This one is hard. I am going to be honest, I do not think there is an easy bow to tie on this one.
Here is what was happening.
The king of Aram was sick. He sent his servant Hazael to ask Elisha if he would recover. Hazael shows up loaded with gifts, asks the question, and Elisha tells him something strange.
Go and tell him he will recover. But the Lord has shown me that he is actually going to die.
Tell him a lie. But here is the truth.
That alone stopped me.
Why would God tell Elisha to have this man go back and lie to the king?
I do not have a clean answer for that. But I think it is worth sitting with instead of skipping past.
Then Elisha just stares at him. Long enough that it gets uncomfortable. And then Elisha starts weeping.
Hazael asks why. And Elisha tells him. Because I know the horrible things you are going to do to my people. The burning, the killing, the children, all of it.
And Hazael's response is what gets me.
How could a nobody like me ever accomplish such great things?
Great things.
He calls it great things.
That is so demented to me. The prophet is weeping over the evil this man is going to do, and the man hears the list and basically says, wow, I get to do all that?
It was almost like Elisha's words empowered him.
Like before that moment, he saw himself as a servant. A nobody. But the second a prophet told him he was going to be king, something shifted. He went home, smothered the king in his bed the next day, and took the throne.
I keep going back and forth on this one.
Why did God show Elisha? Why tell Hazael at all? Did the telling somehow set it in motion? Or was Hazael already that man on the inside, and the prophecy just pulled it to the surface?
I do not know.
But here is what I am taking from it, even if it is not tidy.
Sometimes God lets us see things we do not understand. Things that grieve Him. Things that grieve us when He shows them to us. Elisha wept. He did not celebrate the prophecy. He did not feel powerful for knowing it. He cried.
And sometimes the people God uses to fulfill what He has spoken are not good people. He is sovereign even over the ones who do terrible things. That does not mean He endorsed what they did. It means He saw it coming and is still on the throne in the middle of it.
I do not have this one figured out.
I think some passages are meant to make us uncomfortable. To stop us from acting like we have God all the way figured out. To remind us that His ways are not our ways, and that there are parts of His sovereignty we will not fully understand on this side of heaven.
Sometimes the right response to a hard passage is not a clean lesson.
It is just to sit with it. And let it bother you a little.