2 Samuel 2:12-17. Abner, who is fighting for Saul, and Joab, who is fighting for David, and their men meet at the pool of Gideon. Abner and Joab sit down on opposite sides, and Abner suggests that the young men of their armies "arise and play before us", that is, that the younger men fight first. Twelve young men from each side arise and each catches his opponent by the head and drives his sword into the other, so that all are killed together. Then the others fight, and the battle is intense but David's men come out on top.

When we use our children, our youth, to fight our battles we end up severely harming them, us, and our cause. Abner and Joab are on different sides of an intractable divide when they sit down on opposite sides of the pool. It seems like that might have been an opportunity to talk, to negotiate, but that really was not possible at this point. Both men had given their allegiance to a different king. Their loyalty was to that king, so they were not authorized to negotiate a peace while their kings were still warring with each other. In fact, that would have been a betrayal of their king.

Sometimes we actually have to fight our battles - avoiding them, or sending others to fight them, just makes things worse. So if the point was to engage in the fight, Abner and Joab took a rather cowardly approach to it by using their youngest soldiers as pawns. Perhaps (in fact it seems) they thought they could "sit this one out" and the youth would settle the battle. They immediately learned the folly of this - - the youth were inexperienced in the "art of war," and instead immediately killed each other, not realizing that the point of battle is to have a surviving winner.

We seem to be doing this in our time. We are in a similar war right now to the one that Abner and Joab were in, although ours is spiritual. It takes older, wiser, experienced soldiers to fight this battle and command the youth. Only the wise can see that the way out of this is to have a surviving army who will be able to support the rightful King. Instead, though, what I often see are adults who use their children to try to fight their battles or, worse, adults who follow their children as their rightful leaders, giving up all of their accumulated wisdom to engage in a no-holds barred fight to the death.

As long as we fight this way, there will be huge casualties on both sides and no resolution to the issue. It will end the same way that Abner and Joab's battle ended - the youth will kill each other before the adults have to step up and fight the battle.

Let's not do that to our children. Let's be the soldiers we are supposed to be, and show our children how to be good and loyal but also show them what wisdom demands of us, and of them, in this spiritual battle in which we are engaged.