This is the introduction to a new book, Seeking the Cure - Finding the Christ, which is the book version of multiple sermons preached from 2022-2025. Since this book was meant to bless the church I am also making it available on this blog.
Irredeemable
On the banks of a muddy, mucky river we meet a young man who is felling a lodgepole so he can build a humble dwelling place while he attends school to learn the things of God.[1] To his horror the axe head comes loose from the handle and flies straight into the water. Shock and dismay spread across his face as he stares at the vanishing ripples in the river. He looks from handle to water and realizes what has happened; not only has he lost an expensive tool, but he has lost an expensive tool that belonged to someone else. It was borrowed and would require an account.
If there is any consolation, it didn’t hit someone
(Deuteronomy 19:4–6)! But that doesn’t help his countenance much. Now he can’t
finish his job, he has incurred a debt, and his day is ruined.
You might think that he could wade to the spot and find the
iron axe head, but the river is deep, the current is formidable, you can’t see
even an inch in front of you under the water; the bed is a deep soup of silty
mud that certainly swallowed that axe immediately, and that’s assuming he could
even get to the spot, because the banks are steep.
When I was a teenager I jumped off the back of a boat into
about five feet of pristine Lake Powell water to feel my glasses pulled off my
face by the water. Six of us looked for hours for those glasses and never found
them, even though we could see at least ten feet underwater on a semi-solid
lake bed. It made for a blurry three-day trip. To give you an idea of how clear
the water was, from the boat we could watch fish approach and strike at our
hooks. The glasses did wash up scratched beyond usefulness just a day after I
departed and a friend brought them to me. Even in ideal conditions, finding a
lost valuable under the water proved impossible.
If I was going to pick one word to describe this axe head,
it would be irredeemable. The axe head was gone forever, hopeless, lost.
The story of this axe head is near and dear to my heart because
I was privileged to preach it to a group of about a hundred drug addicts,
alcoholics, career criminals, and dead-beat parents. It didn’t take much for
them to draw the line between the lost axe head and their irredeemable lives.
But God is not limited or constrained to words like
irredeemable or impossible. The prophet Elisha was there to disciple these
young men on the banks of the Jordan, and he asked whereabouts the axe had
fallen.
The young man gestured to the
abyss, and Elisha could have dove into the water and searched for it, and–with
God’s help–emerged with the iron in hand. We could have told gospel stories
about how Jesus dove into the world to rescue us and we could call others to
dive into missions. This certainly would have been a powerful miracle, but the
naysayers could have said, “Elisha got lucky in finding it.” Or “The young man
overreacted, it wasn’t irredeemable, it was just difficult.” Or “Elisha was
extremely adept at finding lost things.”
But instead, Elisha cut off a branch and threw it into the
spot, and the axe head floated on top of the water–not carried off by the
current–and was quickly recovered by its very thankful handler. If God can make
a branch to float, then he can make iron to float.
How did God do it? That is on my list of things to ask in
heaven: Was the water so dense that the axe head became buoyant? Did God change
the molecular structure of the iron so it floated like pumice? Did a sudden
surge of magma deep below the earth’s crust cause a shift in the magnetism and
repel the axe head to the surface of the water? However God did it, he did it. Who
did it? It was not Elisha, nor was it the young man; it was God. Elisha had no
interest in receiving the glory, else he could have gone in after the axe head
or taken it up himself after it floated. He was merely a means to redeeming the
irredeemable.
Now, why is this story in the
Bible? By itself it just seems silly. But, the Bible is to be taken as a whole,
not just a collection of stories. This illustration style is common in the
books of the Kings and the Chronicles in that it illuminates a bigger
principle. In this case, the story of the axe head directly illustrates two
stories, 2 Kings 5 (the healing of Naaman) and 2 Kings 6:8–28 (the redemption
of Elisha with his servant and the deliverance of the Syrian raiding party).
Could Elisha’s servant in Dothan be the same man who lost and recovered the
axe? Another question to ask in heaven.
Is God concerned about irredeemable pieces of inanimate
iron? What about the good name of his prophets-in-training? What about his
prophets? Yes, of course, but he’s so much more interested in the irredeemable souls
of people that he created with redemption in mind.
When I preached this passage at the drug and alcohol
ministry and illustrated it with Naaman I knew it had the power to change
lives, and so I was not much surprised when I gave the invitation and a dozen
people rushed forward to the makeshift altar. Their urgency did shock me:
Minutes passed and more people came, then some of the first responders went
back to their seats. The worship team continued to play and then some of the
original responders returned, more came. I was unprepared to give an extended
invitation, but God was not unprepared to redeem the irredeemable.
On that day this passage became doubly true for me; first, I
believed it was the redemption story of God, but then I saw that it can still
be used to redeem men and women today. This book was born in the hope that the
message might reach more hopeless people.
God is still in the business of redemption and people are
still in need of redemption; many of the most irredeemable and lost people on
the planet are just waiting for someone to tell them how to be redeemed.
In a much grander sense this story illustrates that God is
able and willing to save sinners, and the ultimate story it illustrates is the
story of Jesus Christ, the story to which all other redemption stories point,
and the pinnacle of God’s power to redeem.
And so, let’s pick up the story of a man who was lost and
with no hope of redemption: Naaman.
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