Faith | Hope | Love

Warrior. Poet. King

Pt. 2 David and Saul

We’ve started going through the story of David. We’re giving his story a few articles, because there is so much for us gain from it. We’re specifically reading through the stories of his relationships. Last week was the story of David and Goliath. As you read, be sure to remember who is who. David represents God, Goliath represents the overwhelming sin in our lives, and the scared, helpless soldiers represent us.

Do you remember how David’s story begins with him being anointed as the new king-to-be? Keep this in mind as we go through the timeline of what happened next. David had killed Goliath. So Saul brings David to live in his palace. He loves David, and accepts him as part of his family and gives him responsibilities in the military. But something starts happening. David is extremely successful and Saul promotes him to the status of general; both a social and political status of honor. And he starts winning the hearts of the Israelites. The people start cheering for David and Saul notices those cheers are getting louder than his cheers. (I Samuel 18:6-9)

On top of this growing jealousy, Saul had this nagging memory about how David was prophesied and anointed to be the next king, and this started driving him crazy. It escalated to the point where Saul became unwilling to let the throne be passed on to David. He was denying David his rightful place on the throne! And this was the beginning of a dramatic saga of betrayal, assassinations, and corruption. Saul’s jealousy, anger, and self-righteousness flared up so violently that in the very next verses he attempted to kill David. (I Samuel 18:10-11)

This actually happened twice! And David eventually took a hint and went on the run.

There were soldiers in David’s authority that were still loyal to him. So several hundred soldiers flee out of the country with David also. And Saul pursued them! At this point, Saul is on a rampage. He’s killing everyone who stands in his way; entire cities including, priests, women, and children! The dude is nuts!

Eventually, David and his men find themselves living in caves. When Saul heard about it he started scouring the hillsides looking in all of the caves. At one point, nature calls and Saul has to use the restroom. And so, while on a break from hunting for David, he goes into a cave to relieve himself. Lo and behold, it was the very cave that David and his men were hiding in! (Talk about embarrassing.) Saul does his business, completely unaware that dozens of men were hiding behind him. (1 Samuel 24:1-4)

During this awkward moment, a few of David’s soldiers get the idea, “Let’s take this guy out! We’ll never get a chance like this again!” But David says no, and actually chooses to spare Saul’s life. Instead, he gives him grace and mercy. (1 Samuel 24:5-7) Let me give a quick definition of these two words.“Mercy= not getting what you deserve” “Grace= getting what you didn’t deserve”.

Here’s the point: I am Saul. I am self-righteous, arrogant, angry, and insecure. In my self-righteousness, I have attempted to deny Jesus His rightful place on the throne. And if you were to be honest, I think you would say the same thing. But Jesus, our David, spared our lives and has returned grace to our violence.

In the movie Hacksaw Ridge, Desmond Doss is a conscientious objector, meaning he was against the war. Nevertheless, he feels compelled to join the army as a medic. His reason as he said was, “With the world so set on tearing itself apart, it don't seem like such a bad thing to me to want to put a little bit of it back together.” He joined with the promise that he wouldn’t have to touch a gun or be combat trained. The problem was, his commanding officers and fellow soldiers didn’t like that. If he wouldn’t fight there, then he wouldn’t fight on the battle field, and wouldn’t be able to save them. So they took every opportunity to force him to fight. At one point they even jumped him while he was asleep and beat him. Still, he continued his training in every other area. The entire climax of the movie tells the story of how Desmond went to battle with his battalion, and acted heroically in spite of being called Doss the Coward. By the end of the night, he had saved 75 wounded soldiers, without firing a single shot.

Desmond Doss illustrates Jesus giving grace to those who have been unkind, cruel, and even violent to Him. And it’s the same thing we are commanded to do in Matthew 5:43-44

What are we to do then? Because of the Gospel of God’s grace on us, who have been cruel and unkind to God, we are to extend that grace to others. Not so we can be like David, but so we can be like Christ. Did you know the Bible says in Romans 2:4 that it is God’s goodness that leads to repentance? It’s not God’s wrath that causes people to turn to Him. It’s not His justice, wisdom, or sovereignty. It’s His goodness.

