Adapt a supernatural perspective (2 Kings 6:24 - 7:20)

"... and there was a great famine in Samaria as a result of that siege, that is, as a result of that attack, of that siege of the city, so much so that the head of a donkey was sold for 80 pieces of silver and a quarter of of a seah of pigeon dung for five pieces of silver.” I clarify here regarding "a seah of pigeon dung", apparently in the original Hebrew it is not necessarily what it supposedly is in Spanish, it is an unfortunate translation. It is rather a type of very cheap food but it is not what it seems.

“And as the king of Israel passed through the wall, a woman shouted to him: “Save the king, my Lord”, and he said “if Jehovah does not save you, where can I save you from? , from the barn or from the wine press?", and the king said to her "what do you have?" So we cooked my son and ate him. The next day I told her "Give your son here and let's eat him, but she has hidden her son." When the king heard the words of that woman, he tore his clothes and thus passed through the wall, and the people saw the silicon that he was carrying inside his body. And he said: "God do so to me, and more to me, if the head of Elisha, son of Saphat, remains on him today."

And then we are going to jump to verse 1 of Chapter 7

Elisha then said: “Hear the word of Jehovah, tomorrow at this time the seah of fine flour will be worth one shekel and two seahs of barley, one shekel per Gate of Samaria. And a prince on whose arm the king was leaning answered the man of God, and said: "If the Lord now made windows in heaven, would it be so?" and he said: "behold, you will see it with your eyes, but you will not eat of it." There were four leprous men at the entrance of the gate, who said to each other: “Why are we staying here until we die? If we try to enter the city, because of the famine in the city, we will die in it, and if we stay here we will also die. Let's go, then, now and go to the camp of the Syrians, if they give us life, we will live; and if they kill us we will die. So they got up in the evening to go to the camp of the Syrians, and when they came to the entrance of the camp of the Syrians, there was no one there. For the LORD had caused the sound of chariots, the noise of horses, and the noise of a great army to be heard in the camp of the Syrians. And they said to one another, “Behold, the king of Israel has hired against us the kings of the Hittites and the kings of the Egyptians to come against us. And so they got up, and fled at nightfall, leaving their tents, their horses, their donkeys, and the camp as it was, and they had fled for their lives.”

Verse 9. “Then they said to each other: We are not doing well, today is a day of good news and we are silent, and if we wait until dawn our wickedness will reach us. Come now, then, let us go in and tell the news in the king's house."

Father we bless your name and ask that your word descend upon us with power and clarify whatever you want to clarify in our lives, in Jesus name. Amen.

Brothers, this passage is a continuation of the passage we studied a couple of Sundays ago, where we saw the King of Syria who was continually attacking the people of Israel. And we saw how the prophet Elisha, enlightened by God, worked a miracle so that the Syrian army was defeated and returned to their homeland in shame. The prophet Elisha asked that his servant could see the glory of God, and the servant's eyes were opened and he saw that they were surrounded by angels and chariots of fire to defend them. The Syrian army was blinded and mentally confused and driven into the very center of the city of Samaria. There the king fed them and then sent them back to their homeland, defeated and humiliated.

Who would have thought that after this great favor they did to the Syrian army, they would have said: 'well, they defeated us and they were kind to us, let's just leave it there and never attack them again.' happens? We see again that the Syrian army returns to the charge and once again lay siege to Samaria, the capital city, and proceed to attack the people of Israel. And this time the siege is much stronger than ever. The crisis comes to the city in a terrible way, and we are given an illustration of how terrible is the state of crisis of the city. Two young women with their children make a deal that one is going to feed her son to both of them and that when that food runs out, the other is going to give her son so that she too can share it, such was the famine in the city. And the second woman is not ashamed to go before the king and ask that the king “do justice” by forcing the other woman to give up her son to be eaten. And the scandalized king, and overwhelmed by the state of crisis in which his people have arrived, practically collapses, and the people can see when he walks through the city all discouraged that his skin is covered on the inside with silicon as a sign of mourning before of God. And in that first part of the story we see several things:

1. I said the last time we commented on these passages that Syria and the king of Syria in their persistent hatred against Israel, is a type of Satan in his hatred against the God's people. Satan is always scheming and looking for ways to destroy the children of God. The element of evil always trying to do harm in our lives, looking for different strategies, setting traps and always trying to destroy the good state of God's people. And we see this, that Satan never gives up. He was defeated once, a short time passes but then he returns once more to the charge. And there we have a first spiritual lesson for our lives: we can never let our guard down with respect to our spiritual life. God's people, and I mean you and me, are always in a state of spiritual warfare.

