2 Samuel 21:1-14 The Gruesome Work of God

Of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak is preaching from his series, The Warrior Poet King, Study of Second Samuel. Let's listen in.

All right, well, good morning to everybody. I'm Don Filsak, I'm the pastor here, and we have gathered together, I hope, to honor our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. We will sing some songs to him over the course of our time here.

We're gonna hear from his word. And we believe that the Bible is the truth, that it is the capital-T truth that guides and directs our lives, and that's why a large chunk of our time gathering together on Sunday morning is hearing what he has to say from his word.

And the truth this morning, we've been going through the book of Second Samuel, just taking it off chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph, kind of running through it. And the word of God this morning is gonna bring to us a brutal truth.

I don't know what you signed up for when you came here this morning, but it is a pretty much in-your-face view of atonement. It is a shocking truth. If you leave here and you are not wrestling with feelings of, that was intense, or even a little thought in the back of your mind, what was that, I think you probably were not paying attention.

So if you're paying attention, there's gonna be some thoughts, there's gonna be some feelings that this passage is gonna evoke in you. We're about to read a strange, sorrowful, and even to some level, gruesome, Old Testament-type account of atonement.

Big words, theological words, atonement, propitiation, that is the appeasement of divine wrath towards sin. But let me set the tone for what we're about to read together before we come to worship him this morning, and that is that God is not, what we think about God matters significantly, and I just wanna point out that God is not merely like a really, really good version, like really super-souped-up, hyped-up you.

That's not God. God is holy in a way that we are not holy. God always will punish sin. All that is contrary to his nature results in death and separation from relationship with him. You see, we are not holy, and the way that that expresses itself is that we tend to be flippantly gracious toward others.

Somebody wrongs us or does something wrong, and especially if it's a close friend, we can say this phrase, NBD. What's that mean? No big deal, no big deal, don't worry about it. God never says NBD. When we sin, he never has a no big deal response.

He is holy in a way that you and I are not holy, in a way that you and I cannot even really deeply relate to, in a way that we don't deeply understand. Now, you might have been really angry at somebody before, but that was still probably fairly selfish in its motivation.

God is not like that. God is consistently, consistently in opposition to sin. Anybody kinda sweating already? Like, wait, where is this going? What we see in this text is punishment for sin. It's shocking.

It's ugly. And I'm gonna even point out that it seems, as we read it, it seems like it is a bit unfair. And the text will even feature the sorrow of a specific mother over her two dead boys who have paid for the sin of their nation.

The gap between our culture and this ancient culture of Israel could not get any wider than the span between the reading of this text and our ears this morning. This is one of those passages, one of those rare passages in scripture where the gap between their culture and ours requires a lot of understanding.

We don't see ourselves as being corporate. We are not communal like they were. We do not understand blood guilt and the need for atonement. They got that right away. They understood the need for sacrifice.

We think of atonement as some, if we think about it at all, let's be honest, but if we think of atonement, we think of it as a theoretical theological framework by which God is redeeming humanity from our sins, and we think about it in an academic perspective that God put our sins over on Jesus or something like that, and we talk about it in church offices, in seminary libraries, and in churches that have been cleansed and sanitized, right?

And thanks to Bob Gilman for doing such a great job cleaning our facility, right? We like it being clean, and why am I talking about it being clean? It's because atonement is messy. We talk about it in pristine places, but the Israelites in David's time knew what atonement meant.

They saw it, and they smelled it. You see, without the shedding of blood, the scriptures bear testimony that without the shedding of blood, there will be no forgiveness of sins. They carried their lambs.

They carried the pigeons. They led the oxen to the altar. Blood was spilled gallon after gallon after gallon, day after day after day. Blood spilled to cover sin. It was messy work. It was gross work.

It was atonement work. It was the work prescribed by God for the covering of sin, of our sins. Several years ago, someone was invited to recast church, someone who had never been here before, and in the middle of the discussion about service times, yeah, we meet about 10 .30, and the location, here's our address, 25120 Front Avenue.

Actually, we weren't meeting here then, but they paused in the middle of the discussion and said, hold on a second. There's a fundamental question. Before I visit your church, I just wanna know, are you one of those blood churches?

It's a pretty startling question. Are you one of those blood churches? Blood church, what do you mean, blood church? What are you talking about? You know, are you one of those churches that's always singing about blood, always talking about blood?