That’s what happened with David and Saul. After Saul left the cave, David followed him out and said, “Saul, look here. I had your life in my hands. I could have killed you, but I spared you. Just to prove it, here is a piece of your robe that I cut off. I will not kill you.”

And here is Saul’s response to David’s grace. I Samuel 24:16-22 As soon as David had finished speaking these words to Saul, Saul said, “Is this your voice, my son David?” And Saul lifted up his voice and wept. 17 He said to David, “You are more righteous than I, for you have repaid me good, whereas I have repaid you evil. 18 And you have declared this day how you have dealt well with me, in that you did not kill me when the Lord put me into your hands. 19 For if a man finds his enemy, will he let him go away safe? So may the Lord reward you with good for what you have done to me this day. 20 And now, behold, I know that you shall surely be king, and that the kingdom of Israel shall be established in your hand. 21 Swear to me therefore by the Lord that you will not cut off my offspring after me, and that you will not destroy my name out of my father's house.” 22 And David swore this to Saul. Then Saul went home, but David and his men went up to the stronghold.

David’s goodness brought Saul to repentance. When we’ve been treated with evil, we are to return grace, because we are like Saul, and God has given us grace. And just as God’s goodness has shown us His beauty, mercy, and grace, we too can share that with those who’ve hurt betrayed us. Who knows, it just might bring about their repentance as it brought about yours.

Jonah

Chapter 3: Reach

Pt. 3 The Responses to Evil

           

Jonah 3:9-10 “‘Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.’ When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it.”

Allow me to clarify something right up front. There’s only one proper way to respond to the evil in your own life: Repent! We’ve already discussed that in chapter two, so we don’t need to repeat ourselves. But in case you’re still reading, and you haven’t had that time with God when you confessed your sin, and turned from it to God, please do that right now. You won’t be able to deal with the evil in other people’s lives until you deal with your own.

Once you’ve done that, you’re ready for what’s next. Jonah helps us to see the evil in this world and contrast it to how the Lord responds to it. Here’s the question that is naturally posed; How do I deal with wickedness that offends me? This is personal. We’re not talking about solving the problem of evil in the whole entire world, but rather responding to the evil that directly offends us. And I see only three possible responses.

1^st. You can choose revenge – This is where you pummel the wrong doer. You are determined to hurt the person that hurt you. You believe very much in the “eye for an eye” philosophy of life. And most likely you believe, although nobody would admit it, that is how you should behave toward others but not so much how others should behave toward you, right? I don’t recommend this response. It doesn’t end well for anybody.

2^nd. You can choose retreat – This is when, out of passivity, you just let it go but not in the healthy way. This is when you cannot get past it so you do nothing about it. Outwardly you seem to be fine but inwardly you are bitter and hurt. You go to your room and scream into your pillow. Maybe you pop in the head phones and zone out from the world. Perhaps your medication is a little more serious and damaging. This is more about running away than dealing with the evil.

Neither of these two options are better than the other, because you are responding to the hurt in unhealthy ways. Some people think, “Well I’m not hurting anybody if I bottle up.” But revenge and retreat are BOTH wrong, and do no good for you OR the wrongdoer.

Here’s the last option. This is the one we all need to aim for.  

3^rd. You can choose to reach out – This is the forgiveness that God gives to the people of Nineveh and what he is trying to give Jonah. He is reaching out to them, not to exclude, but to include. This is not reaching out with a fist like revenge. This is not reaching out with a shove like retreat. This is reaching out with an open hand to offer forgiveness and love.

In the book, The Secret Garden, Colin is a cruel, spoiled, arrogant boy who makes the lives of his servants and nurses miserable. At first, you despise him in the book. But as you read on you realize this boy is really just afraid. Because all of his life he’s been told he wasn’t going to live long. That he would get a disease like his father and die. So he chooses to confine himself to his bed and order his servants and nurses around.

