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Week 15 II Samuel 

When Nathan the prophet exposed David’s crimes of adultery and murder he also forecast two pretty heavy outcomes. First: the sword shall never depart from your house. Secondly: I (the Lord) will raise up evil against you from your own household.
The last twelve chapters of II Samuel map out how that forecast developed.
David’s son Amnon raped his half-sister Tamar. In retaliation Tamar’s brother Absalom had Amnon murdered. Eventually Absalom mounted an armed revolt against his father. The rebellion turned into civil war. David escaped, regrouped, and eventually defeated his son. The war was won but the nation was divided between the factions of Israel and Judah. There were post-war reparations to figure out. Disloyalties to be punished. Internationally, the wars with the Philistines kept right on going.
Not much light shines through the grisly treachery of the second half of the book.
David started out so well – so much drama and heroism and bravery and faith and romance and suspense. What a great, talented, story-book guy.
But in the second-half, not so much.
There doesn’t seem to be any question that within himself – in his inner life – David matured and grew during those last years of his life. His faith and his connection with the Lord were restored and vitalized. But despite that, the last years of his living-in-the-natural-world life were turbulent, conflicted, topsy turvy, error-prone, tragic.

Note: quotes from II Samuel 12:10-11 (NASB version)

Week 15 II Samuel

Chapter eleven. Sundown in Jerusalem, gloaming, only a little light left in the sky. But enough that from his pavilion David can see a woman. She’s on her roof, having as private a wash as she can. He stands watching until the day is full-dark and the woman goes inside. Her image stays in David’s head, and a plan starts uncoiling.
[It’s easy to understand what’s happening in David’s head. How short a step it is from seeing a desirable woman to playing out a sexual fantasy. Image, desire, imagination, body chemicals, dizzily stirring up an intense concoction.] 
David stands in the dark with a witches’ brew filling up inside him, and then spilling over into the concrete world of action. David gets the woman, gets his sexual intercourse, conspires to have the woman’s husband killed, and closes the circle by marrying the desirable Bathsheba. On the surface things worked out.
Except there’s a grey stratus smudge on David’s inner horizon: the thing that David had done was evil in the sight of the Lord.
Nathan confronts David.
He tells him that before the adultery, before the murder, back on the dark roof: you despised the word of the Lord. The prophet then adds, quoting the Lord: you despised Me.
David is abjectly, penitently sorry. But the evil outcomes are already working their way out into David’s world.

Note: quotes from II Samuel 11:27 and 12:9-10 (NASB version).

Week 15 II Samuel

Exercise:
Let’s say I have an inverted-V.
And I have the book of II Samuel.
Let’s say I have to fit the inverted-V over the story of David so the point of the V sits at the high point in his story. Question: where will it land?
Answer: chapter seven. Hands down. Where the Lord gives David a Big (twelve-verses long) Promise. It ends by saying: your house and your kingdom shall endure before Me forever; your throne shall be established forever.
This long promise divides into several smaller promises.
The beginning promises are for David – success, victory, peace, rest, fame. Right-Now promises.
Then there’s a promise that one of David’s descendants will build the temple. That’s a Near-Future promise.
And then there’s the final promise: your throne shall be established forever. A permanent dynasty. Which is a Distant-Future promise.
Prophecies that are true have to come true. So I’ll tuck these last two away for future reference.

Note: quote is from II Samuel 7:16 (NASB version).
Side-note: The descendant’s promise (verse 12-14) is complicated by having an if-then attached to it. This muddies things because at first the promise sounds like it’s totally without any conditions. But it  turns out that the way the descendant lives his life will have a huge impact on the way the promise develops. The kingdom will succeed, guaranteed. Will the descendant succeed? Maybe.

