A Day of Good News

How fast does good news travel around your house?

Somebody gets engaged and the phone starts before the ring is warm on the finger. A baby is announced and people in three different states know about it before the end of the day. We are not quiet people when the news is good. We cannot hold in the good news. It gets out from our sheer excitement, anticipation and joy.

Except one kind. The best news most of us have ever been given is the news the God saves sinners, and that is the kind of news we often keep quiet.

There is a story in 2 Kings about four men who almost did the same thing, and I want you to watch them catch themselves.

The city is Samaria and the situation is about as bad as can be. An enemy army has camped around it long enough that the food is gone. The chapter before this one says a donkey’s head was selling for eighty shekels of silver (2 Kings 6:25), and it records worse than that, things a person does not want to read twice. Inside the walls, people are starving, which is typical when a siege is taking place.

And outside the wall, at the entrance of the city, were four men who have it worse. “Now there were four leprous men at the entrance of the gate; and they said to one another, 'Why do we sit here until we die?'” (2 Kings 7:3). Their disease keeps them out of the city. The famine means the city has nothing to hand out anyway. So they run the statistics in their head while desperate. If we go in, we die. If we sit here, we die. The enemy camp is the only hope left: “Now there were four leprous men at the entrance of the gate; and they said to one another, 'Why do we sit here until we die?'” (2 Kings 7:4). A man with nothing left to lose can be honest about those odds and weigh their interest.

So at twilight they walk to the Aramean camp and there is nobody in it.

The text tells us why. “For the Lord had caused the army of the Arameans to hear a sound of chariots and a sound of horses, even the sound of a great army” (2 Kings 7:6). The whole army heard reinforcements that did not exist and ran for their lives in the dark, leaving the tents standing and the dinner cooking. Notice who emptied that camp. The four men did not fight anybody. The enemy fled before they arrived. All they did was walk into it while hungry.

And they did exactly what you and I would have done. They eat. They drink. They start hauling. They carry off “silver and gold and clothes” from one tent and hide it, then go back for another load (2 Kings 7:8). Four starving men have just become the four richest men in their city, while off in the distance their city eats nothing.

Then comes the remarkable realization from these men.

“Then they said to one another, 'We are not doing right. This day is a day of good news, but we are keeping silent; if we wait until morning light, punishment will overtake us. Now therefore come, let us go and tell the king's household.'” (2 Kings 7:9)

Look at who is talking. The speakers are four men whose disease had put them on the wrong side of the gate, men the city would not let in on its best day. No prophet is urging these men. No priest is trying to convince them of the right thing to do. These men have no standing at all. They are also the only people in the region who know where the food is.

And look at what they call their silence. We are not doing right. They are not talking about missing an opportunity or fear of getting caught. They call the silence a wrong, because that is what silence is when you know where the food is and the people behind the wall are staving. The news needed to be shared. These men did not storm this camp and scare off the enemy. They had no inherent right to the spoils of war. The Lord emptied that camp. A man who stumbles into this great blessing did not accomplish anything and has no right for treating it as his own private property.

So they go to tell the king’s household and by the next day the whole city eats.

Centuries later, ten more lepers stand at a distance from Jesus and call out for mercy, and He cleanses all ten of them on the road. One of them comes back. “Now one of them, when he saw that he had been healed, turned back, glorifying God with a loud voice, and he fell on his face at His feet, giving thanks to Him. And he was a Samaritan” (Luke 17:15-16). Jesus asks where the other nine are. Then He says this: “Was no one found who returned to give glory to God, except this foreigner?” (Luke 17:18).

There it is again. The right response comes from the man who was a foreigner. Between the two testaments the pattern is consistent: the people who see what God has done and act like it keep being the people the gate was built to keep out. Lepers. Foreigners. Men with no standing and no title and nothing to their name except a reward they did not earn.

Maybe that is you. Maybe you have stayed away from God, or from the church, because you figure the gate is for other people. Better people. People with the record for it. The Bible you would hear read inside that building spends a remarkable amount of its time saying otherwise. The men who found the food first were the ones the gate had kept out. You would be in good company.

And I will tell you something else about the book of 2 Kings. Two chapters before the famine, it tells another story. The good news in that one comes from just a few words. The person who spoke those words is the least likely mouth to have anything of value to say. That person had even less of a societal standing then the four men at the gate. What those few words set in motion reached further than anybody in the story ever lived to see. That story is where we are spending Sunday morning.

“The Girl Who Loved Her Captors,” from 2 Kings 5, is this Sunday, September 20, at Cornerstone church of Christ, 5051 Wilmington Pike, Centerville, OH. Bible study is at 9:30 and worship is at 10:30. If you are close enough to be with us we would be glad to have you and you would be our honored guest. If you cannot be there in person, you can listen to the sermon on Facebook, YouTube, or the Cornerstone app.

This day is a day of good news. It has been one for a long time. Come hear it.