Crash the Chatterbox: Hearing God's Voice Above All Others (29 page)

Despite the epic quality of Elisha’s life, his story comes to a close with the world’s most remarkable prophet in the unremarkable posture in which so many people ultimately end their lives—sick, presumably in bed, grateful for the life he led, now ready for the tide of death to carry him out.

But as the old man attempts to live his final hours in peace, there is one final disruption. For no matter how precious those final hours should have been, kings have no special regard for such moments. And Israel’s leader, King Jehoash, has to contend with the threat of the Arameans.

He rushes to the side of the prophet, who is only hours away from his last breath. But the king is not there to pay his respects, only to make a final request before the light in Elisha’s eyes fades. As he stands in the presence of the man of God, the proud, regally dressed king comes unglued. He cries out in anguish, “My father! My father! The chariots and horsemen of Israel!”
¹

What he says in his outburst shows his affection and regard for Elisha, but it also echoes Elisha’s own words when
his
spiritual father, Elijah, was taken up to heaven in a chariot.
²
Yet Elisha also understands in Jehoash’s words what has brought the panicked king to Elisha’s deathbed:
We are under attack. Our chariots are not going to be enough. Our horsemen are under threat. Their army is bigger and better than our army
.

If the years have clouded the ailing prophet’s eyes, they have not weakened his spirit. His voice still rumbling with the same bone-chilling authority he’d
spoken with in his prime, the prophet gives the king an order. “Take a bow and arrows,” Elisha says.

The king does so.

While the king holds the bow and arrow ready in his hands, Elisha calls him to his side. He lays his knotted hands on the king’s arm. Here is one last opportunity for the prophet to shape the destinies of the nations. He gives King Jehoash final instructions:

So many times in Israel’s history, kings ignored the counsel and warnings of prophets. But at last here is a king who listens to the words of the prophet, a great man who does exactly what he was instructed to do. He heeds Elisha’s words with precision, striking the ground with the arrows not once, not twice, but three times.

Crash! Crash! Crash!

But then abruptly, before the sound becomes a beat, he stops.

And this is where the quirky little archery lesson descends into the bizarre. Scripture says, “The man of God was angry with him.” The storm of his wrath seems to appear out of nowhere. From the cloud of indignation, he berates the king for his actions:

It is a provocative scene. The king had come to Elisha for help, demonstrating rare humility. Elisha responded by giving him something to do (strike the arrow against the ground). And King Jehoash had obeyed.

Why is this not enough for Elisha? Why the Bobby Knight outburst? And what precisely did the king do wrong?

We are expecting resolution to this cryptic little tale when the story of Elisha’s life ends not with a bang but a thud:

And that is all. There is no commentary; there is no further insight. Only a matter-of-fact conclusion to a life that was stranger than fiction. During his years of ministry, Elisha had performed twice as many miracles as his predecessor, Elijah.

Then Elisha died.

Then Elisha was buried.

Thank you and good night.

And with that unsatisfying, unsettling ending …

The screen flickers one more time.

So why include Elisha’s last recorded miracle here? Because I think buried beneath the rubble of this last Elisha story is the untidy ending we must read if we are going to win the war against the chatterbox, not just a handful of battles.

It comes down to how many times you pound the ground.

In antiquity you rarely won a war with one or two major battles. There were no atomic bombs to drop to take out the enemy with one blast. You were going to have to win a fourth and a fifth and a sixth battle … and probably a seventh and an eighth and beyond. Wars often required near constant waging. Consider the generations of Israelites who were called on to take up arms against the Midianites, Edomites, and Philistines.

Every time King Jehoash pounded the ground with an arrow, it represented another battle Israel would win. Some historical evidence indicates that Jehoash was aware of this dynamic. So when he pounded the ground with the arrow three times, it guaranteed that the people of God would have three decisive military
victories over their enemies. This would be enough to weaken the Arameans. But it would not be enough to defeat them for good.

Now it’s clear why the tired old prophet could not help but use the last of his energy to show his outrage. He was not upset at King Jehoash for lacking faith. If the king didn’t believe God could grant him the victory, he wouldn’t have come to the prophet of God asking for a miracle. Elisha wasn’t upset at the king for being disobedient. The king technically carried out the commands he was given well enough; he did precisely what he was asked to do. What made the veins dance through the leathery skin of the weathered old man’s bald head was to see a king who had faith in the living God, and even the humility to do what He asks, settle for something less than
complete victory
.

