Let’s begin by asking, who was Hanun?
Hanun was none other than the newly crowned king of the Ammonites whose father was a great friend and benefactor to King David. David hoped to continue the wonderful relationship that existed between him and Nahash, Hanun’s late Dad.
Hanun’s reaction to David’s great gesture will show us that a lot of the time, parents are not able to transmit their great spirits to their children.
Let’s also take a look at the case of Mephiboseth, who was evidently unlike his father, Jonathan. I tend to think that a wrong spirit transfers more easily between people than the right one. Parents in particular will, except where the hand of the Lord is at work, bear a negative influence on their offspring the majority of the time. Children often fall far beneath their fathers because they never allowed the Lord to school them through adversity. Parents often would have paid all the price and paved the road but a succeeding generation would take all of that for granted and imagine that good things fall out of the sky. It seems more likely that Mephiboseth got his adverse influence from wrong associations, even though he had been adopted by the king and was now a member of his inner circle.
The trend continues and deepens right down to our day: younger people in general do not value relationships. Rather, they place their premium on their own myopic and shallow types. Hanun wrongly interpreted David’s great intentions through sending his senior officials to console him over his father’s passing, and this led to dire consequences both for Hanun himself and all the Ammonites. We are going to learn some three lessons from the enormous blunder committed by the young man.
The first is that, love is never to be taken for granted. The same person God is using to bring about the blessing is capable of unleashing hell. Don’t make an enemy when there is no cause for it. When someone is there for you, it is because they allowed God to touch them to favour you. The choice not to do it was there.
The second lesson from this is that, most people cannot step over what they are told. They swallow everything they are fed like little children. They cannot tell the difference between the bone and the meat. Only the fully matured discerns the difference between an outright lie, a half-truth, and the plain truth.
This leads us directly to the third point. You are responsible for what you hear. Who hired your counsellor? You did. You got into that audience because you wanted to be there. There is life and death in the power of the tongue. Many Christians wrecked themselves by not choosing who feeds them with God’s word wisely.
In the end, people hear what they wished to hear. They cannot blame their advisors. In fact, it does not count where the influence came from. What counts is what you chose. When all has been said and done, you created the environment in which you found yourself.