Video Transcript: Strange and Terrible

When I looked at our Bible reading plan, I decided I had to preach on this passage because it is today's Bible reading. And I didn't think we could just leave it in a service, read it, and then just let it drop. It's just too messy and too nasty. And that was not something I was very happy about. I've never preached on this passage before, I probably would not have chosen to preach on it if it just weren't there in the Bible plan, if it weren't sticking right in the middle of a church service that I have to preach in. And so, I figured I better preach on it today. It is a very strange and terrible passage in many ways. And yet, after having studied it and meditated on it, I also received great benefit from it. And I hope that you do too.

“Now there was a famine in the days of David for three years, year after year. And David sought the face of the Lord. And the Lord said, “There is blood guilt on Saul and on his house, because he put the Gibeonites to death.”  So, the king called the Gibeonites and spoke to them. Now the Gibeonites were not the people of Israel, but of the remnant of the Amorites. Although the people of Israel had sworn to spare them, Saul had sought to strike them down in his zeal for the people of Israel and Judah.”

Let me give you just a little bit of background on the Gibeonites for those of you who might not remember. The Gibeonites were part of those Canaanite peoples who were supposed to be wiped out in the original taking of the land. God had waited 430 years and waited until these peoples were so bad that He decided it was time for them to be wiped out. And then he sent the people of Israel out of Egypt to take that land. But the Gibeonites had heard what God had done in Egypt and what He was doing. And so, they wanted to find a way somehow to live. And so, they came to Joshua. And they came wearing their oldest dirtiest clothes, and with some bread that they left lying around to get moldy for several days. And they said, “We come from a far, far country, but we’d like to make a treaty with you.” They didn't want to admit that they were right in the land, and that they were among the people who were targeted. And so, Joshua said, “Well sure.” And he got together the leaders of Israel, they made a treaty with these people who they thought lived at some distance and they promised to be at peace with them and to get along with them. Well, once they had made that promise, they really couldn't go back on it.

Joshua made peace with them and made a covenant with them to let them live. And the leaders of the congregation swore to them… All the leaders, later on, after they found out what was going on., they said to the congregation, “We’ve sworn to the Lord, the God of Israel, and now we may not touch them. This we will do to them, let them live, lest wrath be upon us, because of the oath that we swore to them. “So, they became cutters of wood and drawers of water for all the congregation.” They became kind of second-class citizens, they were always under a protected status, because of the promise and the covenant that had been made with them. 

And evidently Saul had decided on his own that he was going to wipe them out a couple 100 years after this peace treaty had been made. And he didn't quite succeed, but he killed an awful lot of them. And now this famine has come upon Israel. And David, goes to God, asks why. And he finds out it's because of what Saul did to the Gibeonites. And David said to the Gibeonites, “What shall I do for you? And how shall I make atonement, that you may bless the heritage of the Lord?” 

The Gibeonites said to him, “It is not a matter of silver or gold between us and Saul or his house; and neither is it for us to put any man to death in Israel.” And he said, “What do you say that I shall do for you?” They said to the king, “The man who consumed us and planned to destroy us, so that we should have no place in all the territory of Israel, let seven of his sons be given to us, so that we may hang them before the Lord at Gibeah of Saul the chosen of the Lord.” 

And the king said, “I will give them.” But the king spared Mephibosheth, the son of Saul’s son Jonathan.” Remember he was the one who have been dropped when he was a little boy and had been crippled and handicapped from then on, “because of the oath of the Lord that was between them, between David and Jonathan, the son of Saul. The king took the two sons of Rizpah the daughter of Aiah, whom she bore to Saul, Armoni and Mephibosheth and the five sons of Merab, the daughter of Saul, whom she bore to Adriel, the son of Barzillai the Meholathite; and he gave them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they hanged them on the mountain before the Lord, and the seven of them perished together. They were put to death in the first days of harvest, at the beginning of barley harvest.”

