January 24, 2022

Passage Read: 2 Samuel 14-17
Meditation Verse: 17:14

Thought

This was all to fulfill the judgment of God on David for his sin with Bathsheba. God intended to punish David, but not to destroy him. Trouble had risen within his own family beginning with Amnon and Tamar. It had snowballed into the open rebellion of his son Absalom, who clearly had lost respect for his father and become so embittered against him as to seek his life! But God would not allow Absalom to succeed against David. Absalom was not good to God, as he was not seeking to serve the Lord, but his own sense of righteousness and vengeance. If David had punished Amnon according to the Scriptures, this whole mess would have been avoided, but David hesitated to do anything that seemed self-serving. Even in fleeing, he was hoping to avoid a fight, probably seeing this whole thing as a personal matter, not a national one. Yet Absalom, no matter what he thought of his father, was rebelling against the king, who was his father. He could not be justified at all in the eyes of the Lord.

Application

The Lord is sovereign even when it seems He's not around. He had all this under control, even to the point of having Absalom sleep with his father's concubines in front of all the people. That detail should have been a comfort to David, if he remembered the Lord's pronouncement against him. God would punish but not take the kingdom away from him. God has plans that we don't always see, and we can trust Him to work His will, even when all seems lost. I can trust that He has a purpose in our being here, even if it seems unclear to me yet.