Even as we move in the secular world of time and space, we have to understand that there is always that dimension we talked about last Sunday, that spiritual dimension where the powers of the devil and God move. Even as we live in the 21st century, the century of psychiatry and the century of science, we have to understand that those rules have not changed. We see this insistence of Satan, for example, in the temptation of Jesus in the desert. When the Lord was tempted by Satan in the desert, Jesus defeated him several times and finally the Scripture says that when the Lord finally said to him: "Go away from here Satan, get away" it says that Satan left and left him for a while. In other words, on many other occasions the Lord had to confront the efforts of the enemy to destabilize and destroy his ministry.

The apostle Paul tells us to be sober and watchful because our adversary, the devil, walks around like a roaring lion and that is an image of insistence and consistency, he walks around looking for someone to devour. And the Bible also says that our fight is not against flesh and blood but against states and powers. Therefore we have to put on the full armor of God. In fact, I believe that this is one of the perspectives or one of the most important attitudes of the people of God who identify with a supernatural mentality. And remember that I have told you many times, to help us as a church to adopt that supernatural mentality. That mentality has different components and one of them is the spiritual warfare component.

There are many members of our Lord Jesus Christ and many good churches that, despite their good theology, do not have, in the right place, that concept of spiritual warfare in which the people of God continually find themselves. And that does not mean that we give more place or more importance to the devil than he deserves, it is simply to understand that the element of spiritual warfare is something of great importance in the life of the believer, along with other teachings. We have to have a balance, in other words. And that all-important concept of ongoing spiritual warfare leads us to a second concept that is part of the supernatural mindset as well.

2. And that is the concept of power, of anointing. Now the concept of spiritual warfare leads us to this concept of having supernatural power over our lives. The Pentecostal people, the people who subscribe to a supernatural mentality, that's why they insist so much on the importance of spiritual power as well. Because? Because if one is at war, war requires power. That is why the apostle Paul says in Ephesians 6 that our war, that is, our fight, is against spiritual powers.

And then he concludes: “therefore put on the whole armor of God. There is the concept of power. And that is why God's people must always be eager and hungry to find that source of power. And that leads us to the fact that since we need power, that power comes from the holy spirit, a life of intimacy with the holy spirit, of understanding the power that is in God through prayer, fasting, reading the Word.

It's not enough to come to church, or tithe, or even read the Bible. It is not enough to have a lot of information about theology, or let's say about Bible history or the like. It is not enough to simply identify as a member of a Christian religion. You need to always be hungry and always be looking for that source of power, that intimacy with God, that is the key to a victorious life.

I mean, those are two principles, there are many others, in supernatural life but those two are very important and we have to understand them. And here in this passage the game of these two principles becomes very obvious, where the king with all his principles and good intentions finds himself powerless to deal with this army that is insistently attacking his nation. This king is obviously sensitive to the suffering of his people, but all he can do is wail and put silicon on his body and take a religious but ineffective stance against the enemy besieging his people. Meanwhile the enemy is drowning and strangling more and more the capital of Israel and the entire nation.

One of the things that motivated me to meditate on this passage is that we are in a time when Satan has established a very tight fence over this nation and its culture, we see that as in the time of this king the people have reached a point of maximum spiritual deterioration as these two women reflect it. But also in this time it is the same, it is the comparison, we see that in this time we have reached an equal spiritual deterioration, where the enemy has taken over and there is nothing that can resist it. Even the church is reduced to a simple contemplation of what is happening and we wring our hands in despair without knowing what we are going to do. In other words, the official organisms see the deterioration, and neither the official church nor the official government really have the power to change the situation that is presented.

This king takes out his frustration on the powerful, true church, represented by Elisha. The king seems to have a grudge against the prophet whom he identifies with what is happening. That is why the king later says: "God do so to me and add to me, if the head of Elisha, son of Saphat, remains on him today." It reminds me of when Jesabel made a very similar threat to the prophet that predates Elisha who is the prophet Elijah.