I just can't stand all that blood talk, she said. I think this message will make it clear that we are indeed one of those blood churches, because the Bible is a book about the forgiveness of sins through the atoning blood of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, because atonement is bloody work, and we are bought by Jesus Christ with the payment that he made, not in silver and gold, not that kind of payment, but in the payment for our sins in his blood.

Our text is about punishment. Our text is about atonement, and the grief and sorrow that life in this broken world bring about because of the effects of sin and the remuneration needed for sin. So I'd encourage you, go ahead and just feel free to be shocked and scandalized as I read this Old Testament account of atonement.

And while I read, consider a fundamental question. Would your God let a substitute die for the sins of others? Would your God allow that? Would he allow someone to pay the price for the sin of another?

The men who die in this account, I want to clarify, they are not innocent, but they will pay for the sins of their nation. But I know a perfect, innocent, sinless one who paid for the sins of the world.

So let's open up, if you're not already there, to 2 Samuel. Did I get anybody's attention, by the way?

Here we go.

2 Samuel 21, one through 14, and we're going to read this in its entirety. Church, this is a good word.

It's a hard word,.

But it is a good word from our Lord and Savior. 2 Samuel 21, verse 14 verses. Now there was a famine in the days of David for three years, year after year. And David sought the face of the Lord, and the Lord said, there is blood guilt on Saul and on his house, because he put the Gibeonites to death.

So the king called the Gibeonites and spoke to them. Now the Gibeonites were not of the people of Israel, but of the remnant of the Amorites. Although the people of Israel had sworn to spare them, Saul had sought to strike them down in his zeal for the people of Israel and Judah.

And David said to the Gibeonites, what shall I do for you? And how shall I make atonement that you may bless the heritage of the Lord? The Gibeonites said to him, it is not a matter of silver or gold between us and Saul or his house, neither is it for us to put any man to death in Israel.

And he said, what do you say that I should do for you? They said to the king, the man who consumed us and planned to destroy us so that we should have no place.

In all of the territory of Israel,.

Let seven of his sons be given to us, that we may hang them before the Lord at Gibeah of Saul, the chosen of the Lord. And the king said, I will give them. But the king spared Mephibosheth, the son of Saul, the son of Saul's son, Jonathan, because of the oath of the Lord that was between them, between David and Jonathan, the son of Saul.

The king took the two sons of Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, whom she bore to Saul, Armanion, Mephibosheth, and the five sons of Merib, the daughter of Saul, whom she bore to Adriel, the son of Barzillai,.

The Maholothite.

And he gave them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they hanged them on the mountain before the Lord. And the seven of them perished together. They were put to death in the first day of the harvest at the beginning of the barley harvest.

Then Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, took sackcloth and spread it for herself on the rock from the beginning of the harvest until the rain fell upon them from the heavens. And she did not allow the birds of the air to come upon them by day or the beasts of the field by night.

When David was told what Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, the concubine of Saul, had done, David went and took the bones of Saul and the bones of his son Jonathan from the men of Jabesh-Gilead, who had stolen them from the public square of Beth-Shan, where the Philistines had hanged them on the day the Philistines killed Saul on Gilboa.

And he brought up from there the bones of Saul and the bones of his son Jonathan, and they gathered the bones of those who were hanged, and they buried the bones of Saul and his son Jonathan in the land of Benjamin in Zillah, in the tomb of Kish, his father.

And they did all that the king commanded. And after that, God responded to the plea for the land.

Let's pray.

Father, there's a lot in this text, and I pray that you would allow us to, by the end of our time together, see the glory and the wisdom and the great grace that you offer to us through atonement. It's a messy business.

It's not easy to discern. It's not easy to figure out. But this one thing we know and we can relate to, at least one thing we can grasp, and that is that you have set forward a plan by which one would be substituted in our place.

All of that Old Testament and Old Covenant and the sacrificial system and the tabernacle and the temple and all of those years of bulls and goats, all pointing toward, and even this passage, pointing toward a greater atonement, pointing towards one who would give himself up for us, not just for our nation, not just for our people, but for the sins of the world.

So Father, I pray that as we have an opportunity now together in these songs to let our voices be mingled in singing to you, I pray that you would help us to praise you as a people who are increasingly knowing what it means to be set free from the consequences of sin and death, brought into newness of life through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.

