God’s Anointed King
Three Studies on Applying the Gospel to Our Lives
by David Gooding
What relevance do 1 and 2 Samuel have for today? These books address major themes such as God’s governance of the universe and how he deals with the guilt of sin, and the importance of using our lives for God’s purposes. David Gooding examines some of the main stories and discusses the lessons they have for us in the practical problems of life. They not only teach us about the history of King David but about the life and reign of our heavenly king, the Lord Jesus Christ. Studying 1 and 2 Samuel will help us to better appreciate the peace and forgiveness the Lord offers, encouraging us to remain loyal even when all others reject him.
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1: The Two Distinctives in Israel’s Testimony
Monotheism and Messianism, Their Loss and Recovery
Introduction
Thank you again for your kind and generous invitation in asking me to come among you here and giving me these occasions to speak to you. Greatly daring, I have suggested for our study meetings that we consider some themes from the books of 1 and 2 Samuel. I say ‘greatly daring’ because I am persuaded that for many of you, 1 and 2 Samuel contain stories that you heard in Sunday school and have loved them ever since. You may think I’m a little bit of a Philistine by the way that I will treat these stories!
The topic tonight, as you have heard, is a worthy title for our session. You will see that it runs together the two distinctives in Israel’s testimony: monotheism on the one hand and messianism on the other. With that, you can forget all about that title, but we shall read now two passages from the first book of Samuel, and you may perceive from them where the argument is going. We start at chapter 4.
So the Philistines fought, and Israel was defeated, and they fled, every man to his home. And there was a very great slaughter, for there fell of Israel thirty thousand foot soldiers. And the ark of God was captured, and the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, died. A man of Benjamin ran from the battle line and came to Shiloh the same day, with his clothes torn and with dirt on his head. When he arrived, Eli was sitting on his seat by the road watching, for his heart trembled for the ark of God. . . . As soon as [the messenger] mentioned the ark of God, Eli fell over backwards from his seat by the side of the gate, and his neck was broken and he died, for the man was old and heavy. He had judged Israel for forty years. Now his daughter-in-law, the wife of Phinehas, was pregnant, about to give birth. And when she heard the news that the ark of God was captured, and that her father-in-law and her husband were dead, she bowed and gave birth, for her pains came upon her. And about the time of her death the women attending her said to her, ‘Do not be afraid, for you have borne a son.’ But she did not answer or pay attention. And she named the child Ichabod, saying, ‘The glory has departed from Israel!’ because the ark of God had been captured. (vv. 10–13, 18–21)
Then two brief passages from chapters 26 and 27.
Saul recognized David’s voice and said, ‘Is this your voice, my son David?’ And David said, ‘It is my voice, my lord, O king.’ And he said, ‘Why does my lord pursue after his servant? For what have I done? What evil is on my hands? Now therefore let my lord the king hear the words of his servant. If it is the Lord who has stirred you up against me, may he accept an offering, but if it is men, may they be cursed before the Lord, for they have driven me out this day that I should have no share in the heritage of the Lord, saying, “Go, serve other gods.” Now therefore, let not my blood fall to the earth away from the presence of the Lord’. (26:17–20)
Then David said in his heart, ‘Now I shall perish one day by the hand of Saul. There is nothing better for me than that I should escape to the land of the Philistines. Then Saul will despair of seeking me any longer within the borders of Israel, and I shall escape out of his hand.’ (27:1)
The Lord give us true understanding of his word.
Two ‘losses’
You will see from the passages we have read that we have the story of two profound losses which Israel suffered in those far-off days. One was nothing less than the loss of the ark of the Lord, and they lost it to the Gentile Philistines. The other was their God-anointed messiah. Perhaps it wouldn’t be true to say they lost him, when in fact they drove him out. Their God-anointed messiah was lost to Israel, lost among the Gentiles. These two events were highly significant in themselves but in the light of Israel’s long history their significance goes beyond their original occasion.
The ark of the Lord contained the tables of stone which Moses had received, written with the very finger of God. Those stones expressed in the first place the uniqueness of the one true God of heaven, creator of heaven and earth and all that is therein; not only the creator of heaven and earth, but the moral authority behind the moral law. Israel were given an ark and the privileged position of being witnesses to God therefore among the nations. But they lost it to the Gentiles.
Similarly we see Israel’s concept of Messiah, the king anointed by God. When we reach David in their history, we come upon a king who was not only himself anointed of God, but to whom God promised a dynasty. Throughout the prophets, the recurring promise is heard that God would eventually restore the dynasty of David, for the benefit not only of Israel but for the peace and blessing of the Gentile nations at large. And when we come to the Christian gospel itself, mark how Paul describes it in the opening words of his Epistle to the Romans.
Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh. (1:1–3)
It is an integral part of our Christian gospel that our Lord is the descendant of David. And Paul, writing towards the end of his life, now imprisoned in a Roman jail, to his young companion and fellow worker Timothy, says,
Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, as preached in my gospel. (2 Tim 2:8)
I’m going to suggest therefore that these two things, in the course of the long history of Israel, have marked Israel. First of all their testimony to the one true God of heaven, and then their testimony to the promises of God to raise another king who would not only be Israel’s King, but a Saviour of the nations. Let’s ponder those two things.
Israel’s testimony to the true God
First of all let’s think about Israel’s testimony to the one true God, the creator of heaven and earth. Of course, that goes back to the beginning of Genesis, but as far as Israel is concerned, they think of Abraham as the forefather of that nation, who began his life between the rivers as a sheer old pagan idolater. The God of heaven appeared to him, the God of glory, and brought him out of that pagan ambience and brought him eventually into the promised land. God did it as a protest against the almost universal idolatry of those ancient nations. He brought out Abraham with that special commission to be a witness to that one true God of heaven. And as I say, that witness was verbalized upon the two tables of stone in the ark, and Israel were to keep it.
