Read Time: 6 minutes2 Samuel 17
Two counsels are set before Absalom, and the kingdom hangs on which he takes. Ahithophel urges speed: let him take twelve thousand and fall on David that very night while he is weary and weak handed, strike the king alone, and bring the people back. The counsel is shrewd and deadly, and it pleases Absalom and all the elders — the rejected king could have been lost before morning.
But Hushai, David’s man in the rebel’s court, turns the counsel aside with flattery and fear. He paints David and his men as fierce as a bear robbed of her whelps, too seasoned to be caught in a night raid, and urges that all Israel be gathered first with Absalom himself leading — a plan that gives David the one thing he needs, time. And the narrator lays bare the hand behind it: Yahweh had appointed to defeat the good counsel of Ahithophel, to the intent that Yahweh might bring evil upon Absalom. Providence overrules the cleverest scheme to guard the anointed.
Word races to David by the priests’ sons, hidden in a well at Bahurim under a woman’s spread covering, and the king crosses Jordan by morning light. Every link holds — Hushai to the priests, the priests to their sons, the sons past the pursuers to David — and by the morning light there lacked not one of them that was not gone over Jordan. The God who defeated the counsel also carries the message and brings the king to safety.
Ahithophel, his counsel refused, goes home and hangs himself. Seeing his advice set aside and the rebellion now doomed, he sets his house in order and hanged himself, and died — the betrayer of the anointed ending by his own hand. The friend who lifted his heel against David dies as the friend who would betray the Son of David died; the wisdom turned to treason destroys itself.
Yahweh overrules the deadliest counsel to guard his anointed; the messengers all get through, and the betrayer who turned on the king ends, like Judas after him, by his own hand.
Jeremiah 21
Zedekiah sends to the prophet hoping for a miracle, and receives a sentence instead. With Nebuchadnezzar at the gates the king asks Jeremiah to enquire… of Yahweh, hoping he will deal with us according to all his wondrous works and lift the siege. But the answer reverses every expectation: Yahweh himself will fight against the city, with an outstretched hand and with a strong arm, even in anger — the hand that once fought for Israel is now turned against her. There is no deliverance to ask for when Yahweh is the besieger.
Then Yahweh sets two roads before the people. Behold, I set before you the way of life, and the way of death — he that stays in the city dies by sword, famine, and pestilence; he that goes out and yields to the Chaldeans shall live, and his life shall be unto him for a prey. The only life on offer runs straight through surrender; clinging to the doomed city is death, and laying down resistance is the one path that survives.
To the king’s house comes the charge to do justice while there is yet time. Execute judgment in the morning, and deliver him that is spoiled out of the hand of the oppressor — even now, late as it is, righteousness is required of the throne. The royal house that should have been a fountain of justice has become kindling; if it will not turn, the fire will devour the forest of its pride.
The two ways are the whole book in miniature, and the gospel’s pattern too. Life is found not in defending what is condemned but in surrendering it — coming out, giving up the doomed stronghold, casting oneself on the conqueror’s mercy. The flesh would hold the city to the death; faith walks out the gate and lives. The way of life has always run through the surrender of what cannot be saved.
Yahweh fights against the doomed city and sets two roads before it: hold the condemned stronghold and die, or surrender and live — life runs through letting go of what cannot be saved.
Romans 7–8
Paul lays bare the war the law could not win. The commandment is holy, and just, and good, yet sin uses it to provoke the very desire it forbids, and the man under it is divided against himself: the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. It rises to a cry of helplessness — O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? — and lands on the only answer: I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. The law shows the war; it cannot win it.
Then the great release: there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus. The law of the Spirit of life in Christ has freed the believer from the law of sin and death; and the heart of it is the act the whole month has been moving toward — what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh. The Son came in our very nature, the flesh in which sin reigns, and never once yielded to it; and in his death sin was condemned where it lives, that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk after the Spirit.
So the Spirit makes sons and heirs out of slaves. The believer receives not the spirit of bondage again to fear but the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father — heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ, if we suffer with him that we may be glorified together. The present sufferings are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come; the whole creation groans, waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God — the redemption of the body that resurrection will bring. The adoption Paul names is no legal transfer into a stranger’s family but huiothesia, the coming-of-age of a son to his full estate — begun now in the Spirit’s cry of Abba, completed when the body itself is redeemed.
And nothing can break the grip of that love. If God be for us, who can be against us? — he that spared not his own Son will freely give us all things; no charge stands against God’s elect, for it is God that justifieth. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Neither death nor life, nor things present nor things to come; in all these we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. The wretched man’s cry has become the conqueror’s song.
The law shows the war it cannot win; but God, sending his Son in our very flesh, condemned sin in the flesh — and now there is no condemnation, only adoption, the glory to come, and a love nothing can sever.
Synthesis and Exhortation
The month ends on the two ways and the one deliverance. Jeremiah sets life and death before the doomed city — hold the condemned stronghold and die, or surrender and live — and Romans sets the same choice in the soul: the law of sin and death, or the law of the Spirit of life in Christ. The wretched man’s cry, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?, is the cry of everyone still holding the besieged city of the flesh; the answer is to come out and live, for there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.
The whole month’s movement gathers here. The rejected king, betrayed by the friend who ate his bread and guarded by a providence that overruled every scheme, prefigured the Son of David condemned and raised; and now Paul names what that death accomplished — God… sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh… condemned sin in the flesh. The flesh David could not master, that broke his house, that Jeremiah found graven on the heart, met its condemnation in the Son who bore that flesh and never yielded. The way of life runs through the surrender of what cannot be saved.
So come out of the city of the flesh and live. Do not defend the stronghold sin has already condemned; surrender it, be found in Christ, and hear the verdict that ends all dread — no condemnation. The God who overruled Ahithophel and raised his Son is for us; nothing in death or life can separate you from that love. The wretched man’s cry can become the conqueror’s song — so walk out the gate, and live.
Two ways stand at the month’s end — hold the condemned flesh and die, or surrender and find no condemnation in Christ; the Son came in our very flesh and condemned sin there, and the God who is for us lets nothing sever the love that makes the wretched man more than conqueror.