To Kill A King
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m your host, Bryan Broome, joined once again by Greg Uttinger and Emily Maxson.
Today we’re discussing the historical event of Saul’s defeat and suicide and the Amalekite who brings the evidence of his death to David, expecting a reward and – clickbait title – “What happens next might surprise you.” So Greg, why don’t you kick us off here.
Please remember that the two books that we have as Samuel were originally one book, so this is a deliberate flow-through by the original author or editor. He’s pulling together the source documents by witnesses, but he’s telling a story. This is not just, “Oh, isn’t it odd that this one ends here and this one begins here.” This is part of the way it’s set up and that God ordained.
Doesn’t this also put this at the center of the book, which is significant in Hebrew writing in general.
Yeah, reckoning it as a chiasm I’m not quite sure. I’ve never tried that but it would be interesting.
I grew up not even knowing what they were, and now it’s like, “There’s a chiasm!” No kidding, it’s the Bible.
It’s named after the Greek letter chi, which is shaped like our X. The idea is that there’s a parallelism between the beginning and the end, whether it’s lines of poetry or themes in a story. There are parallels with the second thing and the second-to-last thing, so then the high point or the emphasis or something important happens in the very middle that sort of turns the whole thing and becomes the hinge point.
If we were to look at all of Samuel that way, this certainly is significant, but what might be even more significant is with Saul dead, it’s not so much the death of Saul but it’s the coronation of David as king of Judah which follows hard upon, which is in a sense where all this is going, but we will get there in a bit.
In chapter 31 the Philistines are fighting against Israel and Israel is losing. Remember that Saul had been to a witch, who inadvertently (on her part) had become the channel for God to send Samuel back from the grave to pronounce Saul’s doom. God gave Saul 24 hours to repent, he did not use it as such, and goes out onto the battlefield. You could speak of his courage and his stubbornness and his tenacity, but he dies. He’s going to be killed, and his sons die. Even our beloved Jonathan dies in the battle.
Saul is hit by the archers and he knows this is it. He’s been hit too badly. He can’t recover, he can’t survive, but he’s not dead yet, and the Philistines are going to come and they’re going to abuse him and make fun of him and torture him and all that, so he wants the easy way out. He turns to his armor-bearer and says –
Draw thy sword and thrust me through therewith, lest these uncircumcised come and thrust me through and abuse me.
His armor-bearer refuses because he knows, oddly enough, that that’s wrong. It’s called murder, but he’s afraid probably on multiple counts, so Saul takes the sword and falls upon it and his armor-bearer does likewise, so that’s the end of that. There’s a few more details that we’ll skip over.
Beginning in 2 Samuel, David and his men have just returned from a little expedition rescuing their own families who have been captured by Amalekites, which lends a little something to this. We’re about to meet another Amalekite.
It came even to pass on the third day that behold, a man came out of the camp from Saul with his clothes rent and earth upon his head. And so it was, when he came to David, that he fell to the earth and did obeisance.
And David said unto him, From whence comest thou? And he said unto him, Out of the camp of Israel am I escaped. And David said unto him, How went the matter? I pray thee, tell me. And he answered that the people are fled from the battle, and many of the people also are fallen and dead, and Saul and Jonathan his son are dead also.
Notice Saul and Jonathan – the king and the crown prince are both dead, the implication leaving the succession unclear at the moment. There were other sons who died too, but at least one son who was not there didn’t die. So the young man who told him now slows down to explain how he knows this.
And David said unto the young man that told him, How knowest thou that Saul and Jonathan his son be dead? And the young man that told him said, As I happened by chance upon Mount Gilboa…
“I just happened in the middle of a battle to just be in the middle of it.” Obviously the guy is a looter and David can read between the lines. It may throw a slight shade on the guy’s character, but it doesn’t necessarily change the information.
Behold, Saul leaned upon his spear and, lo, the chariots and horsemen followed hard after him. And when he looked behind him he saw me, and called unto me. And I answered, Here am I. And he said unto me, Who art thou? And I answered him, I am an Amalekite. He said unto me again, Stand, I pray thee, upon me and slay me, for anguish is come upon me because my life is yet whole in me.
“This was not premeditated. I just happened to be there.” Saul initiated it. He asked to be killed. He’s dying. He recognizes that although he’s not dead yet, he is dying.
