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Updated: May 21, 2025
The detailed question put into Gehazi's mouth describes the circle within which this woman's heart moved, her husband, her child, herself. If these were well, nothing could be very ill; if ill, nothing could be well. But the message, which came so warm from Elisha's lips, had been cooled on the road, and sounded formal from Gehazi.
Elisha had no desires stirred by the wealth in Naaman's train. Gehazi's mouth watered after it. Regulate desires and you rule conduct. The true regulation of desires is found in communion with God. Gehazi had a sordid soul, like Judas; and, like the traitor Apostle, he was untouched by contact with goodness and unworldliness.
Gehazi's story is well hung together, and has plenty of 'local colour' to make it probable. Such glib ingenuity in lying augurs long practice in the art. If he had been content with a small fee, he needed only to have told the truth; but his story was required to put a fair face on the amount of his request. And in what an amiable light it sets Elisha!
A tenderer hand than Gehazi's is needed to unlock the sad secret of that burdened breast. It was perhaps partly pique at her silencing him, and partly mere unfeeling attention to 'propriety, which made the servant wish to check the convulsive grasp of the feet, which the master allowed. Underlings are more careful of what they suppose to be their superior's dignity than he is.
He was in the habit of standing without the door. This induced many to turn away and go home, for they reasoned that, if the house were not full to overflowing, Gehazi would not be standing outside. Only after Gehazi's dismissal did the disciples of Elisha increase marvellously.
"Elisæus, as the course of Holy Scripture tells us, when hemmed in by the Syrian army, said to his frightened servant, by way of calming him, 'There are more that are for us than are against us. And to prove this, he begged that Gehazi's eyes might be opened; upon which the latter saw innumerable hosts of Angels present to the prophet. We, though we cannot see them, yet are sensible of them.
But verse 31 plainly implies that the result of Gehazi's attempt was not what had been expected. Why need there be any hesitation in taking the natural meaning, and supposing that Elisha sent his servant quickly, 'if peradventure' the touch of his staff might suffice, and followed in person, because he did not know whether it would.
Let us take the warning that we are to publish on the housetops what we hear in the ear, and that, if in anything we should be punctiliously sincere, it is in the profession of our faith. III. The last point is Gehazi's avarice, and what he got by it. How differently the same sight affected the man who lived near God and the one who lived by sense!
The prophet Elisha greeted him with the rebuke: "Thou villain! the time has come for me to be rewarded for the study of the Mishnah about the eight reptiles. May my reward be that the disease of Naaman afflict thee and thy descendants for evermore." Scarcely had these words escaped his lips, when he saw the leprosy come out on Gehazi's face.
The question, 'Is this a time to receive? etc., suggests the special reasons, in Naaman's new faith, for conspicuous disregard of wealth, in order that he might thereby learn the free love of Elisha's God and of Jehovah's servant, both of which had been tarnished by Gehazi's ill-omened greed.
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