The Prisoner in the Third Cell (6 page)

9. When John's disciples brought his question to Jesus (pp. 48–50), what caused Jesus such anguish? Do you think Jesus has ever had a similar response to your own doubts or anxious fears?

10. Reread chapter 16. How do you respond to a God we do not understand, who is capable of healing many but does not heal all? Have you ever been offended with God? If so, what are the standards to which you were holding God? Why do you think He remains so difficult to understand?

11. Think of a time when you've prayed or pleaded and the only answer has been silence. How did this affect your relationship with God? What do you think God was saying by remaining silent?

12. “I will always be something other than what men expect me to be. I will work out my will in ways different from what men foresee” (p. 73). Do you agree with the author's proposition? What can we know of God? What sort of assumptions about Him should we avoid?

13. Do you trust your understanding of God, or do you trust God Himself (ch. 19)? When is it easy to confuse the two?

Please turn the page for an excerpt from
A Tale of Three Kings . . .

Chapter 1

The youngest son of any family bears two distinctions: He is considered to be both spoiled and uninformed. Usually little is expected of him. Inevitably, he displays fewer characteristics of leadership than the other children in the family. As a child, he never leads. He only follows, for he has no one younger on whom to practice leadership.

So it is today. And so it was three thousand years ago in a village called Bethlehem, in a family of eight boys. The first seven sons of Jesse worked near their father's farm. The youngest was sent on treks into the mountains to graze the family's small flock of sheep.

On those pastoral jaunts, this youngest son always carried two things: a sling and a small, guitarlike instrument. Spare time for a sheepherder is abundant on rich mountain plateaus where sheep can graze for days in one sequestered meadow. But as time passed and days became weeks, the young man became very lonely. The feeling of friendlessness that always roamed inside him was magnified. He often cried. He also played his harp a great deal. He had a good voice, so he often sang. When these activities failed to comfort him, he gathered up a pile of stones and, one by one, swung them at a distant tree with something akin to fury.

When one rock pile was depleted, he would walk to the blistered tree, reassemble his rocks, and designate another leafy enemy at yet a farther distance.

He engaged in many such solitary battles.

This shepherd-singer-slinger also loved his Lord. At night, when all the sheep lay sleeping and he sat staring at the dying fire, he would strum upon his harp and break into quiet song. He sang the ancient hymns of his forefathers' faith. While he sang he wept, and while weeping he often broke out in abandoned praise—until mountains in distant places lifted up his praise and tears and passed them on to higher mountains, until they eventually reached the ears of God.

When the young shepherd did not praise and when he did not cry, he tended to each and every sheep and lamb. When not occupied with his flock, he swung his companionable sling and swung it again and again until he could tell every rock precisely where to go.

Once, while singing his lungs out to God, angels, sheep, and passing clouds, he spied a living enemy: a huge bear! He lunged forward. Both found themselves moving furiously toward the same small object, a lamb feeding at a table of rich, green grass. Youth and bear stopped halfway and whirled to face one another. Even as he instinctively reached into his pocket for a stone, the young man realized, “Why, I am not afraid.”

Meanwhile, brown lightning on mighty, furry legs charged at the shepherd with foaming madness. Impelled by the strength of youth, the young man married rock to leather, and soon a brook-smooth pebble whined through the air to meet that charge.

A few moments later, the man—not quite so young as a moment before—picked up the little lamb and said, “I am your shepherd, and God is mine.”

And so, long into the night, he wove the day's saga into a song. He hurled that hymn to the skies again and again until he had taught the melody and words to every angel that had ears. They, in turn, became custodians of this wondrous song and passed it on as healing balm to brokenhearted men and women in every age to come.

Chapter 2

A figure in the distance was running toward him. It grew and became his brother. “Run!” cried the brother. “Run with all your strength. I'll watch the flock.”

“Why?”

“An old man, a sage. He wants to meet all eight of the sons of Jesse, and he has seen all but you.”

“But why?”

“Run!”

So David ran. He stopped long enough to get his breath. Then, sweat pouring down his sunburned cheeks, his red face matching his red curly hair, he walked into his father's house, his eyes recording everything in sight.

The youngest son of Jesse stood there, tall and strong, but more in the eyes of the curious old gentleman than to anyone else in the room. Kith and kin cannot always tell when a man is grown, even when looking straight at him. The elderly man saw. And something more he saw. In a way he himself did not understand, the old man knew what God knew.

