Thoughts on 2 Samuel 13

Today’s reading: 2 Samuel 13; Galatians 2

This may sound a little odd at first blush, but 2 Samuel 13 gives me serious pause as a father.

People, rightly, give David a lot of credit for his faith and faithfulness to God. David deeply loved the Lord, sought to fill the role God had given him well, and did amazing things under the Lord’s power as a result. He is regularly called “a man after God’s own heart,” and that should definitely be celebrated.

But for all of David’s faithfulness to the Lord, and effectiveness as a king and military commander, he was a terrible father…

On the one hand, it makes sense practically. David has so many wives, and if he has multiple children with even a handful of those wives, how could he possibly make time to have any sort of relationship with all of his children while also running the nation, carrying out military campaigns, etc.? But does that excuse it? I’m gonna say no.

There are a few places we see this, but none so blatant as 2 Samuel 13 and then somewhat the chapters that follow. David's son Amnon falls in love with his half-sister Tamar and ends up raping her. We are told that when David finds out about it he is very angry, but that's the end of it. David didn't know his own son well enough to see though what he was intending to do when he requested Tamar be sent to make him food, and then after the fact he did nothing about it. Ultimately, David's inaction leads to Tamar's brother, Absalom, taking matters into his own hands and killing Amnon for what he did to his sister. And while the way he does it isn't "right," the penalty for rape in Israel was supposed to be death, so in that sense, given that the king wasn't meeting out justice according to the law, I would say Absalom was more in the right here than David. On top of all that, what we will see over the next few days is even more ineptitude as a father on David's part as he deals terribly with Absalom in the wake of everything, ultimately bringing much more trouble down on himself, his family, and the nation.

One of the important lessons I take from this is that even extreme faithfulness to God in one area does not equate to faithfulness (or even really goodness) in another, and we cannot rest on the success in one to justify ignoring the other.

I can work hard and be faithful in prayer, spend a lot of time in the Word, join ministry teams at church, serve in my community, etc., but if I am not being faithful as a husband and father in the midst of that, I am not being faithful to what God has called me to. This is actually something I have been extremely cognizant of since starting this blog series. Writing these posts every day requires quite a bit of time to be dedicated to it, and that's not time that comes easily. It would be easy to take some of my "free time" after work in the evenings to work on them, but if I do that, I am taking time away from my kids. On the other side of that, if I always push it back and work on them after the kids are in bed, I'm taking time away from my wife. So try to strike that balance of doing this thing that I feel the Lord has set before me to do, while also staying faithful in my role as father and husband is honestly really difficult sometimes. But as difficult as it may be, I don't ever want to be like David here...

I know I will never be a perfect father, but I want to be continually growing in faithfulness in that role. I don't want to settle, like David did, for being a man after God's own heart and also a terrible or absent father. I want both. I want to run increasingly hard and faithfully after the Lord, and I want to grow increasingly good and faithful as a father, and represent God well to my family. David is an important cautionary tale to me in this regard. I don't ever want to rest on my faithfulness to the important work God has in front of me to justify faithlessness to the other important work God has in front of me. Thankfully, by God's grace, and through the power of His Spirit, this is one area we get to have our cake and eat it too. I just don't ever want to lose sight of just how important it is to maintain this balance and start to slip the way of David.