2 Samuel 18:33-19.8

2 Samuel 18 verse 33 reading through chapter 19 verse 8 and the king was much moved and one up to the chamber over the gate and wept and as he went thus he said oh my son Absalom my son my son Absalom would God I had died for thee O Absalom my son my son my son and it was told Joab, behold the king weepeth and mourneth for Absalom and the victory that day was turned into mourning unto all the people for the people heard say that day how the king was grieved for his son and the people got them by stealth that day into the city as people being ashamed steal away when they flee in battle but the king covered his face and the king cried with a loud La voice, O my son, Absalom, O Absalom, my son, my son. Joab came into the house to the king and said, Thou hast shamed this day the faces of all thy servants, which this day have saved thy life and the lives of thy sons and of thy daughters and the lives of thy wives and the lives of thy concubines. And that thou lovest thine enemies and hateest thy friends. For thou hast declared this day that thou regardest neither princes nor servants. For this day I perceive that if Absalom had lived and all we had died this day then it had pleased thee well. Now therefore arise, go forth and speak comfortably under thy servants for I swear by the Lord if thou go not forth there will not tarry one with thee this night and that will be worse under thee. then all the evil that befell thee from thy youth until now. Then the king arose and sat in the gate and they told unto all the people saying, Behold, the king does sit in the gate and all the people came before the king for Israel had fled every man to his tent. May God bless us the reading of his sacred and holy word this evening. In ancient times, tear bottles were used to collect the flowing tears of those who were in mourning. They would capture those tears. In the case of the death of a loved one, the collected tears would be placed in the tomb of the deceased. Scripture reveals that tear bottles were certainly something that were known in David’s time. For the scripture says in Psalm 56, 8, thou tellest my wonderings. Put thou my tears into thy bottle, are they not in thy book? As if God were keeping a record of the suffering of his people. David sees God keeping careful track of the grief of his people, and he’s fully aware of every tear, certainly, that was shed. God is not unsympathetic toward our plight. But there are times when you use far too many tear bottles than you ought. And our text, I think, is a case in point. And we see David displaying intemperate grief here. David’s son, you recall, Absalom, has led a very strong rebellion and trying to steal the kingdom away from David. The climactic battle was won by David’s men. And Absalom, and was put to death, squashing any more resistance by this evil man. David, however, isn’t happy with the outcome. He’s overwhelmed with grief because Absalom, his son, was not spared. And you remember, he had told the commanders of his army, please deal gently for my sake with the young man in chapter 18 and verse 5. So David, groaning in tears were so great that his men, when returning from battle to the city of Mahanayam, were ashamed of their victory. They sort of spoiled everything. And so the king was very displeased. Joav here has to rebuke David about this matter lest he turned a victory into defeat. I want to speak tonight. but inordinate grief from this passage of scripture. I’ll begin by saying this. You find intemperant grief is unjustifiable. In verse 33, we see David here overwhelmed. Now, you see the great grief wayward children cause Christian parents. You see how uneasy David is about his son Absalom. His main concern, you’re recall in chapter 18, verse 29, is the young man Absalon safe? That’s what was his concern when the messengers were bringing the battle report to him. David is anxious about Absalom, despite the fact that he is a rebellious son, wicked in the eyes of the Lord, murdered his brother, who committed incest with David’s concubines, tried to steal the kingdom and so forth. But you see the pain in the heart of this godly father because of his son. As long as the wicked Absalom lives, there is perhaps hope for repentance. There has a hope that perhaps somewhere along the line his heart could be changed. But death steals the fate of the unrepentance son of David. He’s doomed to suffer eternal punishment. accomplishment in hellfire. This certainly would explain the overwhelming grief that David experiences on this occasion. The tragic end of Absalom reveals to us that he is a man who dies without hope. You recall Paul in the New Testament wished himself accursed from Christ if it meant the salvation of his people, his nation. his kinsman in chapter 9 of the book of Romans. David wished he could have died in the stead of Absalom. Paul wished he could have died and even been a cursed, he says, if his own nation would turn to Christ and be saved. And so he would gladly die for his son here if his son could escape condemnation. The sins of children are always a great grief to Christian parents. Tragically so, when rebellious children persist in their sins to the end and die without repentance. Children should always remember how much their salvation means to their parents, believing parents. You should follow their parental instructions. and submit to the Lord and repent and believe on Christ. It’s very difficult for parents to deal with the unconverted state of their children. They’re concerned. They’re worried about them. How exercised in heart are you that your children are safe? Not just in regard to their physical harm, but in regard to their spiritual state for all