Until one day he meets his cousin, Mary. Of course, she doesn’t like him at first because of his demanding, selfish personality. He really was an evil little boy. But instead of getting some revenge on him or choosing to retreat from him, she begins to reach out to him. She talks to him about the beautiful things she had seen in the Secret Garden. She describes the adventures she had with the neighbor boy. She begins to encourage him to come outside with her and to see it all for himself. And through it all, she is really showing him that he is actually healthy and he isn’t going to die.

So as she reaches out to him with a love that he had never received before, he begins to soften. He stops throwing his tantrums and starts thinking about others. The evil in him was ruined when Mary reached out with forgiveness and love. The only way you will ever ruin evil in the world is by reaching out with forgiveness and love. That is the one response to evil that God has commanded.

If we fail to do this, if we choose to exact revenge or run away in retreat, we just become a part of the cycle of evil in the world. We are adding to the sinfulness of our own world, but God has called us to destroy the evil; to help bring forgiveness, love, and repentance to those around us.

That’s a lot easier said than done. Right now you might encouraged and thinking, “Yeah! I’m going to change the world with love!” And it all seems clear to you, right now. But tomorrow, when the bullies come around again, or the family member starts acting selfish again, or that coworker makes up another lie about you, this usually isn’t the first thing in our minds because it’s not natural. You’re going to have to work at this. It will require a good amount of effort. Are you up for it? I believe you are. I really do believe you can ruin evil in your world and bring forgiveness and salvation to those around you. Next month, I’ll show you exactly how this works.

      Jonah 2:4 “Then I said, ‘I am driven away from your sight;

yet I shall again look upon your holy temple.’”

We are given a rare glimpse into the life of someone that is going through the process of spiritual transformation. Jonah knew that saving grace and living grace was entirely of the Lord. He experienced this grace and learned very quickly what it really means; Grace is an undeserved gift from an unobligated giver. Basically, something that nobody deserves or could ever earn. Well then, if grace is a gift, what’s the gift that Jesus gave us? Simply this, His life.

So let’s explain verse four. He looks at the temple because he knows that the answer to his problem is in there. To us 21st Century Americans, that doesn’t mean much. But there is something bewildering about it that we’ve got to understand. What he remembers about the Temple is that sin is taken seriously, there must be a punishment, so blood is shed as a consequence of sin. But it’s not the sinner’s blood.

This is perhaps the most life-changing truth taught in the astonishing true story of Jonah. See, God cannot overlook or dismiss sin. He never has and He never will. But He does not deal with it according to the justice system we have in mind, where he punishes sinners until they’ve paid in full. He chooses to forgive the sinner by punishing his innocent Son.

But wait, there is an amazing parallel here that we won’t see at first, so we’ve got to dig in a little more to understand this. Like we said earlier, Jonah is a picture of us, but he is also a picture of Jesus. See, God sent Jonah to preach repentance to Nineveh, just like Jesus was sent by God to bring repentance to the world. Nineveh was deserving of the wrath of God, just like the world. But neither the world nor Nineveh have received the punishment they deserve. God sent his wrath on Jonah through the storm, just like He sent His wrath on Jesus on the cross. And Jonah spent three days in the belly of the whale, just like Jesus spent three days in the grave.

When they both came back, they brought revival through repentance to Nineveh and the world. Jonah suffered for Nineveh’s salvation and Jesus suffered for ours. So when Jonah looked toward the temple, he was thinking about the sacrifices that had been made for him, and the ultimate sacrifice that would be made for us. He was looking to Jesus. The one who gave His life. The one who deserves our obedient love.

Jonah shows us that Jesus dying on the cross in our place is the greatest gift we would ever receive. And once Jonah became emotionally available to God’s grace, he understood the process of receiving that grace through faith.

So grace is a gift offered by Jesus that we can only receive with faith. What then is faith? Faith is a dependence, a trust, in anything at all. I have faith that a grandé white mocha latte with a pump of peppermint will quench my desire for deliciousness. I also have faith that Jesus dying on the cross is enough to pay for my sins and provide forgiveness and redemption for me.

