Get the Best of Evil by Doing Good

 

Get the Best of Evil by Doing Good

Bless your enemies; no cursing under your breath. Laugh with your happy friends when they’re happy; share tears when they’re down. Get along with each other; don’t be stuck-up. Make friends with nobodies; don’t be the great somebody. Don’t hit back; discover beauty in everyone. If you’ve got it in you, get along with everybody. Don’t insist on getting even; that’s not for you to do. “I’ll do the judging,” says God. “I’ll take care of it.” Our Scriptures tell us that if you see your enemy hungry, go buy that person lunch, or if he’s thirsty, get him a drink. Your generosity will surprise him with goodness. Don’t let evil get the best of you; get the best of evil by doing good. (Romans 12:14-21)

The most sacred symbol in Oklahoma City is a tree – a sprawling, shade-bearing, 80-year-old American Elm. Tourists drive from miles around to see it, people pose for pictures beneath it, and arborists carefully nurture and protect it. The tree adorns posters and letterhead. Other trees in the area grow larger, fuller, even greener. But not one of them is as equally cherished. The city treasures the tree – not for its appearance, but for its endurance. The tree endured the Oklahoma City bombing.

Timothy McVeigh parked his death-laden truck only yards from that tree. His malice killed 168 people, wounded 850, destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, and buried the tree in rubble. No one expected the tree to survive. Frankly, no one even gave any thought to the dusty, branch-stripped tree until it began to bud. Sprouts pressed through damaged bark, and green leaves pushed away gray soot. It was life resurrected from an acre of death and people noticed because the tree modeled the resilience that the victims desired. So, they gave the elm a name: the Survivor Tree.

Truth is, the Timothy McVeigh’s of this world still rock us. They inexcusably and inexplicably maim and scar us. And we want to imitate the tree — survive the evil and rise above the ruin. But how? David can give us some ideas.

When Saul “McVeighed” his way into David’s world, David dashed into the desert where he found refuge among the caves near the Dead Sea. Several hundred loyalists followed him. So did Saul. And in two dramatic desert scenes, David models how to give grace to the person who gives you grief.

Scene One. Saul signals for his men to stop, and so they do. Three thousand soldiers cease their marching as their king dismounts and walks up the mountainside. The region of the Ein Gedi simmers in the brick-oven heat. Sunrays strike like daggers on the soldiers’ necks. Lizards lie behind rocks, scorpions linger in the dirt and snakes, like Saul, seek rest in caves. So, Saul enters the cave “to relieve himself. Now David and his men were hiding far back in the cave.” (1 Sam. 24:3) With eyes likely dulled from the desert sun, the king fails to notice the silent figures who’re lining the walls, but they see Saul.

As Saul heeds nature’s call, dozens of eyes widen. Their minds race and hands reach for daggers. One thrust of a blade would bring Saul’s tyranny and their running to an end, but David signals for his men to hold back. He edges along the wall, unsheathes his knife and cuts not the flesh but the robe of the king. David then creeps back into the recesses of the cave.

David’s men can’t believe what their leader has done, and neither can David. But his feelings are just the opposite of his men. They think he’s done too little; he thinks he’s done too much. Rather than gloat, he regrets. Later, David felt guilty because he’d cut off a corner of Saul’s robe. He said to his men, “May the Lord keep me from doing such a thing to my master! Saul is the Lord’s appointed king. I should not do anything against him, because he is the Lord’s appointed king!” (1 Sam. 24:5–6) Saul exits the cave, and David soon follows. He lifts the garment corner and, in so many words, shouts, “I could have killed you, but I didn’t.” Saul looks up, stunned, checks his robe and wonders aloud, “If a man finds his enemy, will he let him get away safely?” (24:19) David will, and more than once.