I'll put it on pause real quickly a minute for a word about Rizpah, the mother of two of those and Merab, the mother of five. Merab almost married David. She was Saul’s oldest daughter. You remember the tale of David and Goliath? King Saul said that anybody who kills Goliath, “I'll give great riches, and I'll give him my daughter.” And then afterward Saul said to David, “Here's my elder daughter Merab. I will give her to you for a wife. Only be valiant for me and fight the Lord’s battles.” And he was hoping, David would get killed in one of those battles. But David won the battles and then when David came back, “At the time when Merab Saul's daughter, should have been given to David, she was given to Adriel the Meholathite for a wife.” So, here's a woman who should have been David's wife, who ends up the mother of five sons by another man, who end up being killed. 

Then Rizpah, the other one is a concubine, kind of a second- class wife, among Saul’s wives, and she had been caught in some tug-of-wars before. After the death of Saul, there was a struggle between Saul’s son Ishbosheth and David for leadership of the kingdom. And Abner was Ishbosheth’s general as he had been Saul's general before. And Saul had this concubine, whose name was Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah and Ishbosheth said to Abner, “Why have you gone into my father's concubine?” Then Abner was very angry over the words of Ishbosheth and said, “Am I a dog's head of Judah. To this day, I keep showing steadfast love to the house of Saul your father, yet you charge me today with a fault concerning a woman.”

Now we don't know who was at fault or what, but the accusation was made, and Rizpah was the one that the arguing was about. And so, she's just kind of caught in the middle of this power struggle with Abner and the man who wants to be king, Ishbosheth. And so now again, you've got Rizpah caught in a bind where her two sons are killed, because of some famine that's supposed to then rescue the land from this famine. “Then Rizpah, after the sons are killed and hanged, she took sackcloth, spread it for herself on the rock, from the beginning of harvest, until rain fell upon them from the heavens. And she did not allow the birds of the air to come upon them by day, or the beasts of the field by night.”

Now the artist probably got a little too carried away in light of later, biblical revelation in depicting this hanging. They may have been hanged on a tree by a rope or they may have been impaled on poles where they would just stick it up through the middle of the person and leave them dangling in the air. None of them are real, appealing pictures. But anyway, one way or another these men were hanged and Rizpah is defending their bodies from being eaten by various critters. And the bodies are just rotting there while she is guarding them and probably last for a period of up to five months, that she's out there camping, guarding the bodies of her two sons and the other five men who were killed. 

“When David was told what Rizpah the daughter of Aiah the concubine of Saul, had done, David went and took the bones of Saul and the bones of his son Jonathan, from the men of Jabesh-gilead who had stolen them from the public square of Beth-shan, where the Philistines had hanged them, on the day the Philistines killed Saul on Gilboa. And he brought up from there, the bones of Saul and the bones of his son, Jonathan; and they gathered the bones of those who were hanged. And they buried the bones of Saul and his son Jonathan, in the land of Benjamin in Zela, in the tomb of Kish, Saul's father. And they did all that the king commanded. And after that, God responded to the plea for the land.” This ends the reading of God's word, and God always blesses His Word to those who listen.

This is one among several strange and terrible scriptures. And there are a number of things. In fact, just about everything that that people find troublesome in the Old Testament is one way or another coming through in this passage. There are just some cultural oddities that are very hard for us to understand. And that's one of the challenges of reading very ancient books, even if they're inspired books. Just the cultural oddness to those of us who come from a very different setting. And then there are just the very obvious gross cruelties and terrible things going on. One of those was the command to just wipe out all the Canaanite peoples. I am not going to try to get into that very much today. It's just one of those things when you read the Old Testament: wipe them all out everything that lives in those cities. It makes us shudder and the Gibeonites were among those who had been targeted for that kind of a wipeout.

Slavery is one of those things that’s not very exciting when you read the Bible, and it seemingly goes on and on without a lot of direct contradiction or challenge from the Bible. And so, you have the Gibeonites becoming wood cutters and water carriers, servants. Just a one quick note: slavery then, and servanthood was really quite different from the kinds of slaves that were brought from Africa to be here later on. The slaves at that time, were not owned by others, it was more often a matter of paying off debt or being people in a particular class of society. But nonetheless, however you understand it, it's not a very desirable thing. 

