SDfAoWOP: the child

Day Twenty-five

2 Samuel 12:14

He said, “While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept, for I said, 'Who knows whether The Lord will be gracious to me, that the child may live?' But now he is dead. Why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me.”

That is always the question, “who knows whether The Lord will be gracious to me?” We ask it in a hundred ways as we go about our lives, doing the things that we think will make us happy, taking the things that we think we need. What David thought, when he looked out and saw Bathsheba, what led him to think that The Lord had not been gracious, had not given him all that he needed, so that he reached out and took the life and future of another, we don't know. Except that in his ennui he was lingering around Jerusalem looking for something, but not looking for God.

We all fall into it. We all, in the midst of richness and blessing, strain against the margins, go to the farthest point to satisfy our hunger for everything that God hasn't given.

Even then The Lord is gracious. A life comes forth from his hand and is taken immediately into the presence of Mercy, of Grace. Then David has something true to long for. I shall go to him. I will fret and strain and suffer and sin, but then I will go to him. And the sin will have been so redeemed, will have been so taken and forgiven by God's graciousness, that good comes out from it. Every tiny sin, every small forsaking of God to cling more wholly to yourself, every smear of evil, when you cry out to God and ask for forgiveness, all those he takes and weaves them together into the path that you walk on to Glory when you go to him.

Who knows whether The Lord will be gracious? You know, you know when you look up at the one who did not go up, but came down, not that you go up to him, but that he came down to you.