Scene Two. Just a couple of chapters later, Saul, once again, is hunting David and David, once again, outwits Saul. While the camp of the king sleeps, daredevil David and a soldier stealth their way through the ranks until they stand directly over the snoring body of the king. The soldier begs, “This is the moment! God has put your enemy in your grasp. Let me nail him to the ground with his spear. One hit will do it, believe me; I won’t need a second!” (26:8)

But David won’t have it. Rather than take Saul’s life, he takes Saul’s spear and water jug and sneaks out of the camp. And then, from a safe distance, he awakens Saul and the soldiers with an announcement: “God put your life in my hands today, but I wasn’t willing to lift a finger against God’s anointed.” (26:23) Once again, David spares Saul’s life. Once again, David displays a God-saturated mind. Who dominates David’s thoughts? “May the Lord . . . the Lord delivered . . . the Lord’s anointed . . . in the eyes of the Lord.” (26:23–24; emphasis added)

Like David, we think about the purveyors of pain in our own lives. It’s one thing to give grace to friends, but to give grace to those who give us grief? Can you do that? Given a few uninterrupted moments with the Darth Vader of your days, could you imitate David? Maybe. Some people just seem graced with mercy glands. They secrete forgiveness, never harboring grudges or reciting their hurts. Others of us, maybe most of us, find it hard to forgive our Saul’s. We forgive the one-time offenders, mind you. We dismiss the parking-place takers, the date-breakers, and even the purse snatchers. We can move past the misdemeanors, but the felonies? The repeat offenders? The Saul’s who take our youth, our retirement or our health? Were that scoundrel to seek shade in your cave or lie sleeping at your feet, would you do what David did? Could you forgive that scum who hurt you? The problem is that failure to forgive could be fatal: “Resentment kills a fool, and envy slays the simple.” ( Job 5:2)

Vengeance fixes your attention on life’s ugliest moments. Score-settling freezes your stare at the cruel events of your past. But is that where you want to look, or live? Will rehearsing and reliving your hurts make you a better person? No. It will destroy you. Don’t think so? Well, do you remember that old comedy routine where Joe complains to Jerry about the irritating habit of a mutual friend – the guy pokes his finger in Joe’s chest as he talks. It drives Joe crazy. So, he resolves to get even. He shows Jerry a small bottle of highly explosive nitroglycerin tied to a string. He explains, “I’m going to wear this around my neck, letting the bottle hang over the exact spot where I keep getting poked. Next time he sticks his finger in my chest, he’ll pay for it.” Not nearly as much as Joe will. That’s because enemy destroyers need two graves – one for the enemy and the other for themselves.

“It is foolish to harbor a grudge.” (Eccles. 7:9) An eye for an eye becomes a neck for a neck, or a job for a job, or a reputation for a reputation. When does it ever stop? It stops when one person imitates David’s God-dominated mind. He faced Saul the way he faced Goliath — by facing God even more. When the soldiers in the cave urged David to kill Saul, look who occupied David’s thoughts: “The Lord forbid that I should do this thing to my master, the Lord’s anointed, to stretch out my hand against him, seeing he is the anointed of the Lord.” (1 Sam. 24:6)

When David called out to Saul from the mouth of the cave, “David stooped with his face to the earth, and bowed down.” (24:8) Then he reiterated his conviction: “I will not stretch out my hand against my lord, for he is the Lord’s anointed.” (24:10) And in the second scene, during the nighttime campsite attack, David maintained his belief: “Who can stretch out his hand against the Lord’s anointed, and be guiltless?” (26:9) In these two scenes there’s six separate times when David called Saul “the Lord’s anointed.” Can you think of another term David might have used? Yeah, me too, but not David. He saw, not Saul the enemy, but Saul the anointed. He refused to see his grief-giver as anything less than a child of God. David didn’t applaud Saul’s behavior; he just acknowledged Saul’s proprietor — God. David filtered his view of Saul through the grid of heaven. The king still belonged to God, and that gave David reason for hope.

Many years ago, a German shepherd/wolf mix attacked my youngest son on his way to elementary school. The worthless animal, completely unprovoked, climbed out of its run and onto the sidewalk and nearly killed William. The dog left my son with dozens of cuts and gashes, all of which required stitches whose number I can’t even begin to remember. My feelings toward that cur were less than Davidic. Leave the two of us in a cave, and only one would have exited – and it wouldn’t have been the dog. In fact, I told the humane society to put the dog down because this wasn’t its first bite. But I was asked to reconsider. “What that dog did was horrible, but the owner’s still training him. They’re not finished with him yet.” Well, I certainly was.

