2 Samuel 14:21-33

2 Samuel chapter 14 verses 21 to 33 and the king said unto Joab behold now I have done this thing go therefore bring the young man absalom again joeb fell to the ground on his face and bowed himself and thanked the king joeb said today thy servant knoweth that i have found grace in thy sight my lord o king and that the king hath fulfilled the request of his servant so joeb said today thy servant knoweth that i have found grace in thy sight my lord o king and that the king hath fulfilled the request of his servant so joe Noahab arose went to Gesher and brought Absalon to Jerusalem. The king said, let him turn to his own house and let him not see my face. So Absalom returned to his own house and saw not the king’s face. But in all Israel there was none so much praised as Absalom for his beauty from the soul of his foot even to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him. and when he pulled his head, for it was at every year’s end that he pulled it because the hair was heavy on him, therefore he pulled it, he weighed the hair of his head at 200 shekels after the king’s weight. And under Absalom, under Absalom were born three sons and one daughter whose name was Tamar. She was a woman of fair countenance. So Absalom dwelt two four foursons. years in Jerusalem and saw not the king’s face. Therefore, Absalom sent for Joab to have sent him to the king. But he would not come to him. When he sent again the second time, he would not come. Therefore, he set him to his servant, see Joab’s field is near mine. Neath Barley there. Go and set it on fire. And Absalon’s servants set the field on fire. Then Joab arose and came to Absalom unto his house and said unto him, wherefore have thy servant set my field on fire. And Absalom answered, Joab, behold. I sent unto thee saying, come hither, that I may send thee to the king, to say, wherefore am I come from, Gesher. It had been good for me to have been there still. Now, therefore, let me see the king’s face. And if there be any iniquity in me, let him kill me. So Joab came to the king and told him, and when he had called for Absalom, he came to the king, bowed himself on his face to the ground before the king, and, and he had called him. and the king kissed Absalom. May God blessed to us the reading of His sacred and holy word this evening. Hijackers terrorized a passenger jet from the Indian Airlines for eight days. This took place in 1999. And December 31st of that year, the gunman issued a final demand before releasing the hostages. The hijacker, whose code name was Berger, said, you have to, each one of you have to say, I forgive you. When the disbelieving passengers stared back at him, he ordered them to say, I forgive you. And so each one of them had to say that, and after hearing the words, the hijackers disappeared into the desert. Now, not many of us would be so ignorant to insist or demand that some of the same. somebody forgive us. Most people understand that mercy and pardon can be received only by a humble, sincere, repentant person, not someone who is arrogant and demands it. In our text, we have the arrogant Absalon. He demands forgiveness, as our text indicates to us. He demands the king forgive him. The unrepent Absalom. The murderer. The murderer. of his brother Amnon. Acts as if he is the poor victim here. And he’s being mistreated by the king. Such an attitude doesn’t provide any confidence that this guy is going to reform at all. Indeed, this man is going to end up being a troubler of the nation, as we shall soon see. So what you find in this section of scripture are a series of wrong steps. We can learn. from these steps and we can realize that we should avoid them. I begin by saying this. You can be guilty of being satisfied with halfway measures in dealing with sin. Versus 21 to 24. You find Absalom brought back, but he’s kept as a recluse here. He has to stay away from the royal court at his house. So David succumbs to to Joab’s wows to bring Absalom back as we looked at in the first 20 verses, and he gives orders to bring Absalom back. And Joab expresses his gratitude to the king, no doubt. He has a large mazer of secret self-satisfaction. The king listened to him. He rushes off the Gesher. He gets Absalom and brings him back. However, Dave’s conscience here doesn’t allow him. allow him to grant a full pardon to Absalon. So David refuses to receive Absalom into the royal court as verse 24 says, you can’t see my face. He’s uneasy here, I think, about setting aside God’s law, where the scripture says, whoever sheds man’s blood by man shall his blood be shed in Genesis 9.6. So David is like the boy who stole the apples, and then he felt so guilty about it. He didn’t eat any of them, and they all rot it. Absalom, therefore, is not restored to his former position. And he’s kept at arm’s length here for two more years. This was a compromise on David’s part in order to save face. He was not doing his duty as the chief ruler of the nation, perhaps some of the more godly of the David’s counselors were none too pleased with the king disregarding God’s law. And perhaps he saw himself as allowing Absalom to return was to show mercy, but in order to deny him interest to the king’s court, he would show justice in some sense. Maybe that was the king’s thinking in this regard. This halfway measure