Nathan had come to David and prophecied to him following David’s sin with Bathsheba and his subsequent murder of Uriah. He told him that from David’s own household, God would bring calamity. In fact, we find that calamity comes upon David but also extends to the rest of his family and even extends out to the rest of Israel. The consequences of David’s sin truly radiated out and were not just for him, but for all of those over whom he had influence.
Absalom was David’s son. He had killed his brother Amnon, avenging what Amnon had done when he raped his sister Tamar. But David never took a side. He never brought justice upon Amnon nor, subsequently, Absalom for killing his brother. So the calamity didn’t just end with Amnon’s rape of Tamar, but continued with Absalom killing Amnon and even going on believe that David could be replaced because of the impotent leadership that he saw in his father. Absalom saw himself growing within Judah and could even imagine himself replacing his father as the king over all of Israel.
Absalom began to act upon this vision of himself and began to proclaim himself king. He was extremely presumptuous, of course, but David allowed it! In fact, as Absalom began to grow in power with additional followers, David even moved out of his palace, making way for Absalom to enter. As the king, David had completely lost his way. He no longer was the man that had been called to be king. His life no longer looked like the one that he had previously led, worshiping God before all of the people, praising the Lord for what he had done. Instead, he had fallen a long way, leaving behind the identity that God had bestowed upon him as the leader over Israel.
David did finally go to war with Absalom but gave his army instructions to bring Absalom back safe. Think of that… David’s instructions were to go to war against those had betrayed him, the king, but not to kill the one that was leading the betrayal. Keep safe the one that is leading the revolution.
The army doesn’t do this, of course. They can see clearly what is happening in the kingdom, the revolt that is happening. So when Joab, the leader of David’s armies, sees his chance to kill Absalom, he takes it, and he makes sure that Absalom is dead, that the threat was removed. From Joab’s perspective, he wanted to make sure that there would no longer be a threat to David’s reign. He had already seen his king remove himself from his own palace, giving up his own throne. He wouldn’t stand this any longer, and so he ran Absalom through with his own spear and those of his armor-bearers.
But as Joab returns to the king, instead of finding David rejoicing and celebrating his army’s victory, he finds David weeping over Absalom’s death. And the result is that the army must slip under the cover of night back into the city. The army must return in shame because David, the leader of the kingdom had lost his way, had lost all of his clarity related to his identity, who God had called him to be, and what he had called him to do. He was no longer leading his kingdom but was weeping instead for those who betrayed him.
So Joab responded to David:
Today you have humiliated all your men, who have just saved your life and the lives of your sons and daughters and the lives of your wives and concubines. You love those who hate you and hate those who love you. You have made it clear today that the commanders and their men mean nothing to you. I see that you would be pleased if Absalom were alive today and all of us were dead. Now go out and encourage your men. I swear by the LORD that if you don’t go out, not a man will be left with you by nightfall. This will be worse for you than all the calamities that have come on you from your youth till now.
2 Samuel 19:5-7
It is an extremely sad story to see David’s downfall, to see him experience one problem after the next, to see him lose his way, to see him lose his identity. As a result of his sin, he can no longer see who he has been made to be, so instead of looking up to the Lord to find his identity, to find his strength as he once did, he now judges that which he should do by using his own reasoning. He makes decisions based on his own ideas, using his own moral compass. He is no longer truly acting as a king over a kingdom, but instead as a man thinking only of the internal politics of his own fractured family.
Reading this story this morning and considering David’s life as a potential metaphor, I have to say that it made me think of the Church in some ways. I will admit that the comparison that I am about to make could be a stretch and is based on some recent events that I have personally experienced so there could be emotions attached to my connection of David’s downfall to what I see in the challenges that Church today is facing, but I want to relate this story as one to at least consider.
I recently led a group through a training lesson related to baptism. As a team, we regularly lead new believers through a series of lessons related to some of the fundamental teachings of Christ, teaching these new believers to follow Jesus based on what he told us to do. Jesus told his disciples that if they loved him, they will obey his commands, so we take that seriously. The first and most important command is to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, so if Jesus says that if we love him, we must obey him, and so then the first thing that we should do with new believers is to teach them to do what he said to do.
In teaching this group, I explained that there are a series of lessons that we want to take new believers through when we are teaching them to follow Jesus. They are these:
- Repent and believe
- Baptism
- Love (love God, love your neighbor as yourself)
- Abide in Christ
- Make disciples
- Prayer
- The Lord’s Supper
Of course these aren’t all of the lessons that we must learn and put into practice to be able to learn to follow Christ. There are many, many more, but these are some points from which we can begin. This is the start. They are the first steps, and by doing these things, we can gather believers into churches based on a common set of understanding of who Jesus is, a gathering that will allow them to grow in Christ, helping one another to follow him all the more.
From this list of lessons, I chose the baptism lesson as an example to use in our discussion. I know that this lesson has the possibility to truly challenge those who are participating, and to be honest, my hope is to challenge people’s thinking a little bit.
Why?
Because here we have a command from Jesus:
All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.
Matthew 28:18-20
Jesus never gives a command to anyone that they should be baptized, but interestingly, we see that he does actually give his disciples a command to baptize other people. Of course, that naturally implies that we must also be baptized, but if we are being completely clear about what Jesus says, he is telling his disciples to baptize other people. That is one of the first steps to becoming a disciple of Jesus.
However, it isn’t the last step. In fact, Jesus goes on to say that we must teach them to obey everything that he has commanded. As people who are following Jesus, we are to make disciples. And what is the definition of making a disciple? According to Jesus, I would read it this way:
First, baptize them in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Then, teach them to obey everything that he has commanded.
