Hello my good friends! What a blessing it is to hear from you all!
1st Samuel chapter 25.
In this chapter, arrogance is a killer with Nebal. I mean it literally was a killer. Nebal's rude and arrogant response to David and his kindness was not taken well with David nor with God. As a result God struck Nebal down and took his life.
We all encounter tough situations and uncomfortable situations and conflicts and challenges in life. That's just plain life! And when we do, how are we going to come across with those around us? If our response is, “This conflict should be settled my way and for my benefit” or comes across as “You're not as important as I am”, such arrogance kills relationships. Arrogance pushes people away. Arrogance exalts itself and puts down others. Arrogance wants situations settled for my convenience and I'm not to be concerned about how you are affected.
When there's a conflict we need to stop and think through our motives. We need to think through our words and think through how we're going to settle the given situation. Be careful with your words! Be careful with what you're going to say and how you are going to say it. Because what you say and how you say it, is not going to give the same meaning. Then we end up arguing and focusing on what we said verses on how it came across. We spend a lot of time arguing about the words we said and we never once address the arrogance that was behind what we said, which is the bigger issue. And it never gets dealt with and it allows Satan to get his foot in the door of a relationship. It causes a division which either grows and leads to destruction or it is confronted and properly dealt with resulting in a healed broken relationship.
I hate arrogance! Not because I'm not arrogant, but because I know that I can be arrogant in my responses and I know arrogance is the motive behind others as well and I've seen how destructive it can be to relationships. So I hate it and I hate when it becomes a part of me.
We read in this chapter how Nabal was not a very wise man in how he responded to David. His wife Abigail on the other hand was very wise in what she did. I think that Nabal’s actions showed how he was greedy and unkind as it appears that he had an ugly heart. His heart problem would soon lead to his death. David was about to respond to him in anger, but Abigail intervened. David was prevented from taking action that he most likely would have regretted later. I wonder how many times Abigail may have had to do things like this before with others to fix problems that her husband may have caused or stirred up. How often do men sometimes lose their cool and it takes a woman to calm them down and bring peace to a hostile situation? I’m thinking of the calming way to get Bruce Banner back from being the Hulk. This seems to me to be a similar case of soothing here. David was grateful to Abigail and he ended up marrying her in a very short period of time after God soon struck Nabal dead. I think that David probably liked the qualities that he saw in Abigail and he took her quickly after she became a widow.
Our words can be so powerful! May we be quick to listen and choose to use our words wisely. I’m reminded today of Proverbs 15:1.
“A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.”
Jim I love the proverbs verse that you shared. I’ve never heard that before and I feel like it’s so perfect. As an educator I really try to talk to my students with love and kindness, a soft answer, even when I am upset or frustrated because just like that verse says, harsh words stir up anger. Anger with my students, myself, and if I carried it over into my home life, my husband and my son would feel anger and hurt. Sometimes our emotions get the best of us, but we have to remember that God is on our side. We don’t need to have the last word or feel like we’ve “won” an argument or dispute with someone else. There are consequences to our actions, but there is also the greatest reward of eternal life in heaven.