in dealing with his wayward son, will result in further lawlessness, as the next chapter indicates. It’s easy for you to compromise in dealing with sin. Now, you and I can look at this, and when it’s somebody else, you can say, well, we see that David would really compromise on this situation, and he shouldn’t have done that. But are we not guilty of doing the same things ourselves? none of us are likely to be in David’s shoes where we’re dealing with someone who was murdered someone else. But in other ways, you can be guilty as David in compromising in doing on what God has commanded in his work. You take halfway measures in dealing with sin, and you’re satisfied when you’ve done a halfway measure and you think you’ve done enough. God says in Romans 813, through the spirit, mortify the deeds of the body. And the mortify is to put to death, to cut off the right arm and to pluck out the right eye. These are not halfway measures that God demands of us. You were not merely to confine our sin, but to put it to death. Now, your goal is not to contain then, but to kill. your sin, to eradicate it, a much more difficult task, but we can be guilty of pampering our sin. We can be guilty of being too gentle or too lenient in dealing with our sin. God calls you to deal severely with your sin, to take drastic measures with your sin, to rid yourself of it. God says in scripture this, chase in thy son while there is hope. Let not thy soul spare for his crying. Proverbs 1918. Now here is another instance where it fail. When it comes to raising children, biblical discipline should hurt. God talks about the rot. It talks about here not being concerned about the crying of the child, but to continue with the discipline. God warns you here not to spare the child. Further punishment. because they’re crying. Especially when the child is younger, to curtail evil, it’s important to do it while there is hope before the tree is totally bent and they are permanently fixed in their sinful ways. This all seems clear to us, but we live in a day and age when many professing Christians on substituted timeouts for real chase. on the parents’ part. We’ve allowed secular ideas to replace biblical teaching. Because we think God’s way is too severe. We think we have something better. It might make my precious child cry, and I can’t abide by that, so you can find the child to his room where he can play with his toys, read his books, listen to music, or whatever he wants to do. The child never. smarts, if you would, for his or her sin. Never humbled. You see, Absalon here is never checked, and he continues on in his sinful ways. When I was younger, I remember getting spanked, and not only getting spanked, but I would get put in the corner for 30 minutes and just look at the wall. That was the worst thing that ever could happen to me. I hated that more than anything else. but it was a humbling, sobering experience. I remember that much. It sure changed my attitude. And it didn’t ruin me for life. It didn’t cause me to hate my parents. I could go on, but you can work these things out for yourself. We can’t compromise with sin. We have to do what the scripture commands of us. Whatever that sin may be in our life. So you can be guilty of being satisfied with halfway measures in dealing with sin. Secondly, tonight. You can be guilty of focusing on outward image rather than spiritual qualities. We see that in verses 25 to 27. And we see here Israel’s adoration of the handsome Atsonah. He was an extremely popular guy, the darling of the fine example of the nation. Mr. Israel, if you want to call it that. Now this reveals the low spiritual state of the nation that people never seem to learn that what’s highly esteemed among men is an abomination in the sight of God. Absalon is not esteemed for his godliness. He’s a murderer. He is utterly lacking in devotion to God. He doesn’t show signs of wisdom, patience, humility, love, goodness. He’s lacking all the fruit of the spirit in his life. And yet he’s admired because he has a handsome physique, luxuriant hair, and he got a famous family. He’s David’s son. His murderous heart is ignored while people were captivated by his appearance and evidently his charming personality as we shall see from the next chapter. His pride, his vanity is demonstrated here by his yearly hair weighing that’s talked about. The best I can figure out, it’s about it’s about six pounds worth of hair. 200 shekels by the king’s weight, six pounds of hair. I don’t know how much six pounds is, but it sounds heavy. Sounds like a lot of hair. But there’s a hint hair, of course, gives us a little hint about how he’s going to die, as we’ll find out later on, when he gets his hair stuck in the tree. It seems like his head got caught in the tree, and I assume that a lot of writers and commentators assume it was his hair that actually caught him up, so he was hanging. You can’t read these verses without thinking, at least it reminds me of Saul. Remember about Saul? Why was he? He was a handsome guy. he was taller in everybody else, head and shoulders. He was a great specimen. And look how he turned out. He wasn’t a great leader. He was problematic for the nation. When will God’s people learn, not to look on the outward appearance, but the look at the heart as God requires a, he tells us to look beyond