It started innocent enough. A dry year. Crops browning in the field. Nervous farmers. The first year it probably mostly affected farmers’ profits. "We’’ll have a better year next year." they said.
But when the rain continued to not come the second year, panic did. They were in a famine. It was a very tough year for everyone. Belts were tightened. Food was rationed. “Next year has to be better.”
Next year was not. A third year of famine was catastrophic. People were dying of hunger. Men would trade anything to get a little food to keep their children alive.
And King David finally thought “maybe God is trying to tell us something.”
So he went to the Lord, asking God if there was any special reason for this three year famine, and God’s answer surprised him. The famine was not a result of David’s sin with Bathsheba, or anything Joab or Absolom or any of the other flawed characters surrounding David did. The famine was actually the result of something Saul had done decades earlier.
2 Samuel 21:1–2 says:
1. Then there was a famine in the days of David three years, year after year; and David enquired of the LORD. And the LORD answered, It is for Saul, and for his bloody house, because he slew the Gibeonites.
2. And the king called the Gibeonites, and said unto them; (now the Gibeonites were not of the children of Israel, but of the remnant of the Amorites; and the children of Israel had sworn unto them: and Saul sought to slay them in his zeal to the children of Israel and Judah.)
2. And the king called the Gibeonites, and said unto them; (now the Gibeonites were not of the children of Israel, but of the remnant of the Amorites; and the children of Israel had sworn unto them: and Saul sought to slay them in his zeal to the children of Israel and Judah.)
In this story, God’s people were paying for a sin that no one even noticed. It was a sin that happened in Saul’s zeal to the children of Israel and Judah. It was a sin that, like Satan, was masquerading as an angel of light - a sin that seemed like righteousness, that flowed out of what appeared to be godly revival, yet this sin brought God’s disfavor, judgment, and generational consequences.
These verses teach us three powerful lessons about how religious zeal can hide destructive sin and lead to generational harm.
A generational famine
The glory years for the independent Baptists seem to be from the 1960s to the 1990s. These years saw preachers like John R. Rice, Lee Robberson and Jack Hyles. Institutions like Bob Jones University, Tennessee Temple, Pensecola Christian College, Hyles Anderson College and even Liberty University came to prominence. These are the years when the bus ministry was still a novel invention and when The Sword of the Lord was at its peak readership. I’ve heard more than one older pastor pine on about these “glory years” and refer to them as a “revival.”
And then it all stopped. My generation is the most irreligious generation in recent American history.
Ryan Burge, a baptist pastor and political science professor who teaches in my backyard (at the nearby Eastern Illinois University), said this in his recent book “The American Religious Landscape:”
The last three decades have witnessed the unbelievable rise of nonreligious Americans. They broke double digits in 1996 and have never looked back. By 2014 they had climbed to over 20% of the sample. In the most recent survey data collected from a variety of sources, there is evidence that points to them being closer to 30% of American adults today - which makes them easily larger than any other religious group in the country.
The last three decades have been decades of religious famine. Could it be that some of the very zeal that marked those ‘glory years’ actually contained the seeds of our current struggles? Could some of what we thought was revival have actually been contributing to generational consequences we’re now experiencing?
I believe there are three lessons that David’s famine (brought about by Saul’s sin) can teach us about the dangers of religious zeal gone wrong:
Lesson 1: A lesson about zeal
Saul’s sin of killing the Gibeonites was hardly noticed because he did it in what seemed like righteous zeal. If you remember, Israel extremely weak before Saul came on the scene. They were basically existing as a vassal state for the more powerful Philistines and had just come out of a period where it seemed that every non-jewish resident of the land was molesting them. God brought a few “judges” who stood up in their zeal and defended Israel, but the period in general was a period of weakness.
Then King Saul came and brought strength. He took Israel from a scattered group of tribes, bullied by every neighbor to an established country with a standing army and a powerful court.
So when Saul looked around and saw the Gibeonites - these non-Israelites who had tricked their way into a treaty centuries earlier (see Joshua 9) - it probably seemed like an obvious target for his newfound strength. Why should these foreigners continue to occupy Israelite land? Why should Israel honor a treaty that was obtained through deception?
Saul’s zeal for ‘the children of Israel and Judah’ seemed perfectly legitimate. He was finally strong enough to do what previous generations couldn’t - purify the land and protect his people. But God saw it differently.
Here is the first lesson for us: something can seem like religious zeal, and actually be grievous sin.
Of course, you can see this in the New Testament. Jesus said that the Pharisees would “compass heaven and earth to make one proselyte” - that sure sounds like evangelistic zeal - then he said “and once he is made you make him twice the child of hell that you are.”
No one can look at the religious jews of the gospels and say they were anything less than zealous - but their zeal caused them not just to miss Jesus, but to put Him on the cross.
Paul spoke of this zeal before his conversion:
6. Concerning zeal, persecuting the church; touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless.
We have a tendency to look at people who are “on fire for God” and think that they can do no wrong. We pine for revival fires. But the fire of revival can blind us to serious sin. Zeal for God can be completely ignorant of, and even opposed to, what God is actually wanting to do.
Ironically, Saul’s zeal for Israel and Judah actually led to the destruction of Israel and Judah.
Zeal is a good thing, its like the gas in your church bus. That bus isn’t going anywhere without a bunch of little fires and explosions that move the engine forward. But if that bus is pointed the wrong direction, or worse, toward a cliff, that gas isn’t doing you any favors.
