Down to Earth But Heavenly Minded

“Is it well with thee?”

How broken hearts may find solace and blessing through sorrow.

“And when the child was grown, it fell on a day, that he went out to his father to the reapers. And he said to his father, My head, my head. And he said to a lad, Carry him to his mother. And when he had taken him and brought him to his mother, he sat on her knees till noon, and then died. And she went up, and laid him on the bed of the man of God, and shut the door upon him, and went out. And she called to her husband, and said, Send me, I pray thee, one of the young men, and one of the asses, that I may run to the man of God, and come again. And he said, Wherefore wilt thou go to him to-day? it is neither new moon, nor sabbath. And she said, It shall be well. … And when Elisha was come into the house, behold, the child was dead, and laid upon his bed. He went in therefore, and shut the door upon them twain, and prayed to the LORD. And he went up, and lay upon the child, and put his mouth upon his mouth, and his eyes upon his eyes, and his hands upon his hands: and he stretched himself upon the child; and the flesh of the child waxed warm. Then he returned, and walked in the house to and fro; and went up, and stretched himself upon him: and the child sneezed seven times, and the child opened his eyes. And he called Gehazi, and said, Call this Shunammite. So he called her. And when she was come in to him, he said, Take up thy son. Then she went in, and fell at his feet, and bowed herself to the ground, and took up her son, and went out” (2 Kings 4:18-23 and verses 32-37).

Sunlit hills and shady valleys have their place in the earth as well as fertile plains and sun-scorched deserts, and God has made it so, for He is the God of diversity, as all His works declare. And our lives are like that. They are not on one dead level, we have our ups and downs, our laughter and our tears, the hill-tops and the valleys, and sometimes the deep, dark gorges from which it seems impossible that the feet that tread them could ever emerge.

Some have strange views of life, warped and limited; they would restrict the laughter or restrain the tears; but it is legality that does the one, and pride that attempts the other; and legality is of the flesh, and pride is of the Devil. There are those who imagine that there is no joy in the Christian life, and others who wonder why there should be any sorrow in it. The faith of the one has never grasped the fact that God gives us all things richly to enjoy, the others do not understand that He watches us with a Father’s unwearying eye, and may sometimes see that it is necessary to chasten and reprove us lest we revel in earthly good and despise or forget the deeper and eternal things, and drift away from Him Who is the Giver of all good.

See how these two things are figured for us in the experiences of the great woman of Shunem. She was a great woman, the lady of the manor, but she was morally great also, as was evident when she declined to ask for any honour for herself or her husband. “I dwell among mine own people,” she said. She was a contented woman, and what could the King or the Captain of the host do for her? A contented person is morally great, and this all God’s children should be. The popular notion is that he is great who has great possessions, but “a man’s life consists not in the abundance of the things that he possesses,” but “godliness with contentment is great gain.” That man is godly who walks in the fear of God, and has the Lord abiding with him, as this woman had Elisha dwelling with her, and he only is contented and able to refuse the preferments and prizes of the world that attract so many but satisfy none.

But Elisha represented a great and giving God, Who will reward even a cup of cold water that is given to one of His servants, and this woman of Shunem had been exceedingly careful for His prophet’s comfort, and recompensed she must be. So the one earthly joy that she lacked was given to her. In the course of time this childless woman embraced a son, God’s gift to her. Did He intend her to enjoy His gift? Most certainly He did. How strange it is that people should imagine that God does not want them to be happy in the gifts He gives them! How poor is their knowledge of Him. I have met Christians who thought that it was God’s will to check and thwart them, and to take good things from them lest they should enjoy them over much, and they have been afraid, because of this, to trust themselves and their treasures wholly to Him. They were not happy Christians, and were no testimony for Him.

How different from this false notion is the way the Bible speaks of God. There we read that He does good and showers His blessings upon us, filling our hearts with food and gladness (Acts 14:17). And it is undoubtedly His will that His children should enjoy those natural relationships that are His own ordination, if they are received with thanksgiving and sanctified by the Word of God and prayer (1 Timothy 4).

We are sure that this woman’s home at Shunem was a happy one, but as the years rolled by, did she become absorbed with her domestic happiness and less careful for the man of God? It seems almost wrong to suggest it, yet during those years while she watched the development of her son no visit of the man of God to her home is recorded, though his chamber and his bed were still there. One thing is certain, she had more lessons to learn, and these are recorded for our admonition. She had learnt that the man of God was better than her possessions, and that he could bring greater blessing into her life and home than ever she had known. She had learnt that if she delighted herself in the Lord, He would give her the desire of her heart (Psalm 37). Now she had to learn that God’s representative was her one resource in sorrow, and in the grace and power of God greater than death. She had to walk in the shadows as she had walked in the sunshine, and discover that the man of God was the same in both. The heart that has learnt these things in regard to Christ has been enriched with a knowledge that far exceeds all earthly joy, and can say, as Paul said: “I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content … Both to abound and suffer need. I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me” (Philippians 4:11-13).

There is here a striking commentary on the transitoriness of the choicest things in this life. The child has grown, it was harvest time and noon when he died on his mother’s knees. When the promise of that young life was brightest, in the fulness of the year when the earth yielded up her wealth to the sickle, and at the zenith of the day the blow fell, and the mother’s arms, the mother’s love could not protect her child from it. Death smote him, and in smiting him it smote her and broke her heart.