Then there simply is this wrathful God, who lets people starve in a famine, year after year after year, where people are starving because God is angry. Punishing a nation for a dead king’s sins, somebody who has been dead probably for decades. We don't know exactly when this story happened. It almost certainly happened, before some of the events that come before, because this is part of what you'd call an appendix in Second Samuel. It just takes some various events and various people that weren't part of the main storyline throughout the rest of the book, and then it tells these stories as well. But they probably happened, for instance, before the rebellion of Absalom.

But anyway, you have this problem of a nation suffering because of what it's dead king did quite a while ago, does that thought appeal to you? Punishing children, for sins of a father and grandfather? Heroes… David, we've seen a little bit about David that isn't quite as fun as him defeating the big giant enemy. As we've been reading in weeks past: polygamy and mistreatment of women. You have Rizpah, and you have women who are part of a group of wives and whose own feelings seem to be ignored in all this. And it almost sounds like human sacrifice gets the desired result. They kill these guys, and the famine ends. So human sacrifice seems to be fairly good thing in this passage, at least at first glance. So, these are a few of the reasons why I really don't like this passage or didn't very much. 

And I'm not going to try to address all of them, but I do want to move through this part of God's word with you and just find out what God is saying. But just one little thing to keep in mind, whenever you find a passage of the Bible that you just can't stand, they say ugh. Take that one and think about it especially long. Because it is where you don't like something in the Bible, that you are finding out that the world is not exactly the way you figured it out to be. And that God is not exactly the way you figured him out to be. And when something kind of clashes with you, and maybe a story or maybe a command that you just don't like, to you, it's especially important to take the parts of the Bible you don't like very much and think about them more, not just take your five favorite verses and try to feel warm and fuzzy about them.

Family punishment for sin: In the 10 commandments, it speaks of punishing the children for the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me. That just doesn't sound like something we'd like very much. And if this story is not the only one where some people in another generation suffer for what one of their ancestors did. Eli, ”All the descendants of your house shall die by the sword of men.” That’s what God told Eli. Eli had presided over wicked priests, even though he himself, I think, still loved the Lord. And so, his line was just going to be wiped out because he did not stop his sons from doing such wicked things. Now, when you read about people being punished for the sins of the fathers, very often, it's not just that the dads were bad, and the kids were pure as the driven snow, but they're suffering anyway.  Very often, “the generations of those who hate Me” aren't just the ancestor, but the ones that came after as well.

Jeroboam is the king who took over the 10 northern tribes later in Israel's history. And he set up golden calves in two different locations for all the people to worship and got people into very evil practices. And God said, “I will bring harm upon the house of Jeroboam and will cut off from Jeroboam every male.” Now, again, those males He cut off, every king that came from Jeroboam was bad, bad, bad. So, it's not quite like God was just punishing really good guys for what rotten Jeroboam did. They followed right in his tracks, and were just like him, except for one. There was one child of Jeroboam who died when he was a little kid. And when he was sick, the king had sent to a prophet to find out what would happen to him, whether he would live or die. And the prophet sent back and said, “He's going to die and you want to know why he's going to die as a child? He's the only one in your house that have any use for.” And so, he lets the little one die, exactly so he won't grow up to be another Jeroboam, it seems.

And then you have the house of Ahab. Ahab, the whole house shall perish. Ahab and Jezebel were this wicked king and queen and again, their descendants who perished were not outstandingly wonderful people. They were horrible, because they were generations of those who hated the Lord as well. So sometimes just the sins and the evils were passed from generation to generation. We don't know that for sure, in this case, what kinds of guys these sons and grandsons of Saul were? Some wonder whether they participated in the massacres of the Gibeonites themselves? Although it would seem, probably they would have been too young for that. We just don't know for sure. 

But the fact remains, that there are certain things in the Bible that indicate that what you do can affect your offspring. That much, it seems to be quite clear. Now, it says for 1000 generations of those who love Me, and keep My commandments, and for three or four generations of those who hate Me. So, there is a difference between the impact of God's steadfast love and of His wrath. But nonetheless, the wrath of the children of those who hate Me, is there.