Talking of the ark and what was inside it reminds me vividly of when John Lennox and I took a model of the tabernacle through Novosibirsk in Russia. This was not long after the walls had come down, and our audience was largely hard-boiled atheists and scientists. But we took along the tabernacle. Our friends who heard of it came to the conclusion that the rumours about our incipient insanity were now positively confirmed! For people used to say, ‘Am I hearing “tabernacle”? That’s old-fashioned truth. That’s not relevant to Christians today, and certainly not to unbelievers.’ We took it to atheists in the University of Russia: marvellous topic to raise with atheists! Of course we didn’t exactly start with it. We first of all dealt with the manuscripts of The New Testament, because Russians had been taught that Christianity is a fourth century invention—much like the Da Vinci Code, that expensive bit of nonsense! So we pointed to the manuscripts of the New Testament in their early days, that show of course Christianity was not a fourth century invention. The manuscript evidence is authentic and confirms the origin of Christianity in the first century ad.
Granted that the manuscripts are authentic, we then asked if the story was true. Did Jesus Christ claim these things or was it made up by the early apostles? We argued, of course, that the apostles didn’t make it up. Among many evidences that the apostles didn’t make it up is what they themselves tell us. When our Lord first mentioned that he was going to Jerusalem where he would be rejected and crucified, the apostles wholly disagreed and tried to dissuade him. And when he made no attempt to defend himself in the garden of Gethsemane, the whole lot of them ran off. When Paul was converted from being Saul of Tarsus and became a missionary, he tells us from his own experience that the gospel he preached was perceived as foolishness by the intellectual Greeks. Why did he preach it then? He certainly didn’t make it up. What man deliberately invents a foolish message? He preached it because it was true.
Christ said the purpose of his coming was not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. It appears folly to the world, but it is in fact the power of God to salvation. So then we ran into trouble with the academics and the atheists because believing in the New Testament demands believing in the resurrection of Jesus. They said, ‘Isn’t that unscientific?’ You may remember that terrible Scotsman, David Hume, who convinced academics right down to this present day that it is impossible to believe in miracles! We dispensed with that argument fairly quickly.
That left us with the question: if Jesus is the Son of God, then is it likely that God would have sent him into the world out of the blue, so to speak, without being announced, nor anybody being prepared for his coming? Most unlikely. The Bible’s account is that God spent centuries preparing the way for the coming of the Son of God. In particular, it involved raising up the nation of Israel to witness to the one true God. God spent centuries on that topic before he sent his Son. Why is that? Well, what would have been the good of God sending his Son into the world, and then along would come the Christian apostles, telling their Greek friends, ‘Jesus is the Son of God.’ The Greeks would smile and say, ‘Possibly he is, but which god is this? We’ve got plenty of sons of gods in our religion, and we’ve got some daughters as well, like Astarte, and Hera the queen of heaven. So is Jesus the son of one of these gods?’ It would have been utter confusion, wouldn’t it? Before God sent his dear Son into our world, he spent centuries establishing the fact that there is one true God.
And then we pointed to the model and said to the Russians that it was the ancient tabernacle—a sort of a temple. There would have been thousands of shrines about the place, but in the Middle East this one was utterly unique. The other nations around had an idol for their deity. They lost their hold upon the fact that there is one true God; they had suppressed the knowledge of it. But when people suppress the knowledge of the true God, they don’t come to believe in nothing at all. So what do they do then? They have to face the fact that they didn’t make the universe, so what made it then? And so the ancients fell to deifying the forces of nature—the sun god, the moon god, the god of fertility, and so forth—deifying the forces of nature, and raising statues to them in their temples.
Very politely we said to the gathered scientists, about 250 of them, that if you ask a modern atheist what the forces are which control us, they will say virtually the same thing as those ancient idolaters. If you ask about the forces that control us and made us, they will speak about the strong atomic power and the weak atomic power, electromagnetism and gravity, the laws of biology, and such like things. They are but forces of nature, but the atheist is obliged to take them as the ultimate. They are saying and doing the same thing as the ancient idolaters who in their simple, crude way, deified the sun god, the moon god, the storm god, the god of fertility and such like things. So we explained that that was why we brought this tabernacle thing, because here in this ark were the two tables of stone given to Israel by God; the Lord God who made heaven and earth and who commanded that we should have no other God but him. He is the force and the authority behind the moral law.
We posed the question whether perhaps Israel got this idea of one God from evolution, because that is now a popular thing with many scientists and modernists. They will hold that religion too has evolved. So religion began like animism—seeing spirits in everything, trees and stones and rivers, and anything else like that. Like a child will personify a lamppost when he walks into it, saying, ‘Naughty lamppost for hitting me so hard!’; that kind of tendency to personalize. Then people advanced and they evolved a little bit more, and they gave up animism and went to polytheism—lots of gods: the storm god and all the rest of them. And then they evolved a bit further, and went from polytheism to henotheism—that is one god per tribe. Then they evolved further and went to monotheism. And then, according to the atheists, if they had any sense they’d evolve a bit further and come to atheism. A nice neat little theory, but absolutely false!
So what evidence is there that Israel came by this view through evolution? None whatsoever: the evidence is the other way round. Far from gradually coming towards monotheism, they had monotheism from the very start, from Abraham. They were constantly going back and compromising with the old idolatry and paganism of the nations around, and they had to be pulled back to monotheism by the prophets. Israel’s beliefs did not evolve. Starting with a knowledge of the one true God, alas they so often apostatized and went to syncretism, inter-marriage and inter-religion with other groups, and had to be brought back. The wonderful fact was that God achieved that at their return from the exile. So that when the Lord Jesus came, there was no idol in the temple of Jerusalem. There were no temple prostitutes in the temple of Jerusalem like there had been earlier.
God had won the battle. When he won that battle he sent forth his son, in the fullness of time. He had him preached as the Son of the one true God of heaven. We who preach the gospel rightly concentrate on our Lord and his sacrifice and his resurrection, but when you are preaching to a modern world of atheism, you may need to follow the order of the Old Testament and establish what you mean by ‘God’. You will need to stand for the truth of the one true God, creator of heaven and earth, against all the syncretism of the BBC and many others, who want to tell people that Christianity and Judaism are only one version, and Hinduism is equally acceptable with its uncountable thousands of gods. This is the testimony, therefore, of Israel among the nations.
