THE HEALING OF NAAMAN, THE SYRIAN
THE HEALING OF NAAMAN, THE SYRIAN
May 31, 2015, the Year of our Lord
Pastor Carolyn Sissom
The Lord chose in the sovereignty of His divine decrees, from all eternity to insert the name of this Aramite chief in the noble army of spiritual warriors of ever age; and made him a monument of His grace and mercy.
The Lord Jesus Christ took this same story of the Syrian soldier to enforce and illustrate the sovereignty of God’s choice.
Luke 4:27: “There were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed---only Naaman the Syrian.”
This statement made the religious leaders of Nazareth so angry with Jesus they tried to throw him out of the city.
What is impossible with men is possible with God!
What was it that recommended Naaman to the notice and regard of the Jehovah of Israel---leading Him to select that “wild olive tree among the rocks of Syria”, to be grafted into the true olive tree? Was it his valor, his victories, his warlike demeanor and noble bearing, his political sagacity or astute statesmanship or brilliant talents? No! These are but the qualities of earth. There was nothing God-like about them. These won only the hosannas of this world. Personal claim on God’s favor---he had none. The whole secret of His favor is “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy.” “I will call them my people who were not my people” (Rom. 9:25).
Naaman is first commended in the Holy Bible in 2 Kings 5:1: “Now Naaman, captain of the host of the king of Syria, was a great man with his master, and honorable, because by him the Lord (Jehovah) had given deliverance unto Syria---he was also a mighty man of valor; but he was a leper.”
Syria was the instrument of judgment against the evil Ahab. Naaman according to Jewish tradition (in the Midrash Tehillim) is the one spoken of in the last chapter of 1st Kings as the “certain man who drew a bow at a venture, and smote Ahab between the joints of the harness.” Thus the battle was won at Ramoth Gilead.
By others, he is described as a person of colossal stature. He was certainly a trusted adviser of his king and greatly loved. We can discern from this brief narrative, that he was one born to be obeyed (a leader). His character was noble and honorable. We may also claim for him traits of amiability, kindness, and goodness. His servants were not afraid to call him “My father”, nor did a Hebrew slave tremble to offer kindly counsel on his behalf. Her affectionate interest in his circumstances speaks of her favorable regard for her master.
Naaman means “beautiful”, “lovely”,” goodly to look upon.” But the horrors of leprosy were slowly killing him and stealing all quality of life. If he had been a Hebrew by birth, he would have been doomed to cheerless solitude. It is evident from the narrative; this rigid seclusion for lepers was not enforced in the country north of Herman. Naaman continued to discharge the duties of the highest civil office of the state.
He had wealth, and un-bounding material prosperity. Poverty has never darkened his dwelling. The widow and the orphan have been blessed out of his abundant treasure. But his disease was incurable ---no golden bridle can rein in the “pale horse”. “But he was a leper”.
“But” qualifies every condition of life.
Naaman’s trial was no ordinary one. He was not an ordinary man. Out of this great trial, the Lord God Jehovah did a great miracle of grace. From that leper’s couch there rose, as in the patriarch’s night-vision, a ladder reaching to heaven.
Naaman, who in an earthly sense forfeited the name, “beautiful” was to be clothed upon with the beauty of the God of Israel, and to have a name given him better than that of sons or of daughters!
It is the heritage of the Lord’s people. His dispensations of mercy are often incomprehensible. His name is that which He gave to Manoah---“Wonderful,” “Secret”. “Mysterious”. That wearing sickness, that wasting heritage of pain, these long tossing’s on a fevered, sleepless pillow; where can there be love or mercy there?
The silence and loneliness of the sick bed is the figurative “wilderness,” where He “allures”, that He may “speak comfortable unto them, and give them their vineyards from thence”. (Hosea 2:14) Rousing his beloved from busy care and the secular, to the divine and the heavenly.
The rents are made in the house of clay only to make of us a building of God---the house not made with hands---to live in that world where there are no “buts”---no more tears---where we shall stand without a “but” and without a fault before the throne.
Naaman’s leprosy brought him to God and eternal life. Naaman’s leprosy and conversion is an eternal seed in the nation of Syria. The nations typified by Syria will return to the Lord Jesus Christ, be cleansed, healed and made pure.
Our trials may not be sent to us by God, but He will always use them to bring us nearer to Himself. They are His appointed gateways, opening up and admitting great spiritual blessings.
The mother eagle is said to purposely put a thorn into her nest to compel her young brood to fly. If God gave us no thorn---if He never disturbed the downy nest of our worldly ease, we would never press in for the “high-calling”. He knows us better. He loves us better. The day will come when the “buts” in our present lot, we will count it all joy and sing a new song of praise.
