Faith, the slides remind us, is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen, and without it no one can please God. The lesson then takes up the warning of Hebrews 3: ‘Today if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts.’ Israel saw God’s works for forty years, yet their bodies fell in the wilderness because they would not believe. James adds that doubt is a form of unbelief; the doubter is double-minded and unstable.
The second half walks through the siege of Samaria, where famine grew so severe that the curses of Leviticus and Deuteronomy came true, as Jeremiah later saw in Jerusalem. Elisha promised plenty by the next day, and the officer who scoffed was told he would see it with his own eyes but not eat of it. God’s word came true all the same, and even four leprous men at the gate went out to find it so.