The promise of Messiah
Of course there was the other bit: the promise of Messiah. Israel lost that as well, under David, their wonderful king. Before he could be enthroned in Jerusalem, they drove him out. The messiah was lost to the Gentiles. That has been true now for centuries, despite all the varied prophecies in The Old Testament of the coming Messiah as the seed of David. Among the Jewish people, some Jews look forward to it still. Others say it has all been fulfilled, and there is nothing now to be expected. In my student days when I was trying to learn Hebrew, I had a fellow student who was a Jew. He came from Austria and his parents had perished under Hitler. I remember him saying to me one day, ‘David, your Jesus cannot be the Christ.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Because the Scriptures prophesied that when the Christ came he would put down evil everywhere, and your Jesus didn’t do it. It’s no good you saying that he set up a spiritual kingdom. The Old Testament doesn’t know anything about that: Jesus just didn’t fulfil the prophecies.’
I wish I’d known enough then to show him that the Old Testament had something to say on this very topic. It’s curious what we need to know if we’re going to witness effectively to folks in this world.
Leaving the question of the messiahship and how Israel rejected it, and have for centuries rejected God’s true Messiah—whereas he’s been received by millions among the Gentiles—we come back to the fact that in those earlier days Israel lost the ark, which encapsulated Israel’s special relationship with Jehovah. They lost it to the Gentiles. How did they manage to do that? Well, the simple answer is this. The immediate cause was the dire corruption of the priesthood in the tabernacle of the Lord in those days. Eli’s sons, Hophni and Phinehas, instead of performing their service in fear of a holy God, gave themselves to self-indulgence of every type. They were in religion for what they got out of it. When a person brought the sacrifice to the Lord, along would come the servant of the priest and he’d say, ‘Give me certain parts of the offering for the priest.’
The offerer would say, ‘No, first give the bit that belongs to the Lord, and then you can have it.’
‘Oh, get out of the way,’ they said, and they had a three-pronged fork thing, and they stuck it in: the point being that what one prong didn’t bring up, the other two did. They were in it for their self-gratification, let alone their immoralities with the women that assembled at the door of the temple—lurid unholy misrepresentation of the service of God. We need to be warned. Though perhaps we don’t go to that extreme in professing Christianity, some will still. Can Christianity be used to justify homosexuality? And what of the law demanding that you shall not protest against homosexuality? It’s easy for us, if we’re not careful, to indulge in what a friend of mine in New Zealand called ‘Me-ism’. I come to meetings for what _I_ get out of them. If I don’t get anything out of them I ditch God; instead of coming to wait upon a thrice Holy God and to do his service.
The result was that when the Philistines came up against them, at first the Philistines were victorious, and people said, ‘What shall we do?’ And they came up with an idea: ‘Let’s bring the ark of God . . .’, now listen to what they said, ‘so that it may save us from the Philistines.’ My dear beloved, ‘it’ never saved anybody. Whatever the ‘it’ is: it can be the church, or the singing, or the preacher, or whatever you like, but ‘it’ never saved anyone. It has to be the divine person who does the saving. Phinehas and Hophni thought that they could behave like they’d been behaving in the temple, and then when they got in trouble they could bring out the ark, and the ark, like a magic box, would save them. God let them learn through very costly experience that merely passing round the ark wouldn’t save them. That day the ark of God was taken. Eli died as he heard the news that his sons, Hophni and Phinehas, had perished. God’s disciplines can be severe sometimes, when we wake up to the reality of God and his holiness.
Of course, when the ark got down into the Philistine country that was another story. When the Philistines heard that the ark was coming into the camp of the Israelites, they nearly panicked. ‘These are gods coming in and we’ve heard what these gods did in Egypt.’ And then they said, typically, ‘But let’s behave like men, stand up and be counted.’ And on the whole, they found that these gods weren’t all that powerful anyway. Well, not the god that Hophni and Phinehas worshipped: he was a make-believe god. God let the Philistines take the ark. What happened to it when they got into Philistine country was another thing, as God put forth his power and humiliated the pagan god of the Philistines, Dagon.
The ark’s recovery
I mustn’t go into that tonight. Let’s concentrate on the story of how Israel got the ark back. The recovery involves me talking about three groups of females. Now, do forgive the term, it’s not meant to be rude. I would say three groups of ladies, because the first one is Hannah and the second one is Phinehas’s wife. But the third group are two milk cows! I can’t describe them as ladies but they were females; that you must agree! And they were used by God in actually bringing the ark of God back. One of the troubles we noticed was Eli and his sons, and Eli’s false attitude to his sons. Now, we are going to listen to the Spirit of God as he sings the praises of these three groups of females and their sons. For Hannah prayed for and was granted a son. And the remarkable thing about her is that when God gave her a son, she fulfilled her promise and eventually took the lad to the temple and left him there to serve the Lord, and she went back home. She gave her firstborn son.
Phinehas’s wife was in process of giving birth when the news came in of her husband’s death and the fact that the ark of the Lord was taken, and she was distraught. And the women said, ‘Don’t worry too much my dear, you’ve given birth to a son.’ She said ‘Ichabod’ —the ark has been taken and the glory of the Lord has departed. No son could compensate for it and she went home, I hope to glory. She left her son.
When the ark was introduced into the temple of Dagon, the Philistines’ god, he must have taken a fall off his perch, and on one occasion lost his head and his hands. They wanted to be sure that this was supernatural power and not just a curious coincidence. And then, lo and behold, they suffered with an illness that is not normally mentioned in polite circles, so I won’t mention it; but it would be uncomfortable when you sit down! And these proud, big, strong Philistines were humiliated. But they wanted to prove whether it was because the God of Israel was real, or whether this was all just a coincidence. So their experiment was this: they took two milk cows who had just recently given birth to their calves. The Hebrew calls them ‘sons’; so would any cow if it knew Hebrew! The sons meant to them just what human sons mean to their mothers. The Philistines took their ‘sons’ and tied them up at home, harnessed the two milk cows to a nice new cart and put the ark on it. And the experiment was to see whether the God of Israel was real enough to overpower nature in those brute beasts so that, in spite of all they would feel, the cows would go and take the ark of God back to Israel. A simple but ingenious experiment, wasn’t it?