So I stood upon him and slew him, because I was sure that he could not live…
“I double-checked it and checked his vital signs. Yup, he’s dying. He’s bleeding out. He’s going to die. He’s in pain, so I killed him.”
…and I took the crown that was upon his head, and the bracelet that was on his arm, and have brought them hither unto my lord.
What the man obviously is expecting is some kind of reward, because he claims to have killed David’s enemy, the man who stood between David and the throne. He’s probably heard rumors that David is kind and merciful and tender and all that. After all, he is Saul’s son-in-law. So he makes sure that David needs to know this was not a vicious act. It was mercy killing.
“He wanted to die. He was gonna die. I just helped him out and [implication] now the way is clear for you to claim the throne, because the crown prince is dead.” He’ll find out later that everybody in Saul’s family who was actually a warrior of any sort died. The remaining son is kind of a softie who stayed at home in bed or something.
So this man is thinking, “I not only bring the news, and messengers of good news often get rewards, but I’m going to claim that I actually expedited the matter.” There are some critics down through the years who have said, “See, there’s a contradiction in scripture. 1 Samuel gives us one account and 2 Samuel gives us another.”
2 Samuel gives us the account that someone lied about, the account of someone telling a lie.
And all the more stupid when you realize these were one book, and the author who had just finished the last story is the one writing this part. What, he has early dementia and can’t remember what he wrote like three paragraphs earlier?
No, this was like Wheel of Time. They had a separate author come in and finish it.
Oh, I’m so disappointed and glad I never shared the series. Anyway, as Emily says, he’s lying and David thinks he’s lying, judged by what he says. As Bryan says, this is not what you expect. What the Amalekite expected was a reward, praise, maybe a high post in government, who knows, something.
Then David took hold on his clothes and rent them, and likewise all the men that were with him, and they mourned and wept and fasted until even, for Saul and for Jonathan his son and for the people of the Lord and for the house of Israel because they were fallen by the sword.
That takes us to the end of the day, but now we back up to when David has a moment. Apparently the Amalekite is just standing there watching and saying, “What’s this? I just told you your enemy is dead and you’re all crying like babies. I don’t get it.”
The other thing that I didn’t mention is he’s an Amalekite and David is going to kind of come back to that. He won’t make too big a deal about it, but while David was away on the battlefield, Amalekites had come and raided Ziklag, his hometown, and taken his family and the families of all his men and gone off, and David and his men had to go hunt them down, so they weren’t really disposed to like the Amalekites right now.
Given the fact that David and his men didn’t do something violent to the guy right away means they were willing to listen and be reasonable and not judge one particular ethnic group by, well, what a whole bunch had just personally done to them. So David talks to the young man and says –
Stranger is an official title. It doesn’t simply mean he comes from outside of Israel. It means he lives in Israel but he’s not a citizen, so our word would be resident alien, I suppose, non-citizen immigrant. But the point is, he’s not some foreigner who doesn’t know how Israel works. He’s lived there. His family has spent some time there.
Basically what David is saying is, “Do you have enough familiarity with Israeli law to know what’s going on here?” David doesn’t ask it that way, but the man betrays that, “Yeah, I’ve lived here for at least a while.” After all, he’s speaking Hebrew at this point, so okay, just checking. Then David asks a somewhat rhetorical question –
How wast thou not afraid to stretch forth thine hand to destroy the Lord's anointed?
In Baalistic culture it was a crime to try to assassinate the king, because obviously the king was there by the will of the gods. However, if you succeeded then that obviously was the new will of the gods and then it was okay.
You wouldn’t have been able to do it, so you might even ascend the throne at the point, with the applause of the people. So coming from an alien culture, David – as he in some respects did, although he’d lived in Israel a long time – he might be able to use the excuse of, “Well, God willed it, right? Because I succeeded.” So David has to express it in terms that mean something.
“He is the Lord’s anointed. God, by a particular act within history, designated him to be king, and neither you nor I have the authority to overturn God in that respect. God can, but we as private citizens cannot.” That’s all that’s going on there, and David has faced this with his own guys a couple times when they said, “Oh, there’s Saul. You can kill him now.”
“No, no, no. God will take care of him. He’ll fall in battle or God will remove him somehow, but I’m not going to do it.”
He does not wait for a response, because the Amalekite is probably tongue-tied when he realizes he’s in a lot of trouble.
