Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Eyes to See the Spiritual | Historical Books | 2 Kings 13:14-24

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

What is materialism? What are thin spaces? Do you have eyes to see spiritual realities? In today's episode, Patrick shares how 2 Kings 13:14-24 reminds us that at every moment, God is with us. If you're listening on Spotify, tell us about yourself and where you're listening from! Read the Bible with us in 2025! This year, we’re exploring the Historical Books—Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, and 1 & 2 Kings. Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: 2 Kings 13:14-24

Welcome to 10 minute Bible talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. Have you ever noticed that there's thin places in the world? Let me explain what I mean. We live downstream from the Enlightenment, and that means that we take for granted the idea that the world around us is entirely material. Even though you've never seen an atom, you know that everything we see is constructed by atomic

particles. We're made up of stuff. The earth is made up of stuff. The sun, the stars, the galaxy are all atomic material. Now, materialism is the belief that stuff is all that there is out there. It's the belief that reality is totally measurable, quantifiable, observable. And what is not measurable, quantifiable, or observable is not real. It may be a figment of our imagination, maybe a misunderstanding of reality. But whatever it is, if it is, if it is, if it is, It's not those things. If it's not atomic stuff, it's not real. So there is no immaterial God. There are no immaterial spiritual beings, like angels or demons. There's just stuff. Despite the fact that Christians deny materialism, we nonetheless live in a world shaped by it.

We don't feel like the world around us is enchanted. We live like practical materialists, who briefly touched the immaterial and then returned to the normal world of stuff and atoms. That means that for us reality is thick. The world is a thick place made of material things. But if you travel just 500 years into the past, you'd find yourself in a very different world, a world where people believed that reality is porous, that the material and immaterial intersect one another. For them, 500 years ago, there was no part of life or no part of time, or no part of space that wasn't in some ways spiritual. Of course, everything they believed back then wasn't true. Pagan ideas of water spirits, ghosts, and satyrs, well, those aren't necessarily real.

But the fact that they believed in such things and believed that such entities played a role in their daily lives sets them in a different conceptual universe than our own. Christians, of course, in the past, have always believed in spiritual realism, that angels and demons and immaterial forces are ever around us, acting upon us, influencing us, protecting us, and sometimes harming us. For ancient Christians, the world was not a thick place of material stuff and atomic particles. The world was a thin place, a porous place, a place where the veil between the visible and the invisible was precisely that, a veil, not an uncrossable chasm.

So again, have you ever noticed that there are thin places in your life? Places where the material world seemed porous and the spiritual world seemed more real, more present, more available to you. Sometimes we experience thin places in worship or in our quiet time or on retreats or on vacation when we see the incomprehensible beauty of the mountains or the impossible breadth of the ocean. You know those moments where the spiritual becomes. real to you in a way that it's not normally. The Bible is full with stories that show how thin the

world really is, visions of the future, dreams where God speaks, miracles, the sun standing still, waters parting, the dead rising to life, angels with messages from God and demons oppressing image bearers. One reason that the Bible can feel so foreign to us today is precisely because we live as though the world itself is thick. It's made up of stuff. But the world is not thick. The world is thin. Do you believe that? Do you believe that the immaterial God is more real and present than the very atoms that compose your body? In 2nd Kings 13, we encounter a short story that reminds us of the thinness of the world. It's a story that's easy to breeze past or even ignore or maybe even laugh at, but it's a true story. The story begins at the end of the prophet Elisha's life. We read this in verse 14.

Now Elisha had been suffering from the illness from which he died. Jehoahash, king of Israel, went down to see him and wept over him. Now, unlike his teacher, Elisha is not going to be taken up into heaven on chariots of fire. He simply dies of an illness, like so many before him and so many after him. But then we read this story six verses later. Elisha died and was buried. Now, Moabite raiders used to enter the country every spring. Once, while some Israelites were burying a man, suddenly they saw a band of raiders. So they threw the man's body into Elish's tomb. When the body touched Elisha's bones, the man came to life and stood up on his feet. So what do you make of that? I mean, do you believe that the world is thin? That by God's power,

a holy man's bones can raise the dead to life? Of course, the miracle happened, and it was recorded to reaffirm the fact that Elisha truly was a prophet sent by God. It affirmed that Elisha's message was Yahweh's message, and that Yahweh is real, and he's the only true God, and he alone must be worshipped. But it also affirmed that the world is a thin place. It makes me think of many stories like this throughout Christian history. For example, the story of a woman named Corey Ten Boom. You might recognize her name, but if you don't, her faith in Jesus led her and her family to hide Jews from the Nazis during World War II. She knew the risk she was taking, and eventually she faced the consequences. Corey and her family were arrested and then shipped off to concentration camps.

She and her sister Betsy knew that they had no hope of survival in those camps apart from divine protection. And so they prayed fervently. And Corey later wrote that Angels said, came to protect her. She explained the first miracle upon her entry into Ravensbrook concentration camp. This is what she wrote. We hurried back to the row of women waiting to be undressed. A little later, we had our showers and put on our shirts and shabby dresses. I hid the roll of underwear and my Bible under my dress, and it bulged out obviously through my dress, but I prayed, Lord, cause now thine angels to surround me, and let them make me transparent today.

for the guards must not see me. I felt perfectly at ease. Calmly I passed the guards. Everyone was checked from the front, the sides, the back. Not a bulge escaped the eyes of the guards. The woman, just in front of me, had hidden a woolen vest under her dress. It was taken from her. They let me pass, for they did not see me.

Betsy, right behind me, was searched. Later, her sister Betsy began to distribute drops of vitamins from a small vial to keep dying, prisoners alive, they didn't have enough for everyone, but the vial didn't run dry. It lasted an impossible amount of time. Corey knew that the world was a thin place. And in her time of utmost desperation, she turned to the God who is more real than the atomic grains of the universe, and he provided. In his hands, the material world is little more than clay. Of course, God does not promise to do the miraculous in our life.

He cannot be coerced, but it would be foolish to deny or to ignore the truth that in every moment he is there, there to strengthen, there to protect, there to speak, there to act. So why shouldn't we call on him? After all, even death itself is no barrier to the living God.