Now, let's just suppose Saul’s sons and grandsons weren't really that terribly bad. I mean, we know they're all fallen sinners. Let’s just suppose they're not especially targeted, because they're the worst guys around. That doesn't seem quite fair. Life doesn't seem quite fair. For most of their lives up until the last day, these guys lived with considerable power, and luxury. What did they do to earn that? They just landed there, because that's who they happen to be and who their ancestors happened to be rich and powerful. And so, they were rich and powerful through no virtue of their own. They died a terrible death, maybe, for no particular sin of their own. We don't know. In this life you land with stuff that you just get from parents, grandparents in the line before you - for better, for worse for riches, or for poverty for life for death. And we say that's not fair.

And we think the only way it could be fair is if each person is going to receive in this life exactly what they deserve without any impact from anybody else. Well, that sounds good in the abstract, except that means that no relationships matter at all. And nobody has responsibility for anything, because you can't actually harm anybody else. And you can't actually benefit from anybody else. Because we're all just a little self-contained universes. And now we're beginning to understand why we think the way we do; we want to be our own little self-contained universe who runs everything, and who gets what we want, and protests only when what seems unjust comes our way. And anyway, we're connected. We're connected via family, sometimes for enrichment, sometimes for our suffering.

There also is very clearly in this passage national punishment for sin. A nation can come under God's judgment. Israel had been in a famine year after year after year. If a nation's leadership does wrong, the whole nation can suffer for it if nothing is done to address the wrongs. It's very clear from this passage, that if Saul the head of the nation, ordered and did terrible things, and those things were never addressed, the nation could suffer for it. Another thing that's pretty clear here is that the people of Israel, God's chosen, are not automatically right in relationship to other peoples. They did wrong in violating their treaty, their promises before God, and killing the Gibeonites.

Some people nowadays think that Israel is automatically right in all of its policies and Palestinians are automatically wrong in their policies. No, the measuring stick is always the same. What is justice? What does God's Word command? Now there are others too many in our world, who think the Palestinians are always right the Israelis are always wrong. My point here is simply that it is not an automatic – that as long as you’re part of one particular nation, whether Israel or America, you're always right, and the others are always wrong. America is not automatically right. In the past, and in the present, America has killed and oppressed and mistreated many. 

America got its foundations in the early 1600s at the expense of native peoples. King James thanked “Almighty God for His great goodness and bounty toward us” for “this wonderful plague among the savages” that was killing millions of Native Americans and clearing the land so that Europeans could move in. In 1623, not that long after the founding of Jamestown and of the Plymouth Colony, British officials in Virginia made a treaty with the natives near the Potomac River and proposed a toast, symbolizing eternal friendship. The chief, his family, his advisors and 200 others drank the toast and dropped dead of poison. These are things that lay the foundation for the nation. Now other events happened too, like the first Thanksgiving, the more positive story that we celebrate in November. But we usually don't remember this one, very much in November, but it's part of the pile of skulls that helps to form the foundation of a great nation. 

Thomas Jefferson just blasted King George for the slave trade when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Then, the convention that was dealing with the Declaration removed all of those portions from the Declaration because they wanted to keep their slaves. Jefferson said of slavery, “I tremble for my country, when I reflect that God is just, his justice cannot sleep forever.” And he tried just about everything he could to get rid of slavery, except freeing the 200 slaves that he owned. They still remained slaves until his death, and then were passed on in his estate. This again, is part of the pile of skulls and the pile of evils that helped to lay the foundation for a nation to be very prosperous and successful.