eternity. This is a question to act upon while. your son or daughter is alive. Because it’s too late to ask that question and act upon it when death occurs. I was reading an autobiography. I guess it’s an autobiography. A lot of it was Spurgeon wrote, but his wife compiled after his death. When he was a boy, he visited his grandfather’s home and he saw on the mantle above the fireplace. He said, I saw this glass bottle and inside was this big apple. And he says, I picked that glass bottle off the mantle. And I’m looking at it. Did they cut off the bottom of the bottle to put the apple in and put the glass back on and seal it up somehow? And he looked it all over carefully. He said, nope, that’s not what they did. So it was mysterious to him how that apple got into that bottle. He set the bottle back up on the mantel. He said later, when he was out in the orchard of his grandfather’s farm there, he said the mystery was solved. He said on several trees, he saw that someone had slipped a glass jar over the apple when it was still small. And it was on the, you know, it was over the apple, but it was still hanging on the tree. So that the apple would grow. inside the bottle, glass bottle, and then later on, he would just clip off the stem, and then the apple would be in the bottle. So that’s how it got in there. And he said, spiritually speaking, that’s what you ought to endeavor to do with regard to your children. You should be pleading for the Lord to save them and seek to have them brought into the kingdom while they’re young to seek their creator in the days of their youth, that they may be useful all their days unto the Lord. So you see the great grief, wayward children, cause Christian parents. And so you can appreciate why David is so upset here about Absalom. Now notice something else here. Your grief has a tendency, your guilt, excuse me, has a tendency to aggravate your grief. Yes, excuse me, has a tendency to aggravate your grief. Use here David’s pitiful wail. here and his sorrow. Why such eruption of emotion? Yes, he’s lost his son. And yes, his son doesn’t give any appearance of being one of God’s children. But there’s even more, there’s a deeper situation here. Why is it that he lost his son? And he has to look back upon himself and his sin with Bashiba. And the fact that he has to look back upon himself. that Nathan told him coming from the Lord that the sword would not depart from his house. And thus he’s reaping the repercussions as a chastening for his sin that he’s committed. And so he’s looking at this situation as a double grief. One is the fact that he has sin and caused the sword, fall, if you would, on Absalom, as well as the fact that Absalom is perishing as a lost person here. And he had to blame himself to some extent. Now it’s true that Absalom is justly put to death by God for his own sin. He certainly deserved it. But David, you can imagine him thinking, you know, look what I did. You know, how I brought this upon my son. And I think that explains some, to some degree, why he cries out, would God I had died for thee, O Absalom. David deserved to die, but he got mercy from the Lord. Guilt has a way of aggravating your grief. It makes it more intense and more difficult to bear. I read a story about a tragedy which took place in a small village in the south of France. Several motorists were killed when a bridge collapsed near a village. And it seems that a man had been dredging sand from the riverbed, and he got too close to the pillars, some of the pillars of the bridge. And so pulling the sand dot made the pillars unstable, and therefore the bridge collapsed. So he had blood on his hand. You can imagine how bad he must have fell. afterwards that after investigators looked at it and said this is the reason why you’re dredging for the sand here caused this all these people to be put to death now among the kilt was a motorcyclist who happened to be the man’s son now you can imagine how bad he must have felt because his own actions caused the death of his son it added to the dreaders grief over causing all these deaths. It’s hard for a parent, I think, to see his or her sin, directly affecting the child that they have. The sins of the father visited upon the children. There’s no escaping this biblical principle. It occurs. What you do, especially negatively, is a child. bound to affect your children. So you have good reason to guard your steps lest you bring sorrow upon your children and cause them to suffer. So your guilt has a tendency to aggravate your grief. Notice your self-control may crumble before grief. David was a father who loved his son, but his love was blind, and it was certainly obsessive here. His spiritual discernment seems to evaporate before inordinate affection that he has for his son. He seems to lose all self-control in his grief. It seems like why he went to pieces here. We will fall to pieces if we don’t hold ourselves in check by biblical principles when sorrow comes into our lives. And so we have to be careful that we rule our spirit properly. Your mind and your will need to govern your emotions and not the other way around. Therefore, you need to watch closely over your affections, bring reason to bear with regard to your emotions. The longer you let your passions run riot, the harder it’s going to be to gain control of them and be temperate in all things. Remember this, that godly sorrow is constructive when it comes to grief. Godly sorrow leads us to something positive, to change, to repentance, a correction of life. Suppose you were chatting with a friend over coffee at a restaurant and you carelessly reach for the sugar and hit his cup and spill it all over his lap. Now, the typical reaction would