Relationships – Often Highways for God’s Gifts

God could do everything Himself. Instead he often chooses to employ people.

When God chooses to deliver His gifts through people, a purpose may be to nurture the relationships that are conduits for the gifts.

For example, God chose to deliver David from King Saul’s wrath through his friendship with Saul’s son Jonathan.  God could have selected other means, but instead employed a relationship that held firm even after Jonathan’s death.

When David suspected that King Saul intended to kill him, he and Jonathan made a covenant. Jonathan promised to warn David secretly if Saul acted against David, and David promised to always continue his love to Jonathan’s descendants. (1 Sam. 20:30)

Later, when King Saul erupted in anger against David’s absence from a feast, Jonathan warned David with a coded message and David escaped. (1 Sam. 20).

When king, David kept his covenant with Jonathan, by restoring to Jonathan’s son Mephibosheth all the land of Saul and taking him to eat at the king’s table. (2 Sam.9)

Later, David again honored his covenant by forgiving Mephibosheth for failing to join him when David fled Jerusalem in Absalom’s rebellion. (2 Sam. 15; 16:1-4; 19:24-30)

It seems clear that God had more in mind than delivering David from Saul, when Jonathan warned David of Saul’s wrath. By the two men honoring the covenant they had made, God nurtured a special friendship that both blessed David and Jonathan personally, and protected Jonathan’s family after the political tables turned and David was king.

If God so values and uses our relationships with other people, shouldn’t we also value and nurture them?