Sacrifice that Costs us Nothing is no Sacrifice at all - Part Three

In which Christianity misunderstands King David for millenia, to our detriment
Lessons on kingship from 2 Samuel 23-24

Shepherd, King…Writer?

Reading the Psalms, it’s easy to see why someone would want to emulate David. He poured out his heart to God, pleaded for mercy, longed for Your friendship. Side by side with 2 Samuel, however, the tension of his life comes into sharp relief: 

He could not be what he wanted to be. 

I understand David’s dilemma; Paul captured it so well in Romans 7: 

“...I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good…for I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.” (Romans 7:15-16, 18-19) 

The difference is, whereas Paul could add, as he does in verses 17 and 20, “Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me” because he lived secure under the new covenant, after the death and resurrection of Jesus, David had no such confidence. He lived in the age of the perpetual slaughtering of animal sacrifices for sin. There was not, yet, that better sacrifice that the author of the Book of Hebrews writes about so beautifully in chapter 10, in such tight logic it is difficult to quote a fragment without laying out the entire passage: 

"For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near. Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sins? But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.

Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said,

 "Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired,
but a body have you prepared for me;
  in burnt offerings and sin offerings
you have taken no pleasure.
  Then I said, 'Behold, I have come to do your will, O God,
as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.' "

When he said above, 'You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings' (these are offered according to the law), then he added, 'Behold, I have come to do your will.” He does away with the first in order to establish the second. And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified." (Hebrews 10:1-13)

*

We writers are our best selves - often imagined, idealized - when we are writing. Many times, this is to the detriment of our lives off the page. We can see where we want to be, how we want to live, what we know will honor God and bring Him glory…so clearly, there on the page. But the moment we stand up and set down the pen, it’s all gone. 

I remember, early on, asking the Lord to give me a heart like David’s. Now I can see the shadow of the double-edged sword I was demanding that He hang over my head. I can also see that before I asked, before I understood that I wanted a heart that would always pursue Him, He also had this similarity between us in mind: a compulsion to write, to think and pray things out on the page to my audience of One.

Our writing is how and where we make sense of these tensions, of our lives, of scripture, of God. If we did not write, we would not grow, and He would not use us, however unwittingly we serve. 

I wonder when David started writing psalms. Was it during his shepherd days, filling the long hours of listening to sheep bleating and steering them out of marshes and lions’ teeth with songs of praise? Or was it in King Saul’s court, desperately composing pleas for help alongside songs to amuse the tortured king? 

Whenever it was, it must have been early: this sort of writing habit is only established once it becomes clear to the writer that not to write would be to die. 

It must have hurt him, thinking about the passion he poured out for the musicians to play before the people, knowing that his life did not reflect the holy intentions of his writing. I wonder if he was surprised to learn, when he entered eternity, that he had been hearing Your voice and doing Your will, that again and again, he had penned words that the Messiah Himself would take as His own - were His own all along - even some of the precious few words He uttered while hanging on the cross, as He completed His most sacred, precious task, the one that David could not complete: self-sacrificial death for His people. 

After all the battles he fought, his greatest achievement in life came out of those lonely, desperate, dark hours spent in doubt, shame, and repentance, as he penned his thoughts, confessions, desires and praise to his Shepherd and his King.

[See Part 1 and Part 2]

Sacrifice that Costs us Nothing is no Sacrifice at all - Part Two

In which Christianity misunderstands King David for millenia, to our detriment
Lessons on kingship from 2 Samuel 23-24

Taking credit for God’s provision

In the closing story of 2 Samuel, David takes a census of the fighting men in his kingdom.  As a refresher, in Exodus 30:12, God told Moses, “When you take a census of the Israelites to count them, each one must pay the LORD a ransom for his life at the time he is counted. Then no plague will come on them when you number them.” 

Bible scholars have made much of this event, in part because in 2 Samuel 24:1, God Himself incited David to count the people, whereas in 1 Chronicles 21:1, it says that Satan incited David to take the census. 

In 2 Samuel 24:10, we learn that “David was conscience-stricken after he had counted the fighting men, and he said to the Lord, “I have sinned greatly in what I have done. Now, Lord, take away the guilt of Your servant. I have done a very foolish thing.”

What are readers supposed to think about the tension between God’s injunction in Exodus and the implication that He prompted David to commit this act? 

