If I asked you the question, “Who has hurt you the most?”, you will probably think of someone. It will be very rare and unusual if your response was “myself”. Actually, that’s the correct answer, because you will sin far more than you are sinned against. Getting this perspective is fundamental to a Christian worldview: my biggest problems are inside me, not around me. Like when The Times of London at some point in the 1900s posed this question: “What’s wrong with the world today?” G.K. Chesterton wrote this letter to the editor:

“Dear Sir: Regarding your article ‘What’s Wrong with the World?’ I am. Yours truly, G K Chesterton.”

Once you have that perspective, it won’t change the reality of living in a fallen world. Your greatest problems are inside you, but they definitely won’t be your only problems. You will be sinned against. You will live with the consequences of other’s sins. You will find yourself in situations you didn’t create, ask for, or make. What do we do then? How do we deal with other’s sins?

In this short and strange passage from the life of David, we will see David deal with the sins of others. We have seen enough of David’s own sins: his adultery and murder, his failures with his children, but now we witness David, in later life, dealing with the painful consequences of other’s sins.

This account is hard to place in David’s life. Some believe it happened earlier, and is placed here as a kind of appendix, others, like me, believe this happens chronologically after the rebellion of Absalom, late in David’s life and reign.

To walk through this account is to see some things that will be very familiar to us: some devastating consequences of other’s sins. But we will then see David’s response: some drastic action, and finally something very unusual. It is a model for us in untangling the mess that we often find ourselves in, even if it is caused by others.

I. The Devastating Consequences of Sin

Now there was a famine in the days of David for three years, year after year; and David inquired of the LORD.

Israel, like all nations during this time, lived off subsistence farming. They depended on the rains to bring about harvests, which fed them and their livestock. Some stockpiling was possible, but not enough to see one through several years of bad rains and bad harvests.

The first year they probably just took it as a bad year, and expected better things the next year. The second year, when no relief came, they were perplexed, and now suffering, but were tentatively sure it could not happen for a third year. And then it happened a third year, and David now sought the Lord as the nation’s representative.

David would have remembered from the Law, from Deuteronomy 28:11-12, a condition: if Israel diligently obeyed God’s covenant with them, then one of the blessings would be

And the LORD will grant you plenty of goods, in the fruit of your body, in the increase of your livestock, and in the produce of your ground, in the land of which the LORD swore to your fathers to give you.

The LORD will open to you His good treasure, the heavens, to give the rain to your land in its season, and to bless all the work of your hand. You shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow.“ (Deuteronomy 28:11–12)

Conversely, disobedience would bring painful discipline and chastening.

And your heavens which are over your head shall be bronze, and the earth which is under you shall be iron.

The LORD will change the rain of your land to powder and dust; from the heaven it shall come down on you until you are destroyed. (Deuteronomy 28:23–24)

After three years, David knew that Israel was somehow in breach of covenant, that this was divine displeasure upon the nation.

He undoubtedly went to one of the prophets, perhaps Nathan or Gad, and asked why the land was now clearly under some kind of judgement. So this is the answer that David gets from one of the prophets:

And the LORD answered, “It is because of Saul and his bloodthirsty house, because he killed the Gibeonites.”

So the king called the Gibeonites and spoke to them. Now the Gibeonites were not of the children of Israel, but of the remnant of the Amorites; the children of Israel had sworn protection to them, but Saul had sought to kill them in his zeal for the children of Israel and Judah.

Now we touched on this in the early life of David, when he first began his flight from Saul. But to properly understand what has happened, we must back up even further, we turn to the book of Joshua.

But when the inhabitants of Gibeon heard what Joshua had done to Jericho and Ai, they worked craftily, and went and pretended to be ambassadors. And they took old sacks on their donkeys, old wineskins torn and mended, old and patched sandals on their feet, and old garments on themselves; and all the bread of their provision was dry and moldy.

And they went to Joshua, to the camp at Gilgal, and said to him and to the men of Israel, “We have come from a far country; now therefore, make a covenant with us.” (Joshua 9:3–6)

So they said to him: “From a very far country your servants have come, because of the name of the LORD your God; for we have heard of His fame, and all that He did in Egypt, (Joshua 9:9)

These were Canaanites, part of the wicked tribes of people who were told to either vacate the land, or face divine judgement in the form of invading Israel. The Gibeonites chose neither fight nor flight, but deceit. They pretended to come from far outside the land, as if they were not part of these Canaanites under judgement. They flatter the Israelites, and say, “We’ve heard of the fame of your victories far away, and we’ve travelled so far just to come and make an alliance with you.” Well, Joshua and the leaders of Israel, instead of consulting the Lord, hastily make a peace covenant with the Gibeonites, only to find out three days later that they’ve been tricked, and that these are their neighbours.