I pray that that would produce within us delight and joy and gladness, a lightness in our step, but also a seriousness in recognizing what sin does, how devastating it is. Thank you that you're continuing to rescue us from our sin, from the guilt, and also from the power that it once held over us.

I pray that you would continue to do that in us.

In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, yeah, you can go to be seated. But for those of you that aren't around here much, or maybe this is new to you, you can get up at any time during the message and get more coffee or water or donut holes, while supplies last back there.

You're not gonna distract me if you need to get up at any time during the message. And then restrooms are out the double doors down the hallway on the left-hand side if you need those, especially after all that coffee.

So we'll see.

But I encourage you to try, operating word is try to get comfortable this morning. And then I ask that you also keep your Bibles open to 2 Samuel 21, verses one through 14, so that you can see that the things that I'm talking about, I'm talking about that passage.

I'm trying to bring that to our culture, trying to bring that to us, to our hearts, so that we can live it out and understand what we need to do with it. I'm gonna start off with a question, and it's a rhetorical question, but why was the Passion of the Christ movie rated R?

Why was it rated R? Ask yourself that question. How many of you saw the movie? Did any of you see the movie, The Passion of the Christ? Mel Gibson, what was that, maybe 10 years ago, 15 years ago now?

Rated R. Why couldn't Mel Gibson have sanitized it and made it PG -13 for the masses? Why so graphic in the scourging scene? Why so much blood? Why so much blood? You see, sin brings about death. Scripture is abundantly clear that through sin, death came into the world, and the cost of atoning for sin is life.

It is blood.

When I say the sentence, the cost of atoning for sin is blood, I'm guessing that many of us have a fairly innocuous understanding of what that means, but what Scripture teaches us is more robust, I think, than probably what we have in our minds when I say that sentence, so let me state it another way.

Every single sin, every single breach of God's law, every lie, every sexual deviance from his explicit standard, every single instance of gossip, every act of greed, every thought of lust, every act or thought of covetousness or envy, all of it, and that's a small list compared to all the sins that are mentioned in the Bible, all of it must, must, must be punished by a holy God.

And physical death, physical death in this world serves as a physical reminder of a spiritual reality. Death is like a great big old example. It's a pretty stern example, right? But it's a big example of a spiritual reality.

Punishment for sin is real, and that spiritual reminder is that there is an eternal punishment in a place called hell for all of those who do not come under the atoning work of Jesus Christ. In this sense, physical death serves as a foreshadowing of an even more shocking judgment that is to come.

It is a wake-up call to all of us. All sins must be punished. But God has made a way for the many to go free. I wanna relieve a little of that tension here at the start, steal the thunder from the end and just say, hold on, we need a little bit of a breather in that reality because God has made a way for the many to go free by the substitution of one.

The eternal sinless Son of God is the only one who could suffer an eternal punishment for the sins of so many like all of us all across the world. As far as the flow of 2 Samuel, our text serves as the first book end to four chapters that are gonna wrap up this entire book.

So we're nearing the end of 2 Samuel here as we've been marching through it for coming on a year now, and we're gonna be wrapping that up and then doing some Christmas stuff and some Christmas messages, and then we're gonna be going over to 1 Corinthians.

But this is the first chapter that makes a kind of ending summary to the rule and reign of King David here. So it makes sense that this first book end is reflecting back a little bit, and it deals with David handling problems, leftover problems from the previous administration.

Saul is the one who sinned. David is the one here who is left to mop up after his failed rule and reign. So our text this morning is gonna break into three movements. The first is found in verses one through six.

It's a corporate problem. The second movement is a corporate solution, verses seven through nine, and then personal grief, verses 10 through 14. So corporate problem, corporate solution, personal grief.

First, we see a very serious corporate problem in the text in verses one through six. It's very significant and serious for the nation of Israel during the reign of King David. The author is not super concerned with chronology, and so we know that this falls at least sometime after chapter nine because Mephibosheth and the covenant that David made with Mephibosheth actually occurs in chapter nine, but it's also, most scholars don't believe this happens at the very end of David's rule and reign either.

So sometime in the middle of his life, and rule and reign as king, there were three years of famine. Now, the word famine, you know, I mean, we talk about recessions, we talk about supply chain issues, we talk about not being able to get stuff as quick through Amazon and things like that.

