Hallelujah

The poet Leonard Cohen spoke of love more powerfully than I ever will.  His ode to lost love, “Hallelujah”, seems somehow appropriate to these difficult times.

Abused or not, we have all known heartbreak.  The pain can be so bad we find it difficult to breath.  But keeping faith is the hard part.  Faith in love.  Faith in God.  Faith that life will once more be worth living.

It is that kind of faith we must find within ourselves right now.

It is easy to shout “hallelujah” when we are in love.  Easy to praise God when times are good…though often those are the very times we forget Him.  We have to dig deeper when times are tough.

God is there for us, in good times or bad.  We may win at love or lose.  We may stumble in life.  We may fall.  But He never abandons us.  His love never fails.

If anyone understood that truth, ancient Israel’s King David did.  We remember David as the boy who slew Goliath; the shepherd destined to rule a nation; the author of the psalms.  But David’s life was not all sunshine and roses.

David was hunted for years in the wilderness by Saul, before attaining the throne.  David, himself, committed adultery and murder, later repenting.  David fathered a highly dysfunctional family, lost six of his sons, and had to confront open rebellion [1].

Yet, as the psalms attest, David praised God whatever his circumstances.

“Surely in a flood of great waters
They shall not come near him.
You are my hiding place;
You shall preserve me from trouble;
You shall surround me with songs of deliverance.  Selah” (Ps. 32: 6-7).

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[1]  The sons David lost were:

• Amnon – killed by his half-brother Absalom for raping their sister Tamar.
• Chileab a/k/a Daniel or Daluyah – never a contender for the throne; believed to have pre-deceased David.
• Absalom – led a rebellion against David; executed after the Battle of the Wood of Ephraim, while suspended by his hair from a tree.
• Adonijah – sought to usurp the throne in David’s old age; subsequently put to death by his half-brother Solomon.
• Two unnamed sons (one the result of David’s adulterous relationship with Bathsheba) – died in infancy.

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