In Second Kings, chapter five, verse ten, Elisha instructed Naaman to wash himself in the muddy waters of the Jordan River as a simple demonstration of humility and obedience. Furthermore, by doing so, Naaman would find it impossible to ascribe the cure to humans or natural means. The Israelites and the Assyrians knew that the Jordan could not heal leprosy. Naaman needed to know that his healing came miraculously by God’s grace and power through the word of His prophet.
Naaman would be sure that the waters of the Jordan were not a cure for leprosy. Otherwise, there would have been no lepers in Israel. The journey from Samaria to the river would be a great test of his faith and would set the matter before him in a very different aspect from that he had before viewed it. He had come as a mighty person to present his request to a king. He is brought to the prophet and sent on a further journey to what he would naturally look at as an insignificant stream. It was not to the king, prophet, nor the river that his healing could be. We can understand how difficult this new lesson was for Naaman to learn.
We need not think of Elisha as avoiding a leprous person, either from fear of infection or legal scruples. Instead, he wished to prevent any thought of himself as the worker of the cure from coming into Naaman’s mind. The Syrian captain’s idea was, as we can see from the sequel, that Jehovah was especially the God of the land of Israel. If he sent to one of the streams of that land, he would be most likely to connect, as he did, his recovery with the might of the God of Israel. The prophet would only be the mouthpiece of Jehovah, and this reason sent his direction by a messenger.