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When Gehazi tried to push her away, Elisha said, "Let her alone, for she is deeply troubled and Jehovah has not told me the reason." Then she said, "Did I ask a son of my lord? Did I not say, 'Do not deceive me?" Elisha said to Gehazi, "Tighten your belt, take my staff in your hand and go!
Compassionating the distressed Shunammite, Elisha immediately adopted measures to afford her effectual consolation. He commanded Gehazi to hasten to the chamber appropriated to his use, and lay his staff upon the face of the child. He was to avoid the usual compliments upon meeting friends or strangers, in order that not a moment might be lost.
But when he had gone from him a short distance, Gehazi, the servant of Elisha the man of God, thought to himself, "My master has let this Naaman the Aramean go without accepting what he brought! As surely as Jehovah lives, I will run after him and take something from him."
But when he came to the hill, he took them from their hand and hid them in the house and let the men go. Then he went in to Elisha; but when he stood before his master, Elisha said to him, "Where do you come from, Gehazi?" He answered, "Your servant has not been anywhere." But Elisha said to him, "Was I not in spirit with you when the man turned from his chariot to meet you?
But Elisha said it would be so; and saddling his ass he rode away, with Gehazi following after him. But the prophet's word came true, and the Shunammite's heart leaped with joy as she nursed her little babe. Years passed, and the courtyard echoed with the shouts of the merry child, whose bare feet pattered all day about the sunny square, scaring the gray doves up to the housetop.
"For," says Muggleton, "as John Reeve was like unto Elijah, so am I as Elisha, and his place was but as Gehazi, and could stand no longer than my will and pleasure was." Claxton had been formally blessed, therefore he could never be damned, but excommunicated he could be and was. He at once dropt out and we hear of him no more. The second revolt was much more serious.
"Gird up thy tunic with thy belt," he said, speaking to Gehazi, "and take my staff, and go. Greet no man by the way, and answer no man's greeting; but lay it on the face of the child," handing him his staff as he spoke. And the man started at once to run down the path from the village. "As God liveth, and as thy soul liveth, I will not leave thee," the mother murmured at the prophet's feet.
The supposition that Gehazi was sent in such haste with the hope that the touch of the staff might bring back life, is dismissed as 'impossible' by most commentators, who have therefore some difficulty in saying what he was sent for. Some of the Rabbis answered, 'To prevent putrefaction, which would set in soon on that harvest day.
In this he held that, as all islands have been at their discovery found peopled by blacks, we must needs believe that humanity was first created of that color. Mrs. Johnson believed the white race descended from Gehazi the leper, upon whom the leprosy of Naaman fell when the latter returned by Divine favor to his original blackness.
The prophet's gift of supernatural knowledge was intermittent, as witness his ignorance of the Shunemite's sorrow; but Gehazi must have known its occasional action, and we can fancy that his heart sank at the ominous question, so curt in the original, and conveying so clearly the prophet's knowledge that he had been away from the house: 'Whence, Gehazi? One lie needs another to cover it, and every sin is likely to beget a successor.
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