Deal Gently With My Cancer…?

God was able to make love and justice meet perfectly in the death of Jesus.   #daybydaylw   To learn what it means to follow Jesus in your life, go to follow.lifeword.org.   ~~~   It appears to me that what we see taking place in 2 Samuel 18 is what Jesus has in mind in Matthew 10. The love and attachment that David had for Absalom, for whatever reason he had it, was greater, at least temporarily, than his love for God and God’s kingdom. The earthly safety and welfare of Absalom was David’s idol. “God gives no secure salvation to his church unless he brings decisive judgment on her enemies. We must stop praying, “Deliver us from evil,” unless we (truly) yearn for (evil’s) destruction (I John 3:8). Others, we are like a patient ready to undergo cancer surgery who pleads with his doctor, ‘deal gently with my cancer.’ Who urges the surgeon to get most of it but definitely to leave a tad, since ‘it is part of me and I would hate to lose all of it,”? (Dale Ralph Davis, 2 Samuel Commentary) There cannot be fellowship between light and darkness, righteousness and lawlessness. Jesus said that he came to bring a sword, and a sword divides. Truth divides. Holding to biblical principles divides. It can be a lonely business to be a follower of Christ sometimes. But it is worth it because having Jesus is worth it, and Jesus is the one who makes sense of it all. In this text, David cries tears for his own grief and sorrows, and cannot rid himself of them. He cannot bring love and justice to meet perfectly. He cannot bring himself to accept the justice his son deserved, and his love is not strong enough to save Absalom. But there came a king who shed tears for our griefs and sorrows, not his own, and then removed them from us as far as east is from the west, because God was able to make love and justice meet perfectly in the death and resurrection of this king. The putting forth of Jesus as our willing atonement demonstrates the justice of God, and the raising forth of Jesus from the dead tells us that His love for his people was strong enough to save us. Only a completely holy God could do such.