To Bless or Blast

So, someone you love has made a mistake.  And not a little one like locking their keys in the car or forgetting to roll the trash to the street on collection day or coming home with a kitten.  I mean a life-altering, reputation killing, soul crushing failure.  The kind of mistake that requires modifiers like epic or monumental or even monstrous.  The kind of mistake that leaves scars and breaks hearts and changes everything.  What do you say to someone who is responsible for that kind of catastrophe? 

Ancient Israel managed to jack-knife a truckload of chaos more than once.  But the one decision that seemed to make the biggest mess was when they asked the prophet Samuel to get them a shiny new king, just like all the other nations in the neighborhood.

Samuel knew it was a mistake from the beginning.  (He was a prophet.)  And he did warn them.  But they wouldn’t listen.  So God did what God does – he allowed them the freedom to choose who they wanted to be and how they wanted live.

(Not so fun fact: the unpleasant outcomes we often think of as punishment from God are nothing of the sort.  They are consequences – a word almost universally in the plural – and usually the direct result of our decisions, not God’s.  See Proverbs 1:31.)

But Samuel did have a chance to address Israel before he was decommissioned and sent off to the old prophet’s home.  You can read the whole thing in 1 Samuel 12, but basically, he said three things.  And they offer a pretty good guide for what to say to that friend or loved one who is about to learn why the word consequences is always in the plural.

You and me – we go way back.

That’s in vs. 2.  Samuel reminds them that he’s been their leader since his youth and that he has never abused his position for personal gain, a fact they themselves affirm.  It’s a good way to begin.  Credibility is the love child of history and integrity.  If you have known someone for a long, long time and you’ve been a faithful friend, you can say just about anything to them.  Which is why time spent with friends, even if it’s doing stupid stuff that appears to have no intrinsic value, is never wasted.  You are making memories, sharing life, and creating credibility.  If you ever have to challenge your friend, your history will help her hear you.  By focusing on their shared past, Samuel put himself in a good position to confront them one last time.  Which is what he did next.

God has been good to you.

In vs. 7, after he has reminded them that they go way back, he gets serious.

“Now then, stand here, because I am going to confront you . . . .”  Looks like it’s hammer time.

“. . . with evidence before the Lord.”  Great – he has video.

“. . . as to all the righteous acts performed by the Lord for you and your fathers.”

Wait.  What?  I thought this is the moment when he’s supposed to tell them how bad they’ve been. Instead, he tells them how good God is.  This is his chance to poke them in the chest and say, “I told you so.”  Instead, he points to heaven and says, “He loves you, so.”

I don’t know if there is a scripture for this, but if it were a horse in a race I’d bet the farm on it: behind every sin, before every failure, there is some bad theology.  Peel back the airbrushed façade of any temptation and somewhere deep in its jaundiced heart you will find a lie about God.  Once Satan shook Eve’s confidence in God’s goodness, all he had to do was hand her the apple.

So instead of blasting Israel for their sin, Samuel blesses them with a reminder of God’s righteousness.  Most people who are neck deep into something they already regret don’t need for you or me to point out their imperfection.  What they need is for us to remind them of all the times and ways God has been there for them in the past.  And how he will be there for them in the future.  The thing that needs to be confronted first isn’t a moral failure or an ethical lapse – it’s a theological lie.

Oh, and one more thing . . . I will never stop praying for you.

The last thing Samuel says in vs. 23.  “As for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by failing to pray for you.”  Which means, I think, that we need to spend more time talking to God about our brothers and sisters than we spend talking to our brothers and sisters about God.

So did it work?  Did Israel walk the big aisle while the heavenly choir sang Just As I Am?  Well, no.  Three chapters (and four decades) later, Israel’s king is a psychotic mess, the nation is in spiritual free fall, and even God himself is grieved.  Sometimes, even if you say and do all the right things, people will still make bad choices.  But leaning on shared history, reminding folks of God’s forever love and promising to pray for them is world’s better than saying, “I told you so.”