More Than Those With Them

A besieging army does its work before a sword is drawn — it surrounds a city in the dark and lets the morning do the rest, so that the defenders learn, in the ordinary light of morning, that every road home is already closed. Elisha's servant wakes into exactly that: he goes out at dawn and finds the hills around Dothan ringed with horses and chariots, the whole Syrian army come for one unarmed prophet. The cry that breaks from him is the oldest prayer of the cornered: "Alas, my master! What shall we do?" (2 Kings 6:15).

His master is not afraid. "Do not be afraid, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them" (2 Kings 6:16) — which, to a man staring at a ring of cavalry, must have sounded like comfort with its eyes shut. So the prophet prays — and notice what he does not ask: not that the army be destroyed or driven off, but that his servant be allowed to see — "O LORD, please open his eyes that he may see" (2 Kings 6:17). The young man looks again at the same hills and finds them full of horses and chariots of fire. The enemy's numbers had not fallen by one. What changed was the servant's sight.

This is not quite what we usually mean by faith. Faith here does something quieter than pretending the army has gone; the army has not gone. It receives eyes for the larger, truer reality that stood on the ridge all along — the fire we had not counted.¹ Our fear is rarely a lie about the enemy. It is a true thing said with half the picture left out.

Centuries later another servant of God stood surrounded — not on a hill but in a garden, his friends asleep, the torches moving up through the trees. He too knew the chariots were one word away: "Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?" (Matthew 26:53). At Dothan the host was shown and the enemy went home unharmed. In Gethsemane the host was refused and the enemy was let through — not because heaven had run out of fire, but because this King had chosen to take the sword rather than summon the flame.

The Dothan story keeps one more mercy for its end. The blinded raiders are led into the enemy capital, and when the king of Israel moves to cut them down, the prophet stays his hand. He sets bread and water before them, sends them home, and the border has peace — a feast for men who had come for blood, an early rhyme of the table the true King would spread for his enemies: "while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son" (Romans 5:10).

We do not always get the vision; most mornings the ridge looks bare and the odds are exactly as bad as they seem. But the word this story presses into our hands is not that the trouble will be gone by breakfast; it is that we have never once stood on that ridge alone — the same LORD of hosts is with us — and that the King who would not open his own eyes to be rescued kept them fixed instead on us. One morning our eyes will open fully, and we will see what was always true: how thin the darkness was, and how near he stood.