God would say the same about that shepherd/wolf mix who attacked you. “What he did was unthinkable, unacceptable, inexcusable, but I’m not finished yet.” Your enemies still figure into God’s plan. Their pulse is the proof – God hasn’t given up on them. They may be out of God’s will, but not out of his reach. You honor God when you see them, not as his failures, but as his projects. Besides, who assigned us the task of getting even? David understood that. From the mouth of the cave he declared, “May the Lord decide between you and me. May the Lord take revenge on you for what you did to me. However, I will not lay a hand on you. . . . the Lord must be the judge. He will decide.” (24:12, 15) And God did.

God occupies the only seat on the supreme court of heaven. He wears the robe and refuses to share the gavel. For this reason, Paul wrote, “Don’t insist on getting even; that’s not for you to do. ‘I’ll do the judging,’ says God. ‘I’ll take care of it’.” (Rom. 12:19) Revenge removes God from the equation. Vigilantes displace and replace God. “I’m not sure you can handle this one, Lord. You may punish too little or too slowly. I’ll take this matter into my hands, thank you very much.” Is that what you want to say? Jesus didn’t.

No one had a clearer sense of right and wrong than the perfect Son of God. Yet, “when he suffered, he didn’t make any threats but left everything to the one who judges fairly.” (1 Pet. 2:23) Only God assesses accurate judgments. We impose punishments too slight or too severe. God dispenses perfect justice. Vengeance is his job. Leave your enemies in God’s hands. You’re not endorsing their misbehavior when you do. You can hate what someone did without letting hatred consume you. Forgiveness is not excusing, and forgiveness is not pretending. David didn’t gloss over or sidestep Saul’s sin. He addressed it directly. He didn’t avoid the issue, but he did avoid Saul. “Saul returned home, but David and his men went up to the stronghold.” (1 Sam. 24:22) Do the same.

Give grace, but, if necessary, keep your distance. You can forgive the abusive husband without living with him. Be quick to give mercy to the immoral politician but be slow to give him another office. Society can dispense grace and prison terms at the same time. Offer the drunk driver a second chance but keep his license. Forgiveness is not foolishness. Forgiveness is, at its core, choosing to see your offender with different eyes.

When some Moravian missionaries took the message of God to the Eskimos, the missionaries struggled to find a word in the native language for forgiveness. They finally landed on this cumbersome twenty-four-letter choice: issumagijoujungnainermik. This formidable assembly of letters is literally translated, “not being able to think about it anymore.” To forgive is to move on; to not to think about the offense anymore. You don’t excuse him, endorse her or embrace them. You just route thoughts about them through heaven. You see your enemy as God’s child, and revenge as God’s job.

And, frankly, how can we grace-recipients do anything less? Dare we ask God for grace when we refuse to give it? This is a huge issue in the Scripture. Jesus was tough on sinners who refused to forgive other sinners. Remember his story about the servant freshly forgiven a debt of millions who refused to forgive a debt equal to a few dollars? He stirred the wrath of God: “You evil servant! I forgave you that tremendous debt. . . . Shouldn’t you have mercy . . . just as I had mercy on you?” (Matt. 18:32–33)

In the final analysis, we give grace because we’ve been given grace. We survive because we imitate the Survivor Tree. We reach our roots beyond the bomb zone. We tap into moisture beyond the explosion. We dig deeper and deeper until we draw moisture from the mercy of God. We, like Saul, have been given grace. And we, like David, can freely give it because that’s how we can get the best of evil – by doing good.

Grace,

Randy

Crawl into God

 

Crawl into God

Crawl into God - Audio/Visual 

Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of “the brightest and the best” among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have — right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start — comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. (1 Cor. 1:26-30)

The Dead Sea is dying. Sounds like an oxymoron but drop by drop it’s losing three feet of water a year. In other words, the Dead Sea’s shrinking. Galilee sends fresh water through the Jordanian Canal, water worthy of Jesus’ baptism, but the Dead Sea poisons it. Darkening and acidizing, it’s a saline cemetery. There’s little life in its waters, and its surroundings are equally lifeless. Ominous cliffs rise to the west, and erosion has scarred the land into a patchwork of caves and ruts and sparse canyons. It’s home for hyenas, lizards and buzzards. And it was home to David – for a decade. Not by choice, mind you. He didn’t want to swap the palace for the badlands. No one chooses the wilderness. It comes at you from all directions — heat and rain, sandstorms and hail – and sometimes we don’t have a vote. Calamity hits, the roof rips, the tornado lifts and drops us smack dab in the middle of the desert. Not the desert in Israel, but the desert of the soul.

