dar334

I don’t think I’m alone in wanting to ‘pay back’ or ‘give them a taste of their own medicine’ when someone hurts or disappoints me.  In fact, I have done it as a way to show them what it feels like.  Whether it is an annoying habit or simply not following through on something they said they would do but didn’t, or being where they were suppose to be on at an agreed upon time and they weren’t, or the hurtful comments that when called out on, weren’t referring to me.  Although I have done these things myself, I always feel bad for repeating what caused negative feelings for me and then tried to back peddle to make up for my mistake.

In my quiet time with scripture and coffee this morning, my reading was in 1 Samuel, starting with chapter 22.  Now for a refresher, David is running from King Saul because Saul is jealous of the popularity and successes of David and wants to kill him.  Now what Saul should have realized is because of David’s faith, God is with him and there was no way God was going to allow that to happen.  It was God’s plan to make David king and to carry out His promise to have a messiah come from the line of Jesse, who was David’s father.  

David and his men were hiding from Saul far back in a cave and Saul went in that cave to relieve himself.  David’s men wanted to kill Saul right there but David wouldn’t let them.  Instead, David snuck up and cut off a piece of Saul’s robe and when Saul finished and left the cave David went out and called to him, showing him the piece of robe he had cut off to prove he could have killed him if he wanted to.  Now here is where my pondering began when it popped right out at me from 1 Samuel 24:13, David was speaking this to Saul:

As the old saying goes, ‘From evildoers come evil deeds,’ so my hand will not touch you.

Now in this case the evil deed would have been murder.  My pondering had me thinking about lesser things people do in order to pay back a wrong or to prove a point.  Even if it’s just saying something or doing something in a subtle way, if the intention was to pay back a hurt, then it’s an evil deed.  The instruction book tells us that we should heep burning coals on the heads of the evil doers.  Not literally of course, but by killing them with kindness even though they did us wrong.  In that way, the evil doer sees the light of Jesus shining even when what they deserve is the darkness of Satan.  When we ‘pay back’ we are doing the same evil that we complain about.  We are no better than them, we are hypocrites.  

Always pondering,

dar