The Right Thing at the Wrong Time
The Las Vegas Faith Center
The Right Thing at the Wrong Time
by Tiger Todd
If you’re like me, you don’t watch the evening news or read the newspaper any more than is absolutely necessary, not because it’s not entertaining, but because 99% of what is called “news” is mostly “bad news”. This negative slant by mainstream media is also why I don’t watch many made-for-TV Bible stories when they are produced by the major networks. Whether it’s “Samson and Delilah”, “Adam and Eve”, “Solomon and Sheba”, or “David and Bathsheba”, it’s pretty clear from the titles that even these are stories about someone’s worst day. The following message from the Bible peels back the layers of blame to reveal a fundamental understanding of our better nature. Maybe most of us make mistakes because we actually do the right thing, but at the wrong time?
According to the Bible, God had given David an anointing to destroy all enemies to His Kingdom. Isaiah chapter ten says that the enemy’s burden will be removed and his yoke of bondage will be destroyed because of this anointing.
And it shall come to pass that in that day, that his burden shall be taken away from off thy shoulder, and his yoke from off thy neck, and the yoke shall be destroyed because of the anointing. Isaiah 10:27
One great minister sums up the anointing as, “God on flesh doing those things that flesh cannot do, that only God can do.” Needless to say, it was this type of anointing that exalted the obedient shepherd boy David to his eventual kingship. Scripture records that although this boy David used a stone to defeat the giant, Goliath, he could have probably used a Twinkie to accomplish the same thing, since he had so much faith in the anointing of God that was on him! Suffice it to say that David was designed to be a mighty tool for God to free the children of Israel from their bondage to other nations. This was echoed in the book of First Samuel, and I believe that the number one song on the Jerusalem Top Forty Countdown was probably, “Saul slew his thousands, but David his ten thousands”.
I thank God for the calling He gave me. And I am even more thankful that I am not expected to walk according to the dictates of someone else’s calling! A very good Jewish friend of mine, a medical doctor, is a great example of this very principle. He is diligent about whatever his calling requires, and I have never known an instance of him trying to avoid fulfilling what God called him to do on any occasion. And I believe there is a real truth in this. God doesn’t call someone into something that he or she wouldn’t be completely content and competent in fulfilling. Neither my doctor friend nor myself would be able to do what David was called to do, namely, to be an instrument of war for his God. But David didn’t give it a second thought! He not only enjoyed kickin’ Philistine hiney, he also was able to discern the difference between the enemies of God, and those people that just plain didn’t like him.
Have you ever stayed home from work when you just knew you were supposed to go? Sure, you rationalized the decision in your mind by recounting your recent victories, like how many extra giants you slew last week, how the kingdom’s income had doubled, and how the safety of fair maidens was also at an all-time high! Surely it would be no big deal if you took just one day off for yourself… or would it?
And it came to pass, after the year was expired, at the time when Kings go forth to battle, that David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel; and they destroyed the children of Ammon, and besieged Rabbah. But David tarried still at Jerusalem. II Samuel 11:1
Saint and sinner alike, both know what it’s like to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Did you ever stop to think how this happens? Partial obedience! On the day of the battle, David was supposed to be leading the charge at Rabbah, but instead, he was just lying around the palace. After all, he was the king, and I’m sure he thought he could do whatever he pleased. And he did. Partial obedience. Although Israel went to war against the children of Ammon, David didn’t show up like he was supposed to. You may be relaxing at home, you’ve got money in the bank, your kids are well, you’ve even quoted scripture to your wife this morning, and it doesn’t look like you really need to be in church today. But there is something I like to call a divine appointment that you could very well be missing. A divine appointment is a time arranged by God in response to your prayers and your faithfulness to Him. Although Divine Appointments can manifest in many ways, they are usually disguised as business opportunities, a meeting with someone that God has sent to supply for your needs, or as answers to questions you’ve had so that you can move forward in some area of your life.
The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord. Psalm 37 Verse 23
I believe that David missed a divine appointment by not walking in the ordered steps of God’s plan for him. We may not be able to determine what he missed, but we are able to see the consequences of where he went instead.
And it came to pass in an evening tide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon. And David sent and inquired after the woman. And one said, Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah, the Hittite? And David sent messengers, and took her; and she came unto him, and he lay with her; for she was purified from her uncleanness: and she returned unto her house. And the woman conceived, and sent and told David, and said I am with child. II Samuel 11:2-5
It may be hard to believe that these events and their destructive consequences all started when David didn’t go to work like he was supposed to! Just one little day off, and seemingly, all Hell broke loose! Most of the world is aware of the events that transpired, from the birth of the illegitimate child, to the ensuing lies, to the death of Uriah, and to the subsequent death of the child that was conceived. You too could be in the middle of a similar scenario. From your viewpoint, it might seem totally ridiculous that any partiall obedience on your part could be to blame for the mess you are currently experiencing. Sure, you did tell some people that you were going to that men’s meeting at the church down the way, but instead, you ended up in front of a big screen in a Sports bar. No harm in that, until you find out that the man God sent to you with the financial harvest you had been believing for, was not at the Sports bar, but at the men’s meeting! At the Sports bar, there was some woman that didn’t care that you were married, and now the one time you didn’t do what you said you would, because you didn’t feel like it, your business failed, you wrecked your car, your wife threw you out, and you ended up in an affair with some misguided waitress. And in the fulness of this disaster, which was once your wonderful life, you have the audacity to say, “God, why me?”, like He had anything to do with it! Many times as a minister I have been told these stories of distress, and they were all produced when some wonderful person with a great call on their life, simply gave in to their feelings, instead of keeping their word to the letter.
Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things. Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth! James 3:5
Partial obedience is deceptive
Partial obedience is so deceptive, so insidious, that even while you are in the great fire of your circumstances, you still cannot see how just a little kindling was the start of such a tremendous blaze!
And they destroyed the children of Ammon, and besieged Rabbah. II Samuel 1b
The battle that day looked like a success even without David’s obedience. It looked like it was going to be a great day. When David saw Bathsheba bathing, I’m sure he thought it would be a really great day! But that’s the deception! In our generation, we have been deceived, or programmed, through television shows and advertisements. They have separated us from the value system which is part of our nature from God! I have known people who became alcoholics all because their bar owner friend supplied them with free drinks! The deception in their thinking was this, “because it’s free, let’s drink all we can.” Let me ask you something: if you had a friend who could supply you with free rat poison, would you drink all of that you could? This same deceptive pressure ran rampant in the college I attended. Since our meals were included in our room and board fees, we felt it our duty to eat until we couldn’t move from the table! To make matters worse, factoring in the added time pressure of the cafeteria’s extremely limited hours, we began to take on the nature of pigs! Our rationale was, “You never know when we might be able to eat again”! How sad it is today to see so many beautiful women who suffer from low self esteem, all because of those 40 extra pounds they put on in college! Worse still, they were never fully able to conquer their habits in later years, since that pressure training they received at the college cafeteria affected their nature so completely.
Personally, I enjoy sleeping. Sleep can be fun. But sleeping when I’m supposed to be doing something else somewhere else is called laziness! Laziness that is unrestrained is called lasciviousness, or a lack of self restraint, and will eventually show up in every other area of a man’s life. One particular family I know suffers from this very affliction. The part that used to bother me the most about their situation is that although their house is a mess, their kids are rebellious, and they always have trouble paying their bills on time, every now and then, some breakthrough revelation still manages to come forth from their lips. Jesus wrote the book on this phenomenon, when he declared that what is in a person’s heart in abundance, will eventually come out of his or her mouth.
For out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaketh. Matt. 12:34
I’m not saying that what was in David’s heart was evil. But every christian will tell you that just because they got born again in the Sunday night service, that didn’t keep their old language from coming out their mouth on Monday morning. Just as it took some time for the river of our conversation to flow free from our past, so to with David, it took awhile for his disobedience to show up in his future. David didn’t even know why, all of a sudden, God seemingly was nowhere to be seen.
And let the peace of God rule in your hearts. Colossians 3:15 KJV
And let the peace (soul harmony which comes) from Christ rule (act as umpire continually) in your hearts (deciding and settling with finality all questions that arise in your minds.) Colossians 3:15 The Amplified Bible
As I look back upon my life, I find that I have never made a stupid decision that I was really comfortable with! I was always aware of some uneasiness, or some sense of fear or defiance. I believe there is a way that we can avoid every opportunity to be in the wrong place at the wrong time- or be in the right place at the wrong time- and consequently risk disaster. The scripture says that we are to let the peace of God help us make the right choices. Using King David as an example, now, whenever I am tempted to only partially obey the voice of God, I remind myself that there must be somewhere else I am supposed to be, doing something else I am supposed to do!
David was still partially right.
I know I promised you that this wouldn’t be just one more made-for-TV soap opera, so let’s see if there is something else God wanted us to see from this event in the life of David.
Something I used to wonder about was the virtual absence of the words satan or devil in the Old Testament. Although satan’s actions were evident on every page, nobody ever seemed to connect him to any of those heinous events. If you read through the books of Moses and the Books of the Prophets, you can actually get the impression that God is both good and bad! The absence of any destructive act being attributed directly to satan was extremely curious to my thinking. I used to ask, “How can I put my faith in God to heal me if I think He is the same one that made me sick?” Furthermore, reconciling the “God is gonna getcha” of the Old Testament, with the “God is Love” of the New Testament, has always taken a leap of faith on my part to believe.