Israel is angry with them and remonstrates with them, but they cannot attack them, because they bound themselves by a covenant to let them live. They subjugate them, and put them to servile labour in Israel, but they now have to come under Israel’s protection.

That’s the situation for almost 400 years, until Saul. Saul’s actions are never recorded for us in the account of Saul’s life, but we can plausibly reconstruct when and why he did this. When Saul was hunting David, David went to the Tabernacle in the town of Nob. Saul was outraged that anyone would help David, and used a foreign mercenary to slaughter the priests there. Having destroyed the priestly city, he decided to move the Tabernacle further north into his tribe of Benjamin to the city of Gibeon. We know he did this because the Tabernacle is still there during Solomon’s time. The problem for Saul is, the Gibeonites lived in Gibeon. So Saul, breaking this ancient vow and covenant, launches an attack on them. Supposedly in the name of zeal for the Lord, Saul decides, “Why should the descendants of those lying Canaanites live at peace in the very place where we want to put the Ark?” Saul falls upon them, probably unarmed, unprotected people, who had become the water-carriers and woodcutters for Israel.

He didn’t succeed in wiping them out, but certainly wiped them out of their main city. They did have about three others, and so there are Gibeonites still in David’s day.

Now once David heard that this famine was a result of this sin by Saul, he knew that the trouble was unpunished murder, which polluted the land. God said exactly that in Numbers 35:31–33

Moreover you shall take no ransom for the life of a murderer who is guilty of death, but he shall surely be put to death…

So you shall not pollute the land where you are; for blood defiles the land, and no atonement can be made for the land, for the blood that is shed on it, except by the blood of him who shed it.

Now before you rush to come up with a theology of curses upon countries, remember that there was a unique relationship between God, His people Israel and the land itself. They were bound together by covenant. If Israel broke the covenant, they not only disobeyed God, but they defiled the place they were in, a land that was host to the holiness of God. Murder was specifically damaging. Blood shed by a murderer’s hand couldn’t be covered up. It was almost like a living thing, which cried out for vengeance until the blood of the murderer silenced its voice. In this case, there were two complexities. One, the murderer, Saul, was now dead. Two, the murderer, Saul, was the king at the time, representing the nation, so there was a way that the whole nation had done this.

For those reasons, the land and Israel is in breach of covenant. Saul was one man, but that one man was the federal head of the nation: the representative of all the people. This was a public crime, deserving of a public punishment. He had murdered the Gibeonites, and no justice had ever come about.

Why did God wait all these years? Why didn’t He judge this during the time of Saul? We don’t know exactly. Saul died just eight years after killing the priests at Nob which is likely when he killed the Gibeonites, so not much time had passed. Perhaps some of it was God’s longsuffering, giving the nation and David the chance to repent and put things right. But here it is, 40 years later, and David must deal with the consequences of another’s sin.

Here we see a number of truths about sin and consequences.

• First, we sin individually, but its effects are corporate. You don’t have to be guilty of someone else’s sin to feel its effects, and for it to hurt you. The Israelites living in this famine hadn’t harmed the Gibeonites, but they were living with the consequences.
• We all know this, but we feel it is unfair, as if the only consequences I should ever face are those of my own sin. But that isn’t the way God made man. He didn’t make all seven or eight billion of us separately and individually. He made us all descend from one man. We have solidarity in Adam. That means we are many people but one race.
• This is why Adam’s sin could pass on to all, because we were all in Adam naturally, and represented by him. It is also why Jesus could die once for us all on the cross and not seven billion times over for each person. Solidarity is a bad thing when it comes to sin, but it is good news when it comes to Christ’s death.
• It also isn’t the way sin works. Sin is never entirely private, because we don’t exist in isolation. One man’s evil can defile others, harm others, entice others. Even the supposedly private, secret sin in my life is harming others around me, because it is changing me for the worse.
• We sin individually, but the effects are corporate. The fallout of someone else’s sin is with you today. Someone in your family chose unbelief. Someone chose to leave you when you were young, or divorce unbiblically. Someone chose alcoholism and it brought devastation. Someone chose financial recklessness. Someone chose to keep pornographic magazines at home, and you found them. Someone chose anger or self-pity and it become a default way of handling life for you.

We could probably spend hours listing out the ways that we live with the consequences of the choices of our parents, our siblings, friends, neighbours, government, church, previous governments, other nations, our ancestors. The wrong way to think about that is to live with a victim mentality and just marinate in self-pity. The mature way is to embrace we live in a web called the human family. A big chunk of your life will be responding to and living with and dealing with the consequences of other people’s sins.

