2 Kings 6:24-28: a reflection

24After this, Benhadad king of Syria gathered all his army, and went up and besieged Samaria. 25There was a great famine in Samaria. Behold, they besieged it until a donkey’s head was sold for eighty pieces of silver, and the fourth part of a kab of dove’s dung for five pieces of silver. 26As the king of Israel was passing by on the wall, a woman cried to him, saying, “Help, my lord, O king!” 27He said, “If the LORD doesn’t help you, where could I get help for you? From the threshing floor, or from the wine press?” 28Then the king asked her, “What is your problem?” She answered, “This woman said to me, ‘Give your son, that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow.’

This is one of the darkest passages in Scripture. During a prolonged siege of Samaria, the famine grows so severe that the suffering becomes unspeakable, driving people to horrors that the passage records without flinching, a depth of desperation almost too terrible to read. And amid it, a desperate woman cries to the king for help, and the king answers in despair: If the LORD does not help you, where can I get help for you? Even the king recognizes that human help has utterly failed; only God can save now.

Set aside the terrible details, which show how deep a broken world's suffering can go, and notice the king's words: If the LORD does not help you, where could I get help? In the extremity of the siege, all human resources had failed; the king, the highest human authority, could do nothing. His despairing words unwittingly point to a truth: that in the depths of desperation, only God can truly help, and human help, even the highest, reaches its limit.

That is a sobering but important reminder. This passage shows the terrible depths of suffering a broken world can reach, suffering that troubles us rightly, and that the ultimate answer to such horror is not any human power but God, and the deliverance he will finally bring. When we, or others, reach the depths of desperation where human help fails, the king's despairing words become a truer word than he knew: if the LORD does not help, where else is there? Our ultimate hope, in the face of the worst this world can bring, is not in human power, which reaches its limit, but in God. Cry out to him in the extremity, and hold onto the hope that he will finally answer the deepest suffering of a broken world.

Lord, this dark passage shows the terrible depths of suffering a broken world can reach, and the king's despairing words, if the LORD does not help you, where could I get help? unwittingly point to the truth that in the extremity, only you can save. When I, or others, reach the depths of desperation where human help fails, remind me that my ultimate hope is not in human power, which reaches its limit, but in you. I do not understand the worst of this world's suffering; help me not to look away from it, but to bring it, and the sufferers, to you, the only one who can finally answer it. In the face of the worst, be my help, and hasten the day when you wipe away every tear and heal a broken world.