Had it not been for these wilderness experiences---that leprosy---that protracted sickness---that loss of worldly position---the death of that cherished loved one, I would still be clinging to the security of earth--- content with the polluted stream and the broken cistern instead of drawing water out of the wells of salvation.
Without the wilderness experience, I would never have answered the call to the ministry. Without the trials, persecution and rejection, I would never have persevered in the ministry. Had the Little White Church not been pulled out from under us, I would have made it my rocking chair.
Without the scar of leprosy, it would seem easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the commander of the hosts of Syria to seek for mercy at the hands of the God and the Prophet of a hated race! But that God loved him with an everlasting love; and He will take His own means of saying “to the north, Give up,” and of bringing this son “from afar.” God goes to this poor victim, racked with torture amid the splendid, regal garments. “Though you have laid among the pots, yet shall you be as the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her feathers with yellow gold” (Ps. 68:13).
Faith says that all events are in the Lord’s hand---from the creation of worlds and the revolution of empires, to the fall of the raindrop and the sparrow. Though nations are hatching schemes of wicked war, and wild ambition, we are comforted that His eye is upon each one of us. His hand is covering the craters of slumbering volcanoes. The flood waters will go so far and no farther. His Church will come forth from the fierce boiling cauldron, “fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners.”
There is One is heaven who has the hearts of kings in His hands, and who turns them as He turns the rivers of waters. “O Assyrian, the rod of my anger, and the staff in their hand is my indignation…behold the Lord, the Lord of Hosts, shall lope the bough with terror, and the high ones of stature shall be hewn down, and the haughty shall be humbled! He shall cut down the thickets of the forest with iron, and Lebanon shall fall by a mighty One.” (Isa. 10:5; 33; 34).
He who rules over worlds and empires, rules over the individual human spirit; controls, in the case of each, the empire of thought and the fitful human will.
Naaman was angry at the simplicity of the manner by which the Lord chose to heal him. He was expecting some “drama” out of Elisha and from God. “I thought surely he would 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. Aren’t the Abana River and Pharpar River of Damascus better than all the rivers of Israel put together? Why shouldn’t I wash in them and be healed?” (1 Kings 5:11-12)
I find it interesting to note:
It must have been in the waters of these rivers of Syria which Naaman loved so well, that Saul of Tarsus was baptized into the name of “that same Jesus” who met him on the Damascus highway, and transformed the persecutor into a chosen vessel of mercy.
The most eminent of the apostles had the baptismal rite administered to him, not from the sacred streams of Kedron, or Siloam, or Jordan, or other waters in the land of his fathers, but from “the golden river” of pagan story. He received the baptism not from Peter, James or John, but from the hands of a humble, lowly, unknown disciple---“one Ananias”.
Surely that one act of Christian baptism, especially appointed by God Himself for the Apostle Paul affirms, “Neither is he who plants anything, neither he who waters, but God that gives the increase” (1 Cor. 3:7).
For those who have visited both the streams of Syria and Israel, they come into agreement with the verdict of Naaman that the Abana and Pharpar are more beautiful and better waters than the Jordan.
However, the spiritual lesson in this graphic tale of the pilgrimage of a Gentile soldier from his distant Syrian home to the land of Israel is the 7-times washing in the Jordan transmuting barrenness into fertility, and life into death.
The “worshiper of Rimmon is here made a “trophy of Divine grace”, and by loyal conversion and allegiance to Israel’s God, becomes the first of that “handful of grain in the earth upon the top of the mountains,” the harvest is one day to “shake like Lebanon” (Ps. 72:16).
The altars of our lives, the piety of a holy, God-fearing consistent life---does not die with us. Our altars of prayer and worship live on through eternity. Naaman had the responsibility of the Syrian armies and the weight of government on his shoulders; yet he returned to the man of God. He and all his company came and stood before him. He said, Behold, now I know that there is no God in all the earth, but in Israel.”
It is my persuasion, though the scriptures do not say, that the whole company was saved and his household.
Naaman began his journey a leper and a heathen---he washed in Jordan, and was cleansed---he returned home and worshipped the Lord God.
We begin this journey of life as a “miserable sinner”. We wash in the stream of salvation, cleansed by the water of the Word. Our “altar of witness” (our life) is erected. The vow of allegiance and love is publically recorded and devoutly observed.
When our journey is finished that which is of God lives on. That love of God which we deposit in others lives on. The seed of the Word, prayer, and a devout life will bring forth a harvest.
Carolyn Sissom, Pastor
Eastgate Ministries Church
Scripture from K.J.V.
I entered into the labors of John MacDuff (1818-1895) – The Story of Naaman the Syrian – public domain. Comments and conclusions are my own and not meant to reflect the views of Rec. MacDuff.