Hi. It’s been a while.
I’m sitting at the beach, overlooking the Atlantic ocean. It stormed earlier this afternoon, and the beach is still brown from the rain. People are just starting to filter back in to the beach, and the ocean has the haze of distant rain.
I’ve thought heavily about writing you a bunch of updates, but for now, I will simply say I’ve been very busy and I’ve been pursuing things God has called me to – namely business. SendNods, Deskpop Hosting, and the newly minted FD Nerd have all been growing entrepreneurial ventures. Each has it’s own place in my life, and I would like at some point to share them with you, but that’s not for today.
Today, I wanted to talk about a concept I haven’t fully grasped. I try to stick with concepts that I feel I have a good grasp on, so as to not be hypocritical, but I also know that I tend to process things better by talking. In the computer world, they actually use rubber ducks for this. A software developer will talk to a rubber duck to tell the duck what it’s trying to solve, and in the process of talking to the duck, they will work verbally through the problems and come to solutions. Will you be my duck for a moment?
I’m trying to process two concepts – or rather the same concept that ‘s found in two different places in the Bible and has the same implication.
The first place I want to discuss it is in the new testament, the parable of the talents. For those unfamiliar, Jesus is talking to the people and telling them a parable to explain the upcoming and future kingdom of Heaven. He tells of a king who’s going off to battle, and gives 3 servants treasure (talents in the language) and tells them he will be back soon. One servant he gives 5 talents, the second servant gets t2alents, and the third servant gets 1 talent.
For those familiar, you know the first two invest their talents and double the returns – to which the king gives them control of cities equal to the number of talents.
The third servant buries the talent, and returns it untouched. His stated reason is this, and I’m paraphraising, “I know that you are an aggressive man, and you take things that aren’t yours.” His 1 piece of gold is given to the man with 10, and he’s thrown out into the darkness, symbolizing hell. While we could probably tangent onto that for a while, I will save that.
Most people take this as a parable teaching about inaction, and yes, I think that’s a really important lesson that Jesus is teaching. But I don’t think it’s the real lesson Jesus is trying to cover here.
The first two go along with the king’s wishes without a problem, and they seem eager to do so. But this third guy claims that this king, representing God, is a taker – someone who takes what isn’t his and is hard or harsh. A similar translation of the word is used to describe how hard it is to accept Jesus teaching not to marry, or the winds of the sea that Jesus calmed.
Here’s what I’m trying to get at here – I think Jesus is trying to teach us about how we see God. I’ve heard people have problems with God giving the land of Canaan to Israel before – taking from someone else and giving to the people of Israel. I’ve heard of people having problems with all kinds of things God does. You can’t gloss over these problems, but you also have a responsibility to deal with them as well. I have a responsibility to deal with my own judgements of God not being a good God. And I mean actually good – like warm cinnamon rolls and hot coffee after waking gently on a sunny morning, knowing you have a day of rest – good. Not just some aloof good, or some religious good, but really really good.
I think Jesus is really trying to say this – and I could be very wrong, so read it and pray about it and study it for yourself – but I think he’s trying to say, “For you to step into all I have for you, you need to know – I personally need you to understand – that I am looking to love you, to support you, and to help you every step of the way. I’m looking to wipe your tears from your pain, to be close to you when your heart breaks – hoping to scoop you up in my arms. I need you to know I love you. And I want you to succeed, and I want to help you and you reward your work.”
To put it simply, “God wants us to have what we want in life.” I can hear so many people in my head cringe, saying “Yeah, but…!!!” and calling me a heretic. Normally I would qualify things, or explain the minutia. But instead, I’m going to pivot slightly and talk about some comparisons – two in particular that most of us are familiar with. Father God compares Christ and the church to husband and wife, and he compares us to him as Father and son. Unfortunately, the ones of us that need to hear this message the most have most likely experienced the worst in regards to father and son, or husband and wife.
So let me pivot a little. King David wasn’t perfect, but he was said to have been a man after God’s own heart. God loved him so much that he kept his promises to him for every generation thru Christ, even when his children were the worst. King David wasn’t perfect – he had a man killed to hide that he had cheated with his wife – but that’s not how God remembers him. If God is remembering him as “His servant”, then we are acting as the accuser, Satan himself, to label him with those same sins. So from a Biblical perspective – then David was approved by God. But what made David different? Why was David so different from Saul.
Interestingly enough, if you study what Samuel says over Saul, you see a similar flaw. Samuel says of Saul, “even though you were once small in your own eyes.” We see a pattern of weakness. He doesn’t kill Jonathan because his men will revolt, and he makes sacrifices instead of waiting because his men will leave. Here we see a pattern of a man more concerned with his image than how his God feels. But I’m not here to study Saul, I’m here to study David.
Yes, David definitely exhibited a pattern of caution to obey the Lord – think of when he had vowed not to drink and his men fought through enemy lines to bring something to drink. Instead of drinking this water, he dumped it out so he wouldn’t break his vow. Yeah, it’s a bit weird, but it also shows a man who was careful with his relationship with God.
We also see the opposite – him dancing with abandonment. He stripped down to dance in a public celebration before the entire nation, right in the middle of the city. And his wife, his only wife at the time, mocked him for it. But David was defiant.
So we see this pattern of boldness for the Lord, but we have to ask ourselves where does this come from? What made David so much bolder than we often see ourselves? Why was David willing to look the fool.
I think the answer lies in the parable of the talents – and in David’s own words.
We really get a rare treat with David – not only do we get the second half of 1 Samuel and all of 2 Samuel, as well as 2/3 of 1 Chronicles, we get an extra special treat with him. At least half of the Psalms are written by David himself. Here you get the intimate outpourings of this musicians heart – you see his pains exposed from some of his darkest moments. Yet there’s a word you see in these Psalms that you really don’t see anywhere else. It tells of God’s lovingkindness.
See the real lesson of the parable of the talents, in my humble opinion, has nothing to do with wastefulness – it really has to do with how we see God.
David saw God as good. As someone who had his back when no one else did. Who he could trust even when he fucked up. As someone who was faithful to bring him every single thing he wanted in life. And God says as much.
God’s promise to David when he stole Bathsheba and murdered her husband was that he would have given him anything and everything he wanted, had he asked.
Throughout Psalms – you see David responding this way to God. You see David singing praises of God’s everloving kindness. This wasn’t just a saying to David. He had suffered through a lot of hell. And he knew God to be good through it all. “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death – your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”
But back to the parable of the talents.
There are two attitudes seen by the servants who get these talents. One of trusting the master’s faithfulness to reward, and a second attitude of distrust. The wicked servant says – “Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed,so I was afraid…” (Matt 25:24-25 ESV).
It’s easy to focus on this wicked servant’s attitude, and miss that two servants had an attitude like David – one where they trusted God’s goodness. They saw God (or their master in this case) as someone with whom they could trust to reward them, with whom they could trust their goodness.
At this point, I have a nice novelette written and I’m really just trying to distill down one simple concept. Seeing God for his everloving kindness will change our life for the better for you.
With that, I am signing off.