outward appearance. Physical presence without internal submission to God makes for a disastrous leader. And yet, somehow or other, you get caught up in that. Now, of course, you can be just as foolish as Israel. It’s easy again to say, well, that Israel should have known better than that. But look at political leaders. Look at the people that we put into office. Our media and our politics have operated on what we call the Absalom example for a long time. do you have a charismatic personality? Are you an attractive guy or a woman? Why? You know, that’s all that’s important. Your personal life, that doesn’t matter. Your policies are what are important. Isn’t that really what we’ve been told down to the years? Down through the years. Style over substance. Appearance over character. Cosmetics over content. You can lie and cheat and steel and everything else, as long as your political agenda is popular with the masses, they’ll still put you in. There was a mayor of Washington, D.C. Who was caught, you know, smoking, adult, or doing cocaine or drugs. He gets put in jail. After he gets out of his out of jail, he runs again. They put him right back into office. Comes the mayor again of Washington, D.C. During the presidential race against Nixon, John F. Kennedy cultivated a public image of a warm, devoted family life. You remember, I don’t know, during his presidency, they had such, they portrayed his life as such an idealic life. They called it Camelot. Remember that? Some of you may not be old enough to remember that. They, like, an idyllic situation as the kingdom of old, this magical kingdom. And yet, when you dig into the history of the situation, it’s revealed that Kennedy, with his secret servants agents, were often plotting the tunnels under the New York City streets on his way to a sexual liaison with some woman in some apartment or some hotel room somewhere. And this is the pattern of behavior from his first day in the presidency. We could talk about marriage. Young people are often captivated by the superficial qualities of those of the opposite sex. There is an eagerness to marry the handsome man or the beautiful woman. And there’s a failure to look deeper and see the character of the individual. As a Christian, we must look beyond the person. the outward appearance and consider the spiritual character of this person. Our affections need to be watched. They need to be restrained. So that you don’t choose a mate based upon merely the flesh. It doesn’t matter if he has, you know, great hair or great physique, or she has a stunning figure if their heart is far from God. It’s not going to be a good sense. situation. We could talk about choosing a pastor, couldn’t we? Sadly, even in the choice of a minister, the church, has the Absalom syndrome too. Most churches today are looking for a Fortune 500 pastor. In other words, they’re looking for a winsome, charismatic, charismatic, executive-like pastor who exuberable. warmth and success, who is a man known for his humor, maybe not for spirituality, but for his humor. A pastor who focuses on church growth rather than spiritual growth. A pastor who makes people feel good. He’s not too harsh in dealing with the issues of sin. I had a pastor friend one time. I had a pastor friend and told me that he lost his pastorship because they said he preached too much on sin. If I mentioned his name, some of you would know. A pastor who makes people feel good, people like that, rather than feel guilty. Is it too much to ask that we say, couldn’t we go to 1 Timothy chapter 3 and use the qualifications as the Bible speaks about? Is it too much to ask to look for character? in the pastor. Woe to the church who stresses character, who stresses being charismatic over character or business savvy over personal godliness. Because they’re falling into the Absalom trap here. The same idea. Let me if we carry it over. So you can be guilty of focusing on the outward image rather than spiritual quality. It’s the spiritual qualities that are important. And Absalon is devoid of them all, but he’s the darling of the people of Israel. The third thing we see here is this. You can be guilty of doing the wrong thing and not be able to extract yourself from its results. Versus 28 to 32. You find Joa made a mistake from which he cannot extract himself here. Absalom is humiliated that he can’t go to the royal palace. It steams him that he can’t go there. And he’s going to get Joab to intercede for him one way or the other. After two years of chafing under this restriction, the arrogant Absalon has had enough. He remembers how Joab is instrumental in getting him back to Israel, so he figures, well, you go and see the king and now get me back into the royal palace. Sohahab here refuses to meet with Absalom. You get the suspicion here that maybe Joab realized this wasn’t such a bright idea that I brought this guy back. He’s going to be trouble. This wily man perhaps foresaw nothing but trouble coming from Absalom and no doubt deeply regretted bringing him back. He will regret it before it’s all over. The problem is Joab knew the public pulse. He knew that Absalom was highly esteemed by the people. And thinking about the future, and an eye on the future, he’s thinking, you know, this is probably going to be the next king. I’ve got to be careful while I handle