History Unfolding Under God’s Sovereignty

The Shunammite woman waited out the seven years of famine that God had told her of beforehand, only to return home and find her house and land already in other hands. When she appealed to the king, Gehazi, whose leprosy should long since have removed him from the story, appears once more to testify to what Elisha had done, and the woman is given back even the harvest of the seven years she had been away.

This unexpected reappearance comes about because Kings is not a history bound to strict chronological order; it is a prophetic record of how God worked. For the same reason, chapter 8 places Hazael’s revolt alongside the accounts of Jehoram and Ahaziah, kings of Judah. Jehoram did evil in God’s sight, shaped not by his good father Jehoshaphat but by his wicked wife, and Ahaziah likewise followed the house of Ahab down a wicked path.

Though the obedience of one woman whose name is not even recorded stands beside the treachery of those who sat on thrones, it is God who holds history in his hands. Remembering his covenant with David, he did not destroy Judah in the end, and the wicked kings, too, came under judgment in God’s own time. However dark the world becomes, he upholds to the very end those who obey him; that is the message preached today.