Days 45 & 46: Collecting Fortune Cookies

By Bo Gordy-Stith  [CC-BY-SA-2.0 

Proverbs 1:1-6

New Living Translation (NLT)

The Purpose of Proverbs

1 These are the proverbs of Solomon, David’s son, king of Israel.

² Their purpose is to teach people wisdom and discipline,
    to help them understand the insights of the wise.
³ Their purpose is to teach people to live disciplined and successful lives,
    to help them do what is right, just, and fair.
⁴ These proverbs will give insight to the simple,
    knowledge and discernment to the young.

⁵ Let the wise listen to these proverbs and become even wiser.
    Let those with understanding receive guidance
⁶ by exploring the meaning in these proverbs and parables,
    the words of the wise and their riddles.

***

The Book of Proverbs might be full of quotable quotes, but it's so much more than little quips that can be put inside fortune cookies. I believe that it is often dismissed as having little significance because so many of the proverbs are one-liners that have been repeated so often that we mistake them for common sense. The truth is, every word of these little sayings should be carefully considered, because they were written by the wisest man in all of history! So, what was it that made Solomon so wise? It's an interesting story.

Solomon was pretty young when his father, David, relinquished the throne. Most scholars tend to think he was around 20, probably because of his alliance with the Pharaoh which resulted in a marriage arrangement with the Egyptian princess. From everything I've ever heard and read, though, arranged marriages took place at very young ages in the upper crust of society back then, so that really isn't an indicator for me. Sources of Jewish history, on the other hand, put him as young as 12. I'm leaning towards the boy-king theory, personally, because although David had long ago promised Bathsheba that Solomon would be king after him, he didn't seem to consider abdicating the throne to anyone at a time when he was old and in poor health. until he learned that his oldest son was about to overthrow him. At that point, David rushed into crowning Solomon, and in a speech to his kingdom, he acknowledged that the new king was "young and inexperienced". (1 Chronicles 22)

As the story goes, Adonijah then went, not to Solomon, but to the new queen-mother, Bathsheba, and asked her to pass along his request that Abishag, their faither's virgin servant, be given to him as a wife.  He may very well have known that Bathsheba was going to be protecting her son, so soon after Adonijah's plot to steal the throne from his father. Otherwise, why wouldn't he have gone straight to Solomon himself? He must have also thought that his kid brother would be so eager to please his mom that he'd foolishly grant the request. I covered this in another chapter a while back, and at the time it was a little confusing to me why Adonijah would have thought Solomon would be suckered into such an agreement. After all, only a king is allowed to take something so close to his predecessor as his own. Perhaps Adonijah thought that David was too young to know that, and that he'd be able to displace his brother through this little slight of hand.

And then Solomon's own view of himself as this story unfolds, also indicates to me that he may very well have been on the verge of teen-hood. He still thinks of himself very much as a child, and wonders how he can ever fill his daddy's shoes. And I'm sure he was overwhelmed at the enormity of having to rule over a kingdom of people that God had chosen as His own. This must have weighed very heavily on his mind during the early days of his reign. It's no wonder, then, that he was dreaming as he slept one night in Gibeon, where he had gone to offer sacrifices. 


God came to him in his dream, and asked Solomon, "What do you want, more than anything else? Whatever it is, just ask, and I'll give it to you!" (1 Kings 3:5)

Solomon's response went something like this:

Wow, God! I don't know what to say! You've shown unfailing love to my father all these years, and now you've replaced him with me on the throne. But I'm just a kid who doesn't know the ins and outs of all this stuff! I'm like a child who doesn't know my way around! (1 Kings 3:7) And here I am in the midst of your chosen people, and they're all looking at me to lead them, now. (v.8) Who am I to judge them? So God, I guess what I want most of all is an understanding heart so that I can discern right from wrong as I judge their cases. (v.9)

You have to wonder why God would offer to give him anything he wanted. But God know Solomon's heart, even if the boy didn't yet know his own. Even if He had known how the young king would respond, it still pleased God that what he had requested was wisdom. He told Solomon that because he had not asked for anything selfishly, that God was going to not only give him wisdom in spades, but that there had never been, nor would there ever be, anyone wiser. (v.12). He didn't stop there, though. He also gave Solomon what he had not asked for; unsurpassed fame and wealth.

So when you read those snazzy little quotable quotes that are throughout the book of Proverbs, don't breeze through them like they're just cute little sayings that mean nothing.  These treasures that you think are common sense only became common sense because Solomon wrote them down and generations have repeated them. They are nuggets of divine wisdom, an indirect gift to you from God, who dispensed them through the wisest man who ever lived.

