DAY 110

LINGERING…LONGING…LOSING

2 Samuel 9, 10 & 11 and Luke 15:11 – 32

David lingered in Jerusalem while his men went to war…late one afternoon David lingered on a roof top…he saw a woman bathing…and he allowed his eyes to linger upon her…his thoughts lingered, so much so that he sent his people to inquire of her…and David, the “man after God’s own heart”, committed adultery.

Its gets worse, her husband who is out fighting for the King, is murdered. The honor of the husband, Uriah, stands in contrast to the deceit of David. Uriah, on leave from the front lines, will not even go and spend a night with his wife. Instead he stays at the king’s gate (11:11). David resorts to getting Uriah drunk hoping he will go and stay a night with his wife, but that plan fails. Finally, David has Uriah sent to the front line and killed.

David’s lingering over Bathsheba resulted in his longing for her. The Letter to James, in chapter 1, says:

¹³ When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; ¹⁴ but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. ¹⁵ Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.

“After desire has conceived…it gives birth to death.” Desire, longing, they are the result in David’s case of lingering too long. He should have been out with his men and he certainly should not have been up wandering around the roof. In the coming days we will see how this action by David unfolds.

The New Testament gives us a much more compact, and yet a very dramatic story. The text actually begins, “A man had two sons…” Given concern for my length of the blog, rather than chronicling the “lingering and longing” of the sons, I want to take a look at the father. [The best exposition of this text is by Kenneth Bailey in The Cross and the Prodigal].

In our culture we probably do not comprehend the number of times the father dies in this text. We can approximate, but have difficulty completely understanding the depth of emotions in the Middle Eastern culture. Kenneth Bailey went and told this parable to the Nomads of the desert, they were shocked, horrified really, and then they explained it to him!

The first death, asking for your inheritance: in their world the son is saying “I wish you were dead.” It gets worse. The father give it to him as if to say, “I die.” The father has spent most of his life building the family estate. The son not only wants his share, but then he liquidates it. He sells his share in order to get cash so he can leave – all the town would know that the son saw no value in the family or in his share of the inheritance…a second death.

Then the son comes to his senses and heads home. The standard protocol would be for him to camp a distance outside the village. Some men, not the father, would after a number of days, go and inquire of the reason for the sons return. After a series of negotiations, a return to the village and meeting with the father would take place, all on the father’s terms, all geared to restore the father’s dignity. That is not what happens.

The father sees the son in the distance. Was he looking to the horizon for him? Apparently. He then runs, runs to the son. Elderly men in the Middle East do not run. They certainly do not run bypassing all the protocols of the day. While we might not understand, it is another death. Finally we come to the older son’s behavior. How is it people know of his reaction? He publically is disrespectful to the father, yet again a death.

How many times was the father willing to die to reconcile both sons to himself? The point is that is exactly God’s behavior. He is willing to die in order that we might come home and come to the table.

We linger and we long around sin and we lose. God lingers and longs for us to turn home…and when we do, he runs…he closes the gap. This is the kind of God we have, may we not linger too long from Him.