“Formation happens day by day; distortion happens day by day. We are either helping our sons move into
adulthood or joining the culture’s attempt to trap them in an extended adolescence”
- Jon Tyson, The Intentional Father
Nothing happens in a vacuum. This saying has nothing to do with your vacuum cleaner (don’t feel bad if your brain first went there). Instead, it means that everything is connected, rather than isolated. This is the profoundly real concept that the Bible harps on repeatedly when the authors mention that we reap what we sow. If you plant an apple tree, you should expect to see the sprouts of an apple tree after some time. If you shoot a squirt gun into the wind, you should expect to get sprayed a little bit - this analogy should really hit home with the gentlemen.
In our chapters this week, David’s actions (and more significantly, inactions) produce a result that should be bone-shuttering for us. The king’s moral failures have begun to preview his own undoing: we are coming off of his foolish decisions surrounding Bathsheba and the natural consequences that followed. What we see is that licentiousness and impulsivity do not skip a generation in the king’s family. The apple does not fall far from the tree! What should pain us most is that the depravity in the kingdom could have been avoided with a little bit of intentionality. If David had the wherewithal to lead his sons Amnon and Absalom humbly they would not have inherited the capacity to make such a colossal mess out of their lives, and one another. If David had parented his children with the care and concern that God desired, the torch would not have been passed with such catastrophic consequences: incest, rape, murder, and deception. What a role the family has!
As you read through these chapters, I want you to think a little bit about your family. Hopefully, you share little in common with David and his children’s outcomes, but I would imagine you will see some overlap. David is a father of anger and passivity. Amnon is a son who has developed no self-control. Absalom is a child who takes the reigns to find justice where none has been pursued. Tamar is a daughter who is not protected. You see, God created the family very intentionally to play an influential role in each of our lives, and He intended it to be positive. What is crazier is that God made the nuclear family to point us to His family, the Church, where He is the head and we are His children. He intends for His Church to be interdependent and unified, despite our histories and idiosyncrasies. He has made us to be a part of one another’s formation day by day, rather than each other’s distortion.
Read 2 Samuel 13-14
1. What are your immediate observations and thoughts after reading this story? What could David have done to prevent, reverse, or reconcile the pain that his children have produced? Instead of helping, where was David?
2. How does your family background affect your daily decisions? What did it teach you about God? What were you taught about friendships and trusting others? What do you wish was better communicated or modeled?
3. When you read that the Church is intended to look like a family, how do you feel? Is this a new concept? What would the Church look like if we all made the decision to adopt one another as family? How would your life change?
4. What is keeping you from adopting this view? What are you going to do about it this week?