Abraham Lincoln thought very hard about these things. And Lincoln, when he was writing his second inaugural address reflected on the fact that he had not been trying to get rid of slavery. He had been trying to stop the spread of it and preserve the Union. He had not been trying to get rid of slavery, and of course, the other side had been fighting to maintain and spread it. And he said, “Well, the Almighty has His own purposes and none of us were seeking such a fundamental outcome, but it happened anyway.” And he says, “If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses, which in the providence of God, must needs come,  but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove and that He gives both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due those by whom the offense came. Shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribed to Him?” Lincoln understood that both the North and the South were suffering for terrible sins that had been committed. And he said, they both prayed to the same God and they both think that they are completely right. He says, “What if God is dealing with both in judgment?  Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk,” in other words, all those 250 years of work those slaves were doing without getting paid. What if the nation just loses its whole economy? Well, “and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash on the slaves’ back shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, then, as we said, 3000 years ago, so still, it must be said, “The judgments of the Lord are true, and righteous all together.””

Can you imagine an American politician saying such things today? Can you imagine the outcry that would arise? Lincoln believed that God judges nations. So, did Amos. If you've been reading Amos, you find this formula - for three transgressions of such-and-such a nation and for four I will not revoke the punishment. And then he speaks of Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, the Ammonites, Moab, Judah and Israel. As Amos was preaching here, you can imagine his hearers. He was preaching to people mainly in Israel. He was from Judah himself, and he went to the ten tribes of Israel to preach. And you can imagine that they liked how the sermon started, because God was going to blast Damascus, which was quite a ways away, and he was going to get Gaza, remember those Philistines cities, which was getting little closer, and then Tyre, yeah, they got it coming to them, Edom, that’s Esau’s people that’s getting a little closer. And the Ammonites and Moab, man, they are our neighbors! And then he says Judah, and then he says, Israel. For three of your crimes and even for four I will not revoke the punishment. We like God's announcements of judgment on those enemies that are some distance away. But when He starts talking to us about His judgment on ours, well, the response of the listeners to Amos was, “Get out of here and go back home.  How about this question? Does disaster come to a city unless the Lord has done it? That's a question that God asks through Amos. And then five times God says to Israel, “I punished you with this problem or that plague or that disaster. I punished you, yet you did not return to Me. Prepare to meet your God, oh Israel.” 

Well, he might have a word or two for some other nations I know of and I won't circle the globe. I'll just start right here and cut to the chase. The world leader in producing and selling pornography, the founder of the Playboy philosophy back in the early days of Hugh Hefner, up to the explosion of porn today is the United States of America. The number one purchaser of illegal drugs and hallucinogens and all of that in the world is the United States of America. The world leader in war, and in selling weapons to other nations, selling more than half of all the world's weapons, by the way, is the United States. I don’t know 50-60 million abortions of helpless children and counting. The wealthiest nation in the world living in luxury while many needy people suffer. Claiming largely to be a Christian nation and worshipping and doing just about whatever we please. And then Amos’ question: Does disaster come to a city, New York or Washington or New Orleans, or droughts in Texas or devastated economies? Do these things just kind of happened out of the blue? Whenever they would happen in the past, back when Lincoln was around, people would start praying and scratching their heads and say, “What in the world is going on here? And are there things that are coming home to hit us?” Now, Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright got in a lot of trouble because of the things he said about America because he attributed it to America’s injustice to the poor, the terrible things that happened on 9/11. Jerry Falwell blamed it on abortion and homosexuality and say, “All these guys over there on the right are crazy.” Or “Jeremiah Wright on the left, he’s crazy! What if they were all correct? What if America has a quite a broad array of sins, and God is not just intent on giving us what we want and making us prosperous all the time? That's a very sobering possibility to consider. It may be strange, it may be terrible, but it may also be true.

Now, back to our story. We've talked a little bit about family judgment and national judgment. Now, let's get to the details of this story. What did God say? And what didn't He say? Well, this was a three-year famine, very prolonged, very unusual. So, David understood that it wasn't just some ordinary event. And he asked God the reason for it, and God told him the reason: Saul's mass murder of those Gibeonites had never been publicly condemned, had never been punished. And after telling David that, God did not tell David what action to take. It was David who made the choice to let the Gibeonites decide on the punishment.

So, David had a word from God, but it was only a word about what is the problem. David did not receive the word on what the solution ought to be. He just asked the aggrieved party what they wanted the solution to be. Now, the Gibeonites were not happy with the way they'd been treated. And they were undoubtedly praying to God because later on, David says, “We need them to bless us again.” And so, he says, “What shall I do for you? How shall I make an atonement that you may bless the heritage of the Lord?” They’ve been praying against Israel, and God has been listening to them.