The census took nine months and twenty days (2 Samuel 24:8). Did David really only realize his error nearly a year after he started counting? Does that mean he had all that time to reconsider his action, to turn back, to stop counting? How could a man of such deep prayers and thoughts of God go such a long time ignorant of the consequences he was bringing to bear on his country?

I have a feeling that the answer has something to do with the exploits of David’s mighty men, and with other seemingly impossible victories throughout Israel’s relationship with God, like Samson’s, like the defeat of Jericho by marching around the walls, and Gideon’s defeat of Moab with only 300 men. In every instance, it was not the strength of the army nor the number that won the day, but the Lord. With Him, what appears to be necessary isn’t actually necessary at all. He can wipe out an army with a song, as in 2 Kings 19:35 when He wipes out 85,000 Assyrians without a single soldier of Israel lifting his weapon.

So for David to count his fighting men was an act of pride in his resources rather than in the Lord to protect his kingdom: a forgetting of the ways in which God had protected him in the past, when his resources were few. 

Three options: Choose one

My next question has to do with the word of the Lord that comes to David after he prays for the removal of his guilt, in the form of Gad the prophet, David’s personal seer. The Lord tells Gad, “Go and tell David, ‘This is what the Lord says: I am giving you three options. Choose one of them for Me to carry out against you.”

At the start of chapter 24, it says that the Lord was angry with Israel. The Lord has caused David to act in a way that has brought down a punishment against Israel, as its kingly representative. He will take away David’s guilt, but He will do so at Israel’s expense. And what is more, He gives David the choice as to the nature of the punishment. 

It is only as I ask, ‘what does it mean for God to give David the choice of discipline?’ that I understand that God has hidden a personal test of David the King within the bigger narrative. 

Sacrifice that Costs us Nothing is No Sacrifice at all - Part One

Lessons on kingship from 2 Samuel 23-24
In which Christianity misunderstands King David for millenia, to our detriment

What exactly does it mean to be a person after God’s own heart?

I’ve been overtired and disgruntled after weeks of schedule disruption and uncertainty as we deal with my three year old son’s development and sleep regression. So as I came to 2 Samuel 23 in my Bible reading the other day, I was not expecting anything particularly rich. I was disheartened by the thought of the long slog of disappointing kings on the road to exile, waiting for me after 2 Samuel comes to a close. But since it was the first morning in a long while that I’ve had a solid bit of time to devote to God, I asked Him to open His Word to my understanding, and tucked in.

When I started to read, it didn’t take long for me to remember that the Spirit of God is the One who brings the Word of God to life, and He has an infinite number of things to show us. 

The arc of the books of Samuel is an intimate account of the establishment of the monarchy in Israel, beginning with Hannah’s dedication of her yet-to-be-conceived son to God, and followed by God’s call to the dedicated boy, Samuel, to be His prophet: the man by whom He selected first Saul, then David, to be king. 

It is hard to imagine another character in the Bible who is better known than David, with so many of his thoughts, actions, and words laid bare in the books of 1 & 2 Samuel, 1 Chronicles, and the Psalms. He is a shadow of Christ, and His ancestor, to whom the Messiah is promised to come out of his lineage. Of him it is said that he is “a man after God’s own heart” - an often repeated phrase in Protestant Christianity, usually used to imply that we should aspire to be like David, as though there is something inherent in him that warrants admiration. He has been memorialized in marble by Michaelangelo, idolized in Sunday school, and emulated by the writers of worship songs to this day. 

However, I wonder if it is not that he has a heart like God’s, but rather that he is after God’s heart - in a constant state of pursuing Him, going after Him and His will - that we need to understand and strive for in our own lives. No matter how much we may want a heart like God’s - or David’s - we cannot simply make it so. But we can go after Him. We can commit to pursuing His heart and His will no matter what happens in our lives. 

That we can do.

*

From a forgotten shepherd boy to God’s anointed, to unlikely war hero, to favored court musician, to unjustly hunted man, 1 Samuel follows David’s young manhood, as the Lord prepares him to take on the responsibilities of kingship. 2 Samuel opens on David’s established reign as king, and goes on to describe unflinchingly the good, the bad, and the truly horrific acts of his kingship. 

