Posted on 04/26/2021 10:07:16 PM PDT by Pilgrim's Progress
“Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful” (Proverbs 27:6).
Sometimes folks have problems distinguishing between their enemies and their friends. I would like to point out here in this passage that David had that problem, and the critical issue was a misguided love. It was for the love of his son, Absalom. He mourned for his son and plainly blamed himself for his son’s rebellion, but sometimes our sins really complicated things in our life. So, we wind up putting too much weight on something or somebody. We should stop and take a moment to consider whether that thing that we are wrestling with, or that is an issue, what if that thing actually leads you to think or act as if your friends are our enemy?
Folks get upset about church. They get upset and leave because they are mad at the preacher. They are mad at the deacons. They are mad at the preacher's wife or whatever. They are mad at some other person in the youth group or some such thing like that, and they use all that as an excuse to walk away and leave all their previous blessings behind. We had better be careful lest that issue, whatever it is you are dealing with, doesn’t destroy something good. For David, it was the death of a son who had rebelled against him, who frankly deserved to die. Right? Absalom was a Rascal. Right? Furthermore, David had a part in the making of Absalom by his own sins. So, it is a convoluted dark insidious well, sometimes.
My point is here you have David who because of the stumbling block of Absalom's death actually is thinking more along the lines of his enemies being his friends and his friends his enemies, and Joab blasted him about it, and David got right about it. But, in our own case, suppose our error in leaving a good church over a problem causes our own son to rebel and go so deep into the world that he later loses his life to a drug overdose. Before you leave, consider what the end result might be. Especially if we don’t replace what we left with something just as true to God’s word. So many times, it is a case of throwing out the baby with the bath water.
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