On Sunday, we were looking at a passage from 2 Kings 6 and 7 concerning the Aramean seige of Samaria. The situation was so desperate that it included a horrible scene in which a mother and neighbour strike a deal to eat one another’s children. The king only learns of this heinous agreement when one of the mothers – having boiled her own son and shared the corpse with her neighbour – becomes indignant that the other is now hiding her son so that he will not be eaten.

This is a grotesque scene and shows the absolute desperation of the people even considering this and, to a similar extent, the moral degridation of the people that this would even be countenanced as an option! It is this that causes the king to tear his clothes in anguish and to seek the head of Elisha (as a proxy for God himself) whom he squarely holds accountable for this state of affairs. You can listen back to the sermon here for more details on this episode and the specific lessons the wider passage has for us.

However, it is worth thinking about the fact that few of us in the modern West will ever be in a situation quite this precarious. For the best part of 100 years now, there has been little prospect of actual war or seiges being fought on our doorstep. Even where we have been at war – or where war has looked likely – it doesn’t typically take this kind of form now. Few UK citizens were living in dread fear at the height of the Falklands War and not many of us were living in daily terror when we traipsed off to Afghanistan and Iraq. Even during WWII – the most recent war that properly came to our shores on any level – the situation wasn’t quite as heinous as the severe famine and certain death being visited on Samaria. Whilst rationing was clearly miserable, it wasn’t anything like serious enough to start asking if you need to eat your own children!

Despite the desperateness of the situation for Samaria, what soon becomes clear is that God will resolve it. Even in a situation where the outcome is almost certain death, the Lord worked to save his people. He used some very unlikely deliverers to do it – four lepers and an unnamed servant – but nevertheless, he did it. God came through for his people even when everything pointed to the certainty of death and destruction.

Given what we just said about wars and rumours of wars in the modern west, it seems evident we just aren’t likely to find ourselves in quite the same dire straits any time soon. Situations may be bad for us, unquestionably, but I sense they are unlikely to be quite Samaria-level bad. Yet, if God came through for his people in such dire circumstances then, what makes us think he won’t come through for us now?

Of course, we have to remember that he hasn’t promised to save us from every beseiging army, all diseases or whatever else might harm us here and now. There is no guarantee he will free us from whatever it is we might hope to be freed from. The promise we have from him is to take us safely to glory and to free us from all such troubles when we are there. So, we must be careful that we don’t assume – because God did it for Israel sometimes and because God is able to do it now – he necessarily will. He simply hasn’t promised us that.

Nevertheless, it remains true that he is able. There should be no situation so big, serious or frightening that we assume God is unable to help us here. There is no such thing as a set of circumstances that are beyond God and from which he is unable to deliver us. It is always worth going to him and asking him for his help in time of need because he is always able to help us.

But again, he doesn’t always seems to help us in the way we might hope. And, if we read the scriptures well, we’ll recognise he doesn’t promise to always remove these things from us. The question then is not whether God can save us from these things (he can) nor whether we can necessarily expect him to save us from these things (he hasn’t promised that he will. The question is, do we nevertheless believe God is good?

If God is good, then we can believe that whether he saves us from this thing or not, he does so for our good. If God is good, we can trust that he will work for our ultimate good, whether that involves being delivered from this particular set of circumstances or not. There is no situation so big or too hard for God to deliver us from it, but there are some heinous situations that God permits us to endure nonetheless because to do so is better for us. We may not know how or why, we may not see until glory (the bible gives some broad brush answers as to how or why that might be), but if God is good then it is necessarily so.

Which means the question really isn’t can God deliver us. It isn’t whether God will deliver us. It is simply this: do you believe God is good? If he is good, and he works for our good, then whether he delivers us or not, it is for our good. We can always ask God to deliver us – he is certainly able and willing if it would serve us best to do so – but whatever he does the question remains: do you still believe God is good?