Now, David is a prince of this Philistine town called Ziklag, so he is a legitimate magistrate and he’s in Ziklag at the time, so a man who claims to have committed murder on the battlefield – a battlefield he had no business being on – comes to a prince and a magistrate and basically surrenders himself for execution, although that’s not what he meant to do, but that’s what he effectively has done, and David passes summary judgment.
One little thing – the law repeatedly says you need two or three witnesses for an execution, and we’ve seen this before in the book of Joshua, that a confession with corroborating evidence does count as your second witness.
Right, two distinct lines of evidence count, so when we read two or three witnesses we need not take that too literally.
I have a former student friend who was a DA in Sacramento. He’s now a Superior Court judge, and his wife was also a DA. I asked them about what they thought of trying a case with eyewitness testimony and they said, “Give us circumstantial evidence every time. We’d rather try and win with that, because eyewitness testimony is so notoriously unreliable.” Everybody thinks they saw something, and they can’t remember their own story, nor do they cooperate with everyone else’s story. A line of physical evidence is much more secure.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that God is here willing, as he did in the days of Joshua with Achan – willing to accept the second line. The man brought the bracelet and the armband, and the only way he could get them was over Saul’s dead body.
Exactly. So obviously he had seen Saul dead – dead enough that he could remove the royal treasures from him – the crown, too. Secondly, he claims to have done this. So he’s testified against himself and there is this circumstantial corroborating evidence and David says, “Okay. You’re going to be executed. Kill him.”
Thy blood be upon thy head, for thy mouth hath testified against thee saying, I have slain the Lord's anointed.
That sounds like David maybe didn’t believe him or wasn’t absolutely sure he was telling the truth, because he rests it on why would a judge need to justify himself unless there might be some reasonable doubt. Unfortunately, the only reasonable doubt would come from the man who just confessed, so David says, “It’s on you. I have your testimony, we have evidence and we’re done here.”
“If you cared so much about fabricating this tale and this evidence, alright, take the consequences of it being convincing,” even if it’s not really.
“Even if I’m not sure you did it. You have presented a reasonable argument.”
The guy probably is marching to this village where David is a legitimate authority going, “Okay, so what’s the story? What am I saying?” He’s probably thought this through, like “What’s the most convincing way to let him know that I’m on his side, I’m his man? I’ll kill people if he wants me to,” and then it just goes exactly the opposite direction. I would watch a skit about that. That would be hilarious.
Among the many side issues, I’ll just throw this out. I don’t know that we need to expand upon it, but there are those, of course, and there have been forever who say, “See? The law can make wrong judgments. The problem with capital punishment is you can’t undo it when you find out you were wrong, so we should never execute anybody for anything, because we could be wrong.”
The thing is that capital punishment is kind of permanent, is the argument. We can punish them other ways, so we just took 20 years away from your life by prison.
We’ll say we’re sorry. If you’re going to inflict consequences you can’t call them back, and David here seems to at least suspect or at least be open to the possibility that this man is lying. Yet he pushes right through and puts it on his head and says, “It’s between you and God now. I’ve done my job. Our work is done here.”
So that’s the story, and first of all it leads into a hymn of lament that David writes to memorialize the works of Saul and Jonathan, the great place they have played in Jewish history, even though Saul was his enemy and tried to kill him repeatedly.
After that he sets his site on Judah, and Judah welcomes him to the throne and we turn the corner toward what we’ve been waiting for ever since Saul’s first stumble, that God would provide a new man, a man after his own heart, a new king for Israel and a new covenant.
In fact, the whole book of 1 Samuel is sort of the collapse of the Mosaic covenant – the loss of the ark, never restored to the tabernacle, we’re worshiping wherever we want now, we have a king and he’s failed, we have a shepherd boy who’s going to be king but he’s on the run, and now finally we’re kind of stepping toward the establishment not only of the formal Davidic covenant, but also the construction of Solomon’s temple, so we’re on a course that’s charted for the next 1,000 years. It’s a turning point in history. But what we’re talking about specifically today is this matter of mercy killing or euthanasia.
Of course, at this point you have to throw in – “All of these high school students were given the assignment of writing an essay about euthanasia, and all but one failed because, although he wrote poorly, he wrote on the topic of euthanasia. All the others wrote about youth in Asia, because their vocabularies were so poor.” I think that’s a real story. It’s a comment on the American educational system.
The etymology of that would be the eu- prefix meaning good, then -anasia standing for death – so good death.
