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2 Kings 5 is for Parents of Kids with Disabilities – Part 4

Posted in Scripture, tagged on August 11, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Part 1 – In verse one we see God’s sovereignty in Naaman’s life.

Part 2 – In verses two and three we see God orchestrating really unusual things so that a powerless foreign slave girl can deliver good news to the powerful man.

Part 3 – We are reminded that a wealthy, powerful man desperately wants to be healed of his disease, and nobody thus far has been able to help him.

Part 4 – 2 Kings 5:6-7
And he brought the letter to the king of Israel, which read, “When this letter reaches you, know that I have sent to you Naaman my servant, that you may cure him of his leprosy.” And when the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes and said, “Am I God, to kill and to make alive, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Only consider, and see how he is seeking a quarrel with me.”

Remember that Naaman is the commander of a foreign, hostile army as he approaches the king of Israel.  We will learn later about some of his travelling party, but we should assume that he is travelling with a sufficiently large military force that the king of Israel would think twice before dealing badly with him, such as imprisoning or even killing him.

And the king of Israel assumes this isn’t really about Naaman receiving healing, but about Syria looking for a reason to invade.  After all, the king of Israel has just been asked to perform a miracle.  If he had that power, he would be doing it for his own people who have leprosy.  Since he can’t, and the king of Syria certainly must know he can’t, it must be about something else entirely.

Any parent who has sat in an IEP (Individualized Education Plan) meeting knows what the king of Israel is feeling.  We are given reams of documents, most of which are unintelligible, by people with impressive credentials.  And they frequently make no sense – just as this letter to the king of Israel made no sense to him.

So, like the king of Israel, I live with the suspicious thought that these IEP documents don’t really mean what they say, that there is another agenda which results in their seeking to deny services to my son.  I prepare myself for battle.

But my doubts about the authenticity of the message are not always confirmed – sometimes the agenda really is what is written on the paper.  And sometimes it takes another person to help me see it.  As we’ll see in Part 5.

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2 Kings 5 is for Parents of Kids with Disabilities – Part 3

Posted in Scripture, tagged on August 10, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Part 1 – In verse one we see God’s sovereignty in Naaman’s life.

Part 2 – In verses two and three we see God orchestrating really unusual things so that a powerless foreign slave girl can deliver good news to the powerful man.

Part 3 – 2 Kings 5:4-5

So Naaman went in and told his lord, “Thus and so spoke the girl from the land of Israel.” And the king of Syria said, “Go now, and I will send a letter to the king of Israel.” So he went, taking with him ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten changes of clothing.

Lest we forget or minimize who Naaman is, he is a man of great authority.  He has the opportunity to see his lord, apparently without the need to be summoned.  He recounts the seemingly crazy thing that the slave girl told his wife.  The king wants the best for him and takes him seriously, even writing a letter to a foreign king.  Then Naaman wanders off with 750 pounds of silver and 150 pounds of gold.  The clothes must have also been either symbolically valuable or actually valuable to be mentioned (and they come up again near the end of chapter 5 in an important way).

This is not a nice little fairy tale exclusively for children. Important and complex political, economic, military and diplomatic events are happening – ultimately for God’s glory.

And they are happening because nobody can do anything about Naaman’s leprosy – and he desperately, along with his wife, wants to be healed.

Not unlike our own experiences with and desires for our children.  Yet another reason why 2 Kings 5 is for us.

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2 Kings 5 is for Parents of Kids With Disabilities – Part 2

Posted in Scripture, Uncategorized, tagged on August 9, 2009| Leave a Comment »

In 2 Kings 5:1, God’s sovereignty was clearly stated.  As we walk toward the usual highlight of the cleansing, today we see the first of a whole series of really unusual things happening.  And it results in a hard, but good, challenge to me as a parent of a child with a disability.

2 Kings 5:2-3

Now the Syrians on one of their raids had carried off a little girl from the land of Israel, and she worked in the service of Naaman’s wife. She said to her mistress, “Would that my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.”

Does that strike you as odd?  A little girl is ripped from her home by violent men, she is placed as a slave in the home of a powerful man, and she seems to want the best for this man who is in charge of the men who took her from her home and made her a slave.