And we’re told that when they put the milk cows in a harness to the cart and put the ark on the cart, the milk cows went, lowing as they went—the old cows felt the tug of nature. Their sacrifice was that they left their sons because they experienced a bigger power than that of nature, and they took the ark back. When they got back, the Israelites took the ark down and cut the cart in pieces for wood to build a fire upon the altar. They killed the two cows, cut them up, and offered them in sacrifice to God. Now, I don’t know if there are going to be cows in heaven—I rather think not—but I can wish they’d got a reward! What an example of self-denying devotion to the creator: it needed more than mere animal instinct to do it. Such devotion in us will cost more, and require more motivation than mere human enthusiasm.
Hannah lived in a household where there were two wives, and the unholy competition to see which wife could produce the more children led to much bitterness for Hannah, for in those days women felt it was a shame to be childless. The other wife taunted her and ridiculed her and put her down in front of all the visitors and so forth. It was a bitter time. When nature makes demands of somebody, only to find that nature frustrates their fulfilment, it can be a very trying time. It made Hannah think the thing through and she saw there was much more to it than that. She said, ‘Lord, if you give me a son, I will give him over to you.’
Would we know God as real in our witness to a largely atheistic world? If we would know him as real, then life’s ambitions should not merely be promoted by natural desires. There’s nothing wrong in natural desires—of course not, God implanted them in us—there’s nothing wrong in them and in their fulfilment. But there is something beyond the fulfilment of natural desires, and that is in the processes of life where God would so deign to use us in the accomplishment of a higher purpose for his glory. Seeking my career not merely for my career’s sake, but for what it might do to help with the purposes of God in this world. Seeking a home not just to have a comfortable home—for why shouldn’t we have comfortable homes—but that it might be used to further the purposes of God. How shall I convince anybody of the reality of God if, in that sense, God is not my supreme object in what I do in life? It will be costly. My dear good friends, don’t be outdone by a couple of milk cows, will you!
So may God bless his word and our study of it together this week.
2: Salvation Available; Salvation Missed
A Gospel Parable
It is a great pleasure for me to meet with you here this evening. I confess that you look a little bit distant from me and if by reason of the distance you don’t understand my lingo and my accent, raise your hand in protest or stamp your feet because you are the important people and it is exceedingly important that you hear plainly what I intend to say. I’m about to read to you part of a very ancient story. It was written some three thousand years ago; but although it’s a very old story, it speaks like a very clear parable to our hearts. It is about an elderly man—elderly by the standards of those times. He was in fact a king, and of course kings have their worries like the rest of us. Things had not been going too well for this king, and the forces of his enemies were gathering on the horizon. He was worried: he would never be able to defeat them, so he was right to be worried. Unknown to him, within a week or two he would lie dead on the battlefield. Whatever age we are, the prospect of possible death is a dark cloud. And when you’re getting to my age, you have to take this prospect realistically and spend some time thinking about exactly what is going to happen.
The interesting thing about the story I’m going to read to you is that it depicts the last occasion when this king, Saul was his name, came in contact with his saviour—the only one who could have saved him from the enemies that were massing on the horizon. He was a younger military commander in the army and, for various reasons, the king had conceived a fear of this man. The man’s name was David, and the king thought that David was out for his throne and that, if given the chance, he would assassinate him or humiliate him or take away his freedom. Fuelled with that fear, the king had from time to time persecuted David quite unjustly; whereas David had, several times, saved Saul’s life. In spite of it, Saul had come out to attack him and the interest of the story is what happens next, as in all good stories. So, let me read it to you from the first book of Samuel.
Then the Ziphites came to Saul at Gibeah, saying, ‘Is not David hiding himself on the hill of Hachilah, which is on the east of Jeshimon?’ So Saul arose and went down to the wilderness of Ziph with three thousand chosen men of Israel to seek David in the wilderness of Ziph. And Saul encamped on the hill of Hachilah, which is beside the road on the east of Jeshimon. But David remained in the wilderness. When he saw that Saul came after him into the wilderness, David sent out spies and learned that Saul had come. Then David rose and came to the place where Saul had encamped. And David saw the place where Saul lay, with Abner the son of Ner, the commander of his army. Saul was lying within the encampment, while the army was encamped round him. Then David said to Abimelech the Hittite, and to Joab’s brother Abishai the son of Zeruiah, ‘Who will go down with me into the camp to Saul?’ And Abishai said, ‘I will go down with you.’ So David and Abishai went to the army by night. And there lay Saul sleeping within the encampment, with his spear stuck in the ground at his head, and Abner and the army lay round him. Then said Abishai to David, ‘God has given your enemy into your hand this day. Now please let me pin him to the earth with one stroke of the spear, and I will not strike him twice.’ But David said to Abishai, ‘Do not destroy him, for who can put out his hand against the Lord’s anointed and be guiltless?’ And David said, ‘As the Lord lives, the Lord will strike him, or his day will come to die, or he will go down into battle and perish. The Lord forbid that I should put out my hand against the Lord’s anointed. But take now the spear that is at his head and the jar of water, and let us go.’ So David took the spear and the jar of water from Saul’s head, and they went away. No man saw it or knew it, nor did any awake, for they were all asleep, because a deep sleep from the Lord had fallen upon them. Then David went over to the other side and stood far off on the top of the hill, with a great space between them. (26:1–13)
Let that be enough for the moment for our reading of the story. I wonder can you picture it in your mind’s eye. There is Saul come out with his army. He’s come to take, arrest, and kill if he can, David, one of the captains of his forces, because he’s afraid of David. He thinks that David is going to destroy him, or take his throne, or humiliate him. And he’s come to destroy him. But there he is in the desert and he’s got his army around him, and the wagons as a stockade around him, because the wilderness was a very dangerous place. And now he’s gone to sleep. He’s got his big spear stuck in the ground, because in those days a spear also had a little spike at the butt end and so at night you could stick it in the ground beside you. For very good reason, because if you were suddenly attacked by your enemy in the middle of the night, you could immediately grasp the spear and be ready to fight. These were days when you had to watch for your own life and be as secure as you could. And then of course there were his survival rations. In the desert, where the great danger is dehydration, you need a water supply, and there was a water supply by his head. Feeling as secure as he might in those conditions, Saul went to sleep.
Unbeknown to Saul, David had been tracking his movements. That night, with one of his lieutenants, David saw the encampment. Saul and his army were all asleep when David penetrated their barricade, their armoury, and came to where Saul lay on his camp bed in the desert. David’s lieutenant said, ‘Let me kill him, David, for he would have killed you if he could. Let me kill him.’