be certainly be upset with yourself. and you might say how stupid of me, I should have been more careful. Look at the mess I’ve made. I’m sorry. But if you continue to berate yourself and grieve over your misdeed, it would not be constructive. It would not be useful. It would be overwrought by the spilling of this coffee than the mess you’ve made. Constructive sorrow would be different. Yeah, you may be sorrowful, but you’re also going to be reaching for the napkins. You’re also going to be trying to clean up the mess. You’re awful going to offer to pay maybe for the cleaning of the clothes or whatever it is to get the stains out. You’re correcting the problem. Yes, you’re sorrowful, but you’re moving in a positive direction. So godly sorrows like that. It seeks a corrective action or some type of improvement as its goal. So you may properly grieve when sorrow comes into your life. Yet don’t forget that you’re, to engage your mind in biblical thinking, your self-control may crumble before grief. So you find intemperate grief is unjustifiable. Secondly, tonight, you need a rebuke, you may need a rebuke to snap you out of your intemperate grief. And we see that in chapter 19, verses 1 to 8. Now, you sometimes need a strong dose of reality to change your thinking. Job gets the report about David here in verse 1. David’s grief had cast a pall of shame over the whole army here in verses 2 and 3. Many of the troops heard him crying and weeping and crying out about Absalom. And it seemed as if Absalom was the center of his universe. There would be no victory celebration that night in the city. So Joab decided he needs to see. needs to give David some reality therapy. And so he goes marching up to see the king, to awaken him out of his own falling. Otherwise, David may have won a decisive battle, but in the end, lost his kingdom. Sometimes we need help in getting our thinking straightened out. And you start thinking in a biblical manner, what’s best for the kingdom of God, what’s best for your soul, when someone perhaps brings a rebuke to you. You can sympathize with David’s condition, but you have to agree that Jalab is right in his thinking here. In the early 1800s, Ashtha Hel Nettleton had been laboring in a pastorless congregational church in Bridgewater, Connecticut. The church was riddled with… strife and animosity, there was quarreling, he said, there was bickering going on in the church. Nettleton pointedly attacked the problem, he said, in his preaching, and his discussions with the people of the church. They could expect no revival, he told them, until they settled their disputes in harmony prevailed. But the congregation suffered from spiritual deafness. They just wouldn’t listen. In the spring of 18th, the state government proclaimed a certain day as an annual state fast. Yes, that was back in the day when actually there was thinking, some type of spiritual thinking about matters from the government. So they had this supposedly high day where there was supposed to be fasting and prayer and special services across the whole state. What Bridgewater, the occasion was to include a sermon by the celebrated interim evangelist and pastor Ashahel Nettleton. All was all, you know, planned out carefully. The time of the meeting came, no preacher. The people waited. No preacher. Disappointed at last they went home. Aschel Nettleton decided something drastic had to be done. He said, I’m not even going to show up for this thing and see what happens. And so he was a no-show on that. this celebrated fast day, he had just left the community that day. He said, I’m just going to leave. It worked because Nettleton’s invisibility made people see the point, and they organized the real day of prayer and worked toward a solution of settling these festering wounds and peace began to reign in the church. It was not the ideal thing, but drastic majors needed to be. taken sometimes in the Church of Christ drastic majors have to be taken sometimes you have to do something to act as a wake-up call for people like a rebuke of some sort so sometimes you need a strong dose of reality to change your thinking notice something else here should you have more concern over the welfare of the wicked than the well-being of the kingdom of God verses 1 to 6 here David was on the throne of Israel because God willed it. This was how God planned to advance his kingdom on the earth. Absalon was in rebellion against his father. He was essentially setting himself up against God. He was opposing God’s will. Opposing the kingdom of God and God’s king. Allow yourself to be completely overcome with grief, or to himself to be completely overcome with grief. David was obviously showing more concern for his wicked son than the covenant nation of God’s people. David failed to comprehend what was important here. Your own family doesn’t take precedence over the kingdom of God. The well-being of your children must not supersede the advancement of the kingdom of God on earth. God’s interests have to come first. Are your views about divine judgment determined wholly by Scripture or by sentiment? Christians are not always accepting of the death of a loved one, even when it benefits the kingdom of God. So should you have more concern over the welfare of the wicked than the well-being of the kingdom of God? And the answer to that is no. Third point tonight, should you desire the mercy of the mercy of the wicked? of God’s, should you despise the mercy of God’s deliverance? Versus five and six here. Sometimes you can look at God’s providence and not be happy with it. You may quarrel at what Christ is doing in your life. But in doing so, you’re forgetting how merciful he has been to you. How good he has