• Second, time doesn’t remove or lessen the guilt of sin. However many years stretch on, what is wrong remains wrong and must be dealt with. Consequences and judgement can show up decades after the events. You can ignore or pretend the consequences are not there; you can keep blaming others and so kick the can down the road, but it won’t change what is there.
• Third, consequences can be traced back to their sinful source. David wasn’t looking for mysterious curses. He was looking for biblical cause and effect. There are many things and events in life which God doesn’t give us the reason for, and we rest then in His sovereignty. But there are enough things in life that are really no puzzle as to why they are the way they are. They’re only puzzling to those who refuse to see, or those who look to make sure they don’t find anything incriminating. But for almost everyone else looking in, it is pretty obvious why you have many of the consequences in your life that you do. Life is not pure mystery, there are enough consistent sowing and reaping phenomena – sow apple seeds get apple trees, sow this kind of behaviour, get that kind of result.

But now David must respond to this.

II. The Drastic Compensation For Sin

Therefore David said to the Gibeonites, “What shall I do for you? And with what shall I make atonement, that you may bless the inheritance of the LORD?”

And the Gibeonites said to him, “We will have no silver or gold from Saul or from his house, nor shall you kill any man in Israel for us.”

Notice what David does not do. David does not pout that this is unfair, that he should have to bear the brunt of Saul’s sin. He does not point out the obvious, that this is a legacy of the previous king, and that that king is now dead. He doesn’t make the mistake of saying that other people’s sin always makes it other people’s problem. David is now the king, representing the nation. Saul is dead, but David must find a way to deal with the injustice of what happened. So he asks the Gibeonites what they want to make restitution for what Saul did.

The Gibeonites say that they don’t want money from Saul or anyone killed. But the second phrase is more of an opening ploy in negotiation. They say they have no claim to execute any Israelite, which suggests that they are waiting for David to agree to hand Israelites over to them to atone for the murders.

So he said, “Whatever you say, I will do for you.”

Then they answered the king, “As for the man who consumed us and plotted against us, that we should be destroyed from remaining in any of the territories of Israel, let seven men of his descendants be delivered to us, and we will hang them before the LORD in Gibeah of Saul, whom the LORD chose.” And the king said, “I will give them.”

This might seem shocking to us, but consider a few things.

• First, there was the acknowledged law of the ancient Near-East, that a family was in solidarity. The household of Achan was judged along with him, as was the household of Korah. Years later, when king Darius punished the men who had conspired to put Daniel in the lion’s den, he threw them in with their families. Harsh, yes, brutal, yes, but in keeping with the circumstances of these harsh societies. This is centuries away from the system of laws and rights built upon the revealed laws of the Old and New Testament.
• Second, the Gibeonites were unbelievers. The Gibeonites would have managed to live with their old, evil Canaanite culture within the borders of Israel. They understood the laws of retaliation for blood, but not meaning of grace and forgiveness. To their credit, they had not spent years demanding justice, protesting and disturbing David’s kingdom. But now God had intervened on their behalf, and all they know is vengeance.
• A third piece of the puzzle is that Saul’s own family seems to have been partly related, maybe through intermarriage, to some of the Gibeonites. In 1 Chronicles 8, we are told that Saul’s great grandfather was the father of Gibeon. If so, then Saul was slaughtering some of his uncles and cousins.

But the king spared Mephibosheth the son of Jonathan, the son of Saul, because of the LORD’s oath that was between them, between David and Jonathan the son of Saul.

So the king took Armoni and Mephibosheth, the two sons of Rizpah the daughter of Aiah, whom she bore to Saul, and the five sons of Michal the daughter of Saul, whom she brought up for Adriel the son of Barzillai the Meholathite; and he delivered them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they hanged them on the hill before the LORD. So they fell, all seven together, and were put to death in the days of harvest, in the first days, in the beginning of barley harvest.

David then spared Mephibosheth, but took a different Mephibosheth and his brother, and the sons of Michal, who had adulterously married Adriel when already married to David, and hands them over. According to Numbers 25, Israelites were to be killed before being hung or impaled, so it is likely that David ordered a quick and merciful execution before handing the bodies over.

This was not human sacrifice which the Law of Moses forbade. Nor did their deaths atone for sin: you need an innocent life to atone for a guilty one. But this was Old Testament law:

But if any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. (Exodus 21:23–25)

This was legal retribution. Unsolved murder was atoned for by sacrifice; how much more should the death penalty follow known murder by a king!

