Open—Bill Prost
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Could you sing #193?
All that thou hast, thou hast for me. All my fresh springs are hid indeed.
Day I live well, I confess I nothing am get all possessed 193.
Nsnoise.
That's the Lord's help.
Could we turn please to a scripture that?
Has often been before me, and in fact some of us talked about it a little bit on the trip down here.
Second Samuel, chapter 21.
Second Samuel, chapter 21.
I don't want to spend too long on this because there's enough in this chapter.
For the full address but.
What has been on my heart lately is the need for.
Humility.
Perhaps collectively, but it starts individually.
I don't think anyone would argue that we are living in the last days.
And those last days are detailed to us in Second Timothy chapter 3.
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Where it tells us that perilous times shall come.
And what is listed there is not the character of the heathen world, but rather the character of Christendom.
Unless there be any.
Degree of self satisfaction in our own souls. Let's remember that we are part of Christendom.
And that very often the ruin is felt most.
Among those who, perhaps with the best of intentions, seek to hang on to.
And give.
Testimony to the truth.
Here in Second Samuel chapter 21, we have, I trust, an example for us which is often spoken to my own soul.
Let's read from verse 10.
And then we'll go back and explain. I'm not going to read the whole chapter, but let's read from verse 10.
Andrews, for the daughter of AIA, took sackcloth and spread it for her upon the rock.
From the beginning of harvest until water dropped upon them out of heaven.
And suffered neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day.
Nor the beasts of the field by night.
And it was told David what Risper, the daughter of Elia.
The concubine of salt.
Had done.
Sackcloth in Scripture is a universal and well known type of repentance and humility.
What then occasioned what we just read here? What happened?
Way back in the time of Saul.
A king that Israel desired, but not a spiritual man.
A natural man in the context of the chapter we had before us this morning.
And in his lack of wisdom, he decided that these gibeonites in Israel.
Had to be gotten rid of.
They had been part of the nation's in Canaan whom the children of Israel were told to destroy. But by subtlety, you'll remember, they pretended that they had come from a far country and they sought to make an alliance with Israel.
Joshua, instead of looking to the Lord and asking the Lord what to do, went ahead and made that alliance.
And Israel was caught. They could not go back on their word, and they ended up in Israel in perpetuity. But they were made, as it says, to be hewers of wood and drawers of water.
But so.
Actually profane the name of the Lord by going after them and trying to destroy them.
And here's one important point. God doesn't always settle things right away.
Because we're not told that anything happened in Saul's reign.
But here, way on in David's reign, long after Saul was gone, long after David had been on the throne, there's a famine in Israel for three years, and when David inquires of the Lord, he is told that it is for Saul and for his bloody house, because he slew the Gibeonites.
That's an important point that we'll just make briefly without dwelling on it, and that is that sometimes we have to go back in the past in order to look for the reason that the Lord has allowed something either in our personal lives.
Or perhaps among us collectively.
Well, sad to say, while David did inquire of the Lord as to the reason for the famine.
It doesn't seem that he asked the Lord what to do for the solution.
Instead, he asked to.
And as we would say in modern language, they were out for blood.
They wanted revenge.
And they said, we want seven men of the family of Saul.
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We want them to be killed and they even use spiritual language to.
Put a nice spiritual.
Covering over it all, they said we're going to hang them up unto the Lord and give you.
Whom the Lord did choose, Almost as if saying, The Lord chose that man's soul to be king, and look what he did.
So we're going to hang up seven of his sons as revenge for what he did.
And David went along with it.
Very, very sad.
It was allowed of God, yes, but it was rather a sad way to deal with the matter.
But at any rate, it happened.
And they're hung up there.
And those bodies were left.
Dead bodies, as they did in those days, for whatever desecration happened, either from the birds of the air during the day or the beast to the field by night.
You and I recoil at the very thought of such things, but it was rather common and done quite frequently, sad to say, in the history of mankind.
And here's this woman, Rizpah.
She was a concubine of soul. She didn't even have the status.
Of a wife she was a concubine. You may remember earlier in the same book of Second Samuel.
She was the occasion of a dispute between.
The son of Saul, a man by the name of Ishbasha, whom Abner, the captain of Saul's host, tried to put on the throne of Israel. And then Ishbosheth made an accusation about something Abner supposedly had done in connection with this woman. And Abner, as a result, was very angry with this Bosheth and said, I'm going to turn the Kingdom over to David.
Here she is having had two sons.
And there were other sons of Saul, the son of his daughter Mirab, apparently.
And all seven of them, two of Rizpah's sons and five of Murab's sons, all hung up there dead.
Has revenge to satisfy the.
What was she to do?
Was it a right way to handle it? No, it wasn't.
And more than that, it was against the law.