Day 41: What God Wants

Bertram Mackennal [Public domain]

Psalm 51:16-17

New Living Translation (NLT)

¹⁶ You do not desire a sacrifice, or I would offer one.
    You do not want a burnt offering.
¹⁷ The sacrifice you desire is a broken spirit.
    You will not reject a broken and repentant heart, O God.

***

This is really a continuation of yesterday. Whereas yesterday I just assumed that perhaps David was inspired to write that psalm after he had committed adultery with Bathsheba, this Psalm really is. Preceding the words of the Psalm are directions for the choir director, and describes this as being specifically about that sinful period in his life.

I think the easiest trap for us to fall into is thinking that God is only some passive, benevolent spirit in the sky that is quick to forgive when we pay a little lip-service to Him. While He is loving, patient, and forgiving, He's also a just God, and He makes His justice known, even to His own children. The consequences of our actions can bring disastrous results, and God isn't one to let us off the hook easily. He wants us to learn from our experiences, and the lessons He teaches aren't easy ones.

How often do we plea with God for this or that, making our requests known, and then like an afterthought, we remember to say "oh yeah, while I'm at it, will you forgive me of all my sins?" I hope I'm not the only one who has been guilty of that. Or maybe we rush through it at the beginning of our prayer; "Oh Lord, please forgive me for having done such-and-such today. Now will you help me out with this?"

David understood what God really wanted from us. In a time when animal sacrifices were required for just about everything, including to cover sins (because the Lamb of God had not yet come to bear that burden), David knew that what God wanted even more than an adherence to the laws of sacrifice was sincerity.

God doesn't want us to flippantly ask forgiveness as though it were something to mark off our to-do list. He wants us to be broken, naked, and deeply sorrowful before Him. Ok, now I don't mean "naked" as in "nude", despite the imagery, I mean He wants us to be totally transparent, not trying to hide anything from his sight or to cover any of our actions with excuses.

We should learn from David's example. He was on his knees before God, begging for His mercy and compassion. He pleaded with God not only to erase the stain of his sin, but to cleanse him of his guilt and purify him from it. He owns up to what he's done, and is so sorry for his actions that he says it haunts him day and night! He can't get it out of his head how he took another man's wife, and then plotted to ensure that the wronged man would be killed in battle. He knew that Uriah's blood was on his hands, and He specifically asks God to forgive him for that. He accepts that God's judgment against him is just, and that he has deserved the price he has paid. Do you remember what that price was? His sin cost him the life of his child. And the consequences of his actions didn't just affect him. Imagine what Bathsheba must have been going through! Sure, she had moved into the palace after losing her husband, but now she had lost her child! She must have felt a lot of resentment towards her new husband, the king. Don't ya think?

As David prayed, he got it. He knew that burning a sacrifice, although required by law, really wasn't good enough. He understood that what would please God far more than going through the motions was for him to offer himself, his own broken spirit and his own broken heart, as his sacrifice. And that is exactly what he offered, knowing that God would accept such an offering and restore David to the joy of his salvation. He wasn't asking that God would simply let him be happy again, He was asking that God would restore his happiness with the kind of joy that comes only from God, through obedience to God.

That is the manner in which we should pray. We screw up daily, so many times that we can't even keep track. Most of the times we don't even acknowledge the things that we do to offend God, because they're so habitual that we don't recognize them as being wrong. But they pile up around us, creating clutter and chaos in our spiritual lives (even if we don't claim to have one) until we completely break down emotionally. 

The only one who can, or will, pull us out of the quicksand is God. And until we are truly, deeply sorry for having strolled into the quagmire in the first place, God's going to let us keep sinking. Things will never get better until we come before God, broken in spirit, and offer ourselves to Him.

Isn't it time?

Day 40: It's My Life (...and Yours)

Jonathan Billinger [CC-BY-SA-2.0]

Psalm 32:5

New Living Translation (NLT)

⁵ Finally, I confessed all my sins to you
    and stopped trying to hide my guilt.
I said to myself, “I will confess my rebellion to the Lord.”
    And you forgave me! All my guilt is gone. 

Psalm 32:8-9

New Living Translation (NLT)

⁸ The Lord says, “I will guide you along the best pathway for your life.
    I will advise you and watch over you.
⁹ Do not be like a senseless horse or mule
    that needs a bit and bridle to keep it under control.”

***

Oh, how this psalm seems to reflect to my life! That's the beauty of it, for me.   I can read this psalm, written thousands of years ago by some shepherd-boy-turned-king, and feel like we have so much in common! I wonder what life experience, what rebellion, David was thinking of when he wrote it. The worst thing I can think of that could have inspired this was when he got Bathsheba pregnant and then set her husband up to be killed so that her infidelity wouldn't be found out. 