God had taken a house-to-house survey of the whole kingdom in search of someone very special. As a result of this survey, the Lord God Almighty had found that this leather-lunged troubadour loved his Lord with a purer heart than anyone else on all the sacred soil of Israel.

“Kneel,” said the bearded one with the long, gray hair. Almost regally, for one who had never been in that particular position, David knelt and then felt oil pouring down on his head. Somewhere, in one of the closets of his mind labeled “childhood information,” he found a thought:
This is what
men do to designate royalty! Samuel is making me a . . . what?

The Hebrew words were unmistakable. Even children knew them.

“Behold the Lord's anointed!”

Quite a day for that young man, wouldn't you say? Then do you find it strange that this remarkable event led the young man not to the throne but to a decade of hellish agony and suffering? On that day, David was enrolled, not into the lineage of royalty but into the school of brokenness.

Samuel went home. The sons of Jesse, save one, went forth to war. And the youngest, not yet ripe for war, received a promotion in his father's home . . . from sheepherder to messenger boy. His new job was to run food and messages to his brothers on the front lines. He did this regularly.

On one such visit to the battlefront, he killed another bear, in exactly the same way as he had the first. This bear, however, was nine feet tall and bore the name Goliath. As a result of this unusual feat, young David found himself a folk hero.

And eventually he found himself in the palace of a mad king. And in circumstances that were as insane as the king, the young man was to learn many indispensable lessons.

Chapter 3

David sang to the mad king. Often. The music helped the old man a great deal, it seems. And all over the palace, when David sang, everyone stopped in the corridors, turned their ears in the direction of the king's chamber, and listened and wondered. How did such a young man come to possess such wonderful words and music?

Everyone's favorite seemed to be the song the little lamb had taught him. They loved that song as much as did the angels.

Nonetheless, the king was mad, and therefore he was jealous. Or was it the other way around? Either way, Saul felt threatened by David, as kings often do when there is a popular, promising young man beneath them. The king also knew, as did David, that this boy just might have his job some day.

But would David ascend to the throne by fair means or foul? Saul did not know. This question is one of the things that drove the king mad.

David was caught in a very uncomfortable position; however, he seemed to grasp a deep understanding of the unfolding drama in which he had been caught. He seemed to understand something that few of even the wisest men of his day understood. Something that in our day, when men are wiser still, even fewer understand.

And what was that?

God did not have—but wanted very much to have—men and women who would live in pain.

God wanted a broken vessel.

About the Author

Gene Edwards was born and raised in east Texas, the son of an oil-field roughneck. He was converted to Christ in his junior year in college. He graduated from East Texas State University in Commerce, Texas, at the age of eighteen, with majors in English literature and history. His first year of postgraduate work was taken at the Baptist Theological Seminary in Ruschlikon, Switzerland. He received his master's degree in theology from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Ft. Worth, Texas at the age of twenty-two. He served as a Southern Baptist pastor and then as an evangelist for ten years.

Today his ministry includes conferences on the deeper Christian life and on living that life in the context of a practical experience of church life. There have been seventy translations of his books in eighteen languages.

Gene and his wife, Helen, now make their home in Jacksonville, Florida. The author can be reached at the following address:

Gene Edwards

P. O. Box 3450

Jacksonville, FL 32206

www.geneedwards.com

A Tale of Three Kings
and its sequel,
The Prisoner in the Third Cell
, have become modern Christian classics, and readers everywhere have acclaimed
The Divine Romance
as one of the finest pieces of Christian literature of our time and a magnificent saga that will take your breath away. Here is an incomparable love story told in almost childlike simplicity, yet revealing some of the deepest truths of the Christian faith.

Also in the same genre is the spellbinding story of the history of God's people . . . as seen by the angels—The Chronicles of Heaven series (
The Beginning, The Escape, The Birth, The Triumph, The Return
). In addition, The First-Century Diaries series presents the sweeping panorama of the entire saga of the first-century church.

Gene Edwards has written three books that serve as an introduction to the deeper Christian life:
Living by the Highest Life
,
The Secret to the Christian Life
, and
The Inward Journey
. For a complete list of books by Gene Edwards, see the page opposite the title page.