TIME IS REALLOCATED

Friday: January 31, 2020

Reference text: 2 Samuel 11:1-17

2 Samuel 11:1 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.

God has given to man many great gifts, notable among them are gift of salvation and the gift of the Holy Spirit. But there is one other which is often not considered a gift: ‘TIME’. For this particular gift, God has so made it such that there is an allocation for every event. As it is written ‘there is a time for everything’ and those words have to be taken as they are.

Therefore, in today’s account, we find King David embarking on a roof walk at a time when ‘kings went out to war’. There is no case against entrusting this task to his trusted commander, Joab, but the emphasis lies on the use of that time and the task for which it was intended: ‘to do war’.

Here is the message: when the time allocated for a specific task is not used as intended, that time has to be allocated to another duty because time is actually not wasted, but reallocated. Since King David was not at war, there was time to be reallocated, part of which was used for his walk on the roof where he saw Bathsheba. The remainder of the story is a series of events that culminated in the murder of Uriah, husband of Bathsheba.

Beloved, when we hear ‘don’t waste time’, it often suggests we are reallocating the time meant for a specific task to another role. Ideally, this would be no issue because time can always be reallocated but here is the catch: God is able to reallocate time infinitely even when man finds himself in a position where the time assigned is not used as intended because God is outside of time.

When the Prophet Isaiah wrote ‘seek the Lord while he may be found, call on him while he is near’ (55:6), he meant to say ‘you cannot keep reallocating time because man only has a finite amount of time at his disposal. So I ask you, at this moment, are you doing what you should be doing? Because if not, then it means your time is being spent on another thing and you will have to reallocate. However, bear in mind, you cannot keep doing that infinitely.

#’Time is not wasted, it is only reallocated’

#sly