Mensa Otabil - Naaman's Expectation
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2 Kings 5:1. But Naaman became furious and went away and said, «Indeed, I said to myself, he will surely come out to me and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God and wave his hand over the place and heal the leprosy.»
Naaman didn’t like the way Elisha handled him. And he didn’t like the river that Elisha told him to wash in. It’s like a patient who doesn’t like the way the doctor told him to open his mouth for examination or to do some of the odd things doctors tell us to do when we go for an examination. The patient is not happy with the way he’s being treated. That’s a nice observation. Sometimes, we’re not happy with the way we are treated, although we are the ones who need the help the most.
In our passage today, Naaman tells us why he’s furious with Elisha. He’s revealing the source of his anger because he had expectations. In his mind, he had developed a picture of how he thinks Elisha is going to act. First, he thinks when he arrives, because he’s from the king of Syria, Elisha will come out and give him royal treatment. That didn’t happen. Then he thought the man would come out and wave his hand and say some very powerful ecclesiastical prayer or do something really powerful and dramatic. That didn’t happen. He thought the man would wave his hand over the leprosy and then the leprosy would vanish. That didn’t happen.
I don’t know where he got those expectations from. Maybe that’s how they do it in Syria. But by now, he should have known that the Syrian method doesn’t work, and the Syrian God doesn’t work. So if you’ve come to the God of Israel, Yahweh, you cannot dictate to Him how He should minister to you, what He should say to you, and how He should make you well. Many times, we come to God like that. We have clear ideas of what we expect God to do for us. Some of us have grand visions of how God should speak to us.
So we believe that if God is going to speak to us, we’ll hear a voice thunder in a baritone voice from heaven. And so, when we hear a still small voice, we cannot determine that that is the voice of God. Our expectations can be a hindrance to God’s work in our lives. When we create our own expectations or we come to God with expectations we’ve borrowed from somewhere else, and we expect that God will do for us as He did for somebody else or as we have heard it done for somebody else, we miss God. And Naaman missed God on that score because he had expectations that were not met. He thought he would be treated in one way, but he was treated another way.
That doesn’t mean that we should be treated shabbily or that people should not be courteous and respectful. That’s not what the lesson is about. The lesson simply says, when we come to God, we must not have expectations of how we think He should help us. And when we are given instructions based on the word of God, we must have the humility to accept those instructions.
Eventually, Naaman got it right. But at this time, he’s very angry. And probably you may be like Naaman, very angry because you think that the cure to your problem is too harsh. That what God wants you to do is too harsh. Maybe He says you should break a relationship. Maybe He says you should do something you don’t want to do. But if you really need help from God, don’t you think it’s about time that you listen to God and not let your expectations cloud your vision?
Let’s pray. Say with me, «Heavenly Father, deliver me from wrong expectations. Help me to put aside my pride so that I can hear clearly from You in Jesus' name. Amen.» And amen.