God Is Greater Than Gravity

The moment you woke up this morning, you were fighting gravity. You were fighting the gravity that was pulling you back to your bed, and you were fighting the forces that were pulling you back to your bed. There are things that are pulling against you. When you eat healthy, you are fighting gravity. When you exercise, you are fighting gravity. When you think right and do right, you are fighting gravity. Those are not the normal order of things. Gravity is against you.

In I Kings 1 we read about King David in his later days. The book of Kings is just that. It is about the kings of God’s people, and the theme is that success comes from allegiance to God and His truth. You find that embodied in good kings and bad kings. You find what success truly is.

First Kings 1:1 says, “Now king David was old and stricken in years.” It is hard to imagine David this way. You always see him as a shepherd boy with a sling or maybe as a competent and powerful king, but not as an old man. It continues, “And they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat.” It was hard for him to stay warm. Gravity was fighting against him. Gravity is also against you. It is against everything that is right, noble, and godly in your life.

Time is against you. Time is gravity. The Bible later says that David was very old, and David may have been as young as seventy years old at this point. Most of us are in trouble because however long you have lived, you are not as far from seventy as you think you are. Time is against you. We see a picture of Bathsheba here as an older queen. Both David and Bathsheba were getting old.

Even Solomon writes in Ecclesiastes about how all your senses begin to diminish with age. David himself says something that you find throughout the book of Kings, “In my stead.” One king reigns. Then, he grows old and dies, and another king reigns in his stead. So, time is gravity pulling against you.

Nature is gravity pulling against you. This chapter is the story of one of David’s sons, Adonijah, a man who exalted himself and wished to displace his father as king and his brother Solomon as the next king. Human nature is gravity against you. You look at history and it is a bloody story of people striving with all their ambition and power to rule over others. When they finally win, they just rule over misery. History teaches us that you may win the battle, but you are still going to die. The nature of people, conniving, scheming, ambitious, has not changed. That pulls against what God would have you to do. Your own ambitions can do that.

You think about a man like Napoleon, a genius, a brave man of physical courage who organized an empire, yet at the end of his life, Napoleon was overweight, bald, sick, and on an island. That is ever the story of anyone who has come to power. If you are young, you think about Alexander the Great who supposedly wept because there were no more worlds to conquer. The only way you can be a young man like that is to die young. So, old or young, time is against you and your own nature is against doing what is right.

Chance is not going to fall your way. In verse 13 we are reminded that David had said, “Assuredly Solomon…shall reign after me.” It was assured, not just by chance. So, what happens by chance is not what needs to happen. What is good is what needs to happen. Gravity is against you. From the time you get up in the morning, gravity is pulling on your skin, your muscles, your resolve, your will. So, determine to do right whether that means eating healthy or living godly.

Gravity is against you, but here is the good news. God is greater than gravity. The Bible says that “greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.” God is sovereign. Romans 8:31 says, “What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us.” The answer is the whole world can be against us but they can’t win. If God would not withhold His only begotten Son to make salvation possible for us, what would God withhold from you to help you do the right thing if that is what you choose in God’s power today? Gravity is against you. Sometimes your own nature is against you. Time is against you. Sheer chance is against you. But God is greater than gravity.

There are two things to do. Take heart and take action. Take heart. You may be older than you wish you were. You are older now than you have ever been before, but you are younger than you will ever be again. Today, you have the most youth you are ever going to have again. So, ask God to help you to show allegiance to Him so He can show His power in you. Take heart. Don’t be discouraged by time, chance, or nature, whether it is the evil tendencies of others or of yourself.

Second, take action. David had to take action to make sure Solomon would reign in his stead. The Bible shows us a David who didn’t seem to know what was going on all the time, who as a father had never displeased his son Adonijah. Adonijah was a little spoiled. Despite all of that, when David took heart and took action, God gave him the grace to pass the kingdom on to Solomon.

Today, gravity is part of this world. Physical gravity is of a benefit, but there are all the other forces pulling against you all the time. The thing to remember when you face gravity and the forces that pull you to do what is wrong is that God is greater than gravity and greater than your need.