My wife recently purchased a new comforter for our bed. The floral print on the comforter is very nice, and the comforter stuffing is fluffy. It’s a great-looking comforter. It is not a warm comforter.
We heat our home with a wood stove, which is located in our living room. We love our wood stove. It’s not large, but it does an amazing job heating our home. Heat, though, travels in a particular way, right? It rises. Because the staircase leading to our second and third floors is in the living room, the heat from the wood stove flows right up that staircase. The heat does not travel laterally, from our living room into our dining room and kitchen. And the heat most certainly does not travel around corners laterally. Our bedroom is on the first floor around a corner. Our bedroom also has two exterior walls, one of which faces the front side of our which gets slammed with winds blowing west to east. Tonight, the windchill is to be below 0 degrees Fahrenheit.
In other words, our comforter will not keep us warm.
This week on the blog, I conclude the life of David sermon series in 1st Kings chapters 1 and 2. 1st Kings 1, verse 1, we learn that David is old and cold. David’s body is aging and breaking down, and he is at the point where he cannot hold his temperature.
Can you identify? I know I will be cold tonight and the next few nights, all of which are to be in single digit temperatures. But my wife and I have extra covers. We have a space heater.
What about David? What will his attendants do to warm him up? Warm up his room with a huge fire? Put ancient hot water bottles under the covers?
Nope. They come up with a solution, and it is perhaps surprising. Then again, given what we have learned about David’s vices throughout his lifetime, maybe it is not surprising. Look at verse 2,
“So his attendants said to him, “Let us look for a young virgin to serve the king and take care of him. She can lie beside him so that our lord the king may keep warm.”
What do you think about that idea? David is an old man who has loads of wives, but instead they propose a young virgin to care for him, and her care for him will include lying beside him to keep him warm. This is crazy, right? This does not seem to be a God-honoring idea. We’ve seen in the past that David has a struggle honoring God’s ways when it comes to treatment of women. As a result he had numerous wives and concubines. Maybe that is why his attendants thought David would be okay with this idea. We just don’t know for sure.
In verse 3, his attendants search the land, selecting a young woman, Abishag, to serve the elderly king and keep him warm. It’s an honor to serve the king, but if you were the young woman, would you want to do this? Would you feel it was an honor?
It is possible, though, that her selection was essentially the same as winning the lottery for her family. If she didn’t want to go, maybe her parents said, “Of course you will go serve the king and keep him warm, because this is going to pay off for our family in the long run. This is a golden ticket.”
We also read in verse 3 that his attendants specifically searched for a young woman who was beautiful. Why the beauty requirement? Did David’s attendants assume that if a young woman was going to keep the elderly king warm, she had better be outwardly beautiful?
When David was chosen to be king, God said, “Man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart.” Now David’s attendants are betraying that principle by emphasizing outward appearance.
This is quite a bizarre situation. But the young woman Abishag is selected, and we read in verse 4,
“The woman was very beautiful; she took care of the king and waited on him, but the king had no sexual relations with her.”
Sounds like David handled this situation honorably. And yet I have to ask, why is the author telling us this story? It seems that the author is setting the stage for us. He wants us to realize that David is basically on his death bed. And that leads to a crisis, which we’ll find out about in the next post.
Photo by Marcus Cramer on Unsplash
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