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Context No. 1492 of 4322 · 2 Kings

Context · Reflection

2 Kings 8:12-19: in context

12Hazael said, “Why do you weep, my lord?” He answered, “Because I know the evil that you will do to the children of Israel. You will set their strongholds on fire, and you will kill their young men with the sword, and will dash their little ones in pieces, and rip up their pregnant women.” 13Hazael said, “But what is your servant, who is but a dog, that he could do this great thing?” Elisha answered, “The LORD has shown me that you will be king over Syria.” 14Then he departed from Elisha, and came to his master, who said to him, “What did Elisha say to you?” He answered, “He told me that you would surely recover.” 15On the next day, he took a thick cloth, dipped it in water, and spread it on the king’s face, so that he died. Then Hazael reigned in his place. 16In the fifth year of Joram the son of Ahab king of Israel, Jehoshaphat being king of Judah then, Jehoram the son of Jehoshaphat king of Judah began to reign. 17He was thirty-two years old when he began to reign. He reigned eight years in Jerusalem. 18He walked in the way of the kings of Israel, as did Ahab’s house, for he married Ahab’s daughter. He did that which was evil in the LORD’s sight. 19However, the LORD would not destroy Judah, for David his servant’s sake, as he promised him to give to him a lamp for his children always.

The prophet Elisha meets Hazael, a servant of the king of Syria, and weeps. When Hazael asks why, Elisha tells him: because I know the evil you will do to Israel, burning their strongholds, killing their young men, and committing atrocities against their children and their women. Hazael recoils: what is your servant, who is but a dog, that he should do this great thing? But Elisha tells him he will be king of Syria. And the very next day Hazael smothers his master with a wet cloth, seizes the throne, and in time does precisely the evils Elisha foretold.

The chilling turn is in Hazael's own words. Hearing the atrocities he would commit, he recoils in apparent horror: what is your servant, a mere dog, that he should do this great evil? He seems genuinely to believe himself incapable of such things, unable even to imagine himself doing them. And yet the very next day he murders his own master, and in time he does everything Elisha foretold. The man who could not imagine himself capable of such evil became the man who committed it. There is a sobering warning in this about our own capacity for evil, which we habitually underestimate. Like Hazael, we recoil at the thought of certain sins, sure we could never do them, that such things are for other, worse people, not for us. But the human heart does not know its own capacity, and a heart that hardens step by step can arrive, in time, at evils it once recoiled from. Hazael did not leap from horror to atrocity in a day; it began with one murder, one step across a line, and the rest followed as his heart hardened and his power grew. The lesson is not to trust our own sense that we would never do a thing. Watch instead the small steps, the first line crossed, the gradual hardening, for it is by these that people who were sure they were incapable of great evil become capable of it. The heart that says I could never is not to be trusted; guard the small steps, before they lead where we swore we would never go.

Do I trust my own certainty that I could never commit certain evils, when Hazael recoiled from atrocities he would soon commit, and should I not rather distrust my heart's capacity, guarding the small steps and the first lines crossed by which people become what they swore they never could?

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