‘You’ll do no such thing,’ said David. ‘He’s the Lord’s anointed. We would sin against God to kill the man. I know he’s my enemy but I love him. What I’d like you to do is to take the spear and take the water.’
Quietly they left the camp, and from up on the hill David called to Abner, the commander of the army who was meant to be protecting Saul. ‘Abner, wake up man! You deserve to die, letting somebody into the ranks tonight to kill your sovereign. You were asleep. Wake up man!’ (see 26:14–16).
And Saul heard David’s voice. Trembling in the middle of the night, discovering his spear was gone and his water was gone, he said, ‘David, is that you?’ Dramatic, wasn’t it? And the one he thought was his enemy had pierced his barricade: he had no security. And there was David standing on the hill, with a great space being between them. We’re going to watch that space and see what happened as David talked to him.
Let me point out again: Saul was in danger, but not from David. The Philistines were advancing over the horizon and if he didn’t let David save him, in a few weeks’ time he’d be dead on the battlefield. It would be the last time Saul met his saviour, and now there was a big space between them. There hadn’t always been a big space. David had been summoned to the king’s court as a younger man because he was a skilled player of the harp and Saul was afflicted, with bad nerves you would call them, whatever the cause of it. And David, as he played on his harp, could soothe the king’s nerves and bring him back to some emotional stability. David was near the king then. I’ve often wondered what David played on his harp when he was with Saul. Perhaps David tried out the new number he’d just written, and what a lovely number it was.
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. . . . Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for ever. (Ps 23:1–3, 6)
David was near him then. Perhaps in those moments, Saul felt the presence of God, but in the intervening years this space had developed. Do you remember when you were a child? Are you a lovely little child with us this evening? You went to Sunday school maybe and your teachers sang to you too, or your parents maybe. And you know the hymns of Zion—‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want’; and lovely hymns like ‘What can wash away my stain. Nothing but the blood of Jesus.’ Could it be that for you too in the intervening years, there has come a big space between you and your Saviour, Jesus Christ? Over the years all sorts of things have happened and the space has widened. You sit before God tonight and over the horizon are the forces of your enemies, and soon life’s end will come. Are you ready, friend?
If there’s a gap between you and the Saviour, let me tell you straight, you can’t afford the gap. Your salvation could depend on you crossing that gap and coming to meet your Saviour, Jesus Christ our Lord. The interest in the story is going to be that we will watch that space. What will happen? Will we see Saul at last coming to see sense; rising up and realizing that David is not against him but for him? Rising up and saying, ‘David, forgive me for the past. Be now my saviour’? What would happen? Maybe the same things are in our lives tonight. Is there a space between us and the Saviour? And if there is, will we not rise up and cross the space and come to Christ?
It wasn’t the first time David had got near to Saul and penetrated his presence so that, had he chosen, he could have killed him. There was an earlier time when Saul was persecuting David. You say, why on earth did he persecute the man? Well, Saul was king and he sinned against God and God had said he could no longer be king. God had anointed David that he should be king one day and Saul felt that that meant that David was out to kill him. David never tried to kill him. David, in fact, loved him. David did all he could to preserve his life: David was his friend. But when you’ve been king, it’s very difficult sometimes to leave off being king. You can relate to that, can’t you? There is a sense in which we’ve been king of our own lives. We’ve got free will and we like to think we can decide what we do and where we go. Old Karl Marx said that the idea of God was a filthy idea: it removed people’s freedom. And I can tell you straight in my experience, there are multitudes of men and women who know about Jesus Christ but they’re afraid of him. They’re afraid that if they give in to him, he will remove their freedom and they will come under his rule and have to do what he says. They value their freedom and they want to be independent. That’s how Saul felt. But there are enemies to be met, aren’t there? Death itself lies ahead. Then there is the justice of God and the wrath of God against sin. Pass the line and then the Bible says after death comes the judgment, and we can’t save ourselves: we need a saviour.
Let me tell you about that first instance. Saul was out with his army. Can you see him with all his gear and his medals and all that stuff? He was, in fact, seeking David: he was going to destroy David and his men from the earth. But, if you will allow me to say such a thing, like everybody else he had to go to the toilet! He saw a nearby cave and sought the privacy of the cave so as to attend to his bodily affairs. Unknown to him, David and his men were at the back of the cave, and one of David’s men said, ‘Let me smite him. I’ll kill him right now.’
‘No you won’t,’ said David, ‘he is God’s anointed. I love him and respect him. His life to me is dear.’
But David crept near and with his knife cut off the hem of the king’s robe. That’s all he did (see 24:4–7). When the king had done what he had to do, he dressed up and went back out of the cave. I don’t know what the soldiers said when they saw the back of his robe half cut off! Why did David shame him like that? But David would often see the king’s shame. There was that occasion when Goliath came and gave his challenge to come out and fight him and King Saul, for all his supposed power, skulked in his tent. David went in to see him, to volunteer to go and fight Goliath, and David looked in the king’s eyes and saw the terror in them.
David had seen his weakness, and Christ, of course, sees ours. He sees us through and through and knows our weaknesses, but he loves us just the same. I remember as a child being taken to what was in those days called ‘the poor house’, in Newmarket in England. The Christians would sing for them, and as a seven-year-old I was allowed to sing in front of the older folks.
The perfect friend is one who knows the worst about us and loves us just the same. There’s only one who loves like that and Jesus is his name 1
When I finished, an elderly lady at the back put her hand up and said, ‘Please would you sing it again.’ I was told afterwards who she was. She was the widow of a wealthy racehorse owner. She had entertained royalty in her day and now had fallen on hard times and, bankrupt, she was in the poor house. No wonder the words meant a lot to her. ‘The perfect friend is the one who knows the worst about you and loves you just the same. There’s only one that loves like that and Jesus is his name.’ In cutting off Saul’s robe, David was letting Saul know, ‘I could have destroyed you. But I love you, Saul, and want to save you.’
