Hearing God鈥檚 Word in Times of Crisis
For Christian leaders in times of crisis, prayer and seeking direction from God is standard—from presidents of the United States to CEOs to football coaches to pastors. How can we discern God’s word to us when we seem to have no clear path forward and when nothing we can do seems adequate to meet the challenge of the moment?
In 2 Kings 3, the kings of Samaria, Judah, and Edom faced certain doom. King Joram of Samaria received word from his vassal king in Moab that he would pay no more tribute, so he called on Jehoshaphat, King of Judah, and the unnamed king of Edom (another vassal) to go to war with him. They marched their combined armies out into the Desert of Edom and after seven days, ran out of water. Unable to find any source of water, their armies faced imminent dehydration and death. While Joram faithlessly assumed that God had tricked him and led the three armies out into the desert to kill them, godly Jehoshaphat called the prophet Elisha to seek a word from the Lord.
Elisha’s word promised deliverance, but it didn’t give a lot of guidance about what to do. Translations of the Hebrew text differ as to what exactly the word of the Lord was, with translations in the King James tradition directing the kings to “make this valley full of ditches.” The NIV translation announces, “I will fill this valley with pools of water,” while the NLT reflects recent Jewish translations, not indicating who would do the work: “This dry valley will be filled with pools of water!” (NLT). For desperate kings facing certain death, the promise must have been encouraging, but for current readers trying to figure out how God dealt with those ancient kings and what insight the text might give them for solving their own crisis, the different translations don’t help much. Was God telling the kings to spend the last ounce of their strength and authority to make dehydrated soldiers dig ditches in the desert with no reasonable expectation of rain, or was God promising to do all the work by Himself?
I recently felt I had to know the answer. So I checked the Hebrew text and found that the main verb was asoh—to make. The verb form is an infinitive absolute, which allows for any of the three modern translations to be correct. That didn’t help at all. So I checked the Septuagint—a Third Century B.C. translation of the Old Testament into Greek that was accomplished by Hebrew-speaking scholars in Jerusalem. Surely, they would have known the right rendering of this divine promise. I found that they rendered it as an imperative, a choice reflected in the King James Version. They understood God to be commanding the armies to make a “last ditch effort” to get ready for God’s provision. But a rabbi friend of mine in Jerusalem pointed out to me that the targumim—Third Century A.D. translations of the Old Testament into Aramaic—rendered the text as a passive: “pools will be made.” Over the centuries, scholars have made all three of the choices reflected in modern translations. An informal panel of Jewish and Christian experts I consulted tells me that we will never know exactly how to interpret the divine promise to Jehoshaphat—which takes me back to the idea that if the finest biblical scholars in history have not been able to interpret the Hebrew text on this word from God, the original hearers probably didn’t know what to do either. Assuming that the text perfectly conveys what the prophet said, there was no way for the kings (or even the prophet) to know exactly what they should do. But at least they had the promise that God would do something in His own time and in His own mysterious way.
And in practice, that’s how it usually works. We face crises with faith but often without a clear word as to what exactly we should do. No matter how clearly or unclearly God may speak to us in our desperation, the meaning of what He tells us will be filtered through our own faith and theological expectations. A person who follows the faith movement may assume that God will do all the work. An Arminian will assume that we should do everything we can and expect God to step in at the last minute. A Calvinist might assume that the outcome is predestined and that we will just have to do our best and see what happens. A Pelagian might think our job is to fight bravely against cruel fate and assume that everything depends on what we do. An atheist certainly wouldn’t expect anything from God.
In the end, we will always have to do everything we can to deal with crisis and wait on the Lord to be our ultimate rescue. Joram’s position of assuming that God was out to get him certainly failed the leadership test. Jehoshaphat’s decision to seek a word from God offers the right response. Sometimes we will receive a word that encourages us but doesn’t really direct us. In the end, God will never fail us, and that offers our best hope in any time of crisis.