Different from the instance of Saul who was plotting to plant his daughter in the life of David, like a timed device, for future detonation with maximum devastation, the forces that manipulate into disaster do not always reside in a person; they sometimes reside in a curse.
That is our next story, about an elderly priest who worked so hard all his life yet in the evening of his days was mis-‘led’ to join a promising but doomed political party; a step that became the irreparable mistake that suddenly cost him everything, according to a strange and ancient pattern that had followed his ancestors in the past 150 years.
26 And unto Abiathar the priest said the king, Get thee to Anathoth, unto thine own fields; for thou art worthy of death: but I will not at this time put thee to death, because thou barest the ark of the Lord GOD before David my father, and because thou hast been afflicted in all wherein my father was afflicted.
27 So Solomon thrust out Abiathar from being priest unto the LORD; that he might fulfil the word of the LORD, which he spake concerning the house of Eli in Shiloh (1 Kings 2:26-27).
According to the passage, Abiathar’s sudden loss of his priestly office was the result of an ancient curse that was pronounced in Shiloh against his ancestors. That story is told in 1 Samuel chapter 1 – chapter 5. Abiathar’s great-great grandfather was the high priest Eli, who had two very irreverent sons that abused the worshippers that came to the house of God. They brazenly stole from the offerings of the men and mindlessly slept with the female parishioners, right in the sanctuary. Displeased by their conduct, God sent warnings, but those wicked associate-priests seemed too drunk to care, forcing God to declare that He would cast them out of the office, kill them all in one day, and make the surviving other descendants to never see old age or enjoy the fruit of their labour (1 Samuel 2:29-36; 3:12-14).
Shortly after God had announced His verdict against that household, the first phase of the curse came into effect, and all sons plus father and daughter-in-law died in one day. It was the unforgettable inauguration of worrisome multiple deaths (1 Samuel 4:18-22). About 80 years later, the next recorded phase occurred. In their priests-village of Nob, they often received visitors. One day, however, the active curse manipulated or ‘invited’ some wrong visitors. David had been there to seek the Lord. Coincidentally, another man was also at that sacred place on a ‘personal retreat,’ but apparently planted there by the curse that had ripened for another season of bloody harvest. That other visitor, Mr Doeg the Edomite, a chief pastor of the king’s flock, witnessed the priests serve hollowed bread and protection to David. Promptly, Doeg ingratiatingly and deviously reported their care to King Saul who had been seeking David’s head. The consequence was the massacre of eighty-five priests with their wives and children, along with their livestock, on allegations of conspiracy with David to undermine the regime (1 Samuel 22:6-22).
We might blame the massacre on the bloodiness of the demonized King Saul; we might blame it on the restless lips of Doeg the gossip, but realising that the sad event was in continuing fulfilment of the pronouncement that had been made years earlier in Shiloh, we can only say that Doeg was planted there that day by the curse that had been seeking expression and merely found ready vessels in the duo of Doeg the gossip and Saul the demented sanguinary despot.
Now Doeg the Edomite, Saul's chief herdsman, was there that day, having been detained before the Lord (1 Samuel 21:7, NLT).
Did Doeg know that a Curse might have led him there that day; that he had merely been responding to a mystical impulse that found him in that place at that time to see those things that he was further ‘compelled’ to report? Would he ever have agreed that the steps of a wicked man are ‘ordered’ by the devil (Psalms 37:23)? Can a curse manipulate even the choices of a person? Did an unseen hand coordinate the visit of David to coincide with the ‘retreat’ of Busybody Doeg, so as to bring about the subsequent disaster of over three hundred and fifty deaths?
The Bible states that Doeg at the tabernacle had been “DETAINED before the Lord.” What does that mean? Detained, held back, super-ordinarily restrained from departing, until David would be on the scene so that Doeg could see what to report? Can a curse instigate a people against a person? Can it also inspire the kind of rumours that are spread about someone? Should we then entirely blame the impetuous lips or also diagnose the manipulating curse?
Several years after Abiathar as a little lad had escaped Saul’s massacre in Nob, that priest of God felt verily ‘led’ (or mis-‘led’) to join the new political party of Adonijah the surviving eldest son of David. The reverend priest probably had a dream or some strong ‘ministration’ that urged him to take the step. Only too late did he realize and regret the ‘lying spirit’ that had assumed the voice of Jehovah and urged him on in his fatal path. He joined the masses to endorse Adonijah, only to discover that the incumbent king’s electoral-collegiate preference lay in Solomon. Others paid with their life for the error; he escaped again with the skin of his teeth, but he lost all that he had spent years labouring with David to build up.
The Scripture interprets Abiathar’s sudden political, social and religious disaster as a fulfilment of the word of God that had been spoken in Shiloh 150 years before. In other words, all the events that lined up to that priest’s abrupt sack: his ‘righteous’ persuasions to endorse the wrong political candidate, the ‘friends’ and ‘worshippers’ who had ‘genuinely’ and ‘caringly’ persuaded him with the idea, the subsequent ‘ungrateful’ actions of the young and purportedly ‘wise’ Solomon, etc., had been remote-controlled by a slithering Curse that the respected priest never perceived.
Again, sometimes it is helpful to look beyond the hands that perform the act, as there might have been primary hands unseen, manipulating the secondary hands we see.
-From the Series, Stray Bullets
The Preacher
