2 Kings 2:19-25 Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke
God’s Zoo Summer Worship Series Sunday, August 1, 2021 “Two Bears”
Shocking! Incredible! Unbelievable! Stunning! Those are attention-getting words. These are the sort of words used to get you and me to read an article or watch a video. They contribute to a practice online called clickbait. By using creative descriptions, someone with a rather boring video can convince a lot of people to watch that video anyway. In many cases, it doesn’t matter whether the audience actually likes what they see. The content creator got his click and the ad revenue that comes from it. And so the next video or news article has to be even more convincing and even more blatant clickbait. So many people have learned that you can’t always be sure that the description or the headline is accurate. It may not be shocking or incredible after all. And this isn’t only an online issue. Television news competes for viewers. Printed newspapers compete for readers and subscribers. And everyone has learned that the most exciting, shocking, and unbelievable stories capture attention. So they are the ones that are mentioned on the commercials or printed as the large headline on the front page of the newspaper. Maybe you have heard the expression, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Somehow in church and in Sunday School, it seems a little different. There are some quite shocking things in the Bible. There are bloody scenes of death, soap opera-worthy tales of sexual intrigue, and even more. In fact, these are some of the facts that enemies of the Bible argue against. They say things like, “I can’t worship a God who would let people suffer or who would have his people wage wars on others.” People are shocked by these things. And while we don’t hide the fact that these accounts are in the Bible, that’s not really how we tend to advertise our church: “Come hear the shocking things that happened in Israel.” “Join us for Sunday School on bear-mauling Sunday.” And yet here we are, gathered to learn from one of those shocking, graphic accounts, one that is likely less familiar to many of us. Two bears are the animals that place this lesson into our God’s Zoo series, but those two bears escape their cages so to speak and cause incredible damage. The reality is that these two bears came out of the woods and mauled to pieces 42 young people. Shocking. So what can we learn from something like this? To answer the question, we need to start with a closer look at what happened and why. The person we meet by name in this account is Elisha. He was God’s prophet. He replaced Elijah in that role, and the Bible tells us about that transition just before the account in front of us today. Elijah was the one who was taken up to heaven in a whirlwind after he and Elisha were separated by chariots and horsemen of fire. Elisha had asked that God would give him the same spirit with which he had blessed Elijah, and when Elijah was gone, Elisha picked up his cloak and promptly went to cross the Jordan River that parted for him. From there, as our account describes, Elisha dealt with the water supply in the city. The water was making people sick and taking away children. The men of the city knew that they had God’s prophet with them, and so they asked him about it. He had them bring a new dish with salt, and he threw the salt into the spring, and the water was healthful and sustaining from that time on. It was a miracle. And then God’s prophet started on his way to Bethel. The name of that town means “house of God,” but the town itself had become anything but. It had been made a place of idolatry by one of Israel’s wicked kings long before. On the way to that town, Elisha faced some ridicule from a group of young boys. It’s not totally clear how old these young boys are; it is possible that “young men” might be a fair translation too. It also becomes clear that there are quite a few involved in this. They yell at God’s prophet. They say, “Go up, baldy! Go up, baldy!” Elisha calls down a curse in the Lord’s name, and out from the woods come two female bears who maul forty-two of the boys to pieces. And Elisha goes on his way. A quick glance at the account might make it seem incredibly shocking. Did God and his prophet really respond to some little boys making fun of a bald head by having them mauled by bears? Does this punishment really fit the crime? Actually, the punishment tells us exactly how seriously God and his prophet took what the boys were saying. Keep in mind that we don’t know the exact age, but even the words used for little boys here could have referred to men as old as about 20. It appears that they were very intentional not about making fun of a bald man but