Week 15 II Samuel

II Samuel six starts with David’s decision to bring the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem. It had been sitting in Abinadab’s house in Baalejudah for twenty years. Now David wants it in the royal city.
It’s a big event, a processional with crowds, celebration, music. The ark sits on an ox-cart escorted by Ahio and Uzzah. The ark begins to tip over; Uzzah steadies it. And then it happens: the anger of the Lord burned against Uzzah, and God struck him down there for his irreverence.
Uzzah steadies the ark in one second, the next second he’s dead.
David’s reaction is a bit of a consolation to me. He was angry over Uzzah’s death. He was afraid. He stopped the procession in its tracks. All of a sudden he didn’t want the ark. He just left it right there with a Philistine named Obed-Edom.
It’s a weird story for how you’re left feeling. Uzzah was an irreverent man and got the costly outcome of irreverence. At the same time it seems kind of unfair, like he got what he didn’t deserve. I feel perplexed, and I wish I knew more.
Sometimes the bible tells me more than I want. But not this time.
I sit for awhile thinking about reverential fear for the Lord, not so much concerned for Uzzah, more concerned about mhj.

Notes: See the ark story in I Samuel 4-7. Quote is from II Samuel 6:7 (NASB version)

Week 14 I Samuel

Nobody gave me the job but if I revised the two books of Samuel I’d be tempted to make one single book: The Book of Samuel. The two Samuels are pretty much one seamless, interlocking story of The Three Bigs – Samuel, Saul, and David. Separating their stories is like trying to scrape the cheese out of a grilled sandwich.
Still, I’ve got to admit that the book division makes sense. Samuel has already died, and I Samuel ends on the day Saul dies. [Aside: I know I’m likely wasting some good sadness on Saul, but I feel kind of sorry for him. After a good start he joins the Renegade Against Normality Club. It’s like his personality stepped on a landmine, obliterated most of his common sense, and left behind big chunks of murderous rage, delirium, and paranoia – mostly aimed at David.] Anyway, now that Saul is dead the stage is set for the II Samuel story of David in power.

Notes: This morning I recalculated my April numbers. The rest of the month looks like this:
Week 15 II Samuel
Week 16 I Kings
Week 17 II Kings
Week 18 I Chronicles (a five-day week)
I like the thought of reading exactly one book a week. That might not happen again this year, but this month it could happen four times in a row! Plus, those four books give me my 100 chapters – so going forward things are lining up for me.

Week 14 Psalm 34

A while ago I created three categories of psalms using my Title Underlining System:
     Good psalms (not underlined in my bible);
     Really good psalms (underlined in black);
     Best psalms (underlined in red).
Today I landed on: PSALM 34 (red underlined, so one of my best).
Verse four caught my attention: I sought the Lord, and He answered me, and delivered me out of all my fears.
While I’m reading the bible two things are going on. First, I’m reading my chapters to get through. Secondly I’m asking: is there any kind of mutuality going on here – anything in play between me and the text? Is there some derivative for me? 
But then there’s something else going on. Let’s say I find a derivative that makes good sense to me. If I do that’s pretty satisfying.
But what if I find a derivative that doesn’t make sense? Let’s say the text says: I prayed to the Lord, and he answered me, freeing me from all my fears. But what if my real life experience is that I prayed to the Lord, and he didn’t answer me, and didn’t free me from all my fears?
Sure, one solution is to just say the bible is useless. But my rule-to-self is: you gotta make distinctions between what the text says and what the text means. If the bible was a grade-three reader I maybe don’t need the rule. But I’m thinking it isn’t. 

Note: quote from the NASB and the NLT.

Week 14 I Samuel

Saul was Israel’s first king, and he started out pretty well. The Lord endorsed him, put his spirit on him, helped him get established. But in chapter thirteen something happens. After that it’s all down, down, down for Saul.
The tricky thing for the bible reader is that what Saul did seems wrong, but it’s also understandable.
What he did was to offer a sacrifice to God. Since he wasn’t a Levite he shouldn’t have. So when Samuel arrived he asked Saul a probing question: what is this you have done?
But Saul had an answer, had his reasons…
     My troops were panicking
     You didn’t get here in time
     The Philistines were ready to attack
     A sacrifice needed to be made
These were all true, and under the circumstances made logical sense. But Samuel paid no attention to Saul’s excuses. He just said: how foolish! You have disobeyed the command of the Lord your God. Then he added that the Lord was looking for a king who – unlike Saul – was: a man after his own heart. Obedience and heart. 
This juxtaposing of OT-law-and-your-heart has come up before. I saw it in Deuteronomy, quite a few times. Now here it is again. OT obedience isn’t so much looking like a mechanical legalism, isn’t like dancing with a droid. I think it’s more like finding an Andalusian gypsy who wants to fandango.