When God sends his judgment on nations and governments that have strayed from God, many times those governments react against the church, persecuting it and identifying it to a certain extent with the deterioration that society is experiencing. And yet we see here that the only hope for that nation surrounded by the enemy is precisely the church of God represented by the prophet Elisha. The prophet Elisha decides to react to the king's frustration and look here at the mercy of God, who instead of God sending his judgment against this confused and hostile king decides to intervene on behalf of the nation and save it from its predicament.

Elisha approaches this king and comes to him with a completely extraordinary and off the charts prophecy. Elisha tells the king: "Tomorrow at this time the seah of fine flour will be worth a shekel and two seahs of barley a shekel at the gate of Samaria." It is as if we were to say that there is a great famine in this country and we were to say that a pound of rice costs 50 dollars and a 12-ounce pot of oil costs 75 dollars, and all the economic systems indicate that it is impossible for there to be a change for many, many years. At that moment, a prophetic voice rises and says: tomorrow at this same time, let's say 10:40 am, that pound of rice that was worth 50 dollars is going to be worth 25 cents and that pot of oil that was worth 75 dollars is going to be worth 40 cents. . Imagine people would say, impossible, that can't happen!

How many know that for God nothing is impossible. God often waits for things to reach their point of maximum evil and crisis to then intervene. We have seen it continually. In our life also in our lives things can reach their point of greatest difficulty and despair and it is the moment that God is waiting for then to enter with his kind power and do the work of restoration. Because? Because God always wants to manifest his glory.

Many times He artificially sets things up in a way that makes it clear that man doesn't have the answer, and if any answer is given it has to be given by Him and not by anyone else. That is one of the most constant themes throughout all of Scripture.

We see it in the Book of Exodus when the Egyptian army is surrounding the people of Israel and the sea is in front and there is nothing to do, and Moses himself despairs and God comes and goes with a spectacular solution opening the Sea Red.

We see it with Gideon with his 300 men against an army of thousands. We see it with David fighting Goliath. We see it with Lazarus stinking for 4 days in the grave and the Lord waiting until that time comes to then work a resurrection. God takes his time.

And I think, brothers, that in this time when the wickedness of man seems to be reaching its maximum expression is the time precisely in which God wants to intervene with a powerful power of his spirit, this is the time. And a church is needed like what the prophet Elisha represents, with a supernatural mentality that is like an antenna that can receive the power of God and then channel it towards society. A church that is seeking more and more of the power of God, less of the show and more of intimacy with God.

This morning when we began our prayer time, you will remember, I confess to you that my wish is that one Sunday we would not even do anything more than spend a whole service in prayer. And ask the Lord to give me enough courage as a pastor to do that, because sometimes one as a pastor is thinking: “well, what about the visitors who may come and what about those who don't like to pray a lot and get bored, and I let myself be cowed by that, I confess."

But many times God wants his church to assume that supernatural mentality of not only coming to the show but for each person who comes to understand that we come here as spiritual warriors to seek God's blessing in our lives. I ask the Lord that all of you and I can grow in changing the format and perception of what it is to truly come to the house of God. What are we here for and what are we looking for? And that as we mature more in the spirit, it becomes possible to let go more of the flow of God, as God wants in our meetings and our lives. Because it is the only way, I believe, that God is going to do the work that He has to do in this society. The situation is too desperate to be solved with the strategies of men.

As in the case of Jericho, another desperate situation, the wall of the city, the wall of the enemies of God is closed, well closed and the people of God with their own strength do not have the ability to tear down and break that wall and defeat the enemy. Only by a revelation of divine strategy will God's people be able to bring down that wall and come in and defeat the enemy. And so it will be with our lives too, because each one of us has his own Syrian army surrounding our married life, our health life, our emotional life, our life with our children, work, financial life and we need the divine strategy, the mighty power of God to break that fence of the enemy. And we need to put on the armor of faith, that's why again the apostle Paul says “put on the whole armor of God”.

That is the church that God wants, a church with a power mentality. I address all those new brothers in the faith who are coming to our church. I beg you from the beginning to commit to adopting that supernatural mentality in your lives. Do not be formed into an institutional religious mentality. Don't eat that old bread that doesn't have any nutrients in it. We have to drink of that new wine of the revelation of the power of God.