Jonah’s looking toward the Temple helps us to understand the process by which God works in our hearts to bring about spiritual change. Grace is God offering the gift of eternal life. Faith is us receiving that gift by putting our trust in Jesus and His death and resurrection.

That’s the process. That’s how we first experience repentance, and how we always will thereafter. We call this The Gospel.

Jonah 2:9 “But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you;

what I have vowed I will pay. Salvation belongs to the Lord!”

           

There’s a simple truth about repentance written all throughout Scripture that tends to get treated like a secret. I mean, God wrote it in a book and it’s been published throughout the entire world, so it’s really no secret. But it’s often treated like one. Some people don’t like to talk about it because they say it’s too personal, or they’re too embarrassed, or that they don’t completely understand it themselves. But we’re going to unwrap this ‘secret’ to repentance and lay it out on the table for all to see so we can experience a spiritual breakthrough.

Jonah announces while in the fish’s belly that salvation is of the Lord. This is both a confession and an acknowledgement of a lesson learned and it’s really quite astounding. In fact, the entire theme of the Bible can be summed up in that statement, “Salvation belongs to the Lord.”

See, there are different people in the world and they have different beliefs about salvation. There are the Rebellious People, who defiantly say, “I do not need salvation.” Next are the Religious people, who stubbornly say “Salvation is of me.” Then there are the Repentant people, who humbly say, “Salvation is of the Lord”

Until you come to the realization that salvation belongs to the Lord, you cannot and will not experience spiritual breakthrough. That is true for people just coming into a relationship with Christ today for the first time, but it is also true for people that have already started a relationship with Jesus but desire a deeper spiritual breakthrough. And, by the way, everybody falls into one of these two categories: those in need of salvation today, and those in need of a spiritual breakthrough.

Both types of people cannot come to the realization that salvation belongs to the Lord on their own, however. It first requires God extending an invitation to them. He says, “Come and know me.” That is called grace. We can only respond to the invitation and start a relationship with Him. That is called faith.

So the first type of people accept God’s grace by faith. Let’s call that saving faith. The second type who have already accepted God’s grace continue in their faith. That’s called living faith.

So are you ready for the secret? Here it is in one sentence:

Grace is not just the way you have your first encounter with God, but how you have every encounter with God.

Accepting God’s grace through faith is how you are going to have a spiritual breakthrough. If you depend on your works to make you better, if you depend on your knowledge to get you closer to God, if you depend on your talent to do great things, you won’t make it. We have only one thing to depend on and that’s God’s grace.

But that’s just it. So many of us so many times rely on ourselves for our spirituality. “If I just read my Bible more I would be more spiritual.” But we have to have a change of mind; a change of dependence. And that’s exactly what repentance is. The word ‘repent’ literally means “to change one’s mind.” The question then is, “What do I need to change my mind about?” In this case, to have a spiritual breakthrough, we have to change our mind about who we depend on.

When I was teen, my friend showed me what it means to be dependent on the wrong thing. We had gone to spend the weekend at his grandparents’ cabin with his family. One day we were exploring down by the river, and we found this giant branch sticking out over the water about three stories high. So my friend says, “Hey! Let’s make a rope swing!” So he goes and gets a dog leash, he climbs the branch, ties the leash up, but realizes it’s too thin to hold on to. So he does the logical thing and grabs a log and ties it to the other end. Then he says, “Ok, who’s first!?” And the rest of us are like, “Bro, you made it, you have to do the first swing!”

So he climbs up a little and sits on a lower branch for a while trying to work up the courage. And in one awful moment he jumps off the tree trunk and puts all of his weight on this homemade rope swing, depending on it to hold him. But as it tightens, the log rolled, and he slipped. And fell. I’m pretty sure my heart stopped as I watched him plummet to what I felt strongly was his death. He fell about two stories down into about one foot of water with huge rocks underneath. I’m thinking, “Oh my soul! I just witnessed the death of my best friend!” For about two seconds, that felt like two hours, he’s underneath the water, then he bounces up and says, “Well, that didn’t work!” He was lucky to walk away with a small scratch on his knee. Needless to say, nobody else depended on the dog leash rope swing.