In spite of it, Saul came this last time to destroy David if he could, and lay down in what he thought was security. But David got through his security. We are mere creatures, but Christ is the one through whom the universe was made. The very circuits of atoms in our brains, he made them. Apart from Christ, there is no ultimate security. We can have all the security we like, as we think, but there is no security that can bar Christ’s approach. Let me plead the cause of Christ with you. He loves you. The same Christ who made us died for us, took our place and bore the wrath of God against our sin, that we might be forgiven. He came to seek and to save us. If we will repent, put our faith in him and receive him as our Lord, not only will he give us forgiveness, but he will give us eternal life and the guarantee of a place in the Father’s house above.
David stood on the hill pleading with Saul. When David had finished, he said, ‘Here’s the water and here’s your spear, send a young man over to get it. You have no security apart from me, Saul. I want to be your saviour.’ Saul replied to David, ‘I have played the fool, David’ (see 26:6–13; 21–23).
I say to myself, ‘Marvellous, Saul at last is beginning to see sense and he’s going to accept David as his saviour. He’ll get up in a minute and you’ll see him run across that gap and embrace David, and they’ll kiss one another and Saul will be saved.’
But sadly, that isn’t how it happened. When the talking was done, Saul went his way and David went his. That was the last Saul ever saw his saviour David. Like every gospel preacher, I must say this could be the last time that anybody has to meet the Saviour. If you sense there’s a gap between you and him, why not get up and run across the gap, come to Christ and say, like Saul said, ‘I have played the fool so far in keeping my distance from you. Lord, have mercy. Forgive me. Save me and I will take you as my Lord.’
Saul didn’t do that. So what happened? Well, the armies of the Philistines gathered, and now it was clear there would be battle. Saul, in his desperation, prayed to God but God wouldn’t answer him. So he went down to a witch, to a hovel. Witches had been banned in Saul’s day, but now he went down to a witch to try and get some news. ‘What’s going to happen to me?’ he asked.
And the witch said, ‘Who will I bring up?’
‘Bring up Samuel the prophet.’
When the figure of Samuel came up, he said to Saul, ‘Why are you troubling me?’
Saul said, ‘I want to know what’s going to happen: I’ve asked but God doesn’t answer me any more’ (see 28:6).
That’s a fearful thing, isn’t it? The God of love waits for our repentance and faith in the Saviour. But the Saviour himself said, ‘Be sure to rise up and come in through the narrow gate into salvation because the time will come when the master of the house will rise up and shut the door’ (see Luke 13:24–25). It will happen that God will shut the door one day.
God had talked many, many times to Saul, and Saul knew in his heart what he should do, and he could have been saved. But he went by the last appeal and God wouldn’t speak any more. To find oneself in eternity, if one’s creator has turned his back and doesn’t speak any more, will be the eternity of meaninglessness and pain. There sat Saul, or there he lay on the floor prostrate. The witch came to him and said, ‘Oh but cheer up. Have some food.’
Saul said, ‘No. How can I have some food?’
‘Oh, go on’, she said, ‘I risked my life for you. Now get up’ (see 28:21–22).
And she spread her table and put food on it and Saul sat at the witch’s table. Did you ever see such a sorry sight in your life? To get a little entertainment at such a table, before he went out the next day into eternity, lost for ever.
O friend, whose table are you sitting at? Are you at the world’s table, trying to entertain yourself? Or will you come home, like the prodigal who came to the father in the parable, to find welcome and the kiss of God’s forgiveness, the embrace of his reconciliation and all the lovely joys that God puts on for those who receive his Son as Saviour?
So, may God use this ancient parable, this ancient piece of history, to speak to our hearts. And let me just repeat; if any of us senses that there is a space between us and God, between us and Christ, and we’re not sure where we’re headed to, for tomorrow and the eternity that lies ahead, may God grant us the grace and wisdom not to rest until we rise up and come to the Saviour and close the gap and let him tell us how he will save us.
Let’s commend our study to the Lord in prayer.
Now Father, this story comes from thy holy word, written for our admonition. We pray, Lord, that thou wilt help us understand its message to us—each one of us now individually this night. We thank thee, Father, for the Saviour who came to seek and to save that which is lost. While we were yet enemies, thou hast been reconciled to us and we to thee, through the death of thy Son. We thank thee that thou dost wait still, that the door to salvation stands open and not yet shut. So we pray, Lord, speak to our hearts. Show us where each one of us is tonight, we pray. And if there is still a gap, still a space, if we’ve not come home and are not yet reconciled to you, Lord speak to us now that this night may see us rising up and falling into the embrace of the arms of the Son of God, that we may find in him peace, forgiveness and eternal life. We ask in his holy name. Amen.
1 Source unknown.
3: From Rejection to Acceptance
David’s Unifying of the People of God
Welcome to the next of our studies in the books of 1 and 2 Samuel. Once again, my genuine thanks to you for your invitation to come among you and share with you the study of holy Scripture. Thank you too that, although you have seen the advertisements that we shall now be studying the second book of Samuel, you have, in spite of that, come along this evening! Because the second book of Samuel, by common consent, is a difficult book. First Samuel contains some very well-known and very loved stories. The second book of Samuel is difficult. But let us begin by reading a number of Scriptures, first of all in 2 Samuel itself and then from the New Testament, which will serve to put our study tonight in its proper context. Let’s begin by reading 2 Samuel 5.
Then all the tribes of Israel came to David at Hebron and said, ‘Behold, we are your bone and flesh. In times past, when Saul was king over us, it was you who led out and brought in Israel. And the Lord said to you, “You shall be shepherd of my people Israel, and you shall be prince over Israel.”’ So all the elders of Israel came to the king at Hebron, and King David made a covenant with them at Hebron before the Lord, and they anointed David king over Israel. David was thirty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned for forty years. At Hebron he reigned over Judah seven years and six months, and at Jerusalem he reigned over all Israel and Judah for thirty-three years. And the king and his men went to Jerusalem against the Jebusites, the inhabitants of the land, who said to David, ‘You will not come in here, but the blind and the lame will ward you off’—thinking, ‘David cannot come in here.’ Nevertheless, David took the stronghold of Zion, that is, the city of David. And David said on that day, ‘Whoever would strike the Jebusites, let him get up the water shaft to attack “the lame and the blind,” who are hated by David’s soul. Therefore it is said, ‘The blind and the lame shall not come into the house.’ And David lived in the stronghold and called it the city of David. And David built the city all round from the Millo inwards. And David became greater and greater, for the Lord, the God of hosts, was with him. (vv. 1–10)
Now, in chapter 7 and we shall begin reading at verse twelve. This is God speaking to David.
