I. The first remark which this incident suggests is as to the heavy pressure of outward and visible things upon us who are still in the body. The young man could see the Syrian host compassing the city to take his master, but nothing besides. Is not this a true parable for us? We talk of living by faith, not by sight, but what truth has it for us? Take the life of any one day; would it be very different if this world were all, if there were no judgment and no eternity? (1) There is the business of life. (2) There are the pleasures of life. (3) There are the trials of life. All these are real things. Engrossed in them, a man will live hemmed in and blocked up by the present and blind to all the realities which are not of earth, and sense, and time.
II. And yet the history before us is designed to show how very near all the while lies another world and another life, altogether of spirit and heaven, and God. It needed just the opening of the eyes, and nothing more, to show this young man a whole concourse of existences and agencies unseen and unsuspected till that moment. If the word of God is true, we are inmates of two worlds: a world seen and a world unseen; a world of time and a world of eternity. We may be walking blindfold in the midst of truths and realities.
III. Such a truth is the revelation of God's providence. If we could see the spiritual world as we see the natural, we should find that every life is held in God's hand, every faculty kept for us by God's keeping, every step taken, every word spoken, and every work done in virtue of a power not our own.
IV. A man passes out of the life of sight into the life of faith by that opening of the eyes of which the text tells. Prayer is the means of passing from a life of sight to a life of faith.
C. J. Vaughan, Contemporary Pulpit,vol. iv., p. no (see also Good Words,1864, p. 916).
References: 2 Kings 6:16. R. Heber, Sermons Preached in England,pp. 18, 42. 2 Kings 6:16; 2 Kings 6:17. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. ix., p. 84; Preacher's Monthly,vol. iv., p. 149.