To see the king stand toe-to-toe with an opportunity to drive out his enemies entirely—but settle for this?

He technically obeyed. He went through the motions, but the king didn’t finish. Such astonishing potential, such a halfhearted application.

That’s not just sad; that’s a tragedy.

Elisha surveys the wreckage of wasted opportunity, and he seethes: “Is that all you’ve got? Is that all you want? Just enough victory to back the enemy off, just enough to survive? Just enough not to get plundered anymore?

“Why did you stop striking?! If you had kept striking, you would have completely destroyed the enemy! Why would you settle for winning a few battles when you had the opportunity to win the war?”

It would not have taken great intelligence, courage, or ingenuity for the people of God to have defeated their archenemies. All it would have taken was a little more perseverance on the part of the king. He didn’t need to learn anything new, beef up the artillery, sharpen the military strategy; he just needed to pound the ground a few more times, and victory was his.

It wasn’t a matter of technique. It was a matter of tenacity.

King Jehoash must have known what Elijah—Elisha’s spiritual father—had reckoned with in the solitude of the cave:
Every victory you win means another battle you will have to fight
.

Jehoash wasn’t lacking in faith or humility. He just stopped pounding the ground for the same pedestrian reason we all stop striking—he got tired of fighting the battles.

Here’s the bad news:

The chatterbox will not stop talking. It never, ever, ever stops.

The impulses of insecurity never stop poking at your confidence.

The forces of fear never stop pushing against your dreams.

The crow of condemnation never stops sounding off with a
cock-a-doodle-doo
.

The dread of discouragement never stops draining your energy for your assignment.

Chatterboxing is a full-time occupation, because the chatterbox takes no breaks, and it takes no prisoners. The chatterbox is portable. You can go on vacation, but it takes no time off and never takes sick days. The chatterbox is not squeamish with intimate moments. It will go with you to the bathroom or the shower. You can change the scenery, change partners, change your clothes. But the lips of the maniacal chatterbox keep on moving.

You can sabotage it. You can subvert it. But you cannot silence it. The chatterbox always has a few more words to share.

Here’s the good news:

When you’ve defeated the chatterbox once, you have the capacity to beat it every time. The key is persistence.

If you’ll keep pounding, victory will keep coming. And even when you lose, you’ll gain strength you didn’t previously have. When the battle comes around again, you’ll be better prepared for it.

Through this book God has placed the arrows in your hand—arrows of truth and faith. It will not require your strength or power to win the battles or to win the war. All that will be required of you is trust and tenacity.

Whatever you do, determine to never stop pounding the ground, never stop crashing the box.

I know you are weary. I know you’ve fought many of these battles before and often lost. But unlike King Jehoash, you can’t stop after hitting the ground three times. There is too much at stake, too much hope in you, too much life in you, too much promise in you—too much Christ in you.

Show up for battle—and then show up the next day to fight again. And then show up the next day after that, and then show up the next day after that.

Thought by thought, moment by moment, keep pounding, keep asking and believing, keep crashing.

Believe what God has already declared to be true about you. Resist the lies.

Enjoy the brief reprieve with every victory God grants you, but keep the gloves close by, knowing that if you will simply keep making contact, ultimate victory is yours.

It’s just an arrow in the ground, but to God it demonstrates a commitment of the heart:
I refuse to forfeit a victory that God has already given because of a battle that I don’t feel like fighting
.

God hasn’t brought you this far just to win a few battles. God hasn’t brought you this far just to feel a little bit better about managing your life. God didn’t save you to just get by, to just exist, to just barely make it through the day. He wants you to experience the total victory of hearing His voice above all others.

Of course, the same old lies will come back and contradict all this—every word of it. The same insecurities, fears, condemnations, discouragements. But when they come back, let ’em know you have a little something for ’em: a promise from God that you’ve learned how to aim straight for the heart.

There is never anything new about your enemy’s tactics or his weapons. It’s just the same old lies recycled and reincarnated. Sometimes they seem a little scarier or appear a little more complex.

But defeating them only requires one weapon: the living and active promises of God. Applied personally to your life.

The chatterbox doesn’t crash because you underlined some sentences or gleaned some truths. Highlighters and mental assent don’t crash or change anything.