Yet one of the very things that he has commanded us to do, directly within this passage, is to baptize other people. He just said it! So what does that mean? It means that we not only should be baptized, but we should also baptize other people.
If you are part of a more traditional church or have some background within a more traditional church, you may already understand why this lesson could be challenging for believers within similar types of churches. We can sum it up with this question: How often are we taught to obey the command of Jesus to baptize other people?
Almost never, if ever.
In fact, in the group that I was facilitating, I asked if anyone had ever been taught to baptize another person. One hand amongst the group. OK, great, no problem… at least for right now. Let’s learn to do it.
Remember… “Teach them to obey everything I commanded you…”, Jesus said.
So we are going to teach them to obey. We are going to learn to baptize other people.
The way we do that, therefore, is to practice. In the lesson, we’ve learned what baptism is. We’ve learned who should be baptized. We’ve learned why they should be baptized, and how they should be baptized. So now, we want to apply what we have learned and actually role play a baptism in advance of heading to the water so that we know what to expect and how it will work. We have found that this is good both for the person who will be baptized as well as for a new person who will be baptizing another person. To do that, we place someone in a chair sideways and one person practices baptizing the other person.
“Teach them to obey everything I commanded you…”.
However, when we reached this part of practicing baptism, there were three of the people who decided that they didn’t want to do this. They said they weren’t sure how they felt about it. They wanted to take a higher view of baptism, they said.
Now, I’m going to stop here and say that I don’t necessarily want to heap blame on the people that were there that day. Instead, my concern, and therefore my question, is this: Why is this the first time that any of these long-time Christians learned to baptize? Why would this seem strange to any of them? Why would they question it?
I believe the answer to this question is that we have created a tradition that places leaders in a position within our churches that removes, or at the least, neuters the identity of others that are within the church. What does that mean? It means that, instead of equipping and empowering the people within the church to fully becoming the disciples of Christ that they were intended to be, we have instead taken away or reserved certain religious “rites” from believers, which prevents the believers from actually fulfilling Christ’s commands.
Let me say that again:
…which prevents the believers from fulfilling Christ’s commands.
Although there are many other examples, one example is this question of baptism. As one African man once asked me repeatedly after I gave him this lesson: Who can baptize another person?!? You’re saying I can baptize? No way… I need to call my pastor so that he can baptize this person.
And where was his pastor? Back in Africa.
And where was he? Thousands of miles away in Europe.
What had this man learned in his church? Whether through direct teaching or by inference from the practice and lack of teaching to follow the commands that Jesus had given his disciples, he had come to the conclusion that he could not baptize another person. No, instead, he needed to take those people to his pastor.
He refused to follow the command of Jesus to baptize other people because the tradition and practice of his church was that the pastor, and only the pastor, could teach someone else about Jesus or could baptize another person.
I routinely receive the same pushback with regard to the Lord’s Supper, and in fact, one of the people that refused to learn to put baptism into practice that day said the same thing: I think the same about the Lord’s Supper. I don’t want to have a low view of the Lord’s Supper.
To respond, I and our team have an extremely high view of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. So high, in fact, that we believe it is important that every disciple is equipped to do it because Jesus has called us to do it.
Reading about David this morning and realizing how far he had fallen, as well as the effects that we see from his sin ripple out to the rest of both his family and the rest of Israel, I couldn’t help but to draw a connection in my mind to the state of the Church in which we live today. The scriptures teach that there is one Head for the Church, and that is Jesus himself. And the Head of the Church has taught what we, all of us, should be doing to love him. And that is, we should all be obeying him, doing what he has called us to do.
Yet what have we done instead? We have created several layers of headship before we can reach the actual Head. We frequently create titular heads in our churches. We then have layers of oversight within our denominations. And we have denominations with boards and presidents that lead various districts and regions of churches. Furthermore, we have schools to which we send those who will be the leaders, qualifying them and granting them, and frequently only them, authority with a certificate based on the time that they spent in that institution.
In many ways, I can understand the organizational levels as the denominations seek to support the individual local churches. However, we should ask ourselves… What is the fruit? If we can judge the outcomes as Jesus said – You will know them by their fruit – the question is this: Are we producing disciples that follow Jesus fully, as he said, or are we producing fruit that primarily follows our traditions? Are we reinforcing the fact that Jesus is the Head of the church and that we are each – all of us – a part of his body? Or are we enforcing the organizational structure that we have created?
David fell a long way because of his sin, and as a result, he strayed far from the identity that God bestowed upon him and calamity came upon him from within his family. David should have recognized his sin and continuously repented and turned his heart back to God.
In a similar way, in the Church today, each and every one of us, must leave behind our own kingdoms, our ideas that our identity comes from anyone aside from Christ himself and instead look to God and our one, single king. The Head over the church: Jesus himself. The authorities are simple: We hear from Christ only through the word of God and the Holy Spirit.
If we will each do that, we should begin to teach and equip disciples from within our churches who are able to take the Gospel of the kingdom to all nations, just as Jesus said would happen before the end would come. But without this equipping, without leaders who are willing to teach the people within their churches to fully obey everything that Jesus taught us, we will languish where we are today, continuing to see calamity come from within our own family, just as we see happening in many different ways through the broader body of Christ even today.
May Christ have mercy on us all and teach us through his word and through the Holy Spirit to help others fully follow Jesus, putting into practice everything that he has commanded us to do.