God graciously answered this dilemma. He gave us the book of Psalms, a glorious, personal diary of the relationship between a man named David, and the God who loved him! And how would we know the mind of God on the heart of a Father toward His children without the Book of Proverbs? In fact, without the wisdom of the Book of Proverbs, I believe it would be impossible to hold any management position or successfully run any business on this earth. The entire church-world should be thankful that God had Solomon succeed David, his father, as King, so that these truths about God from the books of Psalms and Proverbs could be known. Of course, Solomon’s mother, Bathsheba, was certainly proud that her son could become the God-ordained King of Israel…“wait a minute, but did you just say that the mother of the God-ordained king of Israel was Bathsheba?”...“Surely you don’t mean, ‘I might be married, but I’m waving to you from the shower and I’ll be over as soon as I can’ Bathsheba?”... That Bathsheba? You mean, “I’ll be over tonight, since my husband Uriah is out of town, Bathsheba?” That Bathsheba?
Yes, that Bathsheba! The mother of Solomon, and the wife of David. Don’t you think that it was God that inspired Solomon to pen the book of Proverbs? How about the Book of Ecclesiastes (the Preacher)? If you agree, then Solomon could not have been an accident. “Are you trying to tell us that David and Bathsheba were supposed to get together?” Why yes, I am, since that’s the only way to produce this man named Solomon. Well, if that’s true, then what was the big fuss over David and Bathsheba getting together anyway, if they were supposed to be together? Answer: partial obedience.
Write the vision..
And the Lord answered me and said, Write the vision…for the vision is yet for an appointed time… Habakkuk 2:2-3a
Have you ever had a vision, or maybe just a witness inside you, that what you were doing you had somehow done before, and it just felt perfectly natural? Or maybe you had been introduced to someone and the two of you just “hit it off”? I’ve met people where after 5-years of acquaintance, I still never knew very well. But then there are others that in just 5-minutes, we were chatting and joking with each other like we grew up together! I believe that these types of relationships are God-ordained, and that either through dreams or visions, He has shown us who He is sending to us. Well, our God “wrote the book” on visions, and He has given these kinds of visions to us to confirm what His plans are before we arrive at His destination. This is how he helps us walk in the ordered steps that will get us directly there.
I firmly believe that this is the kind of thing that happened to David that day on the roof of his house when he saw Bathsheba. His positive reaction to this woman in the shower could not have been based solely on her beauty. If that were the case, the writer of the book of First Samuel would have probably compared her to Sarai, the wife of Abram, whose beauty stopped traffic- and Pharaohs- even up into her 90’s. And since wives and concubines were common to the kings of that day, including David, there had to have been something beyond what he saw in the natural that made him react to her as he did. I believe that David had a “deja-vu”, or at least, part of one. The term, Deja-vu, is French for, already seen. Well, isn’t that what our scripture from Habakkuk says a vision is? There is no way that a man after God’s own heart like David, would have committed the subsequent acts against Him, unless he really thought that what he was seeing was part of the plan of God for his life! And it was, but not at that time.
To every divine purpose, there is a season.
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven…a time to embrace…a time to love. Ecclesiastes 3:1,5,8
With no effort at all, I could write an entire book on this subject. In fact, this understanding is more thoroughly covered in my book on Predestination. But for the sake of understanding how to avoid partial disobedience in our own lives, and save the world from its devastating consequences, please permit me to show you this great truth from the previous verse.
Jesus told the disciples in the fourth chapter of the book of Mark that the entire Kingdom of God was governed by the system of seedtime and harvest. Anything then, outside of that Kingdom, is not. Similarly, everything in the United States is governed by the system known as our Constitution. Everything outside the United States, from Mexico to Iraq, is not. Obviously.
But when we start getting too close to home, and I mean literally too close to your home, and your family, we have a tendency to get really stupid where the Kingdom of God is concerned.
Verily I say unto you, whosoever shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein. Mark 10:15
Notice I said stupid, not naive. You see, children are naive when they do things that they don’t know any different than to do. But adults, who have had the manual on how God does things for over 300 years, will spout off things like, “God took Aunt Judy home”, after Aunt Judy died in a car accident last week. Let me ask you something: was Aunt Judy serving God before she died? Was she fulfilling the hope of her calling? If not, and only Aunt Judy and God know for sure, she was not participating in any purpose under heaven according to Ecclesiastes 3, and so her life was not involved in the Kingdom of God! Seedtime and harvest does not govern a person’s life unless they have made Jesus their Lord. Aunt Judy was an independent operator who sadly became just another statistic in the deadly course of this world.
And you…who were dead in trespasses and sins, wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world. Ephesians 2:1-2a
David and Bathsheba bearing Solomon was part of God’s purpose under heaven for them. Much of their earlier life was not. Disaster struck when David took that God-ordained purpose into his own hands and then tried to complete it without God! Don’t you think that God could have gotten David and Bathsheba together without David intervening like he did? Then you must also think that God can resurrect your business without you having to compromise your Christian ethics and try to do things your way. David, like many lovely people today, needed to exercise a little more faith and patience, so that God, in due season, could bring about His purpose and plan in David’s life.