2 Kings 4:40-41

There is death in the pot.

Poisons

Nature grows poison as well as food. The sons of the prophets little knew the hurtful quality of the food that was being poured into the pot. In all things nature has its poisonous side as well as its sustaining and comforting aspect. The bane and antidote are both before us in nature. Death lies very near to life in the great open fields. Even our most natural passions lie but a single step from their destructive application. Can it be possible that a son of the prophets went out to gather food for a natural appetite, and came back with poison? This is what is being done every day. We may turn honest commerce into a means of felony. We may go into the market-place to buy food, and yet by some action we may perpetrate in connection with the purchase we may take all virtue out of the food and make it contribute to our worst qualifies. Blessed are they who eat honest bread: everywhere the great law of trespass is written in nature. By putting poisons upon the earth so plentifully, what does the Lord say in effect but, Take care, be wise, examine your standing-ground, and do nothing foolishly? Thus nature is turned into a great training-school, within whose walls men are trained to sagacity and discrimination, so that they may know the right hand from the left, and the good from the bad, and thus may turn natural processes and customary daily duties into means of culture. (J. Parker, D. D.)

Poison in the cauldron

There are now in the world a great many cauldrons of death. The coloquintida of mighty temptations fills them. Some taste and quit, and are saved; others taste and eat on, and die. Is not that minister of Christ doing the right thing when he points out these cauldrons of iniquity and cries the alarm, saying, “Beware! There is death in the pot”? Iniquity is a coarse, jagged thing, that needs to be roughly handled. I want to go back of all public iniquity and find out its hiding-place. I want to know what are the sources of its power.

I. Unhappy and undisciplined homes are the source of much iniquity. A good home is deathless in its influences. Parents may be gone. The old homestead may be sold and have passed out of the possession of the family. Yet that place will never lose its charm over your soul. That first earthly home will thrill through your everlasting career. Rascally and vagabond people for the most part come forth from unhappy homes. Parents harsh and cruel on the one hand, or on the other lenient to perfect looseness, are raising up a generation of vipers. A home in which scolding and fault-finding predominate is blood relation to the gallows and penitentiary. Petulance is a reptile that may crawl up into the family nest and crush it. There are parents who disgust their children even with religion. They scold their little ones for not loving God. They go about even their religious duties in an exasperating way. Their house is full of the war-whoop of contention, and from such scenes husbands and children dash out into places of dissipation to find their lost peace, or the peace they never had. I verily believe that three-fourths of the wickedness of the great city runs out rank and putrid from undisciplined homes. Sometimes I know there is an exception.

II. The second cauldron of iniquity to which I point you is an indolent life. You will get out of this world just so much as, under God, you earn by your own hand and brain. Horatius was told he might have so much land as he could plough around in one day with a yoke of oxen, and I have noticed that men get nothing in this world, that is worth possessing, of a financial, moral, or spiritual nature, save they get it by their own hard work. It is lust so much as, from the morning to the evening of your life, you can plough around by your own continuous and hard-sweating industries. “Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways, and be wise.”

III. Another cauldron of iniquity is the dram-shop. Surely there is death in the pot. Anacharsis said that the vine had three grapes: pleasure, drunkenness, misery. Then I remember what Gladstone, the Prime Minister of England, said to a committee of men engaged in that traffic when they came to him to deplore that they were not treated with more consideration: “Gentlemen, don’t be uneasy about the revenue. Give me thirty million sober people, and I will pay all the revenue, and have a large surplus.” But the ruin to property is a very small part of the evil. It takes everything that is sacred in the family, everything that is holy in religion, everything that is infinite in the soul, and tramples it into the mire. (T. De Witt Talmage, D. D.)