We've not experienced famine. Dare say that not a single person in this room or a single person alive today in America really understands the idea of famine. Now, even when we went through the Great Depression, I'm sure that there were some struggles there, but very few remember those years.

Three years of a lack of rain, three years of poor harvest, and remember, this is for subsistence people. I mean, these are people who ate the stuff they grew, right? And there's no rain and there's poor harvest and there's increasing starvation.

I believe that three years into any famine in a subsistence farming culture, you have people dying. You have people who do not, I'm guessing somewhere around year two, people are dying. They've stored up enough, but not enough to last two, three years.

And this is a devastating season of David's reign. So David goes and does what a good king is supposed to do in the nation of Israel. And he goes and it says he sought the face of the Lord to see if he's gonna, if God will tell him, why is this happening?

Why are there three years of famine going on? Now, here's what you need to understand about that. When it comes to going to God for answers or for solutions, David understands something fundamental that we ought to grasp and take ahold of here as well.

David knows that God knows why this famine is going on. God knows why the famine is going on. There is always, always, always a purpose in God's plan behind the things that are happening. Now, it might be a trial, like for example, in Job's case.

In Job's case, we were brought into the behind the scenes stuff and Job was being put through a trial and all of these devastating things. And if he had come to God and said, God, why is this happening?

He wouldn't have said it's because of your sin. He would have said it's because this is a trial for you. It could be for the purpose of growth in the faith of his people, that God is growing his people through adversity and through trials.

And just like we've got to break down muscle to build it back up again, he may very well be doing that.

All different kinds of reasons.

Why God's people may go through hard times. It also could be for the purpose of discipline. That's one, that one always grabs our attention, but that's one of multitude of reasons why God may bring us through times where things are spare and scarce.

This text gives us no blanket indication, by the way. Gives us no blanket indication of the purpose behind specific tragedies today. Okay, so why a hurricane in Florida and oh, those wicked sinners, or people will say all kinds of terrible, terrible things about devastations.

There's no blanket indication from this passage why God does any novel or unique thing on the planet. It only teaches us that God knows what is behind everything we experience, and we can deduce one further thing.

We know that at least sometimes the reason is judgment. It's not super helpful for us in determining why God does any one thing, but we know that sometimes it is for judgment, right? Do you see that in the text?

Sometimes bad things happen because God is judging. God does here explicitly reveal the problem. Why is there three years of famine? At some point during King Saul's reign, he was zealous to purify the nation of Israel from all pagan influences.

And so he attempted to commit genocide against a group of people called the Gibeonites. And you're like, oh yeah, I know the Gibeonites. Yeah, no, you probably don't. Some of you maybe remember. There's a super brief history of the Gibeonites to help you to clarify who in the world are these people.

They figure very significantly in this text. They were first encountered all the way back in the book of Joshua in Israel's ancient history, back when Israel was told that God was using them to judge the pagan Canaanites and Amorites and all the ites and the flashlights and all the people.

So he was going after those ites, and he was giving their land to Israel. The Israelites were told to come in and take over the land and eradicate the current residents. And of course, we might have all kinds of issues with that.

Then you go, it kind of pushes the, why would God do that? And time won't permit me to get into explaining all of the depth of that, but the Canaanites just, I think it might suffice to say, at least for now, and if you want to have a further conversation with me, I'd be open to that later, but the Canaanites were not boy scouts or altar boys.

Just want to make sure that you understand that they were suffering for their own sins and for their own judgment, and God was literally using Israel to judge the Canaanites for their sins. But one specific group of the Canaanites, the Gibeonites, from a subset of the Canaanites called the Amorites, the Gibeonites came up with a plot to preserve their people way back in Joshua.

They dressed up in worn out clothing to pretend that they had traveled from a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long ways away. I mean, they literally are putting on their old shoes that are worn out and dust all over the place, and they've got parched water bottles and all this stuff that are broken down and stuff, and they came from so, so far away, and they come to Joshua and his troops.

You see, they knew that the Israelites were set on conquering the land of Israel, and so they asked for a treaty with Joshua. We're from so far away, we'll sign a trade agreement with you, and you don't destroy us, we won't destroy you, and we'll make trade routes and all this stuff is gonna be great.