So the lesson about zeal is that zeal is a good thing, but it is not the only thing, and religious zeal can hide some pretty serious sin. When our religious zeal is pointed in the wrong direction, it often leads to the second problem this famine teaches us:
Lesson 2: A lesson about obedience
With our enlightened modern eyes, it’s easy to read 2 Samuel 21 and think “of course what Saul did was sinful - he was carrying out ethnic cleansing.” But that assumption ignores the biblical context.
God actually commanded the same king (Saul) to do the same thing (kill off a group of people who were in the land.) Remember the story of the Amalekites? In that case, Saul sinned not by killing people, but by not going far enough. He sinfully spared the king and the livestock and it led to him losing his kingdom.
So perhaps Saul thought, if it is good to get rid of the Amalekites, it must be good to get rid of the Gibeonites.
But it wasn’t good. It was evil. The Gibeonites were under God’s protection. In the zeal of the moment though - everyone went with it.
But it wasn’t good. It was evil. The Gibeonites were under God’s protection. In the zeal of the moment though - everyone went with it.
So what is the lesson about obedience? Doing more than God commands you to do is a very dangerous thing."
Again, we can see this pretty clearly in the Pharisees: they looked at the laws of God and thought - if X is good than XX must be really good. If God doesn’t want us working on the sabbath day, let’s put more boundaries around that. Let’s quit several hours before the sabbath even starts.
By the time of Christ they had added so many layers to the sabbath laws that they felt justified in criticizing the disciples because they picked a ear of corn as they were walking on the sabbath. Today, the descendents of the pharisees (the orthodox jews) won’t turn on a light switch on the sabbath because to do so would “kindle a fire.”
This well-meaning approach to the law caused the Pharisees to hurt people, make God look petty, and completely miss out on what God was trying to do.
In our “glory days” many did the same kind of thing. They took God’s good commands and added a buffer to them, thinking they were improving them:
- If it is a good thing to be faithful to church, why not bind people’s conscience to go multiple times a week?
- If it is a good thing to dress modestly - why not enact a strict dress code?
- If it is a good thing to avoid alcohol - why not avoid any place that sells alcohol?
- If some popular music is an evil influence - why not ban all popular music?
- etc.
This kind of thinking, fueled by religious zeal, actually has several subtle yet destructive implications. Let’s consider two:
First, this mindset of “improving” God’s rules tends to make God look petty. Thomas Paine, who was the 18th Century’s Version of Cristopher Hitches (an influential outspoken atheist) said this about the strict Quakers who raised him:
If the God of my parents had created the world, all of the flowers would be black and white.
I think we do well to remember that there is a kind of zealous over-application of rules that sucks all the color out of life and makes God look like a petty tyrant.
The second thing I think we tend to miss is that over-application of scripture is actually a form of doubt cosplaying as faith. When we say “God’s word is good, but it needs more” that isn’t faith, but a profound act of faithlessness disguised as super-spirituality.
Of course, in the blinding light of zeal, it’s hard to see these things. There is a third lesson this famine teaches us about the dangers of religious zeal, and it is just as painful and convicting as the first two:
Lesson 3: A lesson about friendly fire
Saul’s zeal led him to attack the Gibeonites - a group of people who were under God’s protection. If you read the rest of 2 Samuel 21 - the Gibeonites sure seem like faithful, god-fearing people. While they were not a part of Israel, they were a part of God’s family and you attack God’s family at your own peril.
One of the things that often happens when religious zeal is out of control is that we end up partaking in friendly fire. We end up treating God’s people as our enemies.
So here is the lesson about friendly fire: When our zeal makes us draw the circle of “us” too small, we end up firing on our own troops.
We’ve all seen this, haven’t we? We’ve been a part of meetings where more attention was given to attacking those who are not exactly like us than to anything else. Where people are whipped into a zealous frenzy by mocking those who - at the end of the day - are on our team.
Zeal can lead us to the assumption that anyone who is not with us is on the other team, when what Christ actually says is “he that is not against us is for us” (Luke 9:50). Jesus was teaching His disciples (and us) that the kingdom of God is bigger than our little circle, and that there are faithful people out their who are serving the Lord who aren’t a part of our little group. We should rejoice in that, at the very least we need to leave them alone.
We can have strong opinions on a whole host of issues that Christians disagree on. We can and should defend those positions. But there is a big difference between defending a position and attacking people. Zeal can cause us to blur that line.
When we’re defending a position, we can take our opponents’ arguments at their strongest and still demonstrate why we believe differently. When we’re attacking people, we start caricaturing their positions, questioning their motives, and mocking their methods.
Position defense says, ‘Here’s why I believe this is biblical and that is not.’ People attack says, ‘Anyone who disagrees with me is a compromising liberal worldling.’
At the end of the day, I think 2 Samuel 21 should remind us that it is a serious thing to attack those who are under God’s protection - and that in our zeal we can forget that.
These three lessons challenge us to examine our own hearts and methods. Is our zeal informed by Scripture or driven by tradition? Are we obeying God’s actual commands or our improved versions of them? Are we building bridges to fellow believers or burning them down?
The stakes are higher than we think. Saul’s sin brought a three-year famine. Our sins of misguided zeal may be bringing generational consequences we’re only beginning to understand.
There is some hope in 2 Samuel 21. The chapter ends with an atoning sacrifice. With the sons of a king being hung up to bring peace and to stop the wrath of God. A clear foreshadowing of the gospel.
If anything is going to bring us together and keep us on the right track, it will be a focus on the cross and on our Lord who hung there for us, taking the penalty for our sins, even those sins hiding behind religious zeal. When we truly grasp what Christ did for us, we’ll be far less likely to attack those He died to save and far less dependent on our own zeal and righteousness.