Now the king of Aram was warring against Israel; and he counseled with his servants saying, “In such and such a place shall be my camp.” The man of God [Elisha, the prophet] sent word to the king of Israel saying, “Beware that you do not pass this place, for the Arameans are coming down there.” The king of Israel sent to the place about which the man of God had told him; thus he warned him, so that he guarded himself there, more than once or twice.
Now the heart of the king of Aram was enraged over this thing; and he called his servants and said to them, “Will you tell me which of us is for the king of Israel?” [i.e., who is the spy in our midst?] One of his servants said, “No, my lord, O king; but Elisha, the prophet who is in Israel, tells the king of Israel the words that you speak in your bedroom.” [The point here is that Elisha was supernaturally spying on the king of Aram, hence giving Israel a big advantage in the war.] So he [the king] said, “Go and see where he is, that I may send and take him.” And it was told him, saying, “Behold, he is in Dothan.” He sent horses and chariots and a great army there, and they came by night and surrounded the city.
Now when the attendant of the man of God [i.e., Elisha’s servant] had risen early and gone out, behold, an army with horses and chariots was circling the city. And his servant said to him, “Alas, my master! What shall we do?” So he [Elisha] answered, “Do not fear, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them.” Then Elisha prayed and said, “O Lord, I pray, open his eyes that he may see.” And the Lord opened the servant’s eyes and he saw; and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha. When they came down to him, Elisha prayed to the Lord and said, “Strike this people with blindness, I pray.” So He struck them with blindness according to the word of Elisha. Then Elisha said to them, “This is not the way, nor is this the city; follow me and I will bring you to the man whom you seek.” And he brought them to Samaria.
When they had come into Samaria, Elisha said, “O Lord, open the eyes of these men, that they may see.” So the Lord opened their eyes and they saw; and behold, they were in the midst of Samaria. Then the king of Israel when he saw them, said to Elisha, “My father, shall I kill them? Shall I kill them?” He answered, “You shall not kill them. Would you kill those you have taken captive with your sword and with your bow? Set bread and water before them, that they may eat and drink and go to their master.” So he prepared a great feast for them; and when they had eaten and drunk he sent them away, and they went to their master. And the marauding bands of Arameans did not come again into the land of Israel. (2 Kings 6:8-23)
Don: The key element in the story is vision/insight vs. blindness/ignorance. The king of Aram knew that Elisha could eavesdrop on his every word, yet the king thought he could sneak into Israel to capture Elisha. It shows a lack of logical insight; that the king was blind. He saw a supernatural power arraigned against him and thought he could harness it for his own uses. This desire of the king is the fundamental, blind and ignorant, desire of Mankind to get God working for him.
The dialog between Elisha and his servant reflects the fundamental nature of fallen Mankind, always wanting to act (“What shall we do?”) My old professor liked to tell his students: “Don’t just do something—Stand there!” The psalmist said something similar:
Be still, and know that I am God…. (Psalms 46:10)
Often, we are like the servant: Full of despair and hopelessness, seeing only the forces besetting us. But sometimes we may be like Elisha, helping others to assuage their fears and see them through a period of calamity and loss. To reassure his servant, Elisha first told him not to worry, then told him why, and finally asked God to bestow spiritual insight on the servant. The lesson is that we can never see the whole that God sees—we see only part of the truth, and even that as through a glass darkly. We see the grace of God, which enables us to walk by faith and not have to rely on our own imperfect vision except on rare occasions when God may open our eyes fully, as he did in enabling Elisha to see the chariots of fire on the mountain.
The Hebrew worthies Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego walked by faith when they refused to bow to King Nebuchadnezzar’s image and were thrown into the fiery furnace:
… our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire; and He will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But even if He does not, let it be known to you, O king, that we are not going to serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up.” (Daniel 3:17-18)
To recognize God’s power, as they did, while accepting that his ways and thoughts are not like ours (Isaiah 55), and to know that he is not in our service but we are in his, is to walk in faith. That is to say, it is to walk with our eyes truly open.
As the Aram army approached Israel, God struck it blind. The Hebrew word for blindness used in the original passage is used in only one other place in the Bible. All other mentions of blindness in scripture use a different Hebrew word for it:
They struck the men who were at the doorway of the house with blindness, both small and great, so that they wearied themselves trying to find the doorway. (Genesis 19:11)
The word used here is more a sense of confusion, disorientation, bedazzlement—the blindness of the deer in the headlights. What the army of Aram and the men at the door lost was the ability to discern, and in the confusion much energy is spent trying to regain that ability (trying to find the doorway). That this was true blindness is evidenced by the logic that even if one finds the doorway and goes through it, one will still be blind, so to search for it, successfully or not, would be fruitless as well as debilitating. In the case of the army of Aram, it was not total blindness—they still had vision enough to follow Elisha but not enough to recognize their surroundings. They had some sight, but no insight.