How many people pray against their oppressors, and God hears? Here's an example from the Psalms--there are many like it: “Pour out Your indignation on them and let Your burning anger overtake them. Let them be blotted out of the book of the living.” And there are many of these prayers, where God will smite and smash and do horrible things. And sometimes we don't like those kinds of prayers either. But that's about all some people have. They have no chance to be able to stand up for themselves, they have no power, they can't do anything about it. So, all they can do is cry out to God about these injustices and say, “God, bring on those people what they've been doing to us.” And evidently in some form or another, He heeds those prayers. 

Even in the book of Revelation, there are souls crying out under the altar of heaven and say, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” These are people have been murdered for being Christians, and they’re praying, "How long, Lord till you avenge?" We need to realize that where people are wrong throughout the world, their prayers may be rising up to the Almighty, because He's the only one who can do anything about it. 

Well, David wanted the Gibeonites to be praying more positive prayers and bless the heritage of Israel again. So, he handed over seven of Saul’s family to be killed at their request. Now that was a violation, a very direct violation of a commandment in God's law. God can punish the children for the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generation. But humans are not authorized to say, “Hey, great grandpa was bad, I'm going to kill so and so.” “Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. Each one shall be put to death for his own sin.” David did not need God to reveal that. You don't kill kids and grandkids for what their ancestors did; God had already said so.

David violated the vow he had made. Saul, after David had spared Saul's life and had not killed him when he had the chance, Saul said, "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." And David swore this to Saul. But sometimes, when you're in a position of decision and of power, you have got to make a hard choice and it is a hard choice when all your people are starving. You know, you've got to do something, you’ve got to do it fast. But you might also have a few reasons of your own that are a little less than objective.

Let's go back to Merab for a moment. She was the one who should have married David. What if those five grandsons of Saul had been David's own sons as well? What if Merab had actually become David's wife years earlier and gave birth to five sons by David? Do you think David would have handed over his own five sons to the Gibeonites just because they happened to be Saul's grandsons as well? And let's face it, it was kind of convenient for David to have most of Saul’s family to be wiped out except for the one who was disabled. If Mephibosheth had not been a son of David's buddy, Jonathan, and if he hadn't been disabled, if he had been a possible heir to the throne, do you think David would have protected him? I don't know. That's one of the disturbing things about the Bible. You want pure heroes; I'm not so sure David was. In fact, I know he wasn't pure. We've already seen an awful lot about him in the sermons of the last few weeks. But even in this incident, he broke the law of God, he broke his own promise to Saul. And he may have had some hidden motives for doing so. 

At any rate, Rizpah is the one who bears the brunt of it. We don't know if Merab was still alive, to see her five sons killed or not. But we know that Rizpah was living and was trying doing the only thing she could: try to protect the bodies from the birds. And probably people wondered, “What this crazy old lady was doing out there?” A British rabbi says that Rizpah is “every mother who sees her sons killed before their time for reasons of state, be they in time of peace or in war. All that remains for her is to preserve the dignity of their memory and live on to bear witness and call to account the rulers of the world.” 

Now we read this passage, and it's from a long-ago culture, and it seems very barbaric. On any given year, the President of the United States will send out many young men knowing that some of them will be killed. You may think it's justified; you may think it's not; but the fact is, they are dying for what is considered to be the welfare of the nation. Do not think that we advanced civilized peoples have advanced so far beyond those poor, benighted ancients. More people were killed in the last hundred years by the governments of the world for what was considered their own nation's advancement and wealth than seven, I will guarantee you that. 20 million were killed in World War Two alone and we've got what? Three wars in various parts of the world’s nations that haven’t been attacking us. At any rate, we've got to be very careful when we say, "Boy, that was a ugly, terrible passage. I'm glad we're not like that anymore." A lot more than seven people have died for what is considered to be the well-being of the United States in the last year. One thing that comes through in this passage is you can't rescue the land by defiling the land.