More than anything else, isolation seems to mark these seasons. Saul had effectively and systematically isolated David from every source of stability. His half-dozen assassination attempts ended David’s military career. His murderous pursuit drove a wedge in David’s marriage. After David’s wife, Michal, helped him escape, Saul demanded an explanation from her. “I had to,” she lied. “He threatened to kill me if I didn’t help him.” (1 Sam. 19:17) David never trusted his wife again. They stayed married but slept in different beds.

David races from Saul’s court to Samuel’s house. But no sooner does he arrive than someone tells Saul, “Take note, David is at Naioth in Ramah!” (1 Sam. 19:19) So, David flees to Jonathan, his soul mate. Jonathan wants to help, but what can he do? Leave the court in the hands of a madman? No, Jonathan has to stay with Saul, and David can see the rope fraying on his lifeline. No place in the court. No position in the army. No wife, no priest, no friend. Nothing to do but run. And although the wilderness begins with disconnections, it often continues with deceit.

We see David’s deceit in Nob, the city of the priests. The city was holy; David was anything but. He lied each time he opened his mouth. In fact, David gets worse before he gets better. He escapes to Gath, the hometown of Goliath. He tries to forge a friendship based on a mutual adversary. If your enemy is Saul and my enemy is Saul, we can be friends, right? Wrong. The Gittites weren’t feeling very friendly. “Isn’t this David, the king of the land?” they asked. “Isn’t he the one the people honor with dances, singing, ‘Saul has killed his thousands, and David his ten thousands’?” (1 Sam. 21:11)

David panics. He’s a lamb in a pack of wolves. Penetrating glares; piercing spears. And right about now we’d like to hear a prayer to his Shepherd; we’d appreciate a pronouncement of God’s strength. But don’t hold your breath because David doesn’t see God. He sees trouble, instead. So, he takes matters into his own hands. He pretends to be insane, scratching on doors and drooling down his beard. Finally, the king of Gath says to his men, “‘Must you bring me a madman? We already have enough of them around here! Why should I let someone like this be my guest?’ So, David left Gath and escaped to the cave of Adullam.” (1 Sam. 21:14 – 22:1)

Can’t you just picture it? Staring with galvanized eyes and quivering like jelly. He sticks out his tongue, rolls in the dirt, grunts and grins, spits, shakes and foams. David feigns something like epilepsy. The Philistines, however, believed that Dagon’s devil possessed an epileptic and that he made husbands impotent, women barren, children die and animals vomit. Fearing that every drop of an epileptic’s blood created one more devil, the Philistines drove epileptics out of their towns and into the desert to die. And that’s what they do with David. They shove him out of the city gates and leave him with nowhere to go.

So now what? He can’t go to the court of Saul or the house of Michal, the city of Samuel or the safety of Nob. So, he goes to the only place he can — the place where no one goes because nothing survives. He goes to the desert; the wilderness. To the honeycombed canyons that overlook the Dead Sea and there he finds a cave, the cave called Adullam. In it he finds shade, silence and safety. He stretches on the cool dirt, closes his eyes, and begins his decade in the wilderness.

Can you relate to David’s story? Has your Saul cut you off from the position you had and the people you love? In an effort to land on your feet, have you stretched the truth or distorted the facts? Are you seeking refuge in Gath? Under normal circumstances you’d never go there, but these aren’t normal circumstances, so you loiter in the breeding ground of giants; the hometown of trouble. You walk shady streets and frequent shadier places. And, while you’re  there, you go crazy. So the crowd will accept you, and so the stress won’t kill you, you go wild. You wake up in a Dead Sea cave, in the grottoes of Adullam, at the lowest point of your life and feeling as dumb as a roomful of anvils. You stare out at an arid, harsh, unpeopled future and ask, “What do I do now?”

Well, let this same David be your teacher, also. Sure, he goes wacko for a few verses but in the cave of Adullam he gathers himself. The faithful shepherd boy surfaces once again. The giant-killer rediscovers courage. Yes, he has a price on his head, and yes he has no place to lay his head, but somehow he keeps his head. He returns his focus on God and finds refuge.