Notes: quotes from I Samuel 13:11, 13, 14. Deuteronomy  6:4-9 is a nice example of religion of the heart.

Week 14 I-II Samuel

Israel was battling the Philistines. Idiotically they decided to take the ark of the covenant into battle – a kind of big, good-luck charm.
The Philistines won anyway. Even worse, they captured the ark.
The ark landed in Ashdod. Right away an epidemic began. People died. As pre-scientifically dopey as the Ashdod Philistines were they started putting two-&-two together.
They shipped the ark to Gath. Epidemic arrived in Gath.
Gath shipped the ark to Ekron. Epidemic ravaged Ekron.
It seemed pretty clear: the ark was a health hazard. But they decided to run a more definitive social scientific-type case study to test the link between the ark and the plague. They put the ark on a cart and pointed the cows toward Israel. The logic was that if the cows left Ekron then: we will know it was the Lord who brought this great disaster upon us. But if the cows did the natural thing and stayed home: we will know that the plague was simply a coincidence.
The Philistines proved to their satisfaction that the plague was not a chance epidemic. Which is all they wanted to know. Philistine theology seemed to be that geographic proximity was a factor for gods. Get far enough away and you’re safe. Which is a pretty handy idea. A god who could transcend distance would obviously be a bit more of a concern.

Note: quotes from I Samuel 6:9 (NLT version). The ark is described back in Exodus 25-27.

March 31, 2020
At the end of February I was running a deficit in my reading schedule, and not feeling too great about it.
I decided on two action-steps: (a) start reading one psalm a day, and (b) read extra chapters to finish I Samuel by the end of the month.
So the month-end numbers are in: Deuteronomy finished, Joshua (1-24), Judges (1-21), Ruth (1-4), I Samuel (1-31). 100 chapters. Adding the first thirty-one psalms brings it up to 131 chapters.
That makes a January – March total of 329 chapters.
There are 1189 chapters in the bible, and 329 of them is 27.7% of the total. Reading 27.7% of the bible in 25% of the year is about where I want to be.

Notes: quotes are from  the NASB and the NLT versions. I started reading the psalms on March 1 and today I was reading Psalm 31. There’s a nice phrase in verse 15. The writer says: my times are in (the Lord’s) hand. Another version says: my future is in your hands. I’d read the verse sometime before since it was underlined in red. That’s probably because the mhj-version of my-times-are-in-your-hand tends to go something like this: my times are in my own hands, and when they aren’t I don’t like it. So the verse was a soft reminder to me as I tracked my personal progress today.

Week 14 I Samuel

Whatever life Hannah lived before marriage, it didn’t improve much after. Her biggest hope was to have kids, and when that didn’t work out the other wife badgered and mocked and goaded her. Hannah gradually discovered that one of the cruel places in the world can be right there at home.
Years passed and she might have tried different ways to cope with her dispiriting life. Eventually she turned to the Lord. If prayer wasn’t the only thing she tried, it’s only the prayer that’s reported.
Hannah’s prayer was a vow-prayer. Please, please, please Lord let me have a child and if you answer my prayer, then I’ll give the child back to you (the if and the then are right there in verse eleven). It was a hazardous prayer, with a potential risk down the road. The Lord did the if and gave her a son. And Hannah, just as she promised did the then.
Hannah is a really impressive person. It might have been tempting for her to forget about the then. But she took on the regret that came with the reward.
I guess that early on the biggest love and deepest devotion Hannah could have imagined was for her boy.
But as you read her second prayer in chapter two you get the impression that at some point she discovered someone deeper than her deepest.

Note: the Hannah story is in I Samuel 1.