Elisha comes out with a totally inappropriate weapon for the principles of reason, let's say. Just a word, a pronunciation of a prophetic word. Elisha declares something that is going to happen the next day, it is something so revolutionary and so scandalous that one of the king's nobles laughs and expresses his skepticism and says that this is impossible even if God intervened, that could not happen. Again, this official of the king is a symbol of the establishment, that is, the official wing of society that cannot think in spiritual terms, that is always thinking in terms of reason and according to the patterns of man and not of God. And what does Elisha say to him: "Behold, tomorrow you will see it with your eyes but you will not eat of it."

Why, brothers? Because when you don't have faith, you will never experience God's miracles in your own life. You will be able to see God work in others but you will not be able to experience satiety, the satisfaction of seeing God intervene in your own life, because it is only by faith. That is why another of the concepts of the supernatural mentality is the need for faith. And faith is the result of a whole series of practices in our lives, which are increasing. It is like the spiritual health of the believer, faith. Like a child who grows up healthy because he eats well, has a good family life, receives love, gets exercise, and all these things contribute to his spiritual vigor.

Likewise, the believer of faith reaches that position of faith because they have eaten that word, because they have remained in prayer, because they remain in communion with other men and women of faith, because they participate in all those things that are contributing for your spiritual strengthening. Faith is the thread, the conductor of the power of God. Without that we cannot receive the glory of God in our life.

Immediately after this statement by the prophet Elisha the scene changes immediately. And we are presented with 4 leprous men standing in front of the city, and these 4 men represent something very interesting and they are the type of people that God wants to use in this time to reveal what he is going to do and is already doing. These men are representative of another constant element throughout the writing. The God who uses people that no one else wants to use. The God who uses those below and those outside. There was no one more despised in those times of the Old Testament and the New as well, than a person with leprosy. They were feared for fear of contagion, first of all. They were also feared because of the physical deformities caused by leprosy, and they were also feared because they were religiously impure and any contact with them also made the other person impure before God, supposedly. And that is why we find them at the entrance of the gate, that is, on the outskirts of the city. And that represents that God wants to use the little ones of this earth.

I believe, and I don't want to sideline anyone with this, that God wants to use the humble churches and sometimes the ethnic churches of this nation to bring revival to this nation. The poor churches, to which nobody is paying much attention because they are not in the strategic places, nor do they have the money, nor do they have the social position, but they are humble and they are willing, and they believe in the power of God. These men also have something interesting and that is that they are in a state of despair, they don't care if they live or die. They have nothing to lose, they are lepers, they are already outside the margin of society. His physical position also refers to his social, spiritual position, in every sense of the word. I think that ironically, the fact of being outside is what allows them to think in a different way from those who are inside, the king, his nobles and all the people who are in power.

Look at what verse 3 says: “There were 4 leprous men at the entrance of the gate who said to one another: 'Why are we staying here until we die? If we try to enter the city, because of the hunger that is in the city we will die in it and if we stay here we will also die. So let's go now and go to the camp of the Syrians, if they give us life we will live and if they give us death we will die."

They're thinking in a very sane way. They have reached the point of despair. They don't care if they live or die, either way we're going to die so we're going to take action.

Brothers, I believe that the individuals who learn to think outside the box, outside the official, outside the religious, outside the institutional, those are the people to whom God is going to give the strategy to carry out his work at this time. Those of us who are willing to adopt an attitude that if we live we live and if we die we die.

That was Esther's attitude, “if I perish, let me perish” but I am going to do something, you remember. You know what brothers, God cannot use you until you give up your life, until you adopt a dead attitude here on earth. The Lord Jesus Christ said "If the grain of wheat does not fall to the ground and die, it remains alone, that is, it does not bear fruit" remember? "But if it dies it bears many fruits."

Until you give up everything, you cannot receive God's everything and until we become poor in our proud and self-sufficient humanity, God cannot enter with his new revelation, with his new wine and fill us. You have to empty yourself to receive God's anointing in your life.

The Lord Jesus said to the rich young man: “If you want to experience the peace of God, take your possessions and sell them, take the money give it to the poor and then stripped of everything, come and follow me:” But we know the story , the rich young man could not get rid of his self-sufficiency, his social position and therefore he left sad and disappointed.