The deadly pottage

The acts of Elisha are like rays of divine glory shining through his poverty and humiliation. “Elisha came again to Gilgal: and there was a dearth in the land.” This is a picture of our world. Dearth is on every side. Of every stream that runs through it it may indeed be said, “Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again.” But in the midst of this dearth Elisha has a table spread for all his children. So the Lord Jesus has a table for His children in this land of dearth. And mark, this table is especially prepared not for Elisha but “for the sons of the prophets.” The Lord takes care of His children. In the desert they shall never want. But in this land of dearth there is always danger near. The poison is always liable to find its way into the feast of the Lord. And so it was here. “And one went out into the field to gather herbs.” But here lies the danger: we are poor, weak, blind creatures, and the “wild vine” mingles with the “true” everywhere around us. Worst of all, we “know it not.” And the danger is worse from the fact of it being “a vine.” If it were a thorn, a thistle, or some growth bearing the danger on its very front, we should avoid it. There would be no temptation to stoop down and gather it. But it is not from the thorn or the thistle that the danger arises. And is it not so still? Our danger lies not in the open blasphemer, the avowed atheist; not in the open vice, or profligacy, or crime; not in the sin that lifts itself up with unblushing front in our way. These are the thorn and the thistle that carry their own character on the surface. No; our danger lies in that which is so like the vine and yet not it. It lies in that which looks so good, so Christian, so generous, so liberal, so praiseworthy--Rationalism under a great display of the love of Christ, yet denying the innate depravity of the heart. It lies in the theatre, the ball, the concert, under the specious gilding of “charity.” It lies in the world’s follies and amusements, while yet maintaining family prayer, regular attendance at church and its ordinances. In these and a thousand other ways we see the “wild vine.” We think it is “the true vine,” and so, like the man here, we gather plenty of it. We carry the poison home with us. We shred it into the pottage. We carry the spirit of the “wild vine” into our hearts, our thoughts, our spirit, our whole life. And what was it we needed? To see the true character of this “vine” that it was “wild”; to see the true nature of these gourds that they were deadly. Yes, we wanted more spiritual sight, more prayer, more communion with God, more distrustfulness of self, more watchfulness, more of the Spirit of God. For lack of these we were unable to distinguish between the “true vine” and the “wild,” between Christ and mere religion, between Christ and popular Christianity, between Christ and mere benevolence and charity, between Christ and the world. “There is death in the pot!”--everywhere God’s truth blended with “wild gourds.” In ten thousand different forms it is presented to us--in the Church and in the world, in doctrines, in preaching, in services, in private life and public life, at home and abroad. “So they poured out for the men to eat.” How many in this day do the same thing! They literally pour out this mixture of truth and error, light and darkness,--Christ and the world, self and Jesus, for men to drink! In the day in which we are living, this blending of opposites and “pouring them out for men to drink” is most conspicuous. And it will become more and more so. Strict and clearly drawn lines are not palatable to man’s fallen nature. The death in the pot was only discovered in the eating. And then it is said, “they could not eat thereof.” It is so still. It is in the eating that the proof lies. It is when the soul tries to enjoy Christ and the world it finds out the death--that is, if there be any conscience left, if it has ever known,, the joy of God’s presence. Then it “feels how impossible is this blending. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” It is then that the soul of the true child of God feels the force of this “cannot.” We say it again: if the man has ever tasted the joy of God’s presence, of abiding communion with Him, and if there is any conscience left in harmony with this, then it will be felt most keenly that “there is death in the pot”; then it will be felt that he cannot live nor grow in grace on this mingling of “wild gourds” with the pottage of the Lord. A spiritually sensitive soul will feel that, to enjoy the feast of the Lord, it must draw sharp lines between truth and error, light and darkness, Christ and the world. “There is death in the pot” will be felt, and there will be found no real food but in the “true vine,” Christ alone. We notice here that the Divine mode of healing is not by taking out the evil, but by putting in something to counteract it. When Elisha found the spring of Jericho bad he did not strive to draw out the evil, but put in the salt to counteract it. When Moses found the waters of Marah bitter he put in the tree to sweeten them. Throughout the Bible this is God’s way. Man’s is exactly the opposite. He begins by cutting off what he conceives to be the fruitless branches. He begins by reformation, forgetting that it is not reformation man needs, but revolution. Thus man cuts off the branches and leaves the tree unchanged. God lays the “axe at the root of the tree.” The Holy Spirit is given to the sinner. It is a new and Divine power working from within. It is the meal cast into the pot, the tree cast into the bitter waters. Thus God’s “new creation” begins. Hence the spiritual conflict--a redeemed soul in an unredeemed body--the new nature inside the old. Hence the struggle, the agony, the cry, “O wretched man that I am!” This goes on to the end, for the old nature is never made new. It is the old Adam to the last. When the Lord comes again we shall then have the redeemed body. This body will match the redeemed soul, and the conflict will end. Not till then. There will then be a redeemed soul in a redeemed body, and its result everlasting joy and blessedness. What is this “meal”? It is, spiritually, Christ. It is the Holy Spirit bringing Christ into the soul, into the house, into the duty, into all things. Christ is the one great antidote to all error. Christ is the life of all things. “He that eateth Me, he shall live by Me.” The soul will find food in everything where He is, but it will starve without. (F. Whitfield, M. A.)

The poisonous pottage healed

Notice here--

I. A supernatural interposition to counteract a natural mistake. When the Son of God was invited to the marriage feast in Cana, He found there had been a mistake on the part of the provider as to the quantity of wine required, and He rectified the mistake by making more. Here the mistake was not in the quantity; there was enough--there was too much there was death in the pot. But the mistake was in the quality of the food, and was such a mistake as could be rectified by supernatural intervention only.

II. A supernatural intervention watch did not take place until the very moment when it was needed. “And as they were eating,” etc. (2 Kings 4:40). Man’s extremity is often reached before God interposes. The wine was quite exhausted at Cana before the Saviour made more. Abraham’s knife was lifted to slay his son, when the angel of Jehovah called to him (Genesis 22:11). Israel came to the very border of the Red Sea before the waters were divided. So here the hungry men tasted the pottage before the miracle was wrought.

III. A supernatural intervention in which human effort was required to be put forth. When Jesus was about to raise Lazarus, He said, “Take ye away the stone.” So in the miracle at Cana, “Fill the water-pots with water.” Elisha could have rendered the pottage harmless by the power of God without the meal, and the Saviour could have filled empty water-pots with wine quite as easily as those filled with water. But human effort must do what it can. Lessons:

1. Mistakes made through man’s ignorance can be made right by Divine power and wisdom.

2. Sincerity of purpose and good intentions are no guarantees of the harmlessness of actions.

3. We ought to seek to know for what work we are qualified. The man who volunteered to gather herbs for the pottage might have been well fitted for other work; but his undertaking that for which ignorance of the nature of herbs disqualified him had well-nigh been the death of all the sons of the prophets. (Outlines of Sermons.)

Inexorableness of law

God’s laws will not be suspended to accommodate our disobediences, or indolences, or ignorances, or mistakes. If you sweeten your coffee with arsenic, it will kill you as surely that you did it by mistake as if you did it of wilful purpose. Nature’s commandment is, “Thou shalt not make mistakes, thou shalt not be ignorant, thou shalt not be deceived, thou shalt not transgress any natural law.”