Thursday, September 4, 2025
Scripture Readings
- Primary Reading: 2 Samuel 18-23
Key Verse
2 Samuel 21:6 — “Let seven men of his sons be delivered unto us, and we will hang them up unto the LORD in Gibeah of Saul, whom the LORD did choose. And the king said, I will give them.”
Devotional Thought
The rebellion of Absalom ends in a wood, not on a battlefield. Twenty thousand men fall, and the forest itself devours more than the sword. Absalom, who stole Israel’s hearts with his beauty and his chariots, rides a mule under the thick boughs of a great oak, and his head catches fast in the branches. He hangs between heaven and earth, helpless, while the beast beneath him runs on. Joab, who heard David’s charge to deal gently with the young man, drives three darts through his heart. Then Absalom is cast into a pit and buried under a heap of stones — the very man who had raised a pillar to keep his own name alive, and God’s Word through Nathan had already said what would become of that name.
But the deepest wound in this passage is not Absalom’s. It is David’s cry: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee.” The king who had sinned and been sinned against, the father whose own failures had seeded this harvest, weeps for the rebel who hunted him. And Joab, hard and practical, must rouse him from his grief lest the army that saved him slink home ashamed. So David rises and sits in the gate, and the kingdom is stitched back together — Shimei pardoned, Mephibosheth restored, old Barzillai blessed and sent home to die among his own. Then, almost at once, Sheba blows a trumpet and the tribes tear again.
Read this in September, as the year begins to turn and shadows lengthen. Most of us know something of both men here. We have been Absalom, caught in the branches of our own ambition. We have been David, grieving a child or a friend whose ruin we could not prevent. And we have been Joab, tired of mercy, ready to end a problem with three swift strokes. The passage refuses easy heroes. It shows us a father’s love that will not stop, a kingdom that keeps fracturing, and a God who is not absent even in the wood. David’s cry — “would God I had died for thee” — is the cry of every parent and every friend who loves someone who will not be saved. It is also a shadow of Another Father, whose Son did die for His enemies, and who still gathers rebels back to the gate.
Reflection
- Where in your life are you caught, like Absalom, “between the heaven and the earth” — unable to go forward, unwilling to turn back — and what would repentance look like from that place?
- David mourned the son who rebelled against him; is there someone you have written off as an enemy whom God is calling you to grieve for and forgive?
Prayer
O God, our Father, we come to You as people who have played every part in this story. We have run from Your house in pride, and we have watched those we love run from it too. Teach us to weep over our enemies rather than to celebrate their fall. Give us David’s heart, that would rather die for a rebel than rejoice over his ruin. And when we ourselves are the rebel, caught in the branches, give us grace to be brought down and brought home. Through Jesus Christ, who died for His enemies and rose again, we pray. Amen.