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Chosen for her youth and beauty, Abishag found herself one day the live-in nurse of the great but old King David. Her job was to keep the king warm. Within months her patient died. We know little about their relationship except that they never had sexual intercourse. She offered David uncomplicated companionship and human closeness without agenda in his last days. Little did she know how complicated her own life would soon become.
Almost immediately after David’s death, Abishag became the bargaining chip in a power struggle between the king’s son Solomon and widow Bathsheba, and another son of David, Adonijah. For Adonijah, Abishag was probably little more than a possible leverage point to renew his claim on the throne of David. Bathsheba, herself acquainted with being treated as an pawn, may have been trying to do Abishag a favor as well as to pacify Adonijah. Her ultimate agenda, though, was to protect her son, Solomon. Solomon gave his half brother no room for doubt. He assumed Adonijah was planning to use Abishag to fight for the throne. These maneuvers make one fact clear: No one cared what Abishag thought. She might as well have been listed with the furniture.
Home and work are both settings in which people are sometimes treated as objects. You may bear the emotional scars of past encounters with people who devalued and abused you. You may be hurt today by such treatment. Family members may withhold appreciation. Fellow workers may treat you like just another office machine. Resist these invitations to hopelessness or resentment by remembering that God knows. He knows you intimately, and he will always treat you as a person of value.
Other people may overlook us, but God never does.
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