The King Wept for a Son Who Had Tried to Kill Him

The call came at four ten in the afternoon and lasted about ninety seconds.

He said thank you for letting me know. He wrote the date down on a receipt because there was nothing else nearby. Then he went back inside and finished what he had been doing, which was a job that took another two hours.

He drove home. He ate. He slept fine.

And for the three weeks since, he has been carrying something worse than grief, which is the question of what it means that he does not have any. He keeps checking, the way you press a bruise to see if it is still there. Nothing.

He has not told anybody this. He is fairly sure that if he described it out loud, the person listening would think something about him that he could not undo.

A king wept for a son who came to kill him

There is a scene in Samuel that nobody preaches, and it is one of the most human things in the book.

A king's son has raised an army against his own father and tried to take the throne. There is a battle. The son loses and is killed.

Here is what the father does when he is told.

O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son! (2 Samuel 18:33, King James Version)

Count the times he says the word son. Five, in one sentence, from a man who had just survived an attempt on his own life by that son.

Nobody in the Bible tells David to sort out his feelings. The story does not resolve them for him. It records a man breaking in two over somebody who had wronged him past the point where any of it made sense.

You are not the first man whose feelings about a father did not line up in a straight row. 2 Samuel 18 keeps a king's contradiction in the record rather than tidying it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old scene feel like permission rather than history.

Jesus wept at a funeral where He knew the ending

There is a moment in John that has confused people for two thousand years.

Jesus is standing outside the tomb of a friend. He knows, with total certainty, what is about to happen. He is minutes away from calling the man out of the grave.

Jesus wept. (John 11:35)

Two words. The shortest verse in the Bible.

He is not weeping because He is uncertain. He is not weeping because He is out of options. He weeps in a situation He is about to reverse, standing next to people who are grieving.

Which means grief is not a failure of confidence. He had all of it and He cried anyway.

You are not disqualified by anything you feel or fail to feel at a graveside. John 11 puts the tears in the very scene where they were not required, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes two words on a page do more work than a paragraph.

God put mourning on a schedule once

There is a small detail at the end of Deuteronomy that says something about how God treats this.

Moses dies, and here is what happens next.

And the children of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days: so the days of weeping and mourning for Moses were ended. (Deuteronomy 34:8)

Thirty days. It has a start and it has a finish and somebody wrote the number down.

Two things sit in that verse. Grief was given real time, which is more than most people are given now. And it was also allowed to end, and the ending was not treated as a betrayal of the man.

Nobody in that camp was measured by how much they produced during the thirty days.

You have been given room rather than a standard to hit. Deuteronomy 34 sets a length instead of a quality, and it is His Spirit rather than anybody's expectation who makes that difference land.

He keeps a record of what you did not put anywhere

There is a line in the Psalms about tears that is strange enough to read twice.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? (Psalm 56:8)

Tellest means counted. He counted the wanderings.

And then the tears go into a container, and then there is a book.

Whatever the picture is exactly, the point is that nothing gets lost. Not the ones that came out. And by the shape of it, not the ones that did not either.

You have not lost the things you could not feel at the time. Psalm 56 has Him counting and keeping rather than assessing, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a strange old image feel like it was written for a man who felt nothing on a Tuesday.

And He says what He does with a heart that has gone hard

This is the one that speaks straight to the three weeks of checking the bruise.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. (Ezekiel 36:26)

Read who does the work in that sentence.

He does not say soften your own heart. He does not say feel more. He describes an exchange He performs.

That matters, because a man who has gone numb cannot manufacture feeling by deciding to. If it depended on him producing it, he would be stuck, and God does not build the arrangement that way.

You are not the one responsible for turning stone back into flesh. Ezekiel 36 says who does that and never puts it on the man, and it is His Spirit, named in that exact verse as what gets put inside, who does the changing.