2 Kings 1:9-16 Then the king sent to him a captain of fifty with his fifty. And he went up to him: and, behold, he sat on the top of an hill… The Bible does occasionally lift the veil, and shows us how the destructive forces of nature have been the servants of the will of a moral God. It was so when the waters of the Red Sea returned violently on the Egyptian pursuers of Israel. It was so when at the prayer of Elijah the messengers of Ahaziah were struck dead by lightning. It was so when Jonah was fleeing to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord: "The Lord sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken." It was so when there arose a great storm on the Sea of Galilee, that the disciples might learn to trust the power of their sleeping Master. And it was so when St. Paul, bound on his Romeward voyage, was wrecked on the shore of Malta. In all these cases we see "the wind and the storm fulfilling His word"; because the Bible enables us to see exactly how in each case God's word or will was fulfilled. But there is much in modern history, perhaps in our own lives and experience, which seems to us to illustrate the matter scarcely less vividly. Our ancestors saw God's hand in the storm which scattered the great Armada; and a century later the wind which buried the intruding successor of the saintly Ken beneath the chimneys of his own palace at Wells, seemed to pious Churchmen of the day to be not improbably a mark of the Divine displeasure. There are obvious difficulties which our Lord points to in His allusion to the loss of life at the fall of the Tower of Siloam; there are obvious difficulties in pressing such inferences too confidently or too far. But we may see enough, and we may have reason to suspect more that enables us to be certain of this, that nature is in the hand of the Ruler of the moral world, and that we may be sure of a moral purpose, whether we can exactly make it out or not, in the use which He makes of it. (Dean Farrar.) Parallel Verses KJV: Then the king sent unto him a captain of fifty with his fifty. And he went up to him: and, behold, he sat on the top of an hill. And he spake unto him, Thou man of God, the king hath said, Come down. |
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