JUNE 23 "TWO ARE BETTER THAN ONE"

The Word of God declares, “two are better than one”. There are many reasons why two are better than one and here in our story, we have a perfect illustration of how that works. What happens is this woman’s son from Shunem dies. We are not sure what happened, let’s say it’s a tumor or brain aneurysm, he screams out his head is hurting; next thing you know the child is dead. We have a wife and husband in this story. The husband accepts, perhaps, to simply “take the hit”, as I’m sure this hurt. The wife resolves something completely different. While the husband accepts the death, the wife will not. She has resolved to contend for this miracle (the boy) that God gave her. When she is saddling up to head out, the husband thinks she is going to see the man of God for some religious ceremony. Little does she know she is going to fight for the life of her son. This is why two are better than one in a home, in raising children and even when there are no children. It brings a great help and advantage to life. In this particular situation, had it been left to the husband, this boy’s life would have been over. In this tragedy, it is the wife’s faith that rises up. In my life experiences, with my wife, there have been times when her faith was low for a particular trial, event or tragedy and my faith was high and it brought us through; then there were other seasons where it was my wife’s faith that rose up when mine was flat. It is unfortunate in homes where you have a single parent trying to carry the load, trying to always have all the faith, for all of life’s events, trials and tragedies. And the reality is they “will not” have faith for all of life’s events, trials and tragedies, which means there will be times, when something could have lived (keeping in the analogy of the boy) but died. Had the dad been a single parent in this story, the boy would not have lived. From the very beginning, God ordained, this concept of two, starting with Adam and Eve. The idea is when one is weak, the other is strong and so they keep each other from falling. This is the great tragedy of the Garden. Yes it is horrible that Eve was seduced, but even worse is that God’s plan failed. Two are better than one, failed here. It is normal that on any given day, one can be low, can be weak, but the plan is that the other comes along and helps, encourages, brings faith into the situation, brings sound judgment to the table, brings courage into the situation. Unfortunately, on this day, Adam comes into the situation, where Eve is weak, a perfect opportunity for this concept to work, Adam could have taken the apple out of her hand, thrown it to the ground and interceded for Eve and who knows where we would be today, but in his moment to shine, he doesn’t. In this story, the way God meant it to be prevails and it is a “happy ending” as we all like to read.

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