Now we who live now under the blanket and security of the new covenant might look on this brutal world with dismay and even disgust, but consider the applications for us.

David was willing to make some very hard and difficult decisions to deal with the sin of others, sin from the past, sin from a predecessor. He had already been accused of being a bloodthirsty man, of being vengeful against the House of Saul, even though he had done everything to show the opposite. This certainly wouldn’t help – more people would misunderstand him and accuse him of hunting down his enemies.

Dealing with the fallout of other’s sins is messy, complicated, and usually unpleasant. Redressing it is usually hard, grueling work, which is why most people avoid it, and let the cancer grow, let the sore fester, kick the can down the road for someone else to deal with. When you begin to deal with other’s sins, it sometimes involves exposure of someone, it can involve church discipline, it can involve hours of counseling, it can involve a difficult process of sorting things out until the home, the marriage, the church, the relationship looks biblical and functions like God says it should.

But there is one more piece of the puzzle that shows us David’s heart in this whole painful episode.

III. The Deliberate Kindness Toward Sinners

Now Rizpah the daughter of Aiah took sackcloth and spread it for herself on the rock, from the beginning of harvest until the late rains poured on them from heaven. And she did not allow the birds of the air to rest on them by day nor the beasts of the field by night.

And David was told what Rizpah the daughter of Aiah, the concubine of Saul, had done.

Then David went and took the bones of Saul, and the bones of Jonathan his son, from the men of Jabesh Gilead who had stolen them from the street of Beth Shan, where the Philistines had hung them up, after the Philistines had struck down Saul in Gilboa.

So he brought up the bones of Saul and the bones of Jonathan his son from there; and they gathered the bones of those who had been hanged.

They buried the bones of Saul and Jonathan his son in the country of Benjamin in Zelah, in the tomb of Kish his father. So they performed all that the king commanded. And after that God heeded the prayer for the land.

The bodies of Saul’s relatives had not been buried: for the Gibeonites were pouring vengeance on them. One of the greatest acts of vengeance on an enemy was to leave the bodies exposed.

Rizpah was one of Saul’s concubines, and two of her sons were executed. She took her mourning clothes and stayed near the bodies of those hanged from early harvest, at the beginning of spring, until the later spring rains came. She kept away the scavengers, both bird and fourfooted. She kept this vigil up, which was likely a sleepless, partially fasting affair for a long time.

Finally David hears about what Rizpah has done, and decides it is time to put an end to it all. He commands that the remains of Saul, and Jonathan, and all these seven were to be gathered up, and taken to the family tomb of Saul. This former enemy of David, in spite of how much harm he did to David personally, and in spite of harm he has brought to David now 40 years later, receives a state-sponsored burial with honour.

Once again, David showed love and forgiveness to his enemies. Many men would have added resentment against someone like Saul, for all the additional headaches he had caused. But though David has acted drastically and decisively, here we see that there is still compassion and mercy for Saul’s family. He is solving other’s sins, but he still has a heart for those people.

As a shepherd, David knew that sheep get lost, fall into ditches, get caught and torn on thorn trees, and wander away. It is their own fault, but shepherds are not sadistic and cruel. They fetch lost sheep, they rescue trapped sheep, they bind up broken limbs, and put oil on wounds and scratches. Even though Saul’s family brought pain on itself, David is not standing there gloating, or saying “That’s what you get!” David still seeks the good of all, even when it is obvious who brought the pain on the nation.

Notice verse 14. Very importantly, the end of the famine does not come with the killing of the seven descendants of Saul but only after all of them, together with Saul himself and Jonathan, are given fitting burial in their own place. It seems God honoured the prayers of David and Israel when there was both justice for sin, but also mercy and grace.

In working through the pain that others have brought, we do well to remember the gospel. We are sinners saved by grace, and so are they. We are sinners in need of change helping other sinners in need of change. Christ came to die for sins, both those of others, and of us. That’s why we pray, “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

When you think about devastating consequences of others sins, drastic compensation, and deliberate kindness, you are seeing a formula for working through the pains and complexities of this life. But you are seeing something and someone else. You are seeing the Lord Jesus Christ. He came to this Earth entirely because of the devastating consequences of other’s sins. He did not and could not sin, and was here to deal with and embrace and fix the mess that we made of this world and of our lives.

And when it came to drastic compensation, it was not seven sinners impaled for justice, but He Himself, impaled on a cross, bearing the wrath and curse of God for us. And when all that is done, He maintains deliberate kindness to us, even in our spiritual death, seeking life for us and life more abundantly. That’s what is still available for you today, if you have not received Him.

And that is our pattern for making our way in a sin-cursed world.