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Context No. 1750 of 4322 · 1 Kings

Context · Reflection

1 Kings 2:30-35: in context

30Benaiah came to the LORD’s Tent, and said to him, “The king says, ‘Come out!’” He said, “No; but I will die here.” Benaiah brought the king word again, saying, “This is what Joab said, and this is how he answered me.” 31The king said to him, “Do as he has said, and fall on him, and bury him, that you may take away the blood, which Joab shed without cause, from me and from my father’s house. 32The LORD will return his blood on his own head, because he fell on two men more righteous and better than he, and killed them with the sword, and my father David didn’t know it: Abner the son of Ner, captain of the army of Israel, and Amasa the son of Jether, captain of the army of Judah. 33So their blood will return on the head of Joab and on the head of his offspring forever. But for David, for his offspring, for his house, and for his throne, there will be peace forever from the LORD.” 34Then Benaiah the son of Jehoiada went up and fell on him, and killed him; and he was buried in his own house in the wilderness. 35The king put Benaiah the son of Jehoiada in his place over the army; and the king put Zadok the priest in the place of Abiathar.

Joab, who had backed the failed bid of Adonijah, flees to the tabernacle and grasps the horns of the altar, refusing to leave. Solomon orders Benaiah to execute him there, for the innocent blood Joab had shed years before, treacherously murdering two commanders, Abner and Amasa, better men than himself, while David looked the other way. The LORD will return his blood on his own head, Solomon says. So Joab, who had escaped justice for so long, is at last struck down for the blood on his hands.

Joab's end is a study in delayed but certain reckoning. He had murdered Abner and Amasa treacherously, in cold blood, years earlier, and for a long time he seemed to get away with it; David, for reasons of his own, had left the crimes unpunished, and Joab went on in power, apparently beyond the reach of justice. But the blood he had shed was not forgotten. In time, the reckoning came; the innocent blood returned on his own head, as Solomon said. What had gone unaccounted for years was accounted for at last. There is a sober truth here that both warns and reassures. It warns that wrongdoing is not erased by the passage of time; a sin unpunished is not a sin forgotten, and the reckoning, though long delayed, can still come. Joab's decades of apparent impunity did not cancel the debt of blood; it only postponed the day of its payment. This should sober us against presuming that because we have gotten away with a wrong so far, we always will, or that time has quietly wiped the slate. But it also reassures those who suffer injustice and see the guilty prosper unpunished. Delayed justice is not denied justice. The wrongs that seem to go unaccounted, the guilty who seem to escape, are not outside God's reckoning; in his time, the blood returns on the head that shed it. God's justice may be slow by our reckoning, but it is not absent. Joab escaped for years, and did not escape forever.

Am I presuming that a wrong I have gotten away with is behind me, forgotten because time has passed, or do I see in Joab's long-delayed reckoning that sin is not erased by time; and when I see the guilty prosper unpunished, can I trust that delayed justice is not denied, and that God's reckoning, though slow, is sure?

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