That's really pretty bad, and I don't think I could top it, but I can sure relate to it. There was a time in my own life when I had found myself in a similar predicament as David's mistress. Nobody plotted the death of my then-husband, though. No, he's still alive and well. 

God didn't let David off the hook for that. I can only imagine that he tried to ignore God for as long as he could. Nobody wants to feel conviction when they're passionate about their disobedience, and if Bathsheba was his disobedience, he certainly was passionate about her! 

How that speaks of the human condition! Aren't we all like that? Even if we love God with all our heart, when we are seduced away from a right relationship with Him, we get so caught up in the enjoyment of our sin that we just don't want to hear that what we are doing is wrong!

Sooner or later, though, we have to face the music. David sure did. The penalty for committing adultery, then having Uriah killed so that he could marry his lover, was the death of their son. I'm not sure that's what this psalm is about, but I do know that David spent a lot of time on his knees while his infant boy was struggling for life. And I know that later, David enjoyed a renewed relationship with God that can only come from true repentance. In this case, I'm guessing David's rebellion probably lasted all of a year. Oh, I wish mine had been so short-lived. It took me more like a decade.

Once back on track spiritually, God took control of David's life, just as He took control of mine, and just as He will take control of anybody's life who is willing to relinquish their own stubborn will. It's amazing how we always think we can manage our lives just fine, and how far unmanageable our lives become before we realize that we've strolled too far off  the right path. But once we repent and get back in line, we discover what we should have already known... that life is so much easier when we're living for God! There really is true freedom in that. 

We may think we can do better for ourselves than God can, but we can't. Since I have assumed that the sin that brought David to pen this psalm was sexual in nature, I'm going to be bold enough to point out one of the most common misconceptions about our ability to choose for ourselves.

Myth: 
"I can't possibly consider marriage to someone I haven't slept with, because I might get stuck with someone I'm not sexually compatible with." 

Fact: 
God knows everything about us... including what we enjoy physically. Think about it. God created us to be sexual people. He created intimacy between a husband and wife to be a special, wonderful gift! He didn't intend for sex to just be utilitarian. He wants it to be pleasurable, and there is plenty of scripture to back that claim up. So why on earth would anyone think that God wouldn't make sure that any mate that HE was allowed to choose for us would be unsatisfactory in that way? On the contrary, if we were to all live for God and give Him control of selecting our mates, we'd discover the true potential of God's gift to us, and it would be a mind-blowing experience every time.


If we will just trust God to bring us His very best in our lives, we will never, ever be disappointed with the results.

Now, I have to apologize to my mother in case she's offended by reading this. And to anyone else who might wonder how on earth I took a psalm of repentance and restoration and turned it into a lecture on sexual misconduct. Honestly, I don't know. It wasn't what I had in mind when I started writing, but it's what I ended up with. Maybe God knew that someone reading this needed to hear it. I'd sure like to think that even now, I'd allowed God to direct my thoughts, and given Him control over my keyboard.

Day 23: A Dad's Love

2 Samuel 19:1-6

New Living Translation (NLT)

David Mourns Absalom

Joab Rebukes the King

19 Word soon reached Joab that the king was weeping and mourning for Absalom. ² As all the people heard of the king’s deep grief for his son, the joy of that day’s victory was turned into deep sadness. ³ They crept back into the town that day as though they were ashamed and had deserted in battle. ⁴ The king covered his face with his hands and kept on crying, “O my son Absalom! O Absalom, my son, my son!”

⁵ Then Joab went to the king’s room and said to him, “We saved your life today and the lives of your sons, your daughters, and your wives and concubines. Yet you act like this, making us feel ashamed of ourselves. ⁶ You seem to love those who hate you and hate those who love you. You have made it clear today that your commanders and troops mean nothing to you. It seems that if Absalom had lived and all of us had died, you would be pleased.

Yesterday you read the story of David and his first wife, Michal. Today you get to hear about the relationship he had (or didn't have) with one of his sons. Absalom was the king's third, whose mother had been the daughter of the king of Gesher. He had a sister, also, a beautiful girl named Tamar.

Years before his death, Absalom's older half-brother, Amnon, who was heir to the thrown, had lured Tamar into his home and brutally raped her, then cast her aside. She sought refuge with her brother, and Absalom convinced her to carry her shame in silence. It didn't stop the King from hearing about it, though. I guess Amnon, the spoiled, devious, creep that he was, had probably bragged about it to all his friends, and certainly to his cousin Jonadab, who had encouraged him to hook up with Tamar in the first place.

One would think that King David, as wise a man of God as he was, would have  found some sort of punishment worthy of what he'd done, but he didn't. He didn't like what his first-born had done, but he gave him a free pass on it. That didn't set well with Amnon. In fact, it royally ticked him off, no pun intended. So he bided his time, and two years later, he avenged his sister by murdering her attacker.

