YOU are Precious

"therefore let my life now be precious in thy sight" (2 Kings 1:14)

Ahaziah, son of Ahab, gets sick. Elijah prophesies that he will die. Ahaziah sends a company of fifty to fetch Elijah down from the mountain. Fire comes down and consumes the fifty and their captain. Another company of fifty is sent, and they too are consumed.

Now, it's important to take a quick look at WHO is doing what in this interchange. The captains call Elijah a "man of God," yet commands him to "come down." Elijah says "If I be a man of God, let fire come down from heaven, and consume thee and thy fifty," and it was so (2 Kings 1:9-10). What is happening is that the captain is standing in for the person of Ahaziah, and Elijah is standing in for God. This is an interchange between God and the wicked king of Israel.

After these two companies are killed, something amazing happens. The third captain sent comes up the mountain and "and fell on his knees before Elijah, and besought him,and said unto him, O man of God, I pray thee, let my life, and the life of these fifty thy servants, be precious in thy sight" (2 Kings 1:13). Bold and humbling, this man kneels and admits that they are servants in the eyes of God, but-but!-he recognizes that in God's eyes these humble servants are precious.

Think about this, how counter-intutivite it is. God had killed a hundred men before this man as if they were nothing, as if to chastise them for having the audacity to make commands of God's representative, and therefore as if they did it to God Himself. It would make sense then for the third captain to make the argument, 'please don't kill us, you are mighty and we are weak, spare us, apply mercy.' Instead, his argument is 'if you recognize that we are desirable and of worth, then don't kill us.' What is that? Where is this coming from?

Now, I'm going to take some liberty here, but I venture to guess that this third captain knew the Lord. He knew that in the Lord's sight, men were precious, they were worthy of mercy and salvation from political necessities and temporal destruction. This is not something that he would have learned from the other two captains, apparently he was working based off of knowledge learned somewhere, somewhen, else. He gambled that men were precious in the sight of the Lord, and he won that gamble.

The third captain was right. He was speaking to a prophet of the great Jehovah, Jesus, the God who thought that man was so precious that He was going to condescend, suffer, bleed, die and live again just for them. Yes, we are precious, and Jehovah knows that more than anyone.

Maybe when we come to God, pleading for salvation from whatever haunts us, we can fall on our knees and use this same argument: Lord, we are thy servants, but save me, am I not precious in thy sight? This plea is placing a verbal claim on the atonement of Christ, who bought us with a price, who gave us worth, because we already had worth and a precious price worthy of a God's death.

And apparently an unnamed captain in ancient Israel knew this about God, knew how God saw us-and so maybe had an idea of what God will do for us. We have no excuse then to not know how precious we are.