Absalom had known a time when, in the assertion within his own spirit of self-hood, he virtually ceased to be a true son. This was his fall. The old child-affection became weak; an aversion sprang up; father was no longer regarded as a father should be, and child ceased to be genuine child. This was the secret of all. It was a sort of moral death. … Virtually he had said, “I will be free and do as I wish.” This is also the essence of our sin against God. …
Self-will asserted its power. God became one, and he another. Union was gone. This is our Saviour’s teaching in the parable of the prodigal son. The young man was weary of his father, and wanted to do as he liked away from him. If we examine our hearts, it will be found to be the same with ourselves. Sin is, negatively, destitution of the sonship feeling; positively, the assertion of self-hood as against God. In this lies its desperate evil, its incurable vice, its secret of doom. …
As soon as Absalom’s heart was gone, he began to use up his beauty, his eloquence, his scheming, every faculty of his nature, to render himself happy in his self-hood, and to be able to dispense with his father’s favour. In human nature all gifts flow in the line of one master-feeling. Hence when the dominant feeling is alienation from God, the entire man goes away, and all powers are made subservient to self as against the rightful dominion of God. The prodigal son used his patrimony away from his father. Sinners use up their patrimony for self, and not in harmony with God. Kindness is abused.
For a time Absalom simply cherished the feeling of alienation and knew the misery of a lost love. But evil is a force, and we cannot remain as we are when it once enters the soul. The wretchedness of a lost love put him on the way to get rid of the authority which existed in spite of his loss of loving delight in it. Thought begets thought, and so in due time positive rebellion arose. …
There is a corresponding phase in the life of many a sinner. It is misery to be loveless and to know at the same time that God lives. Hence, thoughts flow in suggesting how, by what skepticism, or disbelief, or defiance, or desperation in vice, he can be dislodged from the conscience. Possibly the war becomes violent. No more welcome thought to some men that that God is not. Lost love means in the end antagonism. …
Unhappy Absalom found abettors and flatterers. His independent spirit accorded with the temper of others. His endeavours to live without his father’s love and blessing seemed most successful, for never did men make so much of him as now when he has shaken off the yoke of dependence and has gone in for a free life. His “strength was firm.” The aim of his ambition seemed within reach. Wise and astute men encouraged and helped him, and forces were placed at his disposal.
So all seems to go well for a while with those who are alienated from God the Father. No visible punishment comes on them. They are free from restraints to which once they submitted. They “become as gods, knowing good and evil”. Others, some of them wise and learned and astute, encourage them in their mode of life and join in their aims. The forces of wit, learning, science, worldly sagacity, combine to enable them to put down the authority to which they ought to submit. …
Absalom finds his forces scattered by a force the strength of which he did not expect to meet. The mighty array of power on his side receives a check. He has to learn that the authority despised can make itself felt. And in the course of Providence there are times when events remind sinners that God still rules over forces which they cannot resist, that powers are at work before which they have to bow. Sickness, bereavement, adverse conditions of life, ruin of wicked helpers, pangs of conscience, and personal wretchedness, come and beat down the proud array of wit, learning, jovial companionship, and stoutness of will … The conscience sees, as with prophet’s eye, the dark shadows of the future in passing events.
The pride of Absalom’s person was the means of hastening his death. The hair which had been so much admired, which he counted as a treasure, and made him conspicuous in Israel, now combined with the silent forces that ran through the forest trees to bring him into the judgment for which his course of rebellion had been preparing him. When God’s time has come, he has many instruments for effecting his purpose.
The best gifts of sinful men sometimes get so entangled with the stable order of nature as to prematurely bring their life to an end. There are always “branches” stretching out in the natural order of things, forming objects against which the powers and possessions of men run, to their detriment and speedy death. The young man’s natural vigour, of which he is proud, may run against a resisting force which shatters it in proportion to its strength. Brilliant intellects, in their defiance of God, have, in modern times, become so absorbed in literary work bearing on their infidelity, as to be caught early in the arms of death. Of how many may it be said that their beauty has been their destruction!
The attention of all, especially of the young, should be called to the fact that the right feeling of sonship is that of loving submission, and that the loss of this towards earthly parents is really the fruit of a loss of the filial feeling towards the heavenly Father. … Young men may take warning against the terrible power of evil when once they break the bonds of love to parents, and in this first and chief sin they have their germ of unspeakable crimes and woes.
Let those who in the height of sinful prosperity imagine that all is going well, remember that, though they thus rejoice, yet for all these things God will bring them into judgment. Both the righteous and the wicked may accept it as a certainty that, in some way or other, the very inanimate creation will sooner or later be subservient to the ends of justice. The best monument we can rear to ourselves, or that others can raise to our memory, is that blessed memory of the just which rest on a life of love to earthly parents and righteous fulfillment of all the obligations we owe to God and man.
The Pulpit Commentary, II Samuel p. 443-444, II Samuel 18:1-18, (C. Chapman)
See also: Ecclesiastes 11:9
Gold Nugget 362
Dangers of Excessive Selfhood
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