Success and failure

Children are born with faith.  Without knowledge or strength of their own, they rely unquestioningly on others.  As they mature with growing life experience, faith commonly fades, outshone by the glow of self-dependence and a confidence that human opinions are the best available.  Faith – the certainty about what has not been personally experienced or cannot be directly proved – slowly trickles away.  And so we arrive at adulthood where, for most people at least, personal and communal experiences or opinions become the boundaries and possibilities of life.

King David, however, avoided this decay and reached adulthood with his faith intact.  For him, killing Goliath was not only possible but essential.

He also displayed amazing ability at a very early age.  Ability often proves to be one of the greatest enemies of faith, prompting us to rely on our own ability instead of the vastly greater ability of God, our creator.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson sagely observed: “A man must thank his defects, and stand in some terror of his talents.”

Yet King David avoided this misleading folly also, arriving at the  height of his formidable powers still certain of God’s supremacy.

No wonder he was Israel’s greatest king!  No wonder he was successful.

However, rulership gives power and power is dangerous.  All too often, power corrupts, and sadly for David, after ruling for about 10 glorious years, he plunged into serious error.  For a time, it seems that he believed he was above the laws which governed the behaviour of everyone else in his kingdom.  This is the danger of power.  It appears that, for a time, David felt he was above Moses’ laws about marriage and fidelity.  He saw Bathsheba, a married woman, bathing and took her as his own.  In doing so, he was unfaithful to God as well as to all of his wives and concubines.  He tried to cover it up, and when that failed, ordered the death of Uriah, one of the special heroes in David’s army and Bathsheba’s husband.

David then married Bathsheba before their illegitimate baby was born.

This was a series of disastrous mistake on David’s part.  God was displeased, yet forgave the repentant king and did not insist on the death penalty specified for both murder and adultery.  Yet he still promised punishment with two components: firstly, the baby would die, and secondly, trouble and the sword would ravage David’s family life from then on.

God’s punishment took place.

It is tragic that such a righteous man and outstanding example was unable to maintain that righteousness without failure.[1]  This changed the course of David’s life and that of his family, but managing his family was already a very difficult task.

Our choices

All choices we make – whether of careers, hobbies, friends, spouse, religion, education, diet, clothing, housework or anything else – have consequences.  Not only so, but the choices we make in one arena of life will affect other areas as well.

• Many who are good leaders in society are seen as failures in their families.
• Many who are successful in business also fail in marriage or family.
• Many who enjoy success in their marriage and family achieve little of note in their professional careers.

It’s all about priorities, because we all get the same amount of time each week.  If you choose to commit 100 hours per week to a job, then you only have 68 hours for sleep, eating, hygiene and all the other aspects of life.  If you also allowed 8 hours of sleep each day, only 12 hours would remain each week for everything else you may have in life: friends, family, religion hobbies, housework, etc.

Of course, some responsibilities are optional:

• We don’t have to get married (1 Corinthians 7:8).
• We don’t have to pursue extra education.
• We don’t have to follow a hobby.

If we don’t take up these optional responsibilities, we can commit much more time to the remaining responsibilities that are not optional.  In the Bible, God tell us that we must fulfil these responsibilities to please him.

• We have to work.  Through Paul, God tells us, “if anyone will not work, let him not eat.” (2 Thessalonians 3:10).
• We have to acknowledge God or we have no long-term future (Romans 1:28-32).
• We have to obey God or we will not be in his kingdom (1 Corinthians 6:9)

David, the king

David was an excellent and godly king.  As a teenage shepherd, he had risked his life fighting lions and bears to save his sheep; as king, he tried to care for his nation with the dedication.  Yet one man caring for millions of people spread across a large kingdom is a far more complex task than looking after a “few sheep in the wilderness”.[2]  A king relies on a hierarchy of subordinates to correctly report conditions in the kingdom while disseminating and enforcing policies.  How else can a king decide his priorities or directions?

Ruling a nation will consume any amount of time a king is willing to commit to the task.  Not only so, but the time demanded will always tend to increase and the call will be urgent.

A large family will also consume any amount of time a father or mother is willing to give, but many of the demands will not be so obviously immediate.  A king has servants aplenty to handle the pressing day-to-day demands of children.  In fact, history suggests that a king’s children are more often brought up by servants than by their parents.  In a king’s family, one of those children will later become king.[3]  Who will be this future king’s teacher, his tutor, his coach and mentor?  Unfortunately, it is more likely to be a servant than his far-too-busy father.  Typically, a successful king will not have time to pass on his expertise through personalised training of his sons.

What a calamity that the person best equipped to teach the skills needed to rule a kingdom will be too busy to do so!  As a result, when a king dies, his successor begins his reign without the benefit of hands-on training from a successful monarch.

[To be continued]

Notes

[1] Jesus is the only person who was righteous without fail and without sinning (regarding Jesus being sinless, see 2 Corinthians 5:21; Hebrews 4:15; 1 Peter 2:22; 1 John 3:5, while for everyone else, see Romans 3:23; 1 John 1:8-10).
[2] 1 Samuel 17:28
[3] …or queen in some kingdoms, but not in the kingdom of Israel.