I was reading the opening chapters of 1 Kings, and I could not get past what felt like an obvious injustice.

Before David died, he instructed Solomon to deal with Joab. Joab had murdered Abner and Amasa, and David told Solomon not to let him go peacefully to the grave. Solomon eventually had Joab killed.

Joab was guilty. But David was also a murderer.

David had arranged Uriah’s death after sleeping with Uriah’s wife. Under the law, David deserved death. Yet when Nathan confronted him, David confessed, and Nathan told him:

“The Lord has taken away your sin. You are not going to die.”
—2 Samuel 12:13

David was spared. His infant son died, and violence followed his family for years, but David himself lived and remained king.

Then I thought about Eli.

God judged Eli’s house because Eli knew his sons were behaving wickedly and failed to restrain them. But David also failed to discipline his sons. He did nothing meaningful after Amnon raped Tamar. Absalom murdered Amnon and later rebelled against him. Adonijah tried to take the throne, and 1 Kings tells us that David had never even questioned his behavior.

Eli’s sons died. David’s sons died. Eli died under judgment, while David died in old age after arranging for Solomon to finish his unresolved business.

It did not seem fair.

When mercy looks like partiality

I knew the usual explanations. David repented. God had made a covenant with him. David was forgiven, though he still suffered serious consequences.

But none of those explanations made the distribution of suffering feel equal. David received mercy that other people did not appear to receive. Worse, innocent people suffered because of his choices: Uriah remained dead, Tamar was devastated, and David’s baby died.

It made God’s mercy look partial.

And if devotion does not guarantee protection, justice, or a better outcome, an uncomfortable question follows: Why not simply live according to what seems right to me? Life may give me things I do not deserve regardless of how much I pray, praise, study, or obey.

The Bible itself does not pretend that life consistently rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked. Ecclesiastes observes that righteous people sometimes receive what the wicked deserve, while wicked people receive what the righteous deserve. Job’s faithfulness did not protect him from devastating loss. The psalmists repeatedly asked why wicked people prospered.

There is no reliable formula that says:

I obey God + I study Scripture + I pray faithfully = God gives me the outcome I deserve.

I realized that this was precisely why the story disturbed me so deeply.

The bargain underneath my devotion

I genuinely want to know God. My desire to read and understand the Bible is real.

But I also discovered another motive living alongside it: I want my faithfulness to make me safe. Somewhere deep inside, I have expected that if I study, obey, pray, and do the right things, God will make me successful and protect me from certain kinds of suffering.

That expectation can look like faithfulness, but it can also become pride and legalism. It quietly turns devotion into a bargain:

God, I will do what is right, and you will make sure life treats me fairly.

David’s story disrupted that bargain. Perhaps the question underneath the passage was not only, “Why did David receive mercy?” Perhaps God was also asking me:

Would you love me if life is not fair?

Would you worship me if you receive something a wicked person deserves?

Do you want to know me, or are you trying to use devotion to secure a particular life?

Those are frightening questions. They remove the illusion that I can control my future through sufficiently good behavior.

But they also offer freedom.

Faithfulness is not payment

If studying, working, and obeying do not obligate God to make me successful, then my success is not something I earn from him. God may choose to bless me far beyond anything I have done to deserve it. He can open doors I did not manufacture, redeem my failures, and show me favor that I cannot claim as wages.

That does not mean my choices are irrelevant. Wisdom, diligence, repentance, and obedience matter. They shape me and have real consequences. But they are faithful ways of living, not payments placed into a spiritual vending machine.

I can study without believing my effort guarantees success. I can obey without using obedience as leverage. I can pray boldly without treating prayer as a contract. And when something beautiful happens, I do not have to interpret it as proof that I performed well enough. I can simply receive it as grace and say, “God was kind to me.”

The truth I want to carry forward is this:

I cannot earn success from God, and I cannot control my future through perfect behavior. I will faithfully steward what is in my hands while trusting that every good thing God gives me is grace. He can bless me beyond my performance, sustain me through failure, and remain with me even when the outcome I wanted does not come.

I still care about justice. I still have difficult questions about David’s story. Knowing God does not require me to call unequal treatment fair or to pretend that suffering does not hurt.

But thanks be to God for using an uncomfortable passage to surface the bargain hiding inside my faith, not to condemn me, but to invite me into a relationship that is less transactional and more honest.

I do want to know God. And now I can ask him to keep teaching me to want him, not merely the life I hope he will give me.