Word of Salvation – Vol.47 No.22 – June 2002

Where Did it Fall?

Sermon by Rev A Esselbrugge

on 2 Kings 6:1-6

Scripture Readings: Philippians 3:1-14; 2 Kings 6:1-6

Suggested Hymns: BoW: 33a; 416; 214; 532

Brothers and sisters, young people, boys and girls.

The verses we have here before us tell us about a rather unusual incident.  I can remember as a young boy sitting around the dinner table, and my dad reading this story from our children's story Bible, and I remember being rather amazed and puzzled about how an iron axe head was made to float on water.

It happened during the reign of an evil king, Jehoram, king of Israel; a man who secretly worshipped the idol Baal and so obstructed the true worship of the Lord by His people.  It was also in the time of the prophet Elisha and through him we see the Word of the Lord blossoming.  Despite an evil king on the throne, despite a general decline in the spiritual state of the nation, and against all the odds you might say, there was growth and expansion of the worship of the Lord.

A certain meeting place of the students of the prophet Elisha had become too small.  They'd outgrown their building, and with the consent of their teacher, with enthusiasm and energy, they went to build a new house and Elisha went along with them.  No such thing as going to the timber yard for the building materials.  These men had to go to the forest to cut down their own trees for wood and beams.  But it was in that work of felling trees that one of the students lost the iron axe head of his borrowed axe, and he cried out to Elisha, "Oh my Lord, it was borrowed."  Here was a plea for help, and Elisha cut a stick, threw it into the water at the place where the axe head fell, and the axe head floated to the surface for the student to grab it.

Some people are unwilling to accept the greatness of the power of God and the reality of miracles.  And so they have suggested that what Elisha did here was to cut a long stick and strike it through the eye of the axe head as it lay in the bottom of the stream, and that he somehow levered it up to the surface.

But even that goes against the laws of gravity.  This was a miracle, something with the power of God upon it, so that the laws of nature were suspended for a brief moment.  The result was that something which simply could not float was made to bob up to the surface and float there so that it could be retrieved.  Why is this miracle told to us?  What purpose does it serve?  What does it teach us?

Well, on the one hand it confirms and reinforces for us that the Lord our God is above and over all.  And here, through His specially chosen servant, the Lord displays His power at work.  And by the way, this is not about telling us that if we act like Elisha, we'll be able to raise iron and make it float on water.  In the whole race of humanity, the number of people God appointed and set apart as prophets, and who were permitted and empowered to exercise miracles and receive direct revelations from the Lord, that number is very small indeed.

This miracle however is a contrast to the previous chapter where a servant of Elisha was rewarded for his unfaithfulness.  Greed got the better of the servant Gehazi, and he lied about his actions before the man of God, and as punishment, leprosy, the sign and symbol of sin throughout the Bible, broke out on the man.  The contrast in our verses with that is that we are shown how faithful work and service to the Lord is rewarded.

Conditions in Israel were not good.  The king and his mother Jezebel, the son and wife of that terribly evil king Ahab, were in power.  The nation was by all accounts turning away from the Lord.  And yet the faithful ministry of Elisha was being blessed, his students were growing and a larger house had to be built for them.  Also the faithful service of the student with the lost axe head was rewarded through the miracle of iron floating on water.

But it is Elisha's response to the plea of his student that interests us here.  Elisha asked, where did it fall?

Where did it fall?  Here's a question for the entire human race.  We're living on a borrowed planet, with borrowed time, borrowed resources and borrowed life.  None of this belongs to us.  Yes, I know we save money and work hard so that we can buy houses and land and fill those places with all kinds of things that we call our own.  But none of it in reality actually belongs to us.  It's all given to us to use for the time we are permitted to live on this earth.

Even our very life doesn't belong to us.  We have no control or say in when or where we are born, no say in when or how we die.  So in that sense we are in a very similar situation to that student prophet.  The axe didn't belong to him.  He had the use of it and he was responsible for its care and for its return to its owner.

Our world is in trouble.  With the modern ability we have and with amazing facilities for communication, we can now know what is happening anywhere at any time as it is actually happening.  With all that information pouring over us, with newspapers, magazines, radio, television, internet and mobile phones, what is it that we are bombarded with?  That there is trouble everywhere!

If it's not the Jews and Arabs fighting, then it's the Albanians and the Macedonians.  There is fighting in South America, in Asia between Pakistan and India, among the people of Northern Ireland, in the tropical paradise of the Pacific in the Solomon and Fijian Islands.  And if we aren't hearing about people fighting we're hearing about earthquakes and suffering through disasters, or we're hearing about how two friends go gambling and win a million dollars only to become enemies, as they argue over the money.

What's wrong with us?  We have immense resources and technological expertise.  We have people in this world whom we could call brilliant geniuses in almost every field of human endeavour, and yet from one decade to the next, from one century to the next, nothing changes.  What is wrong with us, with this world?

