rather than a ceremony, and the Spirit of God is the one who gives a person the willingness to obey something that does not feel like much.

His servants saved him

The turn in that story does not come from the commander and it does not come from the prophet.

It comes from his own staff. They walk up to him on the road while he is leaving and they say: my father, if the prophet had asked you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? How much rather then, when he says to you, wash, and be clean.

They asked him a question instead of arguing with him. And they pointed out the thing he could not see, which is that he was willing to do hard, and he was not willing to do small.

He turned around because somebody in his own household was brave enough to ask him one question on a bad afternoon.

You are able to hear it from somebody close to you, and God has never once refused to send the correction through an ordinary person. 2 Kings 5:13 has his servants turn the entire chapter around, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts a plain question in a person's mouth at the right moment.

Seven times, and nothing happened for six

There is one more thing that I think about often.

He went down and dipped seven times. Which means the first time nothing happened. And the second. And the third, fourth, fifth, sixth.

Six dips of nothing, in a river he already thought was beneath him, in front of people who had watched him nearly leave in a rage. That is a long walk back into the water each time.

Scripture does not tell us anything about what he felt on dip five. It just says according to the saying of the man of God, and then his flesh came again like the flesh of a little child.

You are able to keep going through the part where nothing is happening, and it has never once meant the instruction was wrong. 2 Kings 5:14 says he dipped seven times according to the saying, and the Spirit of God is the one who supplies persistence through the middle of an obedience that is showing no result.