Or for those who watch Marvel movies, Thanos, death. Eu- as in euvangelium, the good news. Here eu-thanos – good death.
Which is an interesting point because the word for death in Greek is Thanatos, right? But the root of it is just thanos, and that form never appears by itself. There’s always a prefix; otherwise, it’s Thanatos instead, which is just really an interesting concept I think – but rabbit hole.
So to plead the Amalekite’s case, let me repeat what he has in principle said that he could save if he got a chance to retry this before some other court.
No premeditation. “I mean yes, I meant to kill him once he asked me, but I didn’t go there to kill anybody. I didn’t wake up saying, ‘This would be a good day to kill somebody.’”
Circumstances. “It was a battlefield. You can’t control what’s going on there. People die all the time. That’s what it means. I was just lucky being there. Yes, fine, you want to say I’m a looter, go for it, but that in itself tells you that that was the length and breadth of my desires. I wasn’t there to kill people. I just found people who had already died and took their stuff. I’m not by nature a violent man, and I’m willing to risk my life to support my family in this calling of looting the dead.”
Saul. “He reached out to me first. He saw me and called me over. I would have never gone to him. If I had known he was alive I would have gone the other way, but he called me over. Just by looking at him, there were arrows sticking in him and I could see he was dying and beyond recovery. And even if there were a possibility, there’s no 9-1-1 to dial. I haven’t got an ambulance. I can’t drag him off the battlefield. Death is inevitable at this point, and he’s suffering. He is in pain.
“Furthermore, he might live long enough for the Philistines to come, and if they find him alive they are going to mock him and abuse him and torture him. It’s going to be a horrible existence for as long as they can keep him alive, so I can free him from all that, just physiologically. He’s hurting. He is in a great deal of pain already. I can free him from that, and he asked me to do so. This was his plea. He’s a king and he’s given me this order or royal request.”
“Finally, if we want to get picky about this, this man is worthy of death. He has murdered the Lord’s priests. He has been hunting David, your messiah, all over the place, trying to kill him. And I’ve heard some rumor about this demon possession thing, so he was a man who was worthy to die, wanted to die, couldn’t live, and by killing him I free him. So obviously I did the world a favor in all directions – did him a favor, David a favor, Israel a favor (Philistines a favor), and everybody, so I obviously at the very least should be let go. Probably I should be rewarded by everybody involved. There’s the argument. The defense rests.”
That still doesn’t change the fact that he lacked the authority to do that. All the soldiers had the authority because they were soldiers, at least in some sense of the term, and they went there for the express purpose of fighting and killing God’s enemies – or if you’re a Philistine then they were God’s enemies coming to fight God’s people, but that’s not necessarily winning your case either.
But still, it’s a weird kind of claim to make, that because the king told me to kill him it’s okay to kill him. There is still not only the injunction from multiple places in the Mosaic covenant, but also the Noahic covenant before that which says if you slay someone, your blood is on your head. You should also be slain by whatever counts for authority near you, so it doesn’t work.
But you mean the whole mercy thing! He was hurting. Doesn’t a man have a right to end his own life?
As it turns out, you don’t because God gave you that life and he didn’t leave it up to you as to when it ends.
It’s also interesting because while you were describing that I was thinking what little of City of God that I made it through before I got engaged, and then my attention was elsewhere and books were not a thing where I could sit down…
I was busy! I was distracted by plans. But I do remember there was a charge that the pagans would consistently bring against Christianity, particularly after Rome was sacked one of its many times. I forget exactly which time happened in Augustine’s lifetime offhand.
The claim was, “Your Christian women, your nuns, your single women who were helping in church in some capacity, they were sexually mistreated by the invading pagans. Why didn’t they just kill themselves? That would have been the honorable thing to do. It would have saved them all this suffering. Why didn’t they do this? Obviously they either wanted it to happen or they ended up enjoying it…” all these perverse evil kinds of arguments against this.
Augustine basically said, “Let’s look at the people in your history who have committed suicide to avoid these kinds of things, and ask yourselves the question ‘Was that worth it?’ because it wasn’t.” The women that he then comes to the defense of, he essentially makes the argument at multiple points – he covers it in several sub-chapters – that they recognized that God was the one who ordered life and it’s not a human’s duty to prevent as much ill fortune as possible, if I can use that phrase. It's not their job to prevent as much pain as possible by means of something ungodly especially.
