“You have given me the shield of your salvation, and your gentleness made me great.” (ESV – Read the chapter)
Sometimes when you’re reading through the Scriptures a particular verse catches your eye. Have you had that happen to you before? The reasons it does are manifold, but one of them is that it says something in a way you weren’t expecting. That’s what happened to me with this verse.
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“And the Lord has rewarded me according to my righteousness, according to my cleanness in his sight.” (ESV – Read the chapter)
What David says right here reflects a pre-Jesus understanding of how God operates toward us that is rooted in the Mosaic Covenant. Under that system, if someone kept the Law or at least had offered the proper sacrifices, they could consider themselves clean before God. And God allowed this to be the case even though they weren’t totally right. Their sins had been covered, but they weren’t forgiven. Once Jesus came, He revealed David’s thinking to be right, but his confidence to be very much wrong.
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“So all the men of Israel withdrew from David and followed Sheba the son of Bichri. But the men of Judah followed their king steadfastly from the Jordan to Jerusalem.” (ESV – Read the chapter)
Unresolved issues become the fuel for future conflicts. There’s an old adage about conflict resolution that heralds time as a kind of universal problem-solver. Far from being true, though, this idea is nothing more than a dangerous fantasy. When we face a conflict or even a tension in a relationship, if things are not brought to a resolution, we should not consider the matter resolved. Time is no healer of wounds. Conflicts which are not resolved, but rather are simply left alone do not solve themselves. They become festering pools of bitterness that eventually threaten to poison everything around them and become the lens through which we view everything else in our lives.
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“Now therefore arise, go out and speak kindly to your servants, for I swear by the Lord, if you do not go, not a man will stay with you this night, and this will be worse for you than all the evil that has come upon you from your youth until now.” (ESV – Read the chapter)
The emotions and politics of this chapter are complex. It is filled with grace and also tension. David is rebuilding his kingship after Absalom had done much damage to it in his rebellion. We’d like to think this was a nice, neat little endeavor since that’s how so many of our stories today are written, but it was not. Whereas so many of our stories stop with the victory, this gives us a glimpse of what comes after the victory has been won.
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“And Absalom happened to meet the servants of David. Absalom was riding on his mule, and the mule went under the thick branches of a great oak, and his head caught fast in the oak, and he was suspended between heaven and earth, while the mule that was under him went on.” (ESV – Read the chapter)
What an ignominious end for a man of such potential. Absalom had the leadership gifts that could have made him a great king. He was able to inspire and motivate large groups of people and to unite them under a single banner. He became convinced that he would make a better king than his father had been and rebelled against him in order to claim the throne for himself. Had he been patient he would likely have received the crown anyway, but he wasn’t and so he didn’t.
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The Nexus 