If you and I are going to move to a new level of spiritual breakthrough we must change our mind about who we depend on. Are you depending on your own goodness and effort for a spiritual breakthrough? Or are you ready to depend on God’s grace to give you a breakthrough? You’ll be launched to new heights with barely enough time to hang on when you let go and let God.

But how does Jesus give us His grace? I mean, what in the world is grace anyway? Next month, I’ll answer the question; What is the process by which Jesus gives us His grace?

So there he is; squeezed into the stomach of a giant fish that God had prepared for him. He had been running from God, but all along, God was running after him. He sent the great fish (representing grace) to save him from the storm (representing God’s wrath.)

This is phase #2 of the story. Repentance is the theme of the chapter as Jonah moves from religion and rebellion to repentance.

Now, repentance is the first step of a bigger process called spiritual breakthrough. It’s best described as moving to a new level of relationship with God. You might have experienced this very thing at summer camp as a teen, a holiday service, or a spiritual retreat. Maybe you were convicted. You knew what you needed to stop doing and what you needed to begin doing instead. Jonah had that moment here.

But it wasn’t a walk in the park. This breakthrough came as a result of a seriously painful, even life-threatening, experience that brought about repentance. Don’t be fooled by the cartoon depictions of this moment. Jonah wasn’t walking around inside a stomach. He wasn’t playing on the ribs like a xylophone or playing with the others fishies in there. He was more likely squeezed inside this disgusting, wretched smelling digestive system. Literally being burned by the stomach acids as it tried to digest him. He was raw, he was slimy, he was stinking horribly, thirsty, hungry, lonely, awkward, and broken hearted.

There is a week in the Navy Seal training known as, “Hell Week.” On average, only 25% make it through this part of training. Imagine, on the first night, you are awakened from your sleep with guns firing inside your bunker, and concussion grenades exploding to make your head spin. All that can be made out in the yelling is orders to crawl on your belly across pavement and sand into the ice-cold sea. Thus begins Hell Week, and from that moment on you’re given only minutes of sleep at a time for the rest of the week.

You are ordered constantly to perform hundreds of pushups, sit ups, and pull ups. You are made to perform torturous water training for hours at a time. Swimming. Army crawling. And more swimming. On the first day of Hell Week the sergeants make you take all of your clothes from your suitcase, soak them in the ocean and drag them through the sand and neatly put them back in your suitcase, so your skin is rubbed raw by the sand and water. You’ll have blisters, scabs, and open wounds the entire week and just when it couldn’t get any worse, you’re thrown into the salty ocean for the thousandth time.

There is a constant yelling, whistling, shoving, insulting, and testing to build your commitment. Soldiers are made to carry boats and huge logs and even each other with literally no sleep in days. Several men have actually died during this training week.

But what makes all of this unbearable is the constant temptation of donuts, coffee, and blankets offered to you if you just quit. Basically, Navy Seal training is created to make the strongest men cry. They want to weed out the weak links. But in reality, what they’re doing is strengthening their soldiers. Because the drill sergeants know that if these soldiers are going to be effective in combat, they have to be strengthened. They must be brought to a point of breaking, so they can be built back up.

Sometimes God allows us to go through extreme circumstances to break us. And we’re given a choice. Choice #1. Quit on God. Which usually involves getting angry, getting depressed, getting deeper into sin, and therefore staying broken. Or choice #2. Have an experience of repentance where God is allowed to build you back up the way He wants. See, God was preparing Jonah in the belly of the fish. He wanted to break Jonah, not so that he would quit and give up, but so he would repent and have spiritual breakthrough.

Sometimes God puts us through terrible circumstances to bring about spiritual breakthrough, starting with repentance.

There were some lessons that Jonah learned in the belly of the whale that radically changed his life and moved him to a new level of spirituality. In my next few posts I’m going to investigate the lessons learned in the digestive system of a fish.