Immerse: Kingdoms Full Volume - Flipbook - Page 246
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IMMERSE
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KINGDOMS
2K
| 6:26–7:6
One day as the king of Israel was walking along the wall of the city, a
woman called to him, “Please help me, my lord the king!”
He answered, “If the Lord doesn’t help you, what can I do? I have neither food from the threshing floor nor wine from the press to give you.”
But then the king asked, “What is the matter?”
She replied, “This woman said to me: ‘Come on, let’s eat your son today,
then we will eat my son tomorrow.’ So we cooked my son and ate him.
Then the next day I said to her, ‘Kill your son so we can eat him,’ but she
has hidden her son.”
When the king heard this, he tore his clothes in despair. And as the king
walked along the wall, the people could see that he was wearing burlap
under his robe next to his skin. “May God strike me and even kill me if
I don’t separate Elisha’s head from his shoulders this very day,” the king
vowed.
Elisha was sitting in his house with the elders of Israel when the king
sent a messenger to summon him. But before the messenger arrived, Eli
sha said to the elders, “A murderer has sent a man to cut off my head. When
he arrives, shut the door and keep him out. We will soon hear his master’s
steps following him.”
While Elisha was still saying this, the messenger arrived. And the king
said, “All this misery is from the Lord! Why should I wait for the Lord
any longer?”
Elisha replied, “Listen to this message from the Lord! This is what the
Lord says: By this time tomorrow in the markets of Samaria, six quarts of
choice flour will cost only one piece of silver, and twelve quarts of barley
grain will cost only one piece of silver.”
The officer assisting the king said to the man of God, “That couldn’t
happen even if the Lord opened the windows of heaven!”
But Elisha replied, “You will see it happen with your own eyes, but you
won’t be able to eat any of it!”
Now there were four men with leprosy sitting at the entrance of the city
gates. “Why should we sit here waiting to die?” they asked each other. “We
will starve if we stay here, but with the famine in the city, we will starve if
we go back there. So we might as well go out and surrender to the Aramean
army. If they let us live, so much the better. But if they kill us, we would
have died anyway.”
So at twilight they set out for the camp of the Arameans. But when they
came to the edge of the camp, no one was there! For the Lord had caused
the Aramean army to hear the clatter of speeding chariots and the galloping of horses and the sounds of a great army approaching. “The king of
Israel has hired the Hittites and Egyptians to attack us!” they cried to one