It’s also just generally not our job to try to figure out, “Okay, what’s the balance here? Let’s look at this utilitarianly and figure out this thing I would want to do is kind of bad, but it’s going to prevent me from feeling all these other bad things, horrible physical pain and psychological torment, so it’s okay because the balance comes out ahead. This is less bad than all of this bad.” That’s not the way morality works, generally speaking.
The fundamental issue here is who defines the right to live and die? Who defines under what circumstances we may live and die? We like to believe that we are in charge of our own lives, and that we can take them however we want. In fact, once you get to that point it’s that we can live them anyway we want, because it’s my body, my life, my choice. The only problem is, as you say, it’s not true.
We are God’s creatures. He gave us life on his terms by a sovereign plan and decree. We did not give birth to ourselves. We did not choose the time, place, and circumstances of our birth, our physical connection, our parents, our eye color or skin color or hair color, where we’re going to live, where we’re going to be born, how we’re going to be educated as small children. We chose nothing. God puts us here. God takes us home or calls us to judgment on his timetable and schedule.
Yes. This is called the curse, and it’s something we brought upon ourselves by disobeying God.
Now, here’s the other side. God does establish civil authorities to whom he does grant the right of capital punishment. The Mosaic law is very clear. There needs to be substantial agreement of the evidence, but obviously here not perfect agreement because we are not God and we are not omniscient.
It’s worth noting also that God speaks of the innocents – the blood of the innocents crying out. So despite the fact that we’ve all sinned, despite the fact that we all deserve eternal wrath and judgment, the Lord recognizes this category of, “You’ve treated people in ways they did not deserve to be treated, and their blood is crying out to me and I will hear that.”
Yeah. The authority of civil government to execute is very sharply circumscribed - two or three direct lines of corroborating evidence, someone who is legally appointed the job and recognized as such by the community in which he lives as having the legal authority to try, reach a decision, and execute justice. And where these things fail – even if we’re sure, even if the newspapers are full of stuff that make us absolutely sure the guy’s a murderer, if the jury doesn’t convict or the judge doesn’t pronounce judgment, then that’s that.
The courts are not there to render perfect justice. We’ve talked about this in a different context, but the Bible does not envision perfect justice, and the Bible is willing to admit that sometimes human courts are going to get it wrong, even wrong in the direction of punishing people who, in terms of civil law, shouldn’t have been punished. But the evidence all pointed that way and a good trial was made, witnesses brought forward, and jury or magistrates unanimous.
You did what you could with what you had. You tried hard. God does not say, “Well, you executed him and it turns out he was innocent after all, so you’re all murderers.” God never says that.
David walks away from this, not perhaps certain that the man is actually guilty. The story sounds fishy like everything, but the evidence is there and he does his job and he moves on and he never looks back. He has done what was required of him, and it is more important in God’s economy that we obey his word as best we can under our limited circumstances. Sometimes this means the guilty go free. Occasionally it may mean the innocent suffer because you can’t always get two or three witnesses or lines of evidence in anything.
Then we also have the juxtaposition between the Amalekite and David. David is a legitimate authority instituted by God. Not only is he a magistrate of this Philistine town like you mentioned, but also – even though he hasn’t been crowned yet – he is the next person in line for Israel’s throne.
Yes, he’s been anointed for a while, so he is the anointed not-quite-king but king and he has authority from God to mete out justice. Then you have the Amalekite who is none of that, but he also is acting outside of the civil authority in general. He is a vigilante in that sense, so we have just godly authority and rebellious of authority.
Just like Saul is the epitome of a rebellious individual, even though he’s in power, we have someone who is like him who claims to have killed him and expects the world’s method of repayment for that act. The answer is rebellion doesn’t get you anywhere except the grave.
Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft. I think you could make a good case that at least on one level – and there are many levels to what the Bible is trying to teach us all at once, it’s never just a single lesson – but we are tracing the long history of Israel in wanting a civil magistrate to fix all of their problems. We get one and he is from day 1, day 2 at least, in rebellion against God.
Over against that we have a man who’s the future king and who’s on the run, and yet he refuses to play vigilante. He is a vigilante in part in that he has a bunch of guys out in the wilderness and they’re dealing with bandits and crooks and people like that, because he’s got an army and why not, but he’s not out there waging war, and he refuses absolutely to turn the military power he has against this oppressive king. So we’re seeing the decline of the rebellious legitimate authority, and the patient waiting of the could-be-but-isn’t vigilante.