When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom for ever. I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son. When he commits iniquity, I will discipline him with the rod of men, with the stripes of the sons of men, but my steadfast love will not depart from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away from before you. And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure for ever before me. Your throne shall be established for ever. (vv. 12–16)
Now some verses from the New Testament, first in the Gospel by Matthew, chapter 21.
Now when they drew near to Jerusalem and came to Bethphage, to the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, ‘Go into the village in front of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her. Untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, you shall say, “The Lord needs them”, and he will send them at once.’ This took place to fulfil what was spoken by the prophet, saying, ‘Say to the daughter of Zion, “Behold, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.”’ (vv. 1–5)
Similarly, a few verses from Luke’s Gospel, chapter 24.
Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.’ (vv. 45–47)
Now let’s look at two other short Scriptures. The first is from the Epistle to the Galatians, chapter 4.
Now this may be interpreted allegorically: these women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar. Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia; she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother. (vv. 24–26)
And finally the well-known passage in Hebrews 1.
After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs. For to which of the angels did God ever say, ‘You are my Son, today have I begotten you’? Or again, ‘I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son’? (vv. 3–5)
May God grant us the light of the Holy Spirit on these Scriptures that we might begin to understand them.
Introduction
Many people, as I said, find 2 Samuel to be a difficult book. Tonight, and in the other nights that we are together, I will obviously not be able to give a full exposition of its detail. In fact, you may conclude that I have raised more questions than I have answered! And if, as is likely, you feel very frustrated, then I have a recommendation to make. I suggest you vent your frustration on the elders of this church and tell them they must do better next time! And what is more, they ought to institute a very serious study of 2 Samuel. An open discussion, if need be with all the assembly, that you might come to see what the real answers are to the questions that I will be raising. And if that happens, I will feel my visit has been marvellously well worthwhile! We pray for God’s blessing on your future studies of 2 Samuel.
But it is a difficult book so let’s put it in context if we may, to help ourselves at the beginning. You could sum up 1 Samuel, or at least the second half of it, as recording the difficulties David had in becoming king. The book ends before he is king—even though he is already anointed—recording the difficulties he had in becoming king of Israel. Second Samuel is the record of the difficulties he experienced in being king. And compared to the difficulties of becoming king, the difficulties of being king were even worse. Let’s refresh our memory of the difficulties he faced in becoming king.
Difficulties in becoming king
The story, as it begins to get exciting, is at first very strange (see 1 Sam 16 onwards). God had decided that he’d had enough of Saul: Saul could no longer be king. So God said to Samuel privately, ‘Samuel, you are going to go down to Bethlehem to a man called Jesse and anoint one of his sons to be king for me.’
And Samuel said, ‘Excuse me Lord. I can’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, Saul is still alive.’
It was an odd suggestion, wasn’t it? I mean God had three options, we may say, humanly speaking. He could have executed Saul on the spot and anointed David, no problem. Lots of the nation would have welcomed David. Or he could let Saul live on until Saul came to his natural end or was killed in battle, and then he could have anointed David, no problem. Instead God let Saul live on for some years and yet had already anointed David. You can see Samuel’s point. Suppose Queen Elizabeth went to Australia, as she does sometimes to comfort the Australians, and while she was gone the Archbishop of Canterbury anointed the Prime Minister as king of the country. I think Queen Elizabeth would have something to say about that when she came back!
You can see Samuel’s point. ‘Lord, how can you let Saul live on and require me to anoint David?’ There was a problem in David becoming king. In the end Saul not only rejected him, but persecuted him up hill and down dale. At that point it’s very interesting to see what happened. Though Saul was jealous that David had killed Goliath, Jonathan loved him. He was the crown prince, and he divested himself of his robes and belt and gave them to David. And the king’s daughter loved him. Then all the ladies came out and they sang, ‘Saul has slain his thousands, but David his ten thousands’ (see 18:7). He was the topic of all the latest records and recordings of the time! And the soldiers in the army, in particular the captains, loved David. Interesting that, isn’t it? How would God impose David as a king on anybody? He first gave Israel the chance to learn to love David for what he had done and for what he was.
If I were allowed to question you, like a priest of the Inquisition, I might say, ‘Have you accepted Christ as king?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why did you do it? And why do you persist in that choice?’
Would you not answer in similar vein and say, ‘Well I know Christ is not very popular these days and the world rejects him largely, but I love him’?
That is presently God’s way of imposing his king. Saul tried to kill David and David appealed to Jonathan. Jonathan couldn’t bring himself to believe that his father would actually execute David. He was a little bit like the disciples in the gospels. When our Lord said, ‘I must go to Jerusalem and be rejected by the officials and be crucified and killed and raised the third day’, the apostles just couldn’t believe it. It didn’t make sense, but David had to go. There was that famous occasion when Jonathan came out to indicate to David by secret sign that he would have to go, and he shot the arrows. Do you remember the story? Jonathan shot the arrows beyond the boy and shouted out, ‘The arrows are beyond you’—which was the sign to David, who was in hiding, that he must go. David went. He went into the house of the Lord under Ahimelech the high priest and asked for the bread of the Presence. It is interesting that our Lord mentioned that incident in Matthew 12 (see vv. 3–4) and elsewhere. At that juncture in the Gospels, when he has announced that Judaism was going to reject him, our Lord talked of what David did in the temple with the bread of the Presence when David was thus rejected.
David took from the temple Goliath’s sword. And he must have been bewildered for he did a very funny thing. From there in his flight he went to Achish, the king of the Philistines—with the sword of Goliath in his hand with which he had cut off Goliath’s head. Why ever did he do that? The princes of the Philistines said to their king, ‘You must be mad having this fellow come among us like that. Look at this sword. Isn’t this the one of whom the Israelites said he’d slain his ten thousands?’ David didn’t see any way out of it but to pretend to be mad and he scribbled on the door, and the king sent him away. Strange that, David handing himself over to the Gentile authorities. Why didn’t he use that sword? He had the sword of Goliath in his hand. Why didn’t he go to the palace where Saul was and cut the man’s head off? That would have ended all this nonsense. But if he wasn’t prepared to use the sword on Saul, how could he do it? He delivered himself up into the hands of the Gentiles. And then he went down to a cave, from which he came up and once more presented himself to some of the cities of Judah.
