Nearing Home - Billy Graham [5]
Why does the Bible record this brief incident from the life of one obscure old man? It isn’t just to remind us of the ravages of old age or even the brevity of life. Instead the Bible recounts it to tell us a significant fact: Barzillai’s greatest service to God and His people—the one deed from his entire life that was worthy of being recorded in the Bible—took place when he was an old man.
When King David and his fleeing band of men approached, Barzillai easily could have said to himself, “I’m too old to get involved in this. Let the younger men help if they want to—they have all the energy. And anyway, I’d be a fool to take what I’ve saved for my old age and spend it helping King David and his men. Absalom might attack us and plunder our village if we assist David. Why bother? Why take the risk? At my age I have enough to worry about.”
Instead Barzillai took the lead in organizing help for the beleaguered king. The Bible says Barzillai and his friends “brought bedding and bowls and articles of pottery. They also brought wheat and barley, flour and roasted grain, beans and lentils, honey and curds, sheep, and cheese from cows’ milk for David and his people to eat” (2 Samuel 17:28–29). Think of all the organization and sacrifice that must have gone into this effort! Barzillai saw a need, and he did everything he could to meet it in spite of his age and infirmities. If he had failed or if he had refused to help, David and his men might well have perished in the inhospitable desert beyond the Dead Sea—and the subsequent history of God’s people would have been vastly different. But he didn’t fail, and King David’s life was spared.
The point is this: as an old man Barzillai couldn’t do everything he once did—but he did what he could, and God used his efforts. The same can be true of us as we grow older.
That Great Cloud of Witnesses
Barzillai is not the only person in the Bible who made his greatest contribution in his latter years. In fact, Scripture is filled with examples of men and women whom God used late in life, often with great impact.
In the centuries before Noah and the flood, the Bible tells us, God gave great longevity to His servants. Adam lived a total of 930 years; Methuselah—the oldest person in the Bible and the grandfather of Noah—died at the age of 969. All of his life Methuselah’s father, Enoch, had been a remarkable example to his son of what it meant to have a close relationship with God; the Bible says, “Enoch lived 365 years, walking in close fellowship with God. Then one day he disappeared, because God took him” (Genesis 5:23–24 NLT).
Enoch’s godly example influenced not only his son but also his descendants long after his lifetime. Few greater examples of faith can be found in the Bible than that of Enoch’s great-grandson, Noah. In the midst of a generation that scorned God and gave themselves over to every sin imaginable, the Bible says that “Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God” (Genesis 6:9). When God commanded him to begin building his ark, Noah was more than five hundred years old.
After the flood (through which God brought judgment on the rebellious world and provided the means by which life could start again), God chose another old man, Abram (or Abraham, as he would later be known), to carry on His purposes. Abram was called by God to be the founder of the nation through whom the Messiah would come, the Savior of the human race. He was seventy-five years old when God first called him, and it wasn’t until he was one hundred that his son Isaac was born, “in his old age, at the very time God had promised him” (Genesis 21:2).
The Bible is dotted with other examples of individuals whom God used in their latter years—men and women who refused to use old age as an excuse to ignore what God wanted them to do. Moses was eighty when God called him to leave the Sinai desert and return to Egypt to lead the