Absalom, because he could be a very powerful man. He tries to escape the problem by ignoring it. I’ll just ignore Absalom. I just won’t answer his request. Well, Absalom is going to have none of it. and you see the arrogance of Absalon here. He decides that he is going to literally light a fire under Joab by burning down his barley fields. He says, that’ll get his attention. And, you know, I sent for you twice. You didn’t come? Okay, I’ll get you over here. So he sits on fire at the barley fields and all of a sudden he got Joab’s attention. He rushes over there. He wants an exclamation for his scorched earth policy here. and his burnt crops. What Joab got, however, was an impassioned plea, go to the king and get me back into the royal palace. His argument, either execute me or forgive me, was really kind of a veiled proclamation because I don’t think he thought there was any hope of him being executed at this point. The king, if he was going to execute him, would have already done so, and the people loved him. So he’s thinking, nobody’s going to harm him. me. So he knew full well. I think David loved him too much to execute him. So I think he was pretty safe in this regard. But all this telegraphed to Joab was that sooner or later, Absalom’s going to have his way. And Joab had good reason to fear Absalom. He has good reason to be suspicious of him. What we learned from this, you little know what long-term is. implications are going to come out of your actions. I’m sure Joab didn’t realize how bad things we’re going to actually get when he brought him back. He didn’t realize what was going to have. He didn’t realize he didn’t realize he’s going to lose his barley crop. He didn’t realize that Joab’s going to end up trying to steal the kingdom from his father and Joab’s going to have to lead the army against Absalom’s army. So all this stuff comes up because of something he did. circumventing the law of God and encouraging David to do that ended up causing problems. Like Joab, you can get yourself into a situation which leaves you helpless. You’re busy digging a ditch and realize this pit that you’ve dug you can’t get out of. When you sin by compromising on God’s word and the principles of his word, you can become completely entrapped by your actions. You will bemoan your foolish ways as your own fields get burnt down, so to speak, and you smart under the consequences of your own sin. I was thinking about getting trapped. I thought of a story. I remember reading, I guess it was in grade school. Perhaps you remember the folk tale of Brayrbeth and the Tar Baby that you read. The fox didn’t like Brer Rabbit, so he set a trap for him. He got some tar, put some turpentine in with it and sculpted, if you would, a baby out of it, put a hat on the baby, and set it out in the middle of the road where he knew Brer Rabbit was going to come by, and Brer Rabbit comes hopping by and sees Tar Baby there on the road. The fox hides himself in the bushes to see what’s going to happen, and the rabbit was surprised. baby and he stops and he stares at the creature. Good morning, said the rabbit, doffing his cap, nice weather having. The baby, of course, said nothing. Bray rabbit thought that that wasn’t very polite. Are you deaf or just rude? He demanded losing his temper. And then he said, you take off that hat and say, how’d he do? Or I am going to give you such a lickin. Of course, the rabbit finally lost his temper completely. He took a swing at Tarbaby, and his paw got stuck. And before you know it, he has both paws, both hands and both feet, if you would, stuck against Tar Baby. So he thought he’d butt him with his head. And next, you know, his head stuck. Now he can’t get it. Now the fox comes out of hiding behind the bushes, and he’s laughing at him. He says, I got you now. And he has him trapped by his own fox. foolishness. Well, that’s how we get sometimes. Now, of course, Brer Rabbit was a pretty shrewd rabbit. He said, you can do whatever you want with me, but don’t throw me in the briar patch. Whatever you do, don’t throw me in the briar patch. Of course, that’s what the fox does, and that’s where he lives, so he doesn’t care. He escapes. But in this situation, he got himself pretty messed up, pretty stuck, and he couldn’t escape. That’s what we do with ourselves sometimes. We get ourselves so stuck. We’re like the Brer rabbit in the tariff. We can’t get out in the letter what we do. We’re you completely entrapped by what we’ve done. What we need is to have our feet carefully guided by the Word of God so we’re not ensnared by our sin. Don’t be foolish like this. You can be guilty of doing the wrong thing and not to be able to extract yourself from its results. Thankfully, God has mercy on us and often extracts. from situations that are so bad that we can’t get out ourselves. We’re stuck. Fourthly, you can be guilty of drawing the wrong conclusion from Providence. It’s interesting. Verse 33, so Joav came to the king and told him, and when he had called for Absalom, he came to the king and bowed himself on his face to the ground before the king, and the king kissed Absalom. Think back on this whole story. and think about it from Absalom’s point of view. Things worked out pretty well for him, didn’t it? David’s kiss, I think, signifies that Absalom is now restored to royal favor. This