I think churches are full of people who are in the church but the church is not in us. That we have not emptied ourselves of our love for the world, for our self, for our comfort, or for our material possessions. And we are still like the grain of wheat, whole. We say to Christ, break me but we are closed to God's work in life. And there are still many people who say, 'no, my time is mine', 'my money is mine', my family is mine, my profession is mine, my rest is mine, my soap opera is mine, my television is mine, and when The Lord comes and asks us for these things in order to enter into a deeper dimension of his glory, we say to him: "No, Lord, you cannot enter there because that is too precious for me", and until we reach the point where we we have given all property titles to God and He is the one who has them in His Kingdom, we cannot see the glory of God in our lives. Until we got to the position of these lepers who had nothing to give, they had nothing to lose, they had nothing to defend because they had already lost everything. Until God has broken us, brothers, until he has brought us to a point where we want nothing more than his glory in our lives and have nothing of our own but everything sold to God, we will not be able to see the glory of God. That is why these lepers are in that strategic position to be the first to detect that the situation has changed radically.

There are many more things to say but perhaps we will continue with this passage later. Actually, what interested me the most in this passage is the following: the situation has changed and no one realizes it. The Syrians had been defeated, they had fled. The people were free to move about and yet everyone in Samaria was in the perspective that they were still surrounded and besieged by the king of Syria. The reality has changed but there is no discernment to understand this radical change in the town.

The biggest impression in this last time in my life is that the reality of this nation has changed. In the middle of a situation that looks terrible out there and we don't realize that God has delivered the enemy into our hands and we have to realize that.

On May 17, 2004 homosexuals will begin to marry here in Massachusetts and yet I insist that this is the time that God has declared a change in the spiritual reality of this nation. And now the people of God have to start moving assuming that the enemy has been defeated and that the land is in our hands to possess it. That we have to act now to go and plunder, as the Hebrews did, who arrived at the camp and provisioned themselves with everything that belonged to the enemy and used it to have a great celebration and a great party.

Brothers, I don't have a rational or even circumstantial justification to express this but I feel in my spirit that I have to declare it verbally because when we declare things like Elisha, then they become real in our lives. In my mind I say to myself, Roberto, you are crazy to say this at this time, however I understand that we have to work through the prophetic word that we declare in the name of the Lord and in faith. That is the action that I am taking personally at this time. I am taking a big risk in saying this, but I feel that when we feel that God speaks to us in the spirit we have to speak by faith even if nothing justifies us in the outside world.

I say to this town, brothers, let us dare to preach the gospel to our friends, to our neighbors, to our relatives because the anointing of God is in us to bring people to church. God wants you to dare to do strange and daring things in your life believing that God is going to honor and bless you, each one of you, brothers.

Start praying for people for healing. Start daring to evangelize others and invite them to church. Begin giving boldly believing that God will bless and honor you. Begin to speak in faith that God is going to change your family situation, or emotional or financial situation, or job situation or housing situation. Immigration God can change all those things. Begin to work, speak and move with faith in the spirit and believe that God is going to support your life and fill your life with his anointing, because God has defeated the enemy as he did with the Syrian army and God has given us all the earth that the soles of our feet tread on. In this time we are going to see the glory of God manifested, we are going to see it like never before in history. And God tells us to prepare our hearts and our lives because He is going to do things that will attract the attention of the whole world. Let's not look at the circumstances, let's begin to discern reality as God sees it, not as ordinary people see it. Let us be filled with the holy spirit. Let's adopt the spiritual biblical perspective and move believing that God will honor our faith. Let's adopt a desperate, violent mentality like that of lepers and take action saying “well, if we die, let's die” but we are going to do something. Let's get rid of all personal interest in comfort or defense of our own interests and give it all to the Lord and then we will see how He returns everything to us with a vengeance, blessed.

We are going to stand up and we are going to ask the Lord to bring down on us that supernatural spirit, that mentality. Dare in the name of the Lord. Dare to pronounce. Brothers, please, we are going to ask that the Lord give us back his power, we are going to tell the Lord: “Lord, change my heart, change my mind. We ask you in the name of Jesus, that you visit us with your power and that you change our unbelieving mind. We thank you Lord, because you have changed the reality around us.