Now a troublemaker named Sheba son of Bicri, a Benjamite, happened to be there. He sounded the trumpet and shouted, “We have no share in David, no part in Jesse’s son! Every man to his tent, O Israel!” – 2 Samuel 20:1

Today’s Scripture Reading (January 27, 2013): 2 Samuel 20

We live in a finite world. No matter how much money you have in the bank, it is all you have, and for most of us that balance may rise and fall, but it stays within certain boundaries. We have a finite number of possessions. And again, we may buy something new, but often that means that something that is old is about to be discarded. But maybe the biggest finite thing that we have is time. None of us have an unlimited supply. For each one of us, we have twenty four hours in the day. I do not know anyone that has twenty-five or twenty-six. We each have seven days in our week, and again I do not know of any one that has eight. Our months range from twenty-eight to thirty-one days, but that is all that any of us have. And the result is that we have to make choices of what we do with our time – and if you live with demands on your time, you know that there are always people that think they are short changed.

Sheba was of the tribe of Benjamin. It was the tribe of which King Saul had been a member. And whether or not it was true, Sheba felt that David gave less attention to the tribes of Israel, and especially his own tribe of Benjamin, then they deserved (and for Sheba it might be that David simply gave less time to the tribe of Benjamin then Saul had given to the tribe – but he had been born into the tribe of Benjamin). It is not likely that this was something new. But what was new was that David was in a weakened state. He had just battled a civil war against his son, and in the midst of the war, his son, Absalom, had died. So David won the battle, but in many ways he had lost the war. And in this moment in time, David was militarily weaker than he had been, and he was in mourning the loss of his son.  So now, the time was ripe for his opponents to move against him. That was something that Sheba of the tribe of Benjamin understood.

So Sheba begins to make his charge. The charge is that David had ignored the tribes, he had given his time only to Judah (the charge was unlikely on the whole, but in the recent past the civil war between David and Absalom had been a conflict within the tribe of Judah). But then Sheba calls into question David’s right to sit on the throne. He calls David the son of Jesse, and the intent behind the words is that David was just a man – he was not the king, he was simply the son of man named Jesse. David was nobody important.

It is always something that the enemy wants us to believe about ourselves. We are nobody important, just the sons and daughters of other people. But God’s message to us is radically different - we are his sons and daughters, and we are called to his purpose. That was David’s real identity – and it was an identity that Sheba could not change.  

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Psalm 64

Note: The VantagePoint Community Church Sermon "Detoxification" from the Sermon Series "Danny Boy" is now available on the VantagePoint Website. You can find it here.