been. You’re forgetting all the benefits that you have received from the Lord. Providence can be bittersweet because some things about God’s purposes may upset you or other things must be acknowledged as a tremendous mercy that you’ve received from the Lord. Sometimes you may look at providence and feel like the Apostle, John, eating the little book, in the book of Revelation. It was sweet to the taste, but it was bitter to the belly. Some things are sort of bittersweet in the way they’re, they work out. David here has to be rebuked for despising the mercy shown to him in this great victory over Absalom’s army. His life is spared as well as that of his family. His kingdom is preserved. The chief threat to it, Absalon, has been completely removed now. Where is his thanks to God? Where is his appreciation? for God’s help in regard to his army, overcoming a stronger army, a much larger foe. Sadly, David is consumed with his loss, and therefore he’s not happy with what he’s gained. There certainly no song on his lips at this point, is there? A Quaker once spoke to a lady who was wearing a very deep, what he called, a double sorrow on her face. She had lost one of her children, and she was still grieving years afterwards. And the Quaker said to her, Madam, hast thou not forgiven God yet? In other words, are you still bitter toward God that you lost your child? There’s some truth in that remark at times. At times Christians may feel that, you know, God has wronged you. and you may hold it against him for years. Are you really quarreling with God’s providence? And forgetting that he’s still working all these things for your good? That there’s some good that it will come out of this? But sometimes we’re so focused on the negative, we don’t think about the positive. And I think in this case, David was doing that. It is not spiritually healthy to be like this. You’re forgetting. getting God’s benefits while griping about one incident that displeased you. How grateful you should be that God is patient with his children, and he doesn’t withhold mercy when we have our hissy fits down here on the earth. Should you despise the mercy of God’s deliverance? No, we should not. A fourth thought tonight. Do you realize how much your actions affect you? the people of God. Versus seven and eight of our text. David’s duty is plain, plainly, if roughly, pointed out by Joab here. His groaning and moaning and weeping about Absalon was having a negative effect upon the people of God, wasn’t it? He needed to bestir himself. He needed to publicly congratulating. His troops and thank them for their efforts on behalf of the kingdom. The health of God’s kingdom was at stake, and he needed to encourage those who sacrificed to preserve it. So he listens to David, or to Joav, and he does as he is advised here. Sometimes, in our grief, we speak ill-advisedly with our tongue. We say things. that ultimately have a negative impact upon other believers or on the kingdom of God. Remember what you say and do affects other people. Not merely your family, but the church and even the kingdom of God at large, especially if you’re a well-known person. One of Esop’s fables is called the dog in the manger. A dog was lying in a manger on the hay. When the oxen came in to eat, and the oxen came over and they tried to eat, and the dog growled and snapped at them. He wouldn’t let them get to their food. And one ox said to the others, what a selfish beast. He can’t eat himself, yet he won’t let those eat who can. Dare we be so bitter with God that we would try to make all those around us unhappy as well. Why do you discourage the people of God who hear all your barking? Don’t you care about the harm that’s done to them? In Psalm 73, you read how Asaph is bewildered by God’s providence, because God seems to prosper the wicked, and he seems to be suffering every day. He can’t see how that works out. He doesn’t understand God’s providence. He’s unhappy with it. But he keeps his mouth shut. He says, I didn’t say anything. It kept silent. Why did he keep silent? Here’s what he says in Psalm 73, verse 15. If I say, I will speak thus, God, you’re being unfair in what you’re doing. Behold, I should offend against the generation of thy children. I may cause one of the other people of God to be unhappy with God. or to look negatively upon the lore. I don’t want to be a problem in this regard. So we have, in our suffering, we have a responsibility to think, well, how is my suffering and my complaining about it going to affect everybody else? It’s interesting that lamentation speaks about patient suffering, but sitting alone and keeping silent. And there’s a sense in which I will not say something negative because it may affect other believers. Or perhaps even with Job, we may learn to say something edifying, even when disaster strikes us like the Lord gave and the Lord take it away, blessed be the name of the Lord. Well, in ancient time, tears bottles were used to capture those flowing tears from the eyes of those overcome with grief. and scripture certainly reveals that God is aware of and keeps track of our tears, has his own tear bottle, so to speak. God is sympathetic toward your grief. However, there are times when you allow grief to overwhelm you, and it becomes an intemperate grief as we have in our text. This is unjustifiable because you end up doing and saying things detrimental, ultimately, to the kingdom of God. Sometimes, God has to send you a rebuke to snap you out of this state. And that’s what our text indicates to us. Christ is always aware of our circumstances and always moving toward the end of correcting and helping us as his children, servants. Let us close with the word of prayer tonight.