There in the Bible, God Himself gives us the good news of salvation freely offered to sinners. He tells us of the way to escape from perishing in the fires and misery of Hell. He tells us the true way, the only way, the free way, and it is Himself. All who believe on the Lord Jesus Christ alone for salvation will be saved. They will not perish but have everlasting life. Though they die, they shall be with Christ in paradise and will rise again to glory at the last day. Today is a day of good news because that salvation is still offered to all the world.

“Then they said to one another, “We are not doing right. This day is a day of good news, and we remain silent. If we wait until morning light, some punishment will come upon us. Now therefore, come, let us go and tell the king’s household.” So they went and called to the gatekeepers of the city, and told them, saying, “We went to the Syrian camp, and surprisingly no one was there, not a human sound—only horses and donkeys tied, and the tents intact.” And the gatekeepers called out, and they told it to the king’s household inside.”
II Kings 7:9-11 NKJV
What if today you discovered a perfect cure to the Covid-19 virus? You wouldn’t keep the news to yourself but after telling your friends and family you would quickly tell it to all who would listen. For all who heard and acted on the cure it would be a day of great news! In our text today, the cure for Samaria’s deadly plight of starvation was not an imagination but a reality.
At first, the outcast lepers kept the news of Syria’s flight secret. They hid some treasures for themselves. However, they soon realized they were not doing what was good and must share the good news of the day with the King and all of Samaria. They went back to the city with the news. Samaria had been delivered. Life was coming to those who were near death from starvation. It was a day of great news to be told to all who would hear.
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It will only be in the next life that we discover how much of an impact we really did have. But even that should not be our main concern. Our real aim must be to love God fully and seek to do his will. And yes, to do his will fully and fervently will mean that we will be misfits.

Maladjusted Christians? Yes, in the eyes of the world this will always be the case. And before you think I am going off the deep end again, let me remind you of 1 Samuel 22:2: “All those who were in distress or in debt or discontented gathered around him, and he became their commander. About four hundred men were with him.” As I remarked in an earlier piece:
It is interesting that David, who at the time was not on the throne, but was being hounded and chased around the country by Saul, found himself to be a magnet for those who were on the fringes of society, those who did not fit in, those who were discontented and in distress. The really amazing thing about this motley crew of rejects, misfits and outsiders is that they went on to do many mighty things for God and David. We read about these men later in the Old Testament narratives. In 2 Samuel 23, 24 and 1 Chronicles 11, 12 we learn about “David’s mighty men”. billmuehlenberg.com/2009/11/29/david%e2%80%99s-mighty-men-godly-discontentment/
So we have biblical precedent here. Indeed, a study of the Bible and church history will also reveal this truth. God’s people will always be outsiders. We will always be seen as misfits and oddities and even freaks. That is how the true son or daughter of God has always been considered, by both the world and by worldly Christians.
Here I want to discuss this further, utilising an important Christian thinker I have just featured in my last two articles: Os Guinness. His book Prophetic Untimeliness (Baker, 2003) is discussed here: billmuehlenberg.com/2022/06/16/prophetic-passion-and-resistance-thinking/
Today I want to further explore Chapter 5 of the book: “The Price of Faithfulness.” It begins this way: “A French resistance leader was once asked how he explained the fact that his men had been so heroic. He thought for a while, and then answered: ‘We weren’t heroic. We were simply maladjusted enough to know that something was seriously wrong’.”
He examines unheeded messengers such as John the Baptist, Churchill and Solzhenitsyn. Despite their differences they shared some common virtues:
Discernment of the times; courage to repudiate powerful interests and fashion; perseverance in the face of daunting odds; seasoned wisdom born of a sense of history and their nation’s place in it; and—supremely with the Hebrew prophets—a note of authority in their message born of its transcendent source. No feature of the unheeded messengers, however, is more common than the link between the brilliance of their perspective and the burden of their pain. . . . Both are the result of being outsiders, and for any Christian who would speak out today in a time of the church’s deepening cultural captivity, prophetic untimeliness carries a clear cost.
He lists three such costs. The first is “a sense of maladjustment.” Says Guinness: “When society is increasingly godless and the church increasingly corrupt, faithfulness carries a price. The man or woman who lives by faith does not fit in. . . . 
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Apart from the fact that (1) this view begs the question (cf. Micah 4), it must also be asked (2) why redactors felt encouraged to add these passages to Isaiah if the original form of the prophecy was so uniformly negative. Why not to Amos or Micah or Jeremiah? For that theory to be accepted, the original form of the book will have had to have contained the Judgment/Hope motif in more than a germinal way. 

Lots of modern interpreters read Isaiah 29:17-24 as if it was written after the exile by a redactor, hundreds of years after Isaiah, and inserted into a (mostly) pre-exilic prophecy. (Similar things are argued of Isaiah 40-66, and various other sections of chapters 1-39.) Here is John Oswalt’s careful response, which I have formatted for clarity:

The chief reasons for this are theological, for it is argued that the glowing predictions of salvation to come are not to be found in preexilic prophecy. Apart from the fact that (1) this view begs the question (cf. Micah 4), it must also be asked (2) why redactors felt encouraged to add these passages to Isaiah if the original form of the prophecy was so uniformly negative. Why not to Amos or Micah or Jeremiah?

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