For the Lord had caused the army of the Arameans to hear a sound of chariots and a sound of horses, even the sound of a great army, so that they said to one another, “Behold, the king of Israel has hired against us the kings of the Hittites and the kings of the Egyptians, to come upon us.”
— 2 Kings 7:6
Here we find a fascinating and unusual story involving four men who were lepers — completely helpless, without food and without any means of obtaining it. Faced with certain death from starvation where they were, they made what amounted to a desperate gamble. They reasoned that if they stayed put they would die of hunger, and if they went to the Aramean camp they would likely be killed by the enemy. Either way, death seemed inevitable. And so they made the decision to go to the camp — not out of faith, not out of strategy, but simply because they had nothing left to lose.
God Acts Independently
And then our text tells us what the Lord did. And here there are several things worth noticing carefully.
The first and most striking is this — God’s action had nothing to do with the four lepers. They were not devout men of prayer. There is no record of them crying out to God or making any kind of request for divine intervention. They simply made a desperate human decision. And yet God, entirely on His own initiative, caused the Aramean army to hear the sound of a vast approaching force — chariots, horses, a great army — so that the entire camp fled in panic, leaving behind everything the lepers needed.
We often associate God’s action with our own. We think that perhaps the reason something is not happening is because we have not prayed enough, worked hard enough, or done our part of what we imagine to be a bargain with God. But this story shows us something different entirely — that God operates completely independently of man’s works and man’s efforts when it pleases Him to do so.
God Is Not Confined by Us
This brings us to a very important point. There is a tendency in our thinking to confine God to our own wills — to suggest that God cannot act until we permit Him, or that His power is somehow held back until we release it through prayer or effort or faith. But when you think this through carefully, you realise how deeply problematic this is. If God, despite having all power, cannot act until man gives Him permission, then God has effectively become subservient to man — doing our bidding rather than His own will.
Scripture will have nothing of this. The psalmist declares plainly:
But our God is in the heavens; He does whatever He pleases.
— Psalm 115:3
Jesus told the Pharisees that if the children did not worship Him, He would raise up stones to do so. John the Baptist told them not to presume that their descent from Abraham would protect them from judgment — for God could raise up children of Abraham from the very stones on the ground.
To suggest that we can limit or confine what God does by our own willpower is not only theologically mistaken — it is logically incoherent. God existed before He created us. If His ability to act were dependent on our will, He could never have created us in the first place, since our will would not yet have existed.
Gratitude for Unsolicited Grace
This truth has a very practical implication. There are times when God acts completely independently — for His own glory and for our benefit — and we fail to recognise it, let alone be grateful for it. We become so focused on what we have done to prompt God’s response that when He gives us something we did not pray for, we receive it without the reverence and gratitude it deserves — or worse, we barely notice it at all.
Jesus reminds us that God causes the sun to shine on both the righteous and the unrighteous, and the rain to fall on both the just and the unjust. We did not pray for the sun to rise this morning. We did not earn the air we breathe, the food we eat, the birdsong we wake up to, or the community and fellowship we enjoy. All of it comes to us simply by His grace — unsolicited, unearned, and undeserved.
May we learn to thank God for the things we never thought to ask for — the things that in His sovereign grace He has given us freely, and that we so often take for granted. May we come to a place of appreciating God for all that He is, and refuse to diminish Him by imagining that we could ever confine or limit what He chooses to do.
Amen.
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