The Prisoner in the Third Cell by Gene Edwards Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    â€œKneel,” 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.
    â€œBehold 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,