Even more strange, she talks about a cure for his leprosy!  Such a cure would not have been a normal thing; why would she have said such a thing?

It is also clear, on this side of the telling of the account, that if that little girl had not a) been taken as a slave, b) been placed in Naaman’s house, c) said something to Naaman’s wife, and d) been taken seriously by Naaman’s wife, then Naaman would not have been healed of his leprosy.

In other words, God is already orchestrating a series of events for the benefit of pagan man who is at the head of an army that is openly hostile and contemptuous of the people of Israel.  People in Israel were probably praying to be spared from this man, and God is already showing him kindness, but in ways that Naaman cannot yet see.

God could have started down this road in a very different way: an angel could have been sent, the Spirit could have spoken directly to him, a prophet could have been given a vision to visit him, a donkey could have talked to him.

But God chose a little girl, without power, likely without any standing at all, to bring good news.  By any rational account, it is the little girl who needs the help.  And we will not read anything more about this girl’s situation in 2 Kings 5.

I have frequently felt powerless when dealing with my son’s care.  I stopped counting the medical specialists we had seen after it topped 30.  I’m not sure, at this point, how many social workers, teachers, therapists and administrators I’ve met with as well.  All have or had pretty serious credentials, and all had some power over what would happen with my son.

But I have never been as powerless as that little slave girl. And, mostly, I have thought only about my situation and not theirs. My eternal situation is secure, and my God is the creator of the universe – should I not be telling, like that little girl did, that there is a cure for the spots on their souls?  Some of Paul’s teachers know of my faith in this God, but it isn’t a very high number of the total.

Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible helpfully lays out a series of extraordinary things that are happening in these two verses, but this one sticks with me in powerful way:

  • The unhappy dispersing of the people of God has sometimes proved the happy occasion of the diffusion of the knowledge of God, Acts 8:4

Parents, have we not also been given an ‘unhappy dispersing’ from what we wanted or expected our lives to be because of our kids’ disabilities?  Should we not at least consider that the very purpose of our childrens’ disabilities is for the ‘happy occasion of the diffusion of the knowledge of God’?

I’ll look forward to your comments when I return from vacation about Aug. 16.

We’ll continue in 2 Kings 5 tomorrow.

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2 Kings 5 Is for Parents of Kids with Disabilities – Part 1

Posted in Scripture, tagged , on August 8, 2009| Leave a Comment »

This account of God’s work in 2 Kings 5 has been a huge encouragement for me as a dad with a boy with multiple disabilities and a wife with cancer.  I pray it will be for you as well.

As I wrote yesterday, I want to tell the story of Naaman as it really is laid out in the Bible.  So, while I’m on vacation (and not able to read or respond to comments) we’ll walk through this account verse by verse.

2 Kings 5:1

Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Syria, was a great man with his master and in high favor, because by him the Lord had given victory to Syria. He was a mighty man of valor, but he was a leper.

Here’s what I see in this first verse:

  • The disease comes last.  It does not define who he is; it is a physical characteristic which is important to Naaman’s story.  But it is not all that he is, unlike how American culture wants to define our kids as being exclusively their disabilities.
  • He is powerful.  His disease has not discounted his other gifts of leadership.
  • He is in positive relationships with others.  The king himself considered him a ‘great man.’
  • He is a mighty man of valor.  His disease is a descriptor of his physical state that did not diminish or define his character – which is marked by valor.
  • God takes credit for giving an enemy of Israel success!

That last point is breathtaking!  God himself takes credit, not for ‘allowing’ Naaman to have victory, but for GIVING victory to Syria by Naaman.  God is not a passive actor in this account, right from the first verse.

Combine this with Exodus 4:11:

Then the Lord said to him, “Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?”

The result: we have a God who intentionally makes people with disabilities and who purposefully gives enemies victory.  Without shame, and without feeling the need to explain himself.  He gave Naaman victory, and he gave Naaman leprosy.

And that is very good news for us as parents.  If you don’t feel it yet, there’s much more to 2 Kings 5.  More tomorrow.

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Bible Stories Told Badly to Kids Are Dangerous for Adults

Posted in Scripture, tagged , on August 7, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Bible stories have consequences on children who grow up to be adults who have children with disabilities.