They were told clearly in the law in Deuteronomy that if they were to hang a man's body on a tree, it had to be taken down before nightfall.
They weren't allowed to leave it up there overnight. It was a disgrace.
But evidently David.
And the Gibeonites did not regard that law. And here it was.
What was risk for going to do?
She had no authority. She had no power.
She could have done a number of things. She could have started a campaign, gone around and tried to stir things up among the people and said look what's happening. That's contrary to the law.
And all this.
How do we handle it when there is a problem in our own lives where wrong is done, perhaps to us, or perhaps in the larger scale, when wrong is done among the people of God?
I can still remember quite a few years ago now, talking to a sister whom I knew very well.
And something had happened in an assembly.
Which affected her and it wasn't her local assembly.
And I still remember, I can hear her saying, Bill, it's so wrong. It's just so wrong.
I knew what she was talking about.
And it was wrong, Very wrong.
Turn over to Second Timothy for a minute.
Chapter 4 this time.
And verse 5, Second Timothy 4 and verse 5.
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Watch thou in all things, but watch thou in all things endure afflictions.
Do the work of an evangelist. Make full proof of thy ministry.
In order to get the full force of what I'm trying to bring out, you have to go to the JND translation.
Because that phrase endure afflictions.
Is better translated by the Darby translation.
Bare evils.
Bare evils what?
Paul telling Timothy to put up with evil? Really.
What did he mean? Did he mean that things were getting so bad that the assembly could no longer judge evil?
No, that's not what he meant.
The assembly is to be the pillar and ground of the truth.
And already Paul had told Timothy in the second chapter that if there were such evil that the assembly couldn't deal with it, that he was to purge himself from vessels to dishonor.
So there is no way Paul meant that the assembly should just turn a blind eye to evil because the days were so difficult that it could no longer be dealt with. What did he mean then?
He was meaning that in the last days, Timothy, when things are weak, when all in Asia have turned away from me, you are going to see things done in the wrong way procedurally and you are going to see an attitude and spirit exhibited that is most on Christ like sometimes and you are going to have to.
Bear those evils, because there isn't.
Sometimes the moral and spiritual power to deal with it the way it ought to be dealt with.
And some of us had to learn that lesson the hard way.
And I have to hang my own head.
What is this woman, Rizzo?
Admirable conduct.
Here her. Here are her two sons hung up there.
Before the Lord of all things, as if the Lord approved of that, as if this honored the Lord, this revenge.
This hanging up of men's bodies.
For a long period of time so that the animals could feed off the dead flesh. Can you imagine what that did to a mother's heart?
I can't because I'm not a woman.
Some of you sisters probably can.
What does she do? She takes.
Sackcloth and spreads it out for whom?
For her.
Individually, she took the sin of Israel on herself.
And she says I take my place as part of the failure.
I was the concubine of that man that did that. I was part of the family.
Not that I believe she could have stopped it. I don't suppose Paul would have listened to a concubine if she'd stepped up and said, Saul, no, no, don't you touch the Gibeonites? It's very dealt for whether that would have made any impression on him.
But she takes the responsibility. She didn't put it out and make a big public show of it to try and attract everybody's attention, she says. I'm going to put out the sackcloth. Repentance. Humiliation at what?
At what needed to be judged in Israel because God allowed the famine to affect the whole nation.
David could have said, but Lord.
I I didn't do it and Saul's gone. Do I have to be responsible for what Saul did?
Sometimes yes, sometimes yes, we may have to revisit things in the past.
And sometimes we need to do it collectively too. Sometimes an individual has to do it. Sometimes an assembly has to do it.
That's a healthy thing if we're willing to do it.
And so here we find she spreads this sackcloth for her upon the rock.
That's one thing.
But then what else does she do?
O if the authorities in Israel had no regard for the law of God.
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She did.
And she says I personally will stop.
The birds of the air and the beasts of the field from getting at those bodies.
Yes, I have no doubt that a mother's heart was involved because two of them were her boys.
And it was doubtless more than she could stand.
They have to know that there were hanging the bodies of her sons and the birds and the wild animals were going at them.
But she prevented the birds and the beasts from getting at any of those seven.
No light task day and night.
She probably had to lie awake. How she slept, I don't know. Where she slept I don't know. How she managed, I don't know. She couldn't have been a young woman. Must have been old enough to have sons that were growing up and so on.
But she did it, and it says from the beginning of harvest until water dropped upon them out of heaven.
The Jewish harvest was generally in the late spring.
Because it had a Mediterranean climate and they would get rainfall in the fall and then that was the early rain.
And made their wheat spring up, and then they got the latter rain that brought it to completion so they could harvest it.
These men were put to death in the time of barley harvest, it says. And so she's there all that time.
Probably until what we would have called in script, or what scripture calls the early rain in the fall, not just a day or two, not just a week or two, it must have been a matter of some months.
