As
I said, very heavy.
Joab,
a relative and military commander of David’s, knew David longed to see his son
after years of his son being in exile.
So,
in 2 Samuel 14, Joab sent a woman to the King dressed as a widow. She presented
the case of her supposed son’s killing of his brother and how he lived in exile
because of it. She asks the King to pardon the son, which he is willing to do
as well as provide protection from anyone from taking her life because of the judgment.
Then
she said in 2 Samuel 14:14, “When the king says this, does he not convict
himself, for the king has not brought back his banished son? Like water spilled
on the ground, which cannot be recovered, so we must die. But that is not what
God desires; rather, he devises ways so that a banished person does not remain
banished from him.”
There’s
more to say about these verses that have to do with the politics in the land at
the time and bringing back Absalom to be
in line to be King. In the end Absalom would prove untrustworthy. Another sad
story in the following chapters.
I
realize that 2 Samuel 14:14 is not the point of the story, but for me, these
words always go straight to my heart and point to mercy and grace amid heartache.
In the Message they read, “He works out ways to get the exile back.”
They
seem to foreshadow a time one thousand years later when God once and for all
made a way for the banished person to come back from exile when Jesus came to
this earth and died for our sin. Because friends, we are all banished because
of sin, if not for Jesus. There would be no way for us, but for Jesus. And we
can’t forget that his linage comes through David, and his son Solomon who was
born of Bathsheba. So, God brought something extraordinary, his plan for our
salvation, out of that sad beginning. As if to drive this point home, in his genealogy
of Jesus, the gospel writer Matthew wrote, “David was the father of Solomon,
whose mother had been Uriah’s’ wife.”
At
our church we sometimes sing a song by Don Moen which he originally wrote after
the death of his nephew, “God will make a way where there seems to be no way”
reads the first line.
Sometimes
we need to hear that God will make a way—when the prognosis is grim, when the
door has been shut, when the grief overwhelms, when a decision seems
irreversible, when hope seems to have vanished, or the chasm seems unbridgeable.
We need to be reminded of what Jesus did for us and what he is still doing.
So,
if your heart is heavy over a situation that seems without hope, hold on to all
that God has done, and hope on.