This is the kind of blindness Jesus must have meant when he told his disciples:
Therefore I speak to them [the multitudes] in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand…. But blessed are your eyes, because they see; and your ears, because they hear. For truly I say to you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it. (Matthew 13:13 & 16-17)
In the end, it was their blindness that saved the army of Aram from slaughter, as Jesus, who said…
“For judgment I came into this world, so that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind.” (John 9:39)
…would surely have agreed. Elisha’s servant was blind to the power of God but was helped to see it. The Army thought it could see but was made blind in order to be saved. If they had not been made blind, there would have been a great battle and great loss.
What does such blindness—bedazzlement, spiritual confusion—mean today for us? How come we can’t see God? How come he doesn’t make clear and unambiguous statements telling us what to see, to understand, and do? The Arameans sought to capture and harness the supernatural, the truth, the higher power; but what they were led to was salvation though humiliation.
Anonymous: What is the responsibility of those who, like the disciples, are given the ability to see?
Donald: Our greatest need for God is when we are in greatest pain and turmoil. When we see clearly, we know our way to the door without having to think much about it. It’s in our nature to seek clarity.
Dion: We often feel that we are better than our neighbor, but a recognition that we are truly blind brings humility, which puts us where we need to be.
Don: How can we become blind in this way?
Donald: We meet weekly in this class in an attempt to bring clarity and understanding. Is that dangerous? Should we be aiming for ambiguity instead?
David: Pico Iyer said that the opposite of knowledge (which I read as “insight”) is not necessarily ignorance but rather a sense of mystery and wonderment. Ignorance and uncertainty don’t matter when they are treated as things of wondrous mystery. I think we gather in a shared sense of ignorance and that while on the face of it we appear to be seeking insight, at the end of the day we all know that we can never figure it out. We come to class because it is in a deep sense fun and exciting to explore our ignorance. This ignorance is not a cold, scientific, gap in our knowledge. It is something else.
Jay: The issue is not the seeking of discernment. The human condition, human nature, is such that we must seek it. The issue is the belief that the search has ended—that we have found perfect discernment, that we now have all the answers, that we know right from wrong, good from evil. Blindness is the acceptance that such a perfect state is impossible for us, that our view must necessarily be imperfect and incomplete. Such acceptance would remove the barriers—the blindness—between religions and denominations that were (or have grown) established on the basis of a belief in their own perfect discernment.
It is abundantly clear from scripture that such claims, which all religions make, are wrong and that blindness—ignorance of who God is and what he does—is right. Today, I find that thought to be liberating, but there was a time when I found the thought that my belief system might not be perfect to be frightening. Regular participants in this class have no problem with this, but for many people it causes inner conflict.
Don: The Arameans were confident they could see their way to perfecting their system if they captured Elisha. God said that was not the way things worked. He humiliated them, and by so doing, he saved them.
Dion: In science, saturation is when no more of a substance can be absorbed in a liquid. But absorption can be modified if factors such as temperature are changed. People who think they know everything spiritually are in a sense saturated with their knowledge but blind to the potential for knowing more, therefore they do not feel it necessary to seek more. I think we never really reach saturation in our spiritual growth if we keep looking. At the end of the day it’s not just me but Christ-in-me.
Donald: Regular Bible class seeks to bring clarity and understanding via our creed and doctrines. Nobody wants to feel uneducated, but most of us don’t mind a good mystery. Why can’t we focus as much on the mystery as on the doctrine? How much does our culture affect this?
Jay: Looking at the issue globally, it affects it a lot. It seems preposterous that the doctrines that dictate how I should live my life should dictate how someone on the other side of the planet, with a totally difference culture, should live his. All we ought to expect in terms of global spiritual conformity is love for and service to one’s fellow human being. But in fact we expect far too much more: We expect the world to embrace our religious doctrine and culture, as well.
Donald: Religions go so far as to tell other people that they will wipe them out if they do not accept their religion and its doctrines.
Jay: Potentially, the spiritual model of universal love could exist if we embraced the concept of blindness as we have been discussing it.
David: To me, the really interesting point in the story of Elisha is that even though he tried to put into words what he was seeing, he still had to appeal to God to let his servant and the army of Aram see for themselves. This is a statement that we cannot share our spiritual insight directly with another person. God has to provide the insight. Nobody else can. It seems OK to assume that two people given insight by God in identical circumstances will see exactly the same things, but neither of them would be able to put their insight into words they themselves would understand!
