Re:Verse passage – 2 Samuel 16 (day four)
Honestly, Shimei did not use very good judgment. Here he was shouting curses at King David and throwing dirt and rocks at him and his followers. Abishai said it well…”just let me go cut off his head, that’ll shut him up!” Sounds like an effective solution to the problem. David saw it otherwise.
David understood the sovereignty of God. He understood that God could turn the hearts of people to accomplish whatever He desired. [We’ll see later that God thwarted the counsel of Ahithophel in order to bring calamity on Absalom.] If God had used Shimei to put a curse on David, who was he (David) to go against God? Learning to see life through the filter of God’s eyes makes everything look different. Can you imagine the stress and anger that could be eliminated, simply by yielding to God’s control?
“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways, declares the Lord, for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9.
It is all about perspectives. How we make decisions and how we live our lives are based on how we see things or the world around us. How we see things is a big deal as it can bring unity or division, bring us closer to God or away from God. Seeing with God’s perspective is an ongoing challenge, I am sure, for humans. We are not lack of light but we love the dark. We are diverse in perspectives, and I think only the Holy Spirit has the power to transform and unify us despite our diverse perspectives.
God sees things from a higher perspective and his thoughts are surely different from us. If we are on a plane, from a higher altitude, we see a lot farther than from the ground and see things we would never see from the ground.
The perspectives we choose to conduct our lives and to nurture overtime shape us, for better or worse, into who we are. Therefore, it is important for us to self-examine which of our perspectives God might want to change to bring us closer to Him.