Then he fled. He was bannished from the kingdom for three long years before David finally allowed him to return to his home and his family. But he was stripped of his privilege of rank within his fathers court. Eventually David reconciled with his son, at least he thought he did. Apparently David didn't restore Absalom's rank though, because if he had, surely Absalom wouldn't have taken his anger to the next level.

To abbreviate the story a little, Absalom grew in popularity, and eventually decided to de-throne the king. He gathered his own army from among the Israelites who had grown to adore him, and chased his dad out of the kingdom, plotting to kill David and step into his shoes.

You would think that David would see his son as an enemy at that point, but he didn't. To him, that was still his boy. He instructed his own armies not to kill Absalom in battle. But war is war, and Absalom died.

Oh, how David grieved. Even after Absalom had murdered his brother, even after he'd turned much of the kingdom against his father, and even after trying to overthrow the kingdom with attempts on David's life, that was still his kid, and he still loved him, dearly. He wept so hard that as his armies returned, jubilant in their victory, the king's despair made them tuck their tails like naughty pups.

This did infuriate Joab, David's nephew and commander in chief (who had actually participated in the death of Absalom). He took a moment to go into the King's room and chew his butt out for not showing gratitude to his troops.
He accused him of caring more about the scoundrel of a son who'd tried to wipe out his whole family than about the welfare of the family whose lives were saved through the death of Absalom.

Joab's rebuke did bring David out of his gloom, and he did go down to greet the returning troops, and it appears that he set aside his anguish at that point. But Joab was wrong. David deserved time to mourn. In David's heart, he hadn't lost an enemy that day, he'd lost a child. It didn't make him love the rest of his family any less, but a parent just can't cut their child out of his heart, no matter how rebellious the child is.

That's the kind of unconditional love that most parents have for their children. I do wish I could say all parents come by that naturally, but I've seen enough of human nature to know that not all parents have that ability. I think all who love the Lord do, though. Just as our heavenly Father loves us unconditionally, so He teaches us to love our own children.

Day 21: R-E-S-P-E-C-T

1 Samuel 18:5

New Living Translation (NLT)

David waiting for word from Jonathon 
copyright V. Gilbert and Arlisle F. Beers

⁵ Whatever Saul asked David to do, David did it successfully. So Saul made him a commander over the men of war, an appointment that was welcomed by the people and Saul’s officers alike.

I had a hard time deciding what to blog about today. There is just so much to be said about David that it's difficult to choose just one thing! Unless that one thing can be painted with a really broad brush, like the subject of his character.

David was just a decent guy, no matter how ya slice it. No matter what life threw at him, he handled it with dignity, with the notable exception of Bethsheba, which happens a bit later in his life. 

Anyway, to stay on topic, David had a remarkable work ethic. He had unshakable faith and gave God glory in all he did. For example, when he was chided for offering to slay Goliath in chapter 17, he pointed out that God had delivered both lions and bears into his hand as a shepherd, and that God would deliver the Philistine into his hand as well. Then he took a slingshot and brought the giant down.

He was humble. When King Saul offered his daughter to be David's wife, David  couldn't understand why he should be honored in such a way. Of course, there are a thousand better examples of David's humble nature, but I don't want to get ahead of the current chapter.

He went above and beyond when assigned a task. When King Saul told him to bring him 100 foreskins from the Philistines, he brought him 200 instead. 

He was smart. Everything David did, he did successfully. He showed wisdom in his thoughts, decisions, his tactical maneuvers on the battlefield, and in every aspect of his life. It gained him the respect and admiration of everyone around him, and everyone who worked for him.

He was forgiving. When King Saul became so jealous that he sought to kill him, David refused to avenge himself. Even when he was given two perfect opportunities to kill Saul himself, he wouldn't. Instead, he cut the corner of his robe, or took his water jug, and then begged Saul for mercy, even calling himself Saul's servant, and calling Saul God's annointed. Why he couldn't see that God's annointing was long gone from Saul is beyond me.

He was compassionate. Although he wanted to take revenge on Nabal, a wealthy man whose shepherds David and company had protected, refused to be charitable to David's men when they needed food, he stopped and listened to Abigail, Nabal's wife, when she stepped in to undo her idiot husband's stupidity. He agreed to spare her husband's life because of her request. Shortly thereafter, when God caused Nabal to die of a heart attack, David offered to take the widow as his own wife.

So there you have it. If you want to be the kind of person esteemed by God, and admired by people, then you need to adopt the elements of David's character.

• Let your life be a testimony to God. 
• Seek His will in everything.
• Be humble and give God the glory.
• Work harder than you have to.
• Act wisely in all you do.
• Be forgiving to those who wrong you.
• Be compassionate to those around you.