She stood there, laid there, whatever it took.
To keep those bodies from being desecrated.
You know, sometimes.
And I say it I trust with all humility, because my heart is no better.
But sometimes if things that are wrong are done.
There's a tendency, isn't there, in a moral way, to desecrate the bodies.
There's a tendency to point the finger. There's a tendency on the one hand to say, well, I guess they had that coming to them or whatever it might be.
And perhaps even to invoke the name of the Lord, as these gibeonites did, and say, well, we're hanging them up under the Lord after all. And they could have said the Lord allowed it, which he did.
But I believe the Lord allowed it in order to bring out what was in His heart.
So she protects those bodies, she says. I'm not going to allow them to be desecrated.
I'm not going to allow anyone to do anything to them. I'm not going to allow those birds which speak of that which is unclean and the beasts of the field which speaks of that. That which was without is without reason, without logic. It just acts by instinct, she says. I'm not going to allow any of that.
I am going.
To protect those bodies.
And what happens?
What happens?
Call David. She didn't do it for that reason. I don't think she was trying to get David's attention, but it did.
David here is a type of the Lord.
And if you and I are willing as individuals to humble ourselves.
You'll remember in Israel.
When God pronounced both blessings and curses on Israel for either their disobedience or their lack of it.
And when Solomon gave his prayer the dedication of the temple, what did he say? Among other things?
He says if all Israel.
Or any man. Any man shall what? Recognize the plague of his own heart. Oh, oh, needful. It's easy to point the finger. It's easy to blame others. It's easy to say. Why can't they act normally So that we don't have all this trouble on our hands? No.
Let me deal with the plague of my own heart.
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And it comes to the attention of David.
And what happened?
David although he's a type of Christ, he's also a type.
Of a man in a position of responsibility who had acted wrongly.
And what does he do?
The Lord brings to David's attention, if we could use the term reverently, some unfinished business in his life.
Oh, this woman has an effect on others because David.
Realizes before the Lord I have been guilty to.
There's something in my past, David could have said, well, why? Why should I be responsible for things that Saul did? But then David realized, yes, David realizes, yes, I'm guilty too.
Verse 12 And David went and took the bones of Saul and Jonathan.
The bones of Jonathan, his son.
From the men of Jabesh Gilead.
You will remember that when Saul and Jonathan and Saul's other sons were slain on Mount Gilboa in that final battle with the Philistines, you will remember that the Philistines hung them up there. That's what the heathen did, hung up bodies to be desecrated.
And the men of Jabesh Gilead went all night long and rescued those bodies and buried them.
Why did they do that?
Why did they undertake all that? Oh, they had good memories, didn't they? They remembered in better days, when Saul had come to their rescue, when they were in big trouble.
And Saul had come to their rescue.
And they went and rescued those bodies.
But they'd never been given a proper burial. They'd never been properly treated. And David recognizes that, yes, it was wonderful for those men what they did. They did what they could. But David, as king, ought to have seen to it that they were given a proper burial. So what does he do?
He goes took the bones of Saul and the bones of Jonathan and his son from the men of Jabish Gilead, which had stolen them from the street of Beth Shan, where the Philistines had hanged them when the Philistines had slain Saul and Gilboa.
And he brought up from thence the bones of Saul, and the bones of Jonathan his son.
And they gathered the bones of them that were hanged.
And the bones of Saul and Jonathan his son buried they in the country of Benjamin and Zela, in the sepulchre of Kish's father. And they performed all that the king commanded, and after that God was entreated for the lamb.
One woman, what an effect she had. One woman's repentance, humiliation.
Had a tremendous effect because she took upon her the sin as if it were her own. She didn't point the finger, nor would she allow the bodies to be desecrated, she said. I am part of the failure.
She wasn't the only one.
You'll remember that Ezra did it in his day, even though I'm sure he wasn't guilty. Daniel did it in his day, even though I'm sure he wasn't guilty either. But both of them confessed the sin of Israel as if they were their own.
And God gave blessing as a result of it.
Well, the Lord can give blessing to you and me too, if we own our failure, own our sin, own our own responsibility, the plague of our own heart.
Spread out that sackcloth. Spread it out.
And then refused to allow the desecration.
No, sometimes we have to bear evils and go to the Lord about it, and we find that.
The Lord brings it to the attention of a David. He deals with something.
And then he looks after the very thing that needed to be done with those bodies. David didn't have to be told.
And get a petition signed by 5000 people and present it to David to remind him of his responsibilities. No, the Lord did that. The Lord brought it to his attention.
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And at the same time as he dealt with his lack of responsibility with Saul and Jonathan, he looks after those bodies that were hung up there too. And then the Lord was entreated for the land.
Well, I will only suggest that all that as a lesson for you and me too.
In these last days.