Bible Studies

Significant Servanthood

by Terry Barlow
12/17/14
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    In the story of the leprous Syrian captain Naaman in the Bible (2 Kings 5), it is important to note that on two key occasions the course of his life was changed by the counsel and concern of his attending servants. It was an Israeli servant girl who had been carried away into exile in Syria who first informed her master Naaman that there was a prophet in Israel who had been known to bring miraculous results in peoples' lives.

 Then, when through a series of arrangements he arrived at the door of that prophet and was instructed by a messenger to dunk 7 times in the river, he was inclined to give up and go home in disappointment. After all, he reasoned, I could have dunked in the rivers of my own country. Don't I even get to see this prophet face to face? Again it was the wise counsel of servants that urged him to comply and not waste all the effort and hope required to come such a distance. To his credit Naaman submitted himself to their advice, and experienced a dramatic healing as a result. Maybe that was because he considered himself a servant to the "master" and king who had appointed him a commander in the Syrian army. 

 Even the great playwright William Shakespeare had the insight to make a servant in one of his plays (King Lear) the only true hero with a pure motive, a servant whose part consisted in only a few lines before being stabbed in the back trying to save someone's life.  Upon reading that play, no one could rightly maintain that the servant played a "minor role" any more than one could of those God-sent servants in Naaman's life.