The story of the crashing of that great woman’s hopes, and the sight of her sitting alone with her dead son in her arms, brings vividly home to us the fact that no circle or sphere beneath the sun is immune from sorrow, or impregnable to death. If we have not learnt this lesson, and what it means to us, either by a sore experience or in communion with God, we have not advanced far in our Christian knowledge, nor have we understood the greatness of our Saviour and the tenderness of His heart. Death is here. Do we know to whom to turn when we feel it? “Death has passed upon all men.” Do we know where life abides? Nothing we possess in the natural sphere of life can we retain. Are our affections set on things above, where Christ sits and where death can never come?

It is a sore lesson, but it must be learnt: death is here. It must be learnt either in communion with God or through such an experience as this woman passed through. Of every man it is true as regards himself that the outward man perishes, and the most cherished object of a man’s heart may at any moment be severed from him. He may stand up to resist the advancing foe, but death heeds him not. He may gather all his treasures and pour them out and pile them up, he may offer himself instead: it is useless, it avails him nothing; death cannot be beaten off or bribed, nor will he accept a substitute. Human love is impotent, baffled, beaten, when death claims what is devoted to it, and the unhearing ears, the closed, unseeing eyes, the still, unresponsive heart all witness to the completeness of the breach. What would we do if such an experience were ours?

Let us consider the ways of this great woman, for she was as great in her sorrow as she was in her prosperity and joy. First she laid her son upon the prophet’s bed. What a burden she carried into that chamber, where the prophet had lived and lain. We see her enter it with bowed head and weeping eyes, bruised, buffeted, bewildered. Did she bow in lowly prayer there? I believe she did, for she came forth submissive and calm, with one word in her heart and lips with which to meet all questions: “It is well.”

She knew that no one would understand her sorrow like the man of God, who had given her the joy that she had lost. She must go to him, and if she could bring him back to that chamber which was his, he would find her sorrow there. Ah, there are many hearts that were once filled with the joy of the presence of the Lord upon which now a great sorrow is laid. It may be the sorrow of departure from the Lord, or it may be something that answers to the sorrow of this bereaved mother. Anyhow, it is death, moral, spiritual, or actual death, and the cry of the heart is, “Restore to me the joy of Thy salvation.”

Her sorrow did not rob her of her decision of character, and indeed in this matter there was no time to be lost, and this is so in all matters of lost joy and blessing, for sorrow can harden as well as soften; indeed it will most surely harden if the presence and sympathy of the Lord are not known, and the spirit that becomes absorbed with sorrow becomes strangely dulled, insensitive, and self-centred. “I will rise now and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways will I seek him whom my soul loves,” said the bride in the Canticles who had been indifferent to her lover and had lost the joy of his company. “I will run to the man of God, and come again,” was this woman’s determined purpose, and to her servant she said “Drive, and go forward; slack not thy riding for me, except I bid thee.”

Do not think that I am confounding two things that differ, that I am mixing up the sorrow of a heart bereaved by death, and the sorrow of a heart that once knew the joy of the Lord’s presence. I am not. If the Man of God is not dwelling in the prepared chamber, if Christ is not in the heart, it matters little what the reason for it may be, the great necessity is to seek Him, to recall Him without delay. It was this that this woman was set upon. Her husband does not seem to have had any deep spiritual feeling or discernment. He could not understand what use the man of God could be on any day but the Sabbath, or perhaps at the new moon, like so many whose irksome religion is but a matter of form and ceremony, a one-day-a-week affair, and who have no consciousness of all that need that some of us feel of an every day acquaintance with our living Lord. Anyhow, this lady of Shunem had neither the heart nor the time to argue the point. Her relations with the man of God were not formal; she felt that none but he could understand her sorrow, and she must pour it out at his feet that day. Yet her haste was not the result of panic or hysteria, as her noble answer to husband proved. What confidence she had in God and His prophet when she said, “It is well!”

The man of God saw her afar off, and we may be sure that the Lord knows well and sees the first move towards Himself on the part of any of His own, no matter how far off they may be from Him. From Elisha had been hidden the cause of her coming to him, but nothing is hidden from our living Lord. Blessed be His Name! As she had refused to discuss her sorrow with her unsympathetic husband, so now she refuses to discuss it with Gehazi. Her answer, “It is well,” showed how thoroughly she had realised that not the servant, but his master only, could meet her deep need. And so she bends at his feet and pours out her sorrow there. And she will not be diverted from him, even when it seemed as though Gehazi was commissioned to raise up the child. She must have the man of God. “As the Lord lives, and as thy soul lives, I will not leave thee,” she says. His presence had become the one necessity of her life.

This is plainly the way for hearts, whether broken or backslidden. No mere servant will suffice. Only personal contact with Christ and His company will do. He must take afresh the place that was once His in the heart. He must deal with sorrow and sin. He is greater than both. In the power of the Lord, Elisha brought back the dead child to life again and gave him to his mother, and she bowed again before him, not now in sorrow but in glad worship to the God Whom he served.

It is not the Lord’s way to restore the dead to life in these days. Those who die in the Lord are with Him, which is far better; but He can and does make life spring out of death for us. He can and does turn our greatest sorrows into our greatest blessings, but He does this by drawing near to us Himself, and filling up our empty hearts.