BIAY - Finding a way
2 Samuel 14-17, Psalm 74
Welcome to the Bible in a Year for 2025. Intro to this series and resource links available here, plus here’s how I’m approaching this year.
Scriptures for Today:
Reflection:
A way back (14:13-14) - The context for this line is Joab’s scheme to get King David to allow his son Absalom to return from having fled after killing his brother Amnon. (If you ever think your family is messed up, remember the “heroes” of the Bible!) There are clues throughout the Bible that point to the character and actions of God revealed in Jesus. Verse 14 includes one: “But that is not what God desires; rather, he devises ways so that a banished person does not remain banished from him.” This is the Garden of Eden to the Garden of Gethsemane summarized in a single sentence. The Gospel is about God devising a way for every child who has gone their own way to “not remain banished from him.”
“For the Lord had determined…” (17:14) - A question we often wrestle with is whether we have free will and personal agency to direct our future or if everything is predetermined and simply unwinding. Those who do not believe in the reality of free will might be religious people who believe that God foreordained and set everything in place from the beginning. They can just as easily be non-religious people who believe that history is nothing more than the unfolding of an inevitable chemical chain reaction, including in our brains, making the “choices” that we think we are making. The biblical story seems to dodge the either/or. It paints a picture of God creating humans with capacity to choose good and evil and commanding them to do good. I do believe in “free will.” Yet, passages like this one are reminders that God also works within history to bring his vision to fruition. David sent Hushai to be a spy in Absalom’s ranks. And Hushai craftily proposed alternative advise to Absalom that was plausible and believable. These are portrayed in the narrative as cunning human choices. Still, this sentence reminds us that God is still at work, even if mysteriously, to bend certain events in certain ways: “For the Lord had determined to frustrate the good advice of Ahithophel in order to bring disaster on Absalom.” We ought to be humble about our ability to pick out when and how we believe God is working to shape human events—we’re too given to motivated reasoning to be that confident about our proclamations in real time. But there’s definitely a place for acknowledging that we do not live in a merely deist universe that God has created, wound up, and let run its course. God is alive and active in the world.
Questions:
What else might the Holy Spirit be speaking with you about in the text today?
Prayer: Lord, thank you that your ways are higher than mine and that you have intervened in human history with the saving grace of Jesus Christ. Amen.
“But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.” (Matthew 13:23)
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Praise the Lord.