I’m old enough to remember when little cut-out figures made of flannel were used to tell bible stories in Sunday School.  The problem isn’t the flannelgraph.

The problem is that they made God look pathetically small.

Here’s what I mean:

I heard the story of Naaman from 2 Kings 5 as a kid.  In the flannelgraph version, Naaman emerges as this poor guy with spots on his arms and legs.  The teacher would explain that Naaman had these spots because he had a terrible disease.  Somehow or another this poor guy would end up standing before a figure of an old guy with a grey beard who would tell him to go wash in the river.  The little flannelgraph Naaman would get dunked under a blue piece of flannelgraph and lo and behold, the spots, also of flannelgraph, would fall off and he would be clean, or healed, depending on who was telling the story.

The point: wasn’t God good to do that to poor old pathetic Naaman who had that rotten disease?

Fast forward a couple of decades and memories of that story are not helpful when my child is hooked up to tubes and monitors.  And when the tubes and monitors go away, I’m taking a baby with a life-long disability home.  That isn’t going away.  It didn’t appear that I had a nice god to help me, like Naaman got helped.

The real story of Naaman is very relevant to parents of children with disabilities, unlike the version described above.  Ultimately, it is a story about God – a powerful, just, holy, righteous, purposeful, sovereign God who can be trusted in all circumstance with all things.

The kind of God who is a real comfort when your kid is different than other kids, because of disability.

While I’m on vacation the next several days, I’ve written a series of posts on 2 Kings 5 using the text itself and my thoughts on its relevance to our situations.  I look forward to your reaction, and hopefully your being encouraged to trust this God who is not ‘nice,’ but certainly sovereign – over everything.

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Great writers point us to facts about God

Posted in Quotes, Scripture on October 20, 2008| Leave a Comment »

In The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, a senior devil writes to his protege about how God thinks about human beings:

Remember always that He really likes the little vermin, and sets an absurd value on the distinctness of every one of them.

Every. One. Of. Them.

This makes a great deal of sense, since he created everything:

Thus says the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, and the one who formed him: “Ask me of things to come; will you command me concerning my children and the work of my hands?  I made the earth and created man on it; it was my hands that stretched out the heavens, and I commanded all their host.”  Isaiah 45:11-12

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When Jesus saw their faith

Posted in commentary, Scripture on October 2, 2008| Leave a Comment »

The accounting of Jesus healing the paralytic is told in three different places in the gospels, and is one of the thrilling examples of Jesus’ unique ability as God to forgive sins.  It has many dramatic elements – the friends’ determination to get to Jesus, the lowering down from the roof, the encounter with Jesus that first results in the man’s sins being forgiven and then Jesus giving him the ability to walk, the crowd being astonished and glorifying God.

But there is an interesting piece of information presented in all three accounts about the five men that is often overlooked:

Matthew 9:2 And behold, some people brought to him a paralytic, lying on a bed. And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven.”

Mark 2:5 And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

Luke 5:20 And when he (Jesus) saw their faith, he said, “Man, your sins are forgiven you.”

Do you see it?  In all three accounts, “Jesus saw their faith” and then the paralytic man’s sins are forgiven.  The five men have faith, and one man specifically receives forgiveness.  What does this corporate faith mean in terms of an individual’s faith and forgiveness of sin through Jesus Christ?

Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible is very helpful here (click here to read the entire commentary on Matt 9):

Now their faith was, 1. A strong faith; they firmly believed that Jesus Christ both could and would heal him; else they would not have brought the sick man to him so publicly, and through so much difficulty. 2. A humble faith; though the sick man was unable to stir a step, they would not ask Christ to make him a visit, but brought him to attend on Christ. It is fitter than we should wait on Christ, than he on us. 3. An active faith: in the belief of Christ’s power and goodness, they brought the sick man to him, lying on a bed, which could not be done without a deal of pains. Note, A strong faith regards no obstacles in pressing after Christ.

Strong, humble, active faith.  Sins are forgiven.  God is glorified.  But it was not their ability or determination that brought forgiveness and the physical healing of their friend. It had always been part of God’s plan that these men would have faith!  Foreknown, predestined, called, justified – and today, glorified!

Romans 8:29 For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. 30 And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.

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