God chooses the most peculiar
people. That’s my opinion, of course, but it seems
to me that God should call the best and brightest. Certainly
in our world, those without blight or blemish get the
positions of honor, prestige and fortune. Yet I keep finding
this strange preference in the Bible for the broken and
bruised and just plain odd and even the most egregious
of sinners.
Take David, for example. David:
this guy was the second king in the struggling nation
of Israel back around 1000 B.C. Really, Israel was less
a nation than a group of semi-related clans trying to
figure out how to survive in a hostile land. To give him
credit, David did a decent job of unifying them and bringing
some stability and cohesiveness. However, David was, among
other things, an adulterer, a murderer, a stupendously
awful father, and, when it served his purpose well, a
liar. Furthermore, he taxed his folks pretty heavily to
be able to fund his expanding empire.
Not much of a recommendation,
is it? In fact, I wonder how that would sound on the résumé—“Accomplishments:
had illicit relations with the wife of one of my underlings,
got her pregnant, and contracted the murder of her husband
to cover it up. Also, aided and abetted some of my children
in their wrongdoings against their siblings. Skillful
liar, sneaky warrior; know how to hire and keep good people
and freely eliminate those who don’t please me.
Would make a great CEO. Salary negotiable, but expect
significant remuneration.”
If I were God, this fellow
would have no place in my kingdom. Of course, I am not
God and I suspect we can all be thankful for that. Even
so, it’s never made a lot of sense to me that David
is named, “a man after God’s heart.”
So what’s the deal?
I think the deal is that God
does indeed choose the most peculiar people. That God
does have a preference for even the most egregious of
sinners and that the broken and the bruised are given
great places of honor in the heavenly places. I think
it is in those most broken and painful places that we
discover the keys to the kingdom. We’ll talk about
it more on Sunday.