Anonymous: But when Jesus healed the blind man, he told the man to go out and share his experience of God’s intervention in his life.
David: We are asked to share faith, to share our belief in God, and I think we can do that. But my statement: “I believe in God” hardly proves to you that God exists. To some extent I can share the experiences that led me to my belief. But I cannot share the insight I received, because the insight came from a feeling, not from a logical proposition. [Postcript: My faith is predicated largely (though not entirely) on a dream. I can describe and have described the dream to others, but there is no way I can find words to convey the same sense of God’s real presence that I felt, and felt not only in that dream but also upon waking from it.]
Anonymous: People cannot see how you feel, but when you testify that you were sick then healed, blind then could see, paralyzed then could walk, people can see that. But insight is deeper, more personal. Mary’s pregnancy with Jesus was as much a spiritual insight as a physical thing. What was inside her was not just flesh, but divinity.
Donald: It is so liberating to think that all we need to do is to spread the gospel and share our faith, rather than wrap it all up into a doctrine. As soon as we do the latter, things start to get complicated.
Dion: In Buddhism, “Nothing” is not empty space but something filled with meaning so profound and meaningful that a question can only be answered with silence. Buddha was invited to address a gathering of great scientists, intellectuals, and theologians. He came, but said nothing. After a period of silence, Buddha gave a flower to a menial who was not even invited. That evening, people started to complain. When his disciples asked him to explain, the Buddha replied: “Only an empty vessel can be filled.”
Chris: We not only think we see; we think that God does not, as God himself said:
“Cry loudly, do not hold back;
Raise your voice like a trumpet,
And declare to My people their transgression
And to the house of Jacob their sins.
“Yet they seek Me day by day and delight to know My ways,
As a nation that has done righteousness
And has not forsaken the ordinance of their God.
They ask Me for just decisions,
They delight in the nearness of God.
‘Why have we fasted and You do not see?
Why have we humbled ourselves and You do not notice?’
Behold, on the day of your fast you find your desire,… (Isaiah 58:1-3)
This is when we are most blind.
Don: What is the role of religious education with respect to blindness? Is the problem with doctrine itself, or is it with the imposition of doctrine on others? Doctrine can serve the individual born to it, but is it arrogant to think that it is the only way to reach God?
Jay: It is really difficult to say to a person of a different culture that my spiritual viewpoint may be no more valid than his. I do not think that most Adventists believe that heaven is reserved for Adventists. It is therefore tacitly accepted that there are other ways to heaven, to seeking insight, and to having a relationship with God.
I believe that an Adventist such as myself—born into an Adventist family, educated in Adventist schools, married to another Adventist, and active in the Adventist church—has an excellent basis for developing a very strong relationship with God. But can I be humble enough to admit that your very different background and culture could have led you to an equally strong relationship with God? If I can, then I will have no desire to impose my doctrine on you. Evangelism should be sharing with others how my doctrine—observing the Sabbath, abstaining from alcohol, and so on—has helped me build a relationship with God. If that works for you as it has worked for me, great; if not, there may be other ways that will work or already have worked for you. A desire to show God to people comes with the territory of loving God with all one’s heart and loving one’s neighbor as one’s self, but it should stop short of any form of spiritual subversion.
I was able to tell, thanks to the Internet, that 254 children were born at the exact same moment when my son was born a few weeks ago. It is ridiculous to expect that they each would be born with the probable Adventist future that my son was inevitably born with. We don’t all have to be right, to be the same; but surely we can all seek. Seeking is not about getting the perfect answer, because we can’t—it’s about getting a better understanding.
Anonymous: Why do we even need to explain to “others” anything about our relationship with God and how we got there? Why not just love them and leave it at that? If we could do so, God’s light shines on everyone and all differences are eliminated.
David: If our meetings were about sharing the Adventist doctrine I might find it not just boring but counter-productive, unless you resorted to force and coercion! But sharing one’s faith in God and one’s sense of wonder and mystery is not about imposition. It’s simply about sharing. The world is a much more interesting place because of our diverse approaches to spirituality. Hawaiians believe in the goddess Pele, who lives in the volcanoes. We laugh at such notions, but what do we know of the spirituality underlying this approach to understanding God if we don’t share it? The mystery is that the Hawaiian people have faith in a goddess who is a source of creation and all the good things that happen to them. What a wonderful mystery to explore!
Donald: The Adventist church provides Adventists with a context to help them undertake a spiritual journey that makes their lives more meaningful. But when we start to evangelize it, we are essentially seeking endorsement of our view, rather than seeking to share the mystery of it. Are the terms “religious education” and “mystery” antithetical?
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