And Joshua and the leaders did not ask God's guidance and instead entered into a sacred oath with the Gibeonites, involving the name of Yahweh their God, saying, as the Lord lives, we will not conquer you.

You have our agreement, you have our word, based on the holiness of God, we will not do this. And lo and behold, the Gibeonites were from an area smack dab in the middle of Israel. So all the way down through the times of the judges, to Saul's dynasty, and into the days of David, where we're at today in our text, the Gibeonites had dwelled among the Israelites.

But Saul, Saul under his dynasty, in his rule and reign, broke that oath, dragging God's name through the mud. By rejecting that oath, the nation had made to the Gibeonites in the name of Yahweh, and he had all but wiped them out.

He had committed genocide against them. Once David knows the situation, he goes to the remaining Gibeonites, which would probably be few. Saul wasn't effective, but he tried. He tried to eradicate them.

And he asked them, what would you like for atonement? You can see it in verse three, in the English Standard Version of the Bible there, the word atonement, a very specific word. The goal of atonement is to bring the people back to God.

The goal is to bring Israel corporately back into a good relationship with him, for the purpose of the Gibeonites seeing the glory of God and his great worth. And a quick point here, from the ending of verse three, sin always sullies the glory of God.

I wanna clarify that. Whenever we sin, every single discrete event in which we sin and go against God, we testify to others that God is not enough for us. His ways are not enough for us. God doesn't know what he's talking about.

I do. A sin is a testimony. A sin is communicating something, especially as a Christian. A sin is saying, I'm gonna do this my way. God's way is not good. God's way is not right. A sin is a way of communicating that he is not worthy of trust.

Let that settle on you. The Gibeonites have suffered an attempted extermination, but they have suffered further. They have also suffered now a wrong view of God, a wrong view of his trustworthiness due to this sin of the nation of Israel under King Saul.

They've been all but exterminated, and they now do not see the glory of God among his people Israel. The Gibeonites answered, well, we know the process here. We've been kicking it with you guys for generations.

We know what's required. We understand it. It's not silver and gold. You can't buy off sin. You can't pay enough. You can't come into church, write a check, and then go sin this week, despite what some churches have done over the ages and middle ages and things like that.

You don't get an indulgence. You don't get to write it off. You know what I'm talking about? Silver and gold, no, says the Gibeonites. They get it right. They understand. No, it's not silver and gold in the text.

The only thing that pays for sin is blood. And despite the fact that they understand that blood is required, they get it. They understand. To cover blood guilt, there must be the shedding of blood. They have no authority or power to execute anyone in Israel.

They say it's not within our power. We're a weak, subservient group of people to Israel. You've been gracious to allow us to live among you.

All of these years.

You preserved our people, but we are not allowed to execute. We don't have that authority. But they're pointing back at David in this conversation, saying, you do. You have the authority to make this right.

So they request David use his authority. He comes back. There's this give and take in the conversation, and David's like, no, but really, and a second time, what do you want from this? How do you want to make this right?

And they're like, we want to follow your laws. We want to follow your rules to make it right. In a way that seems unjust to our ears, they make a request. Give us seven descendants of Saul. Give us seven descendants of King Saul.

He's the one who tried to eradicate us, says the Gibeonites, and their request is for seven, which I'm told by scholars is not an arbitrary number, which seems to be likely. I mean, why choose seven? Why not two?

Why not 10? Why not 50? They choose seven with intention because it's the number in the Jewish culture for perfection, a number that is often used to symbolize God himself. It is his sacrifice going to be offered, maybe a picture to some degree of a future perfect sacrifice, and if it's not arbitrary, then we see something of that perfect and holy sacrifice being enacted here, but in verse six, David listens to their request, and he agrees to it.

He selected seven male offspring of Saul, five sons, direct descendants, sons of Saul with his concubines, and then two grandsons, and we find that Saul had two grandsons named Mephibosheth. Somebody mentioned that to me before the service, and I thought, wow, that's really great that he's reading the Bible, but he was like, it doesn't say that he didn't select Mephibosheth because he wanted to honor his covenant, and then he selects Mephibosheth, but even Linda's parents have two grandsons.

One is Luke, and the other is Lucas, and how many of you would just identify that there's a possibility for grandparents to have two grandkids with the same name? Any of you have that, by the way? Anybody here in the room have that in your family,.