The Bible – in spite of Mr Spong and other self-proclaimed intellectually superior people who want to deny the Bible and all that it teaches us – provides us with the single most reasonable and clear explanation of our world.  Back in Genesis 3 it's all laid out for us.  Adam and Eve, the first two humans of God's creation, our first parents, fell into sin.  Contrary to the command of God they took fruit from a tree forbidden to them.  And God, who fellowshipped with them in the cool of the day called out to them, as they hid from Him.  They had become ashamed of their nakedness, something they hadn't noticed before.  Something that is normal and natural and holy in itself, became sin to them.  And the Lord God expelled them from His garden, to work the land, to eat and live by the sweat of their brow and to bear children in pain, to regret their sin until the day would come, for the Lord Jesus to restore peace again between man and God.

There's the explanation for what's wrong with this world.  All the greed, the crime, the violence, all of it, it's the result of that horrific fall into sin by Adam and Eve.  Their descendants, you and I, are all sinners as we each inherit from our parents and pass on to our children the sin of Adam and Eve.

The world constantly tries to patch up trouble spots.  Marriage, and divorce in particular, is a problem and hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of children are being brought up in single parent families.  Governments establish research projects, special grants and counselling centres and make all kinds of special provisions to tackle the issue, while at the same time supporting a hundred other issues that undermine their efforts to prop up the family.  Nothing really works.

AIDS is a terrible spectre that authorities tell us will wipe out millions of people over the next few decades.  Death like this is worse than the plague of the Middle Ages, and what do we do about it?  We try to patch it up with medicines and political decisions.

There's only one solution.  There is only one remedy.  It's the remedy of the Word of God.  There the Lord Jesus is revealed.  There we're told He will come and has come.  There we're taught how He willingly suffered the torments of hell for us who believe.  To die and rise again for the forgiveness of all our sin, for the setting right that which we try so desperately to patch up without Him.

The death of Christ upon the cross provides redemption, provides peace and salvation with God.  Fallen people must be made new.  Patching doesn't work.  History is eloquent witness to that.  We must be made new and recreated, born over again.  What this world needs is people who aren't just born into the world.  You and I, we must be twice-born people, born into the world, and born again into Christ, so that not just the surface of issues are addressed, but the very hearts of people need to be changed.  The heart is where it all begins and ends.  It is the heart that requires a radical work, it must be born over again.

We can give great thanks to God for Australia.  What a great country this is.  Some of you will look to your homelands, but here you are now.  You looked for something safer, some place freer and more open, and that's what we still have here.  But don't forget we still have serious problems.  Crime statistics march on.  People have their homes broken into.  People are also beginning to shoot each other for some road rage incident.  AIDS is an issue that, whilst not the issue it is on the continent of Africa, is growing.  Alcoholism, abortion, euthanasia, the effects of out of control gambling, divorce, they are all ready to overwhelm our peaceful nation.

What this nation needs is a spiritual revival.  We need to ask Elisha's question.  The axe head fell into a stream, and the borrower was worried.  What really could anyone do about it, except ask a basic question, where did it fall?  And Elisha turned to the Lord.  How could he recover that axe unless the Lord did it?  We need to return to God.  The most basic and fundamental issues of our lives, our nation and our world, are in trouble and beyond hope.  No amount of patching will fix them.  We need to return to God.

Consider your own walk with the Lord.  Can you think back to when the gospel first became reality to you?  Can you remember when you first knew that the Lord Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sin, for your salvation, to cleanse you from all your sin?  When that began to light up your life for the first time, do you remember how you felt then?

It was something awesome and wonderful to realise that the Lord God of heaven and of earth, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of David and the apostles, this God, the holy One, sent His dearly loved Son to a wooden cross on a cursed hill.  God did that so that you could be taken out of sin and hell.  God caused you to be born over again and become a precious member of the family of the Lord Jesus.  Do you remember that?

What joy it was, and there was such a desire to serve the Lord in your heart.  And you could almost burst for your love for Christ and your longing to do His will.  Perhaps you will also remember how there grew a hunger in you for the Bible and to meet with fellow Christians and how you wanted others to also know this Lord.

But now it may be that a certain lukewarmness has grown over your soul.  Perhaps now it might be appropriate to ask, where did it fall?  Where did that come from?  What was the reason for your decline?

Elisha's solution was to cast a stick onto the water, and the axe head rose to the surface.  Some have suggested that the stick is a picture of the cross.  I'm not sure there's enough evidence here to allow us to say that.  Others have suggested that this miracle is about showing us how the Lord can relieve earthly suffering through the intervention of a prophet.  Again, I'm not sure that this is supported by our verses here.

What we can confidently say is that this miracle makes us look to the God of Elisha, the One who alone could make a lump of iron float on water.  And this is what we all must do.  If God can do that with a block of iron, imagine what He can do with a living heart?

This world must look to Jesus.  This nation of ours must look to the Lord Jesus, and you and I especially, if our love and service to the Lord have declined.  But all of us must go back and look to the Lord Jesus Christ, our Lord, and our Saviour.  We must get back to the simple message of the cross.

May the Lord our God be our guide, our joy – the One who lifts us up and restores us to Himself.

Amen.