If you leave Jerusalem by the Jaffa Gate and head south, you will first descend steeply into the head of the Hinnom Valley before rising to the Plain of Rephaim. You may not hear “the sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry trees” but, on a springtime morning or just as evening falls, you’ll hear the breeze playing through the almond leaves and hawthorn blossoms and rustling the “tender green” of the fig. The ridge route brings you along the backbone of the Judean high country, five miles southwest to a little town cascading down a double hill. Its inhabitants call it Beit Lahm; we know it better as Bethlehem.
At Bethlehem, the road branches. The main trade route made its way southwest toward Hebron and Beersheba on the edge of the Negev. A less-traveled road heads straight south and then cuts southeast into the mountains and eventually through the Judean wilderness to the oasis of Engedi on the shores of the Dead Sea. Five miles along that road from Bethlehem is Tekoa or Khirbet Teku as it is referred to today.
Circumstances would link these two little Judean towns in the days of David. When the youngest son of Jesse had become the bold chieftan of a band of outlaws and was besieged by the Philistines in the stronghold of Adullam, his heart grew thirsty for a drink from the sweet-watered well of Bethlehem. It was no command he gave, but the outbreathing of his soul. It was, however, enough for three of his mighty men. Slipping out into the darkness, they broke through the enemy lines (you can be sure the water source was “well” protected!) and brought David a dripping skin, filled with the happy memories of a shepherd boy.
The man who would be king was deeply moved. Taking the water bag from the men, he poured it out on the ground. He what? How thoughtless! How wasteful! No, I didn’t say he spilled it; he poured it. Knowingly, thoughtfully, worshipfully, David offered it as an irrevocable sacrifice to the Lord. I do not deserve such devotion, he was declaring. But He does. For in that skin, David knew, was the lifeblood of his three valiant men.
Thirty-five years roll their course. David, no longer in a cave, lives in a palace. His wayward boys have brought him nothing but grief. He is harvesting a bitter crop from his dark deeds with Bathsheba. His army commander, Joab, privy to the conspiracy against Uriah, now has leverage in the palace. He has found a kindred spirit in Absalom, the wild-hearted son of a Bedouin, whose grandfather was king of Geshur.
Joab has a problem. His compatriot, Absalom, in vengeance for his sister, slays Amnon, his half-brother and flees to Geshur. Joab wants him back to strengthen his own hand. In the nearby town of Tekoa there is a “wise woman” who agrees to be Joab’s accomplice.
Disguised in mourning apparel, she approaches the king with the sad tale of two sons. With her husband already dead, she says, her one son had killed the other in a fight. As if that wasn’t bad enough, now the townspeople want to execute the guilty son for murder. She would have no one left. The climax of her argument is a classic: “For we must needs die, and are as water spilt on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again” (2 Sam. 14:14). In other words, Amnon is gone. No use crying over spilled milk, or spilled blood either. Get on with living; we’ll all be spilled soon enough.
So who was right? Is it poured or spilled? Is the believer’s life haphazardly splashed across the hard ground of circumstance, to be absorbed or evaporated and forgotten? Or are our lives to be a drink offering, poured out as a purposeful act of worship to God?
Paul would side with David, and so would Timothy and Epaphroditus and David’s greater Son Himself (Phil. 2). Following the example of the Lord Jesus, the faithful of every age have poured out their lives as servants of Jehovah. We are not to be spilled by some cosmic accident, to be absorbed by the planet we mistakenly call “Home.” May we add our voices to Paul’s as he writes to his brothers and sisters:
“If I be offered (poured out as a drink offering) upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I joy, and rejoice with you all” (Phil. 2:17).