And right when we’re at the end of this, in steps the Amalekite into a plot stream that he doesn’t even know about and says, “Hey! I just played vigilante. Aren’t I cool?” and David looks at him and says, “Have you not been reading the last few chapters? You don’t know what’s going on.”
It doesn’t work that way. It’s amazing and almost amusing how little time David takes with this. It takes more time for the guy to tell his story than it does for David to solve the problem, “Fall on him,” and we move on because, as I say, we don’t look back.
In terms of the modern move toward euthanasia, we again say it is right to pity people who are suffering. The Bible commends this to us over and over. We are to weep with those who weep. It commends to us visiting those who are sick. It talks about how to approach God for healing and such.
Having said that, it does not say that pain is such a thing that it overrides all concern for all of God’s other laws, because if we are allowed to kill someone in their suffering, what other laws are we willing to break to end suffering? What other things will we do? Who will we hurt?
We’ve talked here about killing King Saul, but we could take this into another thing. Someone is about to commit a murder. “Well, if I kill him he can’t, and that will save someone from suffering.” We saw this back when the pro-life movement was going kind of wacky and veering to the left. We had lone gunmen who would go out and attack abortionists because “I need to end the suffering of all these babies and stop their deaths, so I have the right as a private citizen, since the federal and state governments have failed, to kill this abortionist because I know he’s going to kill more babies and cause more suffering and more pain.”
“Because your values are skewed. You think that life is the most important thing, or to end suffering is the most important thing. Well, you know what? The abortionist thinks that ending suffering is pretty important and he’s willing to kill a baby to do it, so that this young woman does not have to suffer social disgrace and career alterations and the bondage of raising a child. He cares a lot about her suffering, and he’s willing to kill somebody. How are you different?”
No, you’re not. Here in the Bible we have God’s instruction manual for how these things play out. Unless you are a king, a judge, a magistrate, or given proper authority from God by whatever channels society has established, you don’t have the right to go around killing people, even to stop suffering, and not even necessarily to save life that is not currently being threatened.
“This guy’s a mass murderer. He’s been released on pardon. I know he’s still a wicked man and he will kill other people tomorrow. I must go kill him now.”
That’s not the same thing as there’s someone in my house at night, and I can make out just enough to see that he’s got a gun, and I will now grab mine and shoot him to protect my family. Those are not the same thing, although some people make them out to be the same thing. Self-defense of your home and family when there is a clear and present danger is not the same as going out and finding people who may or certainly will kill or harm other people and taking them out first.
As I’ve said many times, this is hard for Americans because we’ve been raised on vigilante literature, TV and movies, where the guy who goes out and breaks all the rules and takes out the bad guy with his gun or fist or light saber is the hero.
He gets to ride off into the sunset or the double sunset, as the case may be.
To the applause and cheers of many, in celebrations across the universe. This is not God’s way. Learning the humility that David learned, learning to wait on God, for God to do things in his own time and way –
Now, could the elders of Israel have done something? Yes, actually they could have, because they were the ones through whom Saul had been brought to the monarchy. Samuel had anointed him, or God anointed him through Samuel, but it didn’t kick in until the elders gave their okey-dokey. The elders as legitimate magistrates could have taken Saul to task, arrested him and tried him for the murder of God’s priests. They chose not to.
When other magistrates will not do their job, then oftentimes God’s people’s only response is to run away or to suffer. Again, in America we don’t like those options.
“But the guy is bad. I should be able to take my gun and shoot him.” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s line in True Lies was, “But they were all bad.” That doesn’t necessarily give you the right to kill them.
This is where we are with a readjustment of our ethical thinking, of picking a firm foundation and staying there, and that foundation must be the Word of God, which means we actually do have to read it and see what it says and not just assume, “Well, if I were God I would think….” No, you’re not God and you don’t know what God thinks until you’ve read it.
Let scripture correct your thinking a good deal, because by nature we all want to play God and we all think we know best and we all think we should be able to have a life and get a say over people we perceive to be worthy of death. But that’s not God’s attitude here.
Alright, I think that’s a good place to draw this discussion to a close. Do we have any recommendations?
I’ll throw one out. Back in 1979 Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop, who eventually became Surgeon General under Reagan, wrote a book called Whatever Happened to the Human Race? It is in some ways the seminal pro-life book. It’s fairly short, originally hardback but you can find paperback copies now.