To be honest, by the time I get to the end of 2 Samuel, I am getting tired of David. It is hard for me to watch him transform from a tender young man hungry to know God and committed to justice and righteousness, to a privileged king who murders and rapes, who ignores and covers up the sins of his sons at the expense of his daughter and his people. 

As his kingdom falls apart, it is hard to remember that David loves the Lord totally, knows him better and more roundly than nearly anyone who ever lived, save for a handful of other notables (like Enoch, Abraham, Moses, and Elijah). He never loses faith in his God, and he runs to Him when he sinned, rather than hiding from him. He is also a prophet of the Lord. 

In chapter 22, we are given a brief respite from the mayhem of David’s latter years; we are reminded of the man who still exists underneath the degradations of power. The reminder comes by his own words, for 2 Samuel 22 is Psalm 18 repeated in its entirety: one of the Messianic Psalms that points to the sacrifice of Jesus to come, and of His complete and eternal triumph for His people.

It is no random chance to find a Psalm - this Psalm in particular - at the end of 2 Samuel. David’s heart is laid bare in the Psalms that he wrote; in these prayerful poems, we can see that David understands his humble place under God. Without them, with only his recorded actions to go on, we might come to a very different conclusion about this king. The thing about David is that, while he gets catastrophically distracted by his good fortune again and again, he never completely loses sight of the One Who has made it all possible, the One Who is the true king over Israel. 

And the writer of 2 Samuel wants to make sure that we don’t lose sight of Him, either.

A Toddler-sized Saudade

 

I find myself wrestling with a specific sort of sadness, one I haven’t experienced in a long while.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that I may never live in the US again, and therefore rarely be in close proximity to family and old friends. I’ve given up my longing for the cold, for deciduous trees, for a whole host of things. I’m starting to be familiar with the simultaneous tug of joy and sorrow, at least as it is proscribed in the walk with Christ.

But over a period of couple months, I’ve found myself increasingly wrung out over an extended goodbye, in such a way that it almost feels like it portends something. (In my long sojourn in the prophets, I’ve come to have a wary understanding of symbolic actions and scenarios. I’ve learned that the Lord is accustomed to using strange and repetitive things to get our attention and cause us to think outside our usual patterns. This is what fuels prophetic thought and speech: a heightened awareness of what the Lord is doing in the present that foreshadows what He will do in the future, by relating what is happening in the present to what He has done in the past.)

Sometime in late summer, my little son Ernesto, who had just turned two, started playing with some neighborhood babies his age, facilitated by their nannies/grandmothers, etc. I didn’t notice right away, because I dislike spending time outside in peak Hanoi heat, but I did notice when Nen began talking about ‘Cay’ and ‘Ahreen’. Nen’s nanny Nga explained that “Cay” was a little Vietnamese boy and “Ahreen” a Korean girl. As the weather began to cool, I joined him outside sometimes and observed this tiny toddler friendship. 

Cay is an energetic, acrobatic little guy who likes to pretend he’s a superhero, and climbs and zooms around with an ease that is far advanced of Nen’s abilities. But Ahreen (we later learned that her name is actually Ayun; her nanny could not pronounce it) is a quiet girl who likes to swing and paddle calmly around on a seated scooter. Without any words between them, she and Nen would get on the scooter together and roll around the circular drive-around that connects our 4-building apartment complex, in our quiet suburb. Their little hands casually resting on each other, they spent their outside time in peace that seemed, to my unaccustomed eyes, unusual for toddlers.

When Nen was inside for the day, he talked about Ayun. When I began working part time at HIF, I always make sure to ask how his day was when I returned home. “Did you have fun? What did you do today, Nen?” His response invariably was “Cay” and “Ahreen” – even if he hadn’t seen them that day. I learned from Nga that Ayun also talked about Ernesto.

He and Ayun have a special connection. They make each other laugh. They are gentle together, never making each other unhappy. Watching them together became one of the highlights of my day, a great joy – what mother does not delight in watching her son grow in kindness and gentleness?

So it was with some dismay when I learned in December that Ayun’s family was returning to Korea, with no plans of returning to Hanoi. As the children are so young, it seemed very unlikely that they will see one another again. So young, in fact, that they are equally unlikely to carry any personal memories of this early, precious friendship with them into their childhoods.

I was, and am, heartbroken by this thought. I suppose in some unspoken part of my brain, I had been imagining a lengthier friendship, one that grew as they did, shaping their lives and ours in its sweetness.

