Boundaries
“Brother, without hesitation, my life for yours. I’ll never stab you in the back, but that doesn’t mean I won’t cut your heart out if you betray my trust.”
Had David held that attitude with his cousin Joab, the history of Israel would have been quite different. After that first murder, David should have with his own hands executed his cousin. David’s fatal flaw was not that he doted too much on his family. He was overly indulgent because he was self-indulgent. Not just a skirt-chaser, David was unwilling to pay the emotional price for putting God first. He loved the warm regard of the sheep more than he loved the sheep. He was a shepherd unwilling to cause distress by yanking his flock back from the precipice of sin.
If love is exerting oneself for the welfare of another, then David didn’t love God enough. He didn’t trust God to handle the political and social consequences of doing the right things.
This was the essence of Adam’s failure in the Garden of Eden. He wasn’t willing to face any possible emotional distress from correcting Eve over the Forbidden Fruit. Instead of dragging her back, seeking to make atonement and surrendering her to God’s authority, Adam allowed Satan to set the menu. In all things, we either serve God or we serve Satan.
Again, it’s too easy for Western minds to read that wrong, seeking some nearly invisible bright line that is always true in every context for every person. That’s entirely the wrong approach. The shepherd’s power is not limitless over every factor affecting the flock. He has tools and skills and his own compassion. Success is not even a significant issue from our end; faithfulness from the heart is what God seeks.
David passed the buck onto Solomon regarding Joab. That was wrong, and it sent the wrong message to everyone. Joab was David’s mess and it was his duty to stop the profligate self-indulgence of Joab, but he first had to correct his own. You’ll notice David correctly exercised no judgment in cases not brought to his attention. The affairs of his people were their own concern for the most part. Not every murder required his attention. There was no human with any authority to hold him accountable for the murder of Uriah. Don’t confuse God’s mercy with David’s self-indulgence in the matter of Joab and others.
Context is everything. God is the ultimate Judge of all things. Don’t misread the Law of Moses as harsh, with unreasonable penalties. Westerners simply do not understand what a serious threat adultery is to family stability. It’s like ripping big holes in the moral fabric of the universe. Let the wound fester and the cancer spreads both quickly and subtly until everything comes apart. Social stability is founded on trust and commitment. Those are essential expressions of God’s own character. A man or woman could forgive adultery and spare their spouse the death penalty, but it could also eventually cost his or her life, if not their soul. The sole issue is how much of a threat God sees to His glory, and our commitment to promote His glory. David was spared but Joab should have been executed because each presented a differing threat to God’s glory.
The difference requires understanding the limits of authority and roles, among other things. There are boundaries, but they are written in Heaven and applied on earth. It requires a heart after God, a determination to please Him. Our civilization hates and rejects the utter necessity of falling at the feet of God and giving Him full authority over our lives. We keep inserting the authority of our logic into the context, and that is simply blasphemous. We won’t let Him choose for us to suffer for reasons we can’t comprehend; we demand accountability from Him. God is in charge. Each moment of decision should bring a change within us, making us able to work smarter as we age and our bodies are less eager for exertion. Divine enlightenment is not a simple matter of God turning on a switch. It’s a matter of teaching our hearts to see what our eyes cannot.
To the Hebrew mind, the heart was the seat of will, where the convictions were carved into stone, as it were. Your awareness of those convictions — your conscience — should change over time. That simply reflects how your mind should be trained by the Spirit, who speaks through your will primarily. You are obliged to obey your conscience as the best you know at any given time, with the expectation you’ll be better informed once you’ve tested what you already have. It’s as if we seek to sweep away layers of rubble obscuring the foundations of our souls; the mind only knows what it has learned with its own powers. It does not want to obey, but it is wholly incompetent to rule. We make a conscious effort to train it for its proper role, which is to organize and implement what God says through the convictions.
David allowed his emotions too much free rein, letting them overpower the warnings of his convictions. When the mind demands a second opinion after consulting the convictions, it can’t possibly be a better answer. You cannot force anyone else to live against their own best estimate of what God requires of them, either. At some point your authority ends, and that other person has crossed the boundary outside your authority. By the same token, there is a world of folks willing to transgress those boundaries in the other direction, demanding you comply with something contrary to your convictions.
Wading through this relentless clash of overlapping authorities and demands requires you first have a clear vision of your own moral boundaries, the things for which God holds you accountable. The rest is making a habit of conferring with Him when things aren’t too obvious. That typically means testing everything against your conscience.
The reason God gave Satan so much room to operate in human space is to remind us that we cannot afford to be lazy about our duty to His Lordship.