A couple of you?

It's not that rare, and we find that there's two Mephibosheths in Saul's line. It's not that crazy, but David spared Mephibosheth Jonathan's son, that specific one, because he had made a covenant with him to spare him.

There's something vital in that notion. Maybe in this we see just a slight glimpse of salvation based on the gracious choice of a king. Why does this Mephibosheth go free in this scenario? Why is he not one of the seven?

Why is he selected? He is spared because the king promised to spare him. End of story. Nothing in Mephibosheth that makes him worthy of being saved.

As a matter of fact,.

It's actually abundantly clear in the text that he was not able to get around on his own. He was a paraplegic. He had to be carried everywhere that he went.

He was dropped as a kid.

It tells us in the text of 2 Samuel,.

Dropped as a kid,.

And probably some vertebrae broke, and he's not able to walk. He's not able to get around. He's certainly not able to save himself. Why is he spared in this situation? Because the king said he would. Because the king just promised.

Why are you and I going to be spared on that day? It's only gonna be on the basis of his promise. Only on the basis of him saying, I'm gonna spare you. Well, he's done something, obviously, to give us that right, that ability to forgive us.

But I call this section a corporate problem because it's national in scope. Hear me carefully. God is not giving us here in this text a model for how to handle personal disputes, right? Please say amen to that.

This is not how you settle a dispute with your neighbor. I believe that God is showing us the devastating severity and scope of sin. How many, just think of it from another perspective, a perspective you're probably not considering.

How many have already died from the genocide of Saul? How many among the Gibeonites have had their blood shed? How many have died from the famine? And then ask yourself, is seven a fair number? Is the death of the murderer in capital punishment ever worth the people that they killed?

When a serial killer is put down,.

Is that fair?

Are we all good now? One for 20, one for 30, one for 50? Is that, are we good? Does that sound, raise your hand if you think, that just sounds super just.

That's a good one.

What is human justice? What are you talking about? God is the one who gets it right. I praise God that there is hope for a justice that goes beyond this life. One who sees it all and can be just. Because I can't get it right.

The other question is, should anyone pay for this sin? The more fundamental question that I'd encourage you to wrestle with this week, and maybe this is gonna result in some conversations with some of you.

But is God good? Is God good?

That has to settle on you today, church. I encourage you to ask that question. And really wrestle with it before you set up.

A meeting with me.

Don't just lean on me to answer that question. I'll answer it for you. I'd love to talk with you about it, but after you take some time to look into his word and seek to settle that. The second movement of the text is the corporate solution.

We saw the corporate problem is this famine that's going on. And it's nationwide and it's national in its scope. It's a corporate problem. And in verses seven through nine, we see therefore a corporate solution.

And it's gruesome.

What we think of when we see the word hanged in this text, a little word that's just hanging there in the middle of the text, but it's likely by the word that's used there, it's gruesome, it's gross, it's the word impaled.

It's much more likely during this ancient time they didn't tie nooses and hang people from trees. This is likely impaled and lifted high on a gibbet. They take these seven sons and grandsons of King Saul and they kill them.

And a question that I wrestled with, crazy significant this week, and I went back and forth and back and forth, were they guilty? Were they guilty? I wrestled with this. I read commentaries and I read other people's thoughts and I read the text over and over again looking for their guilt.

And while I can tell you with extreme confidence that these seven men were not sinless, because there is no one that is sinless except for Jesus Christ himself. So although there is no question that they are sinners, I still stand before you unclear whether or not these specific men took part in the actual genocide of the Gibeonites.

Did they actually have swords in their hand with blood on them at the end of Saul's thing? Now, how many of you would just admit if they took part in the genocide, then we might breathe a sigh of relief?

How many of you would just feel better about this text if they themselves killed somebody? Like you feel better, right? Somehow that makes us, oh, okay, they're dying for their own sins, right? Oh, okay, that seems more just, that seems more fair.

Unless this is a passage that has one primary intention, that's to point to somebody who would die for others. If that might be what this is about, then suddenly it might snap more into focus, right? What if they're dying a representative death?

Well, suddenly I feel more shifty. Suddenly I'm left with a question mark over God's fairness, his kindness, his justice. And so let me ask a stark and honest and very, very, very serious question for us this morning, church.