I am just preparing a sermon on a funny little episode in 2 Kings 4. It is one of a series of miracles done through Elisha. It is the curing of the stew. It is only a short episode, which I include in full here:
38 When Elisha returned to Gilgal, there was a famine in the land. The sons of the prophets were sitting before him. He said to his attendant, “Put on the large pot and make stew for the sons of the prophets.”
39 One went out to the field to gather herbs and found a wild vine from which he gathered as many wild gourds as his garment would hold. Then he came back and cut them up into the pot of stew, but they were unaware of what they were.[a]
40 They served some for the men to eat, but when they ate the stew they cried out, “There’s death in the pot, man of God!” And they were unable to eat it.
41 Then Elisha said, “Get some flour.” He threw it into the pot and said, “Serve it for the people to eat.” And there was nothing bad in the pot.
There are various things we might say about this little episode. Perhaps a few questions we might have about it too. I just want to land on one thing that struck me.
It is hard to ignore that the poor soul who went out to gather food for the sons of the prophets to eat in the midst of a famine did so with every good intention. Elisha wants to make stew and the forager did his best to bring back whatever he could find. Little did he know that what he brought back was so seriously problematic that he might have wiped out the whole camp. No small matter either given that these were the faithful remnant.
As with most miracles, God effectively redeems the entire situation. The deadly stew is cured when Elisha throws in some flour. Clearly flour is not the agent or particularly significant. It’s not just that it tasted bad and needed some of The Colonel’s special recipe to sort it out. This is God’s work, healing a deadly stew and using a visual so that everyone might see the sign for what it is. A well intentioned servant ends up making a deadly stew and a good God takes his heinous blunder and makes it so that his effort is not wasted.
I think this is how our service of God often works. There are of course the obvious things: that terrible effort to explain the gospel that just went horribly wrong, the advice we gave that blew up in somebody’s face, the action we took that we look back and think was actually wrong. All well-intentioned mistakes in the service of Jesus. But we have a God who specialises in taking our weak, rubbish and often downright damaging, but well intentioned, service and making it good and valuable in the end. We might conclude that, like my mother, he can’t abide food being wasted. But I think it is fair to say that he doesn’t like any service being wasted. Indeed, with God, nothing is wasted.
If you want some biblical proof, you don’t get a much bigger mistake than taking the very messiah you have been waiting to save you and nailing him to a cross. As clangers go, that’s a pretty big whoopsie! We all know Jesus was resurrected after that, but I don’t think that is point of redemption of this particular mistake. We also know this is the means of salvation for the world, but I still don’t think that was the redemption of this event either. I think Acts 2 – where Peter specifically nail the sin of the crowds in Jerusalem as crucifying the messiah, the Lord Jesus, whom God then raised from the dead as proof – this is the point of redemption.
Bear in mind, as far as their Jewish understanding went, that crucifixion seemed to be absolutely the right thing to do. It was, in a sense, well intentioned. But it was a gross mistake. But that very mistake of crucifying the messiah leads directly to that same crowd asking, ‘what should we do?’ Peter tells them to repent and be baptised in the name of Jesus for the forgiveness of their sin. And 3000 of them do! God takes the grossest sin of crucifying the very messiah sent to save them and uses their specific sin to actually save them; first convicting them of it and then causing them to believe in Christ. Our God takes our well-intentioned, but even harmful and damaging efforts, and redeems them so that they become valuable.
Strikes me, if he will do that with something as grim as putting to death the messiah, he can sort out our well intentioned but sub-optimal efforts too.