There are no wasted words in scripture. At least, I’m not having
much luck finding any.
The apostle John says that if everything Jesus did were
written down, the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. Sanctified hyperbole? Maybe. But what is
certain is that we’d need tractor trailers to carry our Bibles to church and bigger
doors on our buildings. Much bigger. Add a few more unnecessary details to our
Old Testaments, and we’d have to leave them at home. Except of course that our
homes would not be big enough, and we couldn’t afford to own all the volumes.
The Holy Spirit is not just the world’s greatest-ever
writer, he is also the world’s greatest-ever editor. We get exactly what we
need and no more. No detail is frivolous.
An example: Abishag the Shunammite. The first four verses of
1 Kings are all about Abishag. She basically served as King David’s pre-electricity electric blanket in his old age. As is so often the case with people of advanced years, try
as he might, David could never get warm. So his servants found him a beautiful
young virgin to lie in his arms. The writer pointedly adds, “the king knew her not.” The issue was not sex but body heat. David was apparently past all that.
But the first-time reader quite rightly says, “Huh? What’s
the point of that?” It seems like an irrelevant, quirky detail, as it does in
verse 15 of the same chapter when the writer of Kings notes that Abishag was attending David when his wife
Bathsheba came to see him about an attempted coup being plotted by his son
Adonijah.
Why? Who cares? What does Abishag’s presence have to do with
anything? There are literally thousands of times in scripture that characters
speak to one another without the writer noting the names of others who were
present at the time. Why this one? We know nothing about Abishag’s character or
personality, she contributes exactly nothing to the exchange between David and Bathsheba,
and we will never be told the ending to her personal story. She is a
non-entity, utterly beside the point.
But as they say, “Wait one.” Or in this case, wait until one
chapter later, when Adonijah asks his brother Solomon for Abishag’s hand in
marriage by way of manipulating Solomon’s mother, Bathsheba, and gets himself summarily dispatched for his effrontery, one of three significant royal executions that, along with the expulsion of
Abiathar from the priesthood, serves to establish King Solomon’s throne.
So that’s what the first four verses of 1 Kings are about. Abishag
looks like an irrelevancy, but she is actually the maguffin in a very important episode of Israelite political intrigue. Sure, Abishag’s “story
arc” is interrupted by the accounts of Adonijah’s attempt to become king,
Solomon’s anointing and David’s death, but it resolves itself unobtrusively and
with no little significance some way down the road, as do so many of the
seemingly irrelevant details we find in our Bibles.
* * * * *
Speaking of David, one obvious purpose of the books of
Samuel and Kings is to serve as a useful caution to all who may desire the responsibility of leading God’s people.
If we were to assess the significance of Bible characters by
wordcount, few would match David. Technically, his story begins in Ruth, then spans from 1 Samuel 16 through 1 Kings 2, a staggering
42 chapters. On top of that, he wrote at least 50% of the psalms in the third-longest book in the Bible, and is mentioned 58 times by the writers of the New Testament, which arguably ranks him behind only Abraham and Moses in
that department.
Like many of us, David’s life flip-flops between shining
example and cautionary tale. A forty-year reign, unprecedented conquests of
Israel’s enemies, reuniting a divided kingdom, bringing the ark into Jerusalem,
almost complete consistency in his devotion to his God, making preparations for
Solomon’s temple, and a tendency toward unusual, gracious and often Christ-like
displays of loyalty and love toward his enemies. These all stack up on David’s plus
side. On the other hand, his adultery with Bathsheba, his betrayal and murder
of Uriah, his numbering of the fighting men of Israel, his awful track record
as a father and husband, and his chronic inability to keep his most trusted lieutenants
under control serve to blemish his memory.
In other words, he’s portrayed as a believable, flawed human
being who succumbed less frequently to the temptations offered by incredible
power and authority than almost any other monarch about whom we have
significant information.
But if David’s reign over Israel serves as any kind of
primer for aspiring leaders in the church, its lessons are hardly encouraging
ones. The politics, plots and shenanigans during David’s reign are non-stop. From his time on the run and seven-year wait to become king of Israel as well as Judah, we learn that God’s purposes for leaders may involve a lot of hard learning before we get to serve publicly. From
Absalom’s, Sheba’s and Adonijah’s rebellions, we learn that even religious
people are remarkably fickle, and that when you are top dog, someone always
wants your job. From Ahithophel and Abiathar we learn that even one’s most trusted
aides and co-workers may decide to stab you in the back at any time. From the
Benjaminites, we learn that there are often those among the people of God who
are self-serving and bear such intense grudges that they may never be placated.
From the Gibeonite debacle, we learn that the sins of the past may come back to
bite you, even when you personally had nothing to do with them. From Joab, we
learn that when you give orders they will rarely be followed to the letter, and
certainly never in the spirit they are intended. From the Bathsheba episode, we
learn that even the best men can take a serious tumble off their pedestals. Let
anyone who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall. From the numbering of the fighting men, we learn that one unusually bad idea
can hurt an awful lot of comparatively innocent people.
Don’t get me wrong: there are always faithful, loyal
servants like Barzillai, Hushai and Ittai the Gittite to compensate, and there
are plenty of perks in being king. Just don’t imagine it’s a walk in the
park ... unless the particular park you have in mind is somewhere on the Golan Heights.
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Photo courtesy David Shay [CC BY-SA 3.0].
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