looked impossible five years ago. His cool, calculated murder of Absalom seemed to dash any hopes of Absalom ascending to the throne. And he’s stuck out there in Gesher. foreigner to his own land. His self-imposed exa made his future look bleak with regard to Israel. He had sabotaged it by killing Amnon. But when Joab went to work on David and with his pro-Apsilon scheme and gets David to allow at least Absalon to come back to the land, Things seem to be better. At least he’s got his foot in the door. Still, David is intent on keeping Absalom a distance, and Joab doesn’t want to meet with Absalom either. If these two obstacles are now removed, he burns down the fields of Joab, doesn’t have any repercussions from that either, and now he gets the kiss of the king, and that obstacle’s removed. Looking at this from Absalom’s viewpoint, it seems like a… marvelous piece of Providence. Everything’s just working out perfectly for him. It seems like everything is working for his good. It seemed like Providence was smiling on Absalom. No wonder Absalom’s thinking of grasping the throne, even if it means displacing his father’s, we shall see in Chapter 15. He’s more popular than ever. All the cards are just falling into place for him. Absalon may not have thought in terms of divine providence here, but he might have thought, well, Lady Luck was certainly favoring him. But you find people often misinterpret providence. I read it a story about Adolf Hitler. On July 20th, 1944, there was a military conference in progress, in Berlin, during World War II. A briefcase was left under the table with his conference was taking place. Suddenly it exploded in a blazing sheet of flame. Some moments later, Adolf Hitler, the intended victims, staggered outside the debris, singed, and tattered, since somehow he survived the blast. They said that the desk was an old desk and it was very thick. And because of the thickness of the desk itself, that helped spare him. And he only had temporary paralysis in the right arm and a punctured ear drum. Now, Mussolini was scheduled to arrive, his buddy from Italy. He was coming by train. And so Hitler went off to the train station to pick up Mussolini, and he came back to the conference room to show him all the debris and the blast and everything and see what happened here. Hitler confirmed. He said, frankly, Deuce, he said, I regard this event as the pronouncement of divine providence. When Mussolini admitted he had had a marvelous escape, Hitler retorted, marvelous, it’s more than that. It’s God’s intervention. Look at this room, at my uniform. When I reflect on this, I know nothing will happen to me. Clearly, it’s my divine task to continue on and bring my great enterprise to completion. That’s the conclusion he drew. Now, you can certainly dispute that interpretation of Providence, but you can see how a perverted mind might draw that conclusion. You can imagine Absalom thinking, boy, everything just worked that great for me. Absalom was a man driven by hate, guilty of murder. But he has friends in high places. He has the gall here to force the issue and to get off scut-free. Now, sometimes it appears that God’s providence is blessing evil men with success. It’s hard for us to grasp that. Wicked men seem to have a charmed life. You know, leukemia doesn’t kill their child. Cancer doesn’t decimate their wives. Drunk drivers don’t mangle their families. Downsizing doesn’t cost them their jobs. Hale doesn’t ruin their crops. They don’t die at a young age. Success, crowns. all their endeavors. It’s very tempting to think that God’s smile is resting upon them. Hasn’t God’s Providence been very good to me? They’re thinking. So it’s easy to pursue an evil course because God’s Providence doesn’t seem to be thwarting you. You get success in everything you do. You can sin it seemingly with impunity. And so we look at this situation and it makes us wonder what’s going to happen until, of course, we go to the House of God and we read what God says in his word about him in a way, preparing by giving them his providential smile, if you would, preparing them for their downfall. And so the wicked unchecked by divine providence have hearts that are fully set in them to do evil, but ultimately God is setting them up. for a great fall. We talked about that last week. And so Absalon here, it looks like everything’s going to go great, and he thinks he’s got the kingdom made. He thinks he’s got it. And we’ll see next week that he thinks he has all his cards in order. He thinks that he’s going to sweep David away. The kingdom is his, and everything’s going to be fine and dandy. But God has other plans. and he will see that this very step that he takes will bring about his destruction. And we’ll look at that later. Well, the hijactor who demanded his hostages, forgive him, and say that to him, didn’t understand that forgiveness involves humble repentance. The arrogant Absalom here demands forgiveness, but his heart here is unchanged. Our text provides a series of wrong steps. We can be satisfied with half measures in dealing with sin. We can be focused on outward image rather than spiritual qualities. We can be doing the wrong thing and not be able to extract ourselves from its results, and we can draw the wrong conclusion from Providence. As Absalom did. Let us close with it.