You’ll notice that after the seven are killed, you may have thought human sacrifice worked. It didn't. The seven are dead, and the rain is not falling. It says in the book of Deuteronomy, “If a man has committed a crime punishable by death, and he is put to death and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day.” They didn't do that, did they? “For, a hanged man is cursed by God. You shall not defile your land that the Lord your God is giving you for inheritance.” So again, another violation of God's law, letting those bodies just dangle for weeks and months on end while the mother is desperately trying to protect them.

So, you've got all these competing prayers. You’ve got hungry Israelites who are praying for God to send rain and provide food and end the famine. You’ve got David praying for insight into the cause of the famine. You've got the bereaved and downtrodden Gibeonites, who’ve lost so many people praying for God to judge the family and the nation of the king who killed so many of them. And then you've got poor, heartbroken Rizpah, praying for God to give her executed sons a decent burial, and remove the curse of hanging on a tree and remove their shame. Just think of what it's like to be a king like David competing with all the different demands and challenges. And then think for a moment and then don’t try too hard to think of it, of being God, and hearing lots of prayers from lots of different angles, some of those prayers contradictory. It may be best that we not try to be God.

Finally, it says, “God heard their cry for justice against Saul. But he also heard grief-stricken Rizpah and rain came only after Saul and his family, including these seven men, received lawful burial. Rizpah guarded the bodies until rain fell upon them from the heavens. They buried the bones of Saul and his son Jonathan in the land of Benjamin in  Zela, in the tomb of Kish his father and they did all that the king commanded. And after that, God responded to the plea for the land.” After the bones are buried, and the land is no longer desecrated, then God finally responds to the plea for the land.

Now again, if God chooses to interact with a bunch of wicked, fallen sinners, it is always going to be messy. That's one reason why the Bible is very messy. Not just because in some ways God might be strange and terrible, but He's dealing with very strange and terrible situations and people who have fallen very, very far from Him.

One of the bright spots of this passage is that He is the Lord of the lowly. Why should a powerful king keep an old treaty with a bunch of wood cutters of a different nationality? Who cares? What can they do about it? Who defends their rights? Who avenges them? Somebody does. The king of the nation and a whole future generation of the king’s offspring can go on as though nothing happened. And they can enjoy the benefits of wiping out people and seizing what was theirs. 

When the American Constitutional Convention legitimated slavery, there were some who saw it as a great compromise that was going to keep the nation together and do something wonderful. But one man said, "I believe we have planted the seeds for civil war." And the notion that you can just build a nation when you have millions of people who worked without being paid, and millions of people who lived here before who perished when new settlers came in, but have no negative consequences from that, well, that may be a stretch. If some young men have to die for the nation to prosper, who cares about the old woman crying over her sons and trying to guard their dignity? Nations sometimes forget the millions of mothers whose sons came home in body bags, and we don't realize the extreme price and anguish; but there is somebody who does: God! We don't always understand what He's up to, or why He doesn't take action more quickly or more obviously. But of course, we don't always like it when He does take direct action either, do we? Because that can be pretty dangerous. But the one thing the Bible makes very clear, He is Lord of the lowly. And when the lowly cry out to Him, He does hear.

And now let's get to the bigger picture. Sin reigns, death reigns, and it's because of the interconnectedness of humanity. Sin came into the world through one man and death through sin and so, death spread to all men, because all sinned.” It’s not just that Adam was a rotten egg and we pure innocent people, we die anyway, because of what bad old Adam did. No, Scripture says, “All sin, and so, death reigned.” You know, those seem like big doctrinal statements by Paul. That's one reason why it's important to read the rest of the Bible. You find out what the reign of sin looks like when you see seven guys dangling for something they didn't do, and their bodies rotting and their mother crying. Then you begin to understand what it means that sin reigns and it’s just a mess everywhere. And even those who don't directly do the crimes of their nation are living based on advantages that accrued from the crimes that others committed to get them their wealth and their power in the first place. Sin reigned and death reigned and there are no innocents. “And where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness, leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord. “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord.”

