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2 Kings 13:14  Now Elisha had been suffering from the illness from which he died. Jehoash king of Israel went down to see him and wept over him.  “My father! My father!” he cried.  “The chariots and horsemen of Israel!”

There are three things that strike me from this verse.

Firstly, that we need to settle our minds with the truth that each one of us has been alloted a specific time-span on this earth (during which we are to ‘glorify God and enjoy him forever’ – Westminster Shorter Catechism Q.1).  Psalm 90:10 & 12 suggest a good life-span figure to keep in mind as we ‘nightly pitch our moving tent a day’s march nearer home’ (James Montgomery hymn, ‘Forever with the Lord’) is 70-80 years, and so suggest a helpful prayer: “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”!

It is good for us to keep this in mind if we are diagnosed with a terminal illness, even as we pray earnestly and trustingly for healing!  Elisha, throughout his lifetime, had been used powerfully by God to bring healing to others, and even to raise the dead, but now his divinely-allotted time had come.

Secondly, the very atypical and counter-cultural visit of King Jehoash (aka Joash) to a dying prophet speaks volumes about Elisha’s godliness and his profound, deep-rooted impact on the whole nation during his lifetime and ministry.  When God calls and commissions someone to carry out his purposes, he is able to use humble and easily ignored faithful servants to achieve remarkable things for him.

Thirdly, and not unrelated to this, it is apparent that one of the things God revealed through Elisha, was the reality of unlimited spiritual forces available to him to carry out his purposes through unseen angels and other agencies.  The cry of the king in the face of the pending disaster, “My father!  My father!  The chariots and horsemen of Israel!”, was exactly the same as what Elisha had cried out when Elijah was taken from him (2 Kings 2:12). Moreover, they allude to what Elisha’s keen spiritual eyes had seen, which his servant Gehazi failed to see, when the two of them were ‘helplessly’ surrounded by a vast enemy Syrian (Aramean) army in Dothan, and which led Elisha to pray, “Open his eyes, LORD, so that he may see.”, so that “the LORD opened the servant’s eyes, and he looked and saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha” (2 Kings 6:17).

In the light of this, let us all determine to be humble, faithful servants of the Lord Jesus Christ, servants whom he might choose to use in unexpected ways through the intervention of unseen, but real, angelic forces, for his glory.  “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.  But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.’ (2 Corinthians 4:6-7).

  Bruce Christian