It is not the most profound thing you will ever read. It doesn’t have all the statistics you’d want. It’s not finely argued. In fact, there is a film series that goes with it, and I heard when I was in college some of the people who had watched it say, “He spends all his time talking about whether or not the Bible can be trusted, and whether or not it’s talking about time and space events.” They didn’t say it, but what they didn’t seem to understand was he’s arguing against neo-orthodoxy, and it takes him a long time to do that before he even gets to talking about life.
There’s a reason, because there are a lot of people who claim the label Christian but don’t want to obey what the Bible says. So before you can talk about the ethics of life and death, of abortion and euthanasia, you have to be sure that you trust the Bible to speak to time and space circumstances. You have to be sure that God is the sort of God who can speak into history, can speak propositionally, can speak in words that we can understand. So he spends a lot of time with this, but it’s not a hard book.
I think the only temptation would be to say, “I don’t see what this has to do with pro-life as such.” That was the hint. What he’s doing is establishing that the God who is can speak to us in our circumstances with real words that make sense.
If you’re an evangelical Bible-believing Christian you may say, “Duh,” but most of the world doesn’t, so that’s why that’s there. If you’re going into college, this may be a good place to start. So again it’s not the most exciting of books, but it’s seminal. In some ways it kicked off the pro-life movement in America. You can get through it. It’s worth your time.
I’m going to recommend small home repair, because that is something I’ve had to do a lot the past several months. It’s just little things. There’s a bigger project that we have this summer when the weather has warmed up here that we’re saving up for, which is driveway replacement, which I will not be handling. In the meantime there’s just little things around the house. Today I felt really proud because I replaced the showerhead in the shower…
Yes, I do actually. It was just one of those things. The old one was really janky and the new one is new. It has a handle and you can bring it down. It’s a nice model. We got it at Aldi because Aldi has everything.
It is magical. It’s a nice thing. It makes you feel accomplished and it makes your house nicer. These are all good things and I recommend it. If you have something that needs fixing in your house, just do it yourself because it’s a learning experience at the very least, and at the end of it you have something that looks very nice.
My comeback to that is when you have a very, very, very old house where everything is rusted in place, you can try it yourself because it will make your wife think you’re a hero, but when you fail you still have to call in the guy and pay him $1,000 to fix all kinds of things that you just can’t move because they are all rusted in place…but keeping your house maintained is a good thing.
My parents grew up in the Depression and their mindset, which I somewhat inherited from them was, “Good enough is good enough. It’ll keep for another 10 years. We don’t really need to fix that.” I have found that your house runs better, people are happier, and your home will maintain its value and the whole environment is not so trashy if you do the small repairs and keep up on them, so amen.
We’ve found in our house that whenever you’re acquiring something new, whether it’s a blender or a shower curtain or whatever, there’s always a tradeoff. We can get the cheap version if that’s good enough, or we can get the nice version, and we can get fewer nicer things because we’ve focused our energy on the nice things.
I think everybody has to draw the line for himself with regard to different things and what’s worth it to you, because value is subjective. See also Hayek.
Or until you find out the thing you bought doesn’t actually do what you thought it would do, and you end up buying the best thing afterwards. My father did that a great deal. It’s a mindset, buying the cheap one and then finding out, “No, I need the one that actually does the job,” so then you end up with two of everything.
That is the story of my life. David and I have changed that pattern recently and it’s been delightful. We bought a nice blender and I’m like, “This is the best thing.” Then every time you use it you’re like, “I’m so glad I bought this one.” It’s not about the next one when I can afford to upgrade. It’s that this one does what I want it to do and it’s awesome and I’m really thankful for it.
My recommendation is going to be the board game Codenames, which we played for the first time last evening. I had played the collaborative version, Codenames Duet, which works really well if you have exactly four people, I feel like. But if you’ve got a bigger group, Codenames the original is a lot of fun. It’s sort of “How do I communicate ideas clearly to other people saying very little?” which is the whole endeavor of poetry in a board game, so I had a great time.
Thank you so much, both of you, for joining me to discuss this, and for your recommendations. Thank you as well to our listeners for joining us. If you’d like to follow us you can do so at YouTube or Rumble. You can follow our Facebook page where we regularly – or at least did – drop dank memes. We semi-not-so-regularly drop dank memes for your enjoyment. You can find us on all major podcast catchers or apps.
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