There is no situation so big or too hard for God to deliver us from it, but there are some heinous situations that God permits us to endure nonetheless because to do so is better for us. We may not know how or why, we may not see until glory (the bible gives some broad-brush answers as to how or why that might be), but if God is good then it is necessarily so.

On Sunday, we were looking at a passage from 2 Kings 6 and 7 concerning the Aramean seige of Samaria. The situation was so desperate that it included a horrible scene in which a mother and neighbour strike a deal to eat one another’s children. The king only learns of this heinous agreement when one of the mothers—having boiled her own son and shared the corpse with her neighbour—becomes indignant that the other is now hiding her son so that he will not be eaten.

This is a grotesque scene and shows the absolute desperation of the people even considering this and, to a similar extent, the moral degradation of the people that this would even be countenanced as an option! It is this that causes the king to tear his clothes in anguish and to seek the head of Elisha (as a proxy for God himself) whom he squarely holds accountable for this state of affairs. You can listen back to the sermon here for more details on this episode and the specific lessons the wider passage has for us.

However, it is worth thinking about the fact that few of us in the modern West will ever be in a situation quite this precarious. For the best part of 100 years now, there has been little prospect of actual war or seiges being fought on our doorstep. Even where we have been at war—or where war has looked likely—it doesn’t typically take this kind of form now. Few UK citizens were living in dread fear at the height of the Falklands War and not many of us were living in daily terror when we traipsed off to Afghanistan and Iraq. Even during WWII—the most recent war that properly came to our shores on any level—the situation wasn’t quite as heinous as the severe famine and certain death being visited on Samaria. Whilst rationing was clearly miserable, it wasn’t anything like serious enough to start asking if you need to eat your own children!

Despite the desperateness of the situation for Samaria, what soon becomes clear is that God will resolve it. Even in a situation where the outcome is almost certain death, the Lord worked to save his people. He used some very unlikely deliverers to do it—four lepers and an unnamed servant—but nevertheless, he did it. God came through for his people even when everything pointed to the certainty of death and destruction.

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