Never Morning Wore to Evening that some Heart did Break

2 Samuel 18:29-33

"The king asked, “Is the young man Absalom safe?” Ahimaaz answered, “I saw great confusion just as Joab was about to send the king’s servant and me, your servant, but I don’t know what it was.” The king said, “Stand aside and wait here.” So he stepped aside and stood there. Then the Cushite arrived and said, “My lord the king, hear the good news! The Lord has vindicated you today by delivering you from the hand of all who rose up against you.” The king asked the Cushite, “Is the young man Absalom safe?” The Cushite replied, “May the enemies of my lord the king and all who rise up to harm you be like that young man.” The king was shaken. He went up to the room over the gateway and wept. As he went, he said: “O my son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you—O Absalom, my son, my son!”

Poet Alfred Tennyson once wrote "never morning wore to evening that some heart did break". We reach the culmination of a very sad saga in David's life, possibly one of the saddest in Scripture. We can probably imagine hearing Absalom, in the last moments if he were still alive in David's arms replying, "Dad, I really didn't want you to die for me, but I sure wished you lived a little bit for me." How can a son hate his father so much? David deceives one man and he is deceived, he wrecks a home and in turn his is broken, separating father and son. Sin is not cinematic, the boomerang reaches back and brings with it much pain and suffering to our real lives and the lives of others around us until we reach this point of death. We live in times when people try to eject God from daily experience, reject Him and His Word even as a terrible harmful 'myth' and yet at the same time affirm with highest praise human goodness and genius. Malcolm Muggeridge said "the depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact." Such pride in Secular Humanism fails to grasp that we 'all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God' and that 'the heart is deceitful and wicked above all things, who can search/save it?' David and Absalom's story is a live demonstration in history, of sin leading to death, and there are many others and until now we see around us the fallenness of our world. We tend to dismiss these and become overly optimistic about our faith in humanity, until it comes around. "Never morning wore to evening that some heart did break", the poet ends his long elegy for a friend with these lines: "Whereof the man, that with me trod

This planet, was a noble type

Appearing ere the times were ripe,

That friend of mine who lives in God,

That God, which ever lives and loves,

One God, one law, one element,

And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves."

Through our humanity, God seeks to show His awesome glory and the essence of being human and the highest point that we can reach is by living according to God's will. Despite broken hearts daily, our fallenness, squandered potentials, and homes ripped apart by sins of our own undoing, we have an answer, far more than David and his family could've ever imagined what God had promised:

Romans 6:23

"For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."

~08.06.2014