Refuge surfaces as a favorite word of David’s. Circle its appearances in the book of Psalms and you’ll count as many as forty-plus appearances in some versions. But never did David use the word more poignantly than in Psalm 57. Even the introduction to the passage explains its background: “A song of David when he fled from Saul into the cave.” So, close your eyes and envision Jesse’s son in the dimness: on his knees, perhaps on his face, lost in shadows and thought. He has nowhere to turn. Go home, he endangers his family; go to the tabernacle, he imperils the priests. Saul will kill him; Gath won’t take him. He lied in the sanctuary, and went crazy with the Philistines, and here he sits. All alone.

But then he remembers: he’s not. He’s not alone. And from the recesses of the cave a sweet voice floats: Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me! For my soul trusts in you; and in the shadow of your wings, I will make my refuge. (Psalm 57:1) Make God your refuge. Not your job, your reputation or your retirement account. Make God your refuge. Let him, not Saul, encircle you. Let him be the ceiling that breaks the sunshine, the walls that stop the wind, the foundation upon which you stand. The truth is that most of us, like David, will never know that Jesus is all we need until Jesus is all we have.

Wilderness survivors find refuge in God’s presence. They also discover community among God’s people. “Soon [David’s] brothers and other relatives joined him there. Then others began coming — men who were in trouble or in debt or who were just discontented — until David was the leader of about four hundred men.” (1 Sam. 22:1–2)

Not exactly a corps of West Point cadets, they were in trouble, in debt or discontent. Quite a crew. Misfits, yes. Dregs from the bottom of the barrel, no doubt. Rejects. Losers. Dropouts. Just like the church. (No, that’s not a typo) Because if we’re honest with ourselves, aren’t most of us the distressed, the debtors and the discontent? The Apostle Paul, talking to the church in Corinth, certainly thought so: “Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of ‘the brightest and the best’ among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”? (1 Cor. 1:26–28) Strong congregations are populated with current and former cave dwellers, people who know the terrain of Adullam. They’ve told a few lies in Nob. They’ve gone loopy in Gath. And they haven’t forgotten it. And because they haven’t, they imitate David: they make room for people like you and me.

And who’s David to turn these men away? He’s no candidate for archbishop, that’s for sure. He’s a magnet for marginal people. So, David creates a community of God-seeking misfits, and God forges a mighty group out of them: “(t)hey came to David day by day to help him, until it was a great army, like the army of God.” (1 Chron. 12:22) Gath. Wilderness. Adullam. Folly. Loneliness. Restoration. David found all three. So did Whit Criswell.

Whit was raised in a Christian home. As a young man, he served as an officer in a Christian church, but he got hooked on gambling, daily risking his income on baseball games. Over the course of time, he lost $200,000.00 and found himself in deep and desperate debt to his bookie. So, he decided to embezzle funds from the bank where he worked. Welcome to Gath.

Of course, it was only a matter of time until the auditors detected a problem and called him in for an appointment. Criswell knew he’d been caught. But the night before the meeting he couldn’t sleep. So, he resolved to take the path of Judas. Leaving his wife with a suicide note, he drove outside of Lexington, parked the car and put a gun to his head. But he couldn’t pull the trigger, so he took a practice shot out the car window. He pressed the nose of the barrel back on his forehead and mumbled, “Go ahead and pull the trigger. This is what you deserve.” But he couldn’t do it. The fear that he might go to hell kept him from taking his life. Finally, at dawn, he went home, a very broken man.

Meanwhile, his wife had found the note and called the police. She embraced him, and the officers cuffed him. He was, at once, humiliated and liberated: humiliated to be arrested in front of family and neighbors but liberated from the chains of mistruth. He didn’t have to lie anymore. Whit Criswell’s Adullam was a prison cell. In it, he came to his senses; he turned back to his faith. Upon release, he plunged into the work of a local church, doing whatever needed to be done. Over a period of years, he was added to the staff of the congregation. He’s now a minister at Mt. Zion Christian Church in Lexington, Kentucky. Another David restored.

Are you in the wilderness? Crawl into God the way a fugitive would a cave. Find refuge in God’s presence and comfort in his people. Cast your hat in a congregation of folks who are one gift of grace removed from tragedy, addiction and disaster. Seek community in the church of Adullam. Refuge in God’s presence. Comfort in God’s people. Your keys for wilderness survival. Do this and who knows? In the midst of the desert, you may write your sweetest psalms, and in the midst of a cave find God.

Grace,

Randy