* 

Due to a language barrier compounded by my lack of either Viet or Korean, and Ayun’s Vietnamese nanny’s limited English, we did not know when exactly the final parting would come. Each time they played became more charged with this impending final farewell. Was this the last time? The babies’ sweet tendency to have drawn out goodbyes, with both of them yelling, ‘BYE BYYYYYYYYYE’ over and over at each other before being removed by their respective caregivers, only exacerbated the knowledge of their soon to be final goodbye. 

I held up my sadness to the Lord, asking for Him to keep both children physically and emotionally and, if possible, to protect and preserve their memories of one another.

A strange thing began to happen. We learned the family would leave for Korea before Tet, the lunar holiday. They would move into temporary housing, outside our complex, before their flight. Before that, they would vacation for a week at the beach.  As January ticked closer to February, we had a series of goodbyes we thought were final, and I would return home deeply saddened; Ernesto’s every mention of her name was a small lance of pain.

I added her name to our prayers at night; he woke every morning with her name in his mouth.

And then the next day we would see her again. A series of strange delays and mishaps contributed to ‘just one more’ playdate. Every single one was a delightful surprise.

Even COVID lent itself to another day, as their travel plans were delayed due to the most recent outbreak, which came conspicuously timed just before Tet after months of zero cases in Vietnam.

Every toddler in the neighborhood seemed to be out, as all elementary school children had the day off, an early start to Tet in an attempt by the government to slow the spread of the virus. It became an impromptu sendoff for Ayun. Nen and his Ahreen swung side by side, took turns on the slide, and watched the other kids. 

They seemed to hug more than usual, and I wondered whether it was possible that they understood, somehow, that this was the last time they would play together. One more day of sweetness. As we all rode the elevator in our building for the last time, Ayun and her nanny to the 4^th floor, Nen and Nga and I to the 16^th, their sweet BYE BYYYYYYEEEEs brought tears to my eyes.

The next day, she was gone.

I don’t know how long Ernesto will talk about her, how often he will ask to go outside to play with his Ahreen, whose real name he isn’t even conscious of. How many naps and nights he will include her in his list of people he loves.

This long farewell has gone on long enough, however, to rise into my consciousness as conspicuous. I begin to suspect that the Lord has more in mind than simply responding to my heart-prayers and vicarious sadness over the loss of my son’s little friend.

On one level, I believe that these unexpected “just one more” encounters were gracious gifts from my Lord to both my son and to me. He loves children far more than I ever could, and I know deep in every cell that He has enjoyed watching them together – and watching me experience such a sweet development in my son’s life and personality. I have learned so much from their camaraderie – about Ernesto as a person, about the rich blessing of living in Vietnam with a small pre-bilingual child in a COVID world, and about myself as a mother. 

On another level, I believe that He also has intended this painfully extended farewell to embed itself in my heart. There is something here, or many somethings, that I must not forget – just as I hope Ernesto will not forget Ayun.

Partings are common in the Bible, many of them permanent. At the Lord’s direction, Abram left his family and his home and never looked back. Rebekah did the same to marry Isaac, sight unseen - a picture of post-resurrection believers 'betrothed' to Christ. Joseph. Moses. Rahab. Ruth. The remnant of the Lord’s people carried off to Babylon, like Daniel, Esther, Nehemiah. All of these partings came with bitter tears of separation, an uncertain future without hope of reunion, and the fading voices and memories of lost people and places.

Even Jesus Himself was forced to flee His homeland to escape the murder of little children very close in age to Ernesto, Cay and Ayun.

As Christians, our most common identity is that of the exile – a people without a homeland, without a permanent residence, traveling toward a destination, a God we have not seen but have been promised will be ours in the end: Christ.

We can trust that promise because He alone experienced the ultimate undoable separation – death – and by His resurrection tore a hole in it, making it a journey and not a destination, making Himself the gateway between the temporal world and eternity.

Over the past year and a half, I have been on a journey with my emotions. They used to rule me, sadness, depression and anger bottomless, hopeless, aimless. The Lord has been teaching me, softly, patiently, how to feel in obedience to Him – the Man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, Who has born our sorrows and burdens and uncertainties. He has been teaching me how not to fear sadness and grief, but to feel it from within the strong, unbreakable comfort of His hands and His heart, where I abide. To let Him guide me in it and through it to do His will, for the good of those around me. I can do this because the scarred hands and heart that built the universe will also, without fail, knit it all back together again better than before, removing every sorrow, undoing every separation, wiping every tear from our eyes.