We need to understand the terror of the reign of death and the reign of sin and passages such as the one we've read today will begin to give us an actual feel for that. A sacrifice seems so unjust and sometimes the people who pull it off like David-- think he was unjust. He could have looked for different solutions than ones that broke the law of God. But he did what he did.

There was another man, Caiaphas, who was high priest in a certain year. And he said to the people around him, "You know nothing at all. Nor do you understand that it's better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish." He says, “We've got to bump off this Jesus guy, and it'll be good for the nation.” Well, he had his own evil motives for saying that. But the Bible says, "He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation, and not only for the nation, but also to gather into one the children of God, who are scattered abroad." In the strange and terrible ways of God, a no-good rat, who just wants to bump somebody off for his own convenience, and for the good of the nation, is speaking as a prophet of God, and is explaining the meaning of the death of the Son of God. And so, when we think about what is strange and terrible, we remember, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, by becoming a curse for us. For it is written, Cursed, is everyone who is hanged on a tree."

It is a terrible story, those bodies hanging while a mother guards them. It's a terrible story, that the one truly innocent and perfect person who ever lived is hanging there on a tree with some crying women at the foot of it, looking at His dead body. It is an offense. It is foolishness. And it is God's way. His thoughts are not our thoughts. Neither are His ways, our ways. “As the heavens are higher than the earth,” says God, “so are My thoughts higher than your thoughts, and My ways than your ways.” For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength.” 

You may wish God would just come right now and straighten everything out. If He straightened everything out, He did that once. He did that once; He straightened everything out except for eight people. And even after he had only those eight left, He said, “The thoughts of man's heart are only evil all the time.” And old Noah went out and got drunk and pronounced a curse on his own grandson. So, if you want God to just intervene and make the whole world free of evil, there's a way to do that. And God said, “I am never going to do that again.” And instead, He did this: and that is the strange and terrible way of God. You may wonder at some of these stories you read, but this is the strangest and most terrible of them all. And it is the only reason why we live forever. 

And like Rizpah long ago, Jesus’ female followers gathered there at the cross did not want His body dishonored. Neither did Nicodemus or Joseph of Arimathea. And so, they removed His body from the cross. And they put it in a grave. And finally, it would seem, as Jesus’ disciples said, "We thought He was the hope of Israel, and now He's gone." So, the reign of sin, the reign of death, was finally complete. But not quite.

And that's why we gather every Sunday, because on the first day of the week, He rose again, and the tomb was empty. And He revealed Himself to His dear friend, the apostle John. Later on, He said, "Fear not. I am the First and the Last. I am the living one. I died, and behold, I am alive forevermore. And I have the keys of Death and Hades." He has the keys that can unlock doors for poor Gibeonites who were massacred by Saul. He has the keys that can unlock the godly, devoted, wicked King David, and give him glory forever. He has the keys that could comfort Rizpah, who can rejoice in His presence today, and can comfort every person who lives through the blood and the horror and the strange and terrible world that we inhabit, the one we avoid a lot of the time. But let us face it; sin is within us; death is around us. It will claim all of us. And yet it will not. Because Jesus said, “He who lives and believes in Me will never die.

Let's pray together. 

We thank you Lord, for Your greatness, for Your power, for Your justice, for Your wisdom, for Your mystery, for Your love. Lord, we confess that Your ways are far beyond us. We can't even understand the workings of human behavior and human evils. And so, we ask that You will give us again a heart of trust in You when we don't understand, a heart of praise when we do understand the glad tidings of the gospel. Help Lord, each of us to put our faith in Jesus Christ crucified, the wisdom and power of God. Help us to live in relationship to the living and risen Lord Jesus Christ, to rejoice in Him, to look forward to the day when creation no longer groans under the burden of sin, but when it is released and liberated into the glorious freedom of the children of God. And so we pray, Lord, that You will, in the middle of this muddled and broken world, bring many more people to you. Help us Lord to be a godly influence for You. Forgive our many failings and hasten the day when You come again and make all things new. Come Lord Jesus, come quickly. Amen.