Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - What Causes a Dysfunctional Family Legacy | David in 22 | 2 Samuel 13

Episode Date: December 16, 2019

You know the sad thing? Dysfunction seems to be the norm in most families. I mean, most of us, when we were kids, we made vows: "Oh, I'm not going be like my parents. Oh, I'll do things differently" Dysfunctional families are everywhere. Everyone has some sort of family dysfunction. No one believes the cover images of perfect, smiling families. There's always something going on in the background, even if we can't see it and don't know what it is. What causes a dysfunctional family legacy? Where does it all start? And how do we function with the dysfunction? Find out from https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/patrick-miller/ (Patrick) as he digs into https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+Samuel+13&version=NIV (2 Samuel 13) to continue our series on https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcast-series/david-in-22-stories/ (David in 22). In this episode, we discuss the outcome of David's sins. Listen to https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-consequence-of-confronting-god-david-in-22-2-samuel-11/id1477778533?i=1000459095422 (The Consequence of Confronting God) for more context. To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO (Facebook), https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO.  Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. And I'm Keith Simon. Right now, we're working through the story of David's life found in First and Second Samuel. Well, I'm glad that you're sticking with us. If you haven't figured it out already, the latter half of David's life is dark. And that means, honestly, that these episodes are living under a shadow. But I think it's a shadow we all need to live under for a little bit. It's the shadow of human rebellion

against God. Today's story takes us away from David to instead focus on his children. And any parent can tell you this. A child's story is always interconnected to our own. And so any true biography out there of any parent is going to talk about their children. Second Samuel is no exception. But the story it tells about David's children, it's an ever-escalating tragedy. It just keeps getting worse and worse and worse and worse. Why? Well, it's because David's two sons, Amnon and Absalon, they catch the contagion of David's sin. They catch the contagion of the sin that David committed against Bathsheba and Uriah, lust and murder. We read in 2 Samuel 13. This happened sometime afterward. Absalom, son of David, had a beautiful sister named Tamar, and Amnon, son of David, became infatuated with her. Amnon was so distraught

because of his half-sister Tamar that he became sick, for she was a virgin, and it seemed impossible to Amnon to do anything about it. This story is a story of untethered lust. It's not entirely untethered, though. It's almost untethered, because Amnon is the crown prince, and so his lust always comes tethered to power. And so Amnon, he hatches a plot to get Tamar alone. He pretends to be sick, and then he asks for his sister to attend to him. We continue reading in Second Samuel. So Tamar went to the house of her brother Amnon, who was lying down. She took some dough, kneaded it, and made the bread, and put it in his sight and baked it. Then she took the pan and served him the bread, but he refused to eat. Send everyone out of here, Amnon said, so everyone left. Then Amnon said to

Tamar, bring the food here into my bedroom so that I may eat it from your hand. And Tamar took the bread she had prepared and she brought it to her brother Amnon in his bedroom. But when she took it to him to eat, he grabbed her and he said, come to bed with me, my sister. No, my brother, she said to him, don't force me. Such a thing should not be done in Israel. Don't do this wicked thing. What about me? Where could I go? Where could I get rid of my disgrace? And what about you? You would be like one of the wicked fools in Israel. Please speak to the king. He will not keep me from being married to you. But he refused to listen to her. And since he was stronger than her, he raped her. Then Amnon hated her with intense hatred. In fact, he hated her more than he had ever loved her. Amnon said to her, get up and get out.

Amnon's sexual violence is horrifying. Any sane reader of this story wants justice and wants justice. justice immediately. But what's David do? Well, we learned that he's angry. He's furious, but he remains silent. There's no justice. The narrator says Tamar lived in her brother Absalom's house, a desolate woman. This is tragic, painful, awful understatement. Tamar is now living in the hell of sexual violence. And Amnon? Nothing. He just gets to move on like the feckless, wretched, man that he is, and he learns an important lesson in the process. Power absolves even the worst atrocities. Not much has changed today, has it? But Tamar's brother, Absalom, he's going to get his vengeance. He waits years, but he hatches his own plot to get Amnon alone at a feast. We pick up the

story in verse 28. Absalom ordered his men. Listen, when Amnon is in high spirits from drinking wine, and I say to you, strike Amnon down, then kill him. Don't be afraid. Haven't I given you this order? Be strong and brave. So Absalom's men did to Amnon what Absalom had ordered. Then all the king's sons got up, mounted their mules, and flood. Absalom takes his revenge. He murders his own brother, and he flees the country. And again, what does David do? Well, nothing. He mourns the loss of both sons in their own ways, Tamar, she languishes, but nothing, nothing changes. So welcome to David's family. Dysfunctional, isn't it?

I mean, dysfunctional really isn't even a strong enough word for what's happening here. You know the sad thing? Dysfunction seems to be the norm in most families. Not on this scale, not always on this scale. Although I have to say power and wealth, they do have this tremendous capacity for amplifying family dysfunction. But still, for a lot of us, this story isn't too far from the mark. For some of us, family really is synonymous with sexual abuse and violence. For others of us, it's the abuse of words and language.

But no matter who we are, we all have dysfunction in our families. And we desperately hope that our kids aren't going to make the same mistakes that we made. I mean, most of us, when we were kids, we made vows. We said, oh, I'm not going to be like my parents. Oh, I'll do things differently. I think that happens in almost every family. But of course, the sad truth is that we often become the things that we swore we would never actually become. Because sin is generational. Sin is contagious. In the modern West, we tend to operate under the assumption that my choices are my own, that my choices only affect me. They don't really affect other people. It, we're not. It, we we act as though our character, our lives are hermetically sealed from the outside.

But this story shows us how wrong that assumption really is. We're not sealed off containers. We're porous. Rebellion is contagious. Evil pollutes generations. Sin corrupts. We've seen this on a national level. Research has shown that mass shootings lead to more mass shootings.

Apparently something happens when someone is considering doing a mass shooting. they get encouraged by seeing other people do the same thing. Researchers call this a social contagion. But these social contagions, they're passed on in much smaller scales. They're passed on through families, through friendships, offices, relationships. When we watch David's own sin get amplified and replicated in his own children, it cuts through the lie that what I do doesn't affect anybody else. You are interconnected with everyone around you.

Everything you do affects them. Your choices away from your children, shape your children. Your choices away from your friends, shape your friends. Your choices away from your coworkers, shape your coworkers. The true mystery isn't that we catch each other's sin sickness. The true mystery, I think, is that there's actually a cure. The only cure is actually a different kind of. of social contagion, a countercontagent. And that countercontagent is the sacrificial love of Jesus.

Because when his love enters into a sick human system, it doesn't send that system cascading downward into even worse destruction. Instead, when his love enters a system, that countercontagion, it actually begins to remake the system. Because when we experience the fullness of Jesus' sacrificial love, it frees us from the need to take from others. It breaks the chain of sin and selfishness. And the contagion of self-sacrifice, it actually begins to infect us so that we want to replicate that self-sacrifice in our own life. And when that counter-contagion, when it gets hold of a family, when it gets hold of a friendship circle or an office, it's like heaven coming to earth. So today, ask yourself this question, which contagion do you want to spread?

selfishness or the self-sacrifice of Jesus? What would that look like practically? To come into Jesus's presence, to sit beneath his feet, to do it enough, to get enough contact with him that you actually catch this bug, that you actually keep it. How would your family change? How would your office change? How would your friendships change if you brought the counter-contagent of Jesus' sacrificial love into your systems?

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