Parkerville Baptist Church
This Sunday is Reconciliation Sunday – the Sunday in Reconciliation Week that invites Christians to reflect on their journey of reconciliation with Australia’s First Peoples. As God’s people, we share communion together to remember what Jesus has done, and we seek to live that out in lives that are reconciled to God, to one another, and to all people. Reconciliation Sunday encourages us to consider how the journey of reconciliation is going, and to live out reconciliation in every part of our lives.
Mike Bullard will be bringing us his final message, from 2 Samuel 21:1-14. This is an unusual story from David’s life. It highlights the profound effect that listening and mourning can have on the journey of reconciliation. Join us to explore and discover some insights about how wounds from the past can be resolved and blessing come into difficult places as people move through processes of reconciliation. What might a journey of reconciliation look like for each of us?
2 Samuel 21:1-14 NIV
Ask God...
2 Samuel 21:1During the reign of David, there was a famine for three successive years; so David sought the face of the Lord. The Lord said, “It is on account of Saul and his blood-stained house; it is because he put the Gibeonites to death.”
Ask People...
2 Samuel 21:2The king summoned the Gibeonites and spoke to them. (Now the Gibeonites were not a part of Israel but were survivors of the Amorites; the Israelites had sworn to spare them, but Saul in his zeal for Israel and Judah had tried to annihilate them.) 3David asked the Gibeonites, “What shall I do for you? How shall I make atonement so that you will bless the Lord’s inheritance?”
Act On Behalf Of...
2 Samuel 21:4The Gibeonites answered him, “We have no right to demand silver or gold from Saul or his family, nor do we have the right to put anyone in Israel to death.”
“What do you want me to do for you?” David asked.
Obeying The Bible?
2 Samuel 21:5 They answered the king, “As for the man who destroyed us and plotted against us so that we have been decimated and have no place anywhere in Israel, 6 let seven of his male descendants be given to us to be killed and their bodies exposed before the Lord at Gibeah of Saul—the Lord’s chosen one.”
So the king said, “I will give them to you.”
2 Samuel 21:7 The king spared Mephibosheth son of Jonathan, the son of Saul, because of the oath before the Lord between David and Jonathan son of Saul.
2 Samuel 21:8 But the king took Armoni and Mephibosheth, the two sons of Aiah’s daughter Rizpah, whom she had borne to Saul, together with the five sons of Saul’s daughter Merab, a whom she had borne to Adriel son of Barzillai the Meholathite. 9 He handed them over to the Gibeonites, who killed them and exposed their bodies on a hill before the Lord. All seven of them fell together; they were put to death during the first days of the harvest, just as the barley harvest was beginning.
2 Samuel 21:10 Rizpah daughter of Aiah took sackcloth and spread it out for herself on a rock. From the beginning of the harvest till the rain poured down from the heavens on the bodies, she did not let the birds touch them by day or the wild animals by night.
2 Samuel 21:11 When David was told what Aiah’s daughter Rizpah, Saul’s concubine, had done, 12 he went and took the bones of Saul and his son Jonathan from the citizens of Jabesh Gilead. (They had stolen their bodies from the public square at Beth Shan, where the Philistines had hung them after they struck Saul down on Gilboa.)
2 Samuel 21:13 David brought the bones of Saul and his son Jonathan from there, and the bones of those who had been killed and exposed were gathered up 14aThey buried the bones of Saul and his son Jonathan in the tomb of Saul’s father Kish, at Zela in Benjamin, and did everything the king commanded.
Finally...
2 Samuel 21:14b After that, God answered prayer in behalf of the land.
