God will devise plans so as not to keep an outcast banished forever from His presence.

 

Monday, August 7, 2023


Psalm 90

2 Samuel 14:4-24

John 10:40-11:16


Observance: John Mason Neale, priest, hymn writer (d. 1866)


God will devise plans so as not to keep an outcast banished forever from His presence.


There was a theory going around once that, as all theories do, hold up for as long as one keeps it more as folk wisdom rather than divine law. It suggested that an individual’s political leanings reflect their family situation: where people voted conservative, their homes would have happy relationships, and the inverse was true for those who voted progressive. This all relied on the idea that if one was unable to resolve their personal relationships, they would outsource them to the government to solve. As an armchair philosophy it is not such a bad one, in that the theory itself is laughably brittle, yet the underlying thought process is sound. And the underlying thought process is that there is a universal human desire for happy family relationships.


David’s family has all the hallmarks of an umpteenth season of a daytime waiting-room soap opera: Joab seems to think life has to be led by a succession of various schemes; Ammon suffers from uncontrolled lust; Tamar enters the scene and leaves it again merely to be an unhappy victim of a most heinous crime; Absalom, demanded so by honour, does the only thing he can do; and the father, king David, is the type of man whom to be around feels like walking on eggshells. This is not a happy family.


It leads one to think of another family held together merely because God desires it: the church. In no other social grouping could you have the type of people that the church has. If we met each other anywhere else, I am certain our opinions of one another would range from pleasant acquaintance to outright repulsion. We do not all support the same sports team, or even all follow sports teams at all. Political opinions stretch the definition of a political spectrum. Even hymn preferences within the church would be reason for a greater schism than the Great Schism of 1054. Yet we are held together by something far superior than any human bond. Each one of us has been estranged from our heavenly Father; Ammon and Absalom have better reason to be good brothers than we do to be children of God. Yet God, before the foundation of the world, devised the plan that would bring us together with each other and Him in an unbreakable bond of love. Through the blood of Christ we have been reconciled with God. Through the blood of Christ we also love one another, just as God loves us.

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