The great tentmaking traveler Paul, who I think must be the man most well-versed in goodbyes in the Bible, was the one who captured the tension we must live with, those of us in Christ who are still subject to the physical laws of this earth: “Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Corinthians 6:10).

*

As I was pressing into this toddler-sized grief, feeling pain for the loss of Ayun on Ernesto’s behalf, this tension of “both sorrowful and full of joy” reminded me of something. One of my favorite words in any language also happens to be one that isn’t easily translated into English: the Portuguese Saudade.

The concept has many definitions, including a melancholy nostalgia for something that perhaps has not even happened. It often carries an assurance that this thing you feel nostalgic for will never happen again. Portuguese writer Manuel de Melo called it "a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy."

Supposedly it came about in the early days of Portuguese sea-exploration, when a ship setting sail to seek out new worlds meant, for the crew, near-certain permanent separation from everything and everyone they had ever known.

A handful of other attempts to grapple with saudade include:

- a mixture of melancholic longing or yearning coupled with a sense of loneliness and incompleteness

- a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future

- a nostalgic longing to be near again to something or someone that is distant, or that has been loved and then lost; ‘the love that remains’.

It occurs to me that saudade is the naked state of every individual human soul. This ‘vague and constant desire’, this longing and loneliness and incompleteness, this feeling of having lost something very dear, just out of sight in space and time, reminds me of Ecclesiastes 3:11, which says that God “has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”

I’m not the only one to connect with this.

Philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ.”

“Humans are searchers, desperately looking for the right measure of worldly desires to fill the hole in their heart. It may be work, or pleasure, or drink. It might even be your husband, or food, or Kentucky basketball. When Adam committed that first sin, we became estranged from God, and the hole was opened, a hole we have been trying to fill with everything but the One who is perfectly designed to satisfy.” - Anonymous

C S Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “If I find myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

There is so much truth in this. It is as complex and difficult to be contained – or explained - as so many of our experiences throughout our lifetimes. I long for Ayun to stay, for she and Ernesto to somehow remain friends, lifelong friends, to remember and reunite in all their adorable camaraderie. Ultimately, at the bottom of it all, I long for Christ to return for us and make all this right, to end the exile and the parting of friends forever.  

                           

The Lord is my worship leader

[Note: I was thinking about how I started this blog initially as a way to log my relationship with Jesus. I think I got away from that idea a bit, but I’ve been wanting to go back to that. After I began thinking about it, a friend came up to me at church and commented on how much she enjoyed my blog (one of my 3 readers, haha). So here I am, back at the keyboard for an update. I'm thinking that I'll post little bits as they come, rather than gear up for big posts for awhile.]

So, I have a terrible untrained voice, and I can’t hold a tune or note, so singing has always brought out some self-conscious anxiety that I have to determine to get over for the Lord in worship. It seems that the Lord has been encouraging me to sing, to give myself up to it. From time to time during worship, I sense Him guiding my voice, sometimes for a whole song, sometimes only a line or two. I can barely hear myself over the worship team, but I sense that my voice lifts into some harmony (rarely the melody). 

The point is, He works unaided by my musical ignorance or vocal cords.

I have a recurring sense that the Lord is singing with me. He lifts my voice to meet others’ in what becomes, for a moment, a tiny microcosm of harmony within the greater medley. I’ve begun to hunger for these moments and feel His delight in them. I feel my face beaming in genuine smile when it happens. It’s exciting to realize the Lord’s presence in this way. When I’m chasing His voice, I lose self-consciousness in my desire for our harmony.

It occurs to me that this is how He works as our Head, bringing us together in every area of our lives and in our work for Him. It is just like Him to pick an area of my life that I haven’t even considered working on, that is ‘hopeless’ to me – so hopeless that I don’t bother about it – to demonstrate how He is in complete control. If He wants me to worship Him with my voice, then by golly, I will, even despite myself. He even makes it sound good from time to time!

If I was the only one singing, it would be a sad and possibly scary worship time! But in step with my brothers and sisters and the Spirit, He draws a symphony out of us. That's something worth singing about.