I don’t know if you remember the story about the Lord Jesus—how he refused to execute judgment on an apostate high priesthood in Judaism, and after having done notable miracles he said to the disciples, ‘The Son of Man must be delivered up into the hand of the Gentiles’ (see Mark 10:33–34). They couldn’t make any sense of that. How could Christ, who could do these stupendous works of divine power, be handed over, helpless, into the hands of Gentiles? They couldn’t make any sense out of it, but it happened. On his way to the throne, Christ was handed over to the Gentile Romans and was executed and went down into the grave. He came up again in resurrection and sent his apostles around the cities of Judah and to the Jews in the Roman Empire, offering them forgiveness and God’s amazing grace. Not only a general forgiveness of sins, but a forgiveness for the murder of their Messiah. God gave the nation forty years to repent and at the end of the forty years, by ad 70, they had refused to repent, and God allowed the Gentiles to sack Jerusalem. And Paul went off to the Gentiles. ‘Since you thrust it aside and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life,’ said he to the Jewish synagogue, ‘behold we are turning to the Gentiles’ (Acts 13:46).
So did David; then he briefly came back and visited cities in Judah and helped them. Yet the question was, what would those cities do? Would they accept him and face out Saul? Or if Saul came to capture David, would the cities of Judah hand David over? God told David, ‘They’ll hand you over, David’ (see 23:11–12). David had no choice but to go to the Gentiles and the anointed messiah was lost to Israel among the Gentiles. He came back again, of course, and became king, first in Hebron and then in Jerusalem city. That is the story of 1 Samuel—the difficulties David had in becoming king.
Difficulties in being king
But then once he was established as king, first in Hebron and then in Jerusalem, he faced severe difficulties in being king. I’m tempted to remind you of what David endured at the hands of Joab in the second book of Samuel. Some years ago, without first saying ‘I hope I don’t offend your faith’, I asked a senior Christian teacher of the word how he accounted for the fact that in the book of Samuel, Joab the commander of the army, overruled David more than once and insisted of having his own way against David’s will. And David was helpless to do anything about it. You remember Joab assassinated Abner when Abner was in negotiations for bringing over the ten tribes to serve David. Joab heard about it and was not willing that Abner should come over and be accepted by David, for Abner would have brought the army of ten tribes and Joab was only commander of two. He wasn’t going to have his nose put out so he went and assassinated Abner. At the public funeral David let the public know he did not agree with that: ‘You sons of Zeruiah are too hard for me,’ he said (see 2 Sam 3:39). Why didn’t he take control of Joab? Absalom sinned by murdering his brother and ran into exile. It was Joab that forced David to take him back against David’s conscience.
Unwise decisions?
David went off into exile and when he came back he sent a message to the elders of Judaea and to Amasa, who had been commander in chief of the army of Absalom who had revolted against the king. Now Absalom was dead and David wrote a note saying to Amasa, ‘Why don’t you bring me back? And if you bring me back, I will make you commander in chief of my army in the place of Joab.’ Really, when Joab had been so loyal to him? So Amasa was given the post and then given the commission as what to do, but he made a bungle of the whole thing. When Joab saw how it was going, he came across Amasa and greeted him, but Amasa didn’t notice Joab had a dagger in his hand, and he put it through his belly and that was the end of Amasa. And Joab took control once more.
There was one occasion when David overruled Joab and had his own way. That was when he told Joab to go and number the people (see 24:2–3). ‘Your Majesty,’ said Joab, ‘are you sure that we ought to do this?’ Even Joab sensed it was sinful and did not want to do it. David insisted and had his way and Joab had to go and number the people. The result was that David’s action brought a plague upon the nation. Why was that? Well I’m not going to give you all the answers—but you can see what they’re going to ask you when you start this intensive Bible study of 2 Samuel!
The older brother—the teacher I mentioned earlier—whom I consulted years ago finally rebuked me. He said, ‘My son was listening when you posed those questions and you nearly broke his faith.’ Well, I’m sorry for that, and I don’t intend to break your faith. I believe this story is inspired of God. I’ve only been telling you what the story says. Just in case you think that David was the last word of perfection as he ruled from the throne, 2 Samuel will ask us to face the actual reality. Why didn’t David deal with Joab? Do you think he could have done? Joab was commander of the forces. You will forgive what I say next, and please don’t take it the wrong way, but have you thought about God’s government of the universe recently? Why doesn’t God stop sin? He has the power to do it: you surely will agree with me that he does. Satan is but a creature so why doesn’t God stop him in his tracks? Why did God allow Hitler and Stalin? We believe in God and we believe in his almighty and ultimate power—that nothing happens in this whole universe but what he allows to happen. Let’s affirm our faith in it and one day he will bring it to a glorious conclusion.
Being king and being a father
But for the moment, God’s government of our world hasn’t always overthrown evil men. Why doesn’t it, and what’s that got to do with David? Well, I’m only pointing out the difficulties David had in being king and reigning over that nation—real, practical difficulties. The Holy Spirit doesn’t hide them from us. Let me just take one incident. Because of David’s sin, God allowed the rebellion by Absalom his son—David’s own son rebelling against his father, and he would gladly have put a dagger through his father’s breast. When at last Absalom was defeated, the king told Joab, ‘You are not to kill Absalom.’ But Joab found Absalom hanging in a tree by his hair and killed him nonetheless. It broke David’s heart. You see, if David had simply been a king and Absalom had been an ordinary man, David would have had him executed. If David hadn’t been king but had been a father, he might have been inclined to spare Absalom. The difficulty was David was both a father and a king and faced the enormous question of the father’s love on the one hand and the guilt on the other that called for punishment. ‘O my son Absalom,’ he said, ‘my son, my son Absalom! Would that I had died instead of you’ (2 Sam 18:33). That was the problem for David.
That experience, though in part David’s fault, brought David nearer the heart of God than ever he’d been before, because God himself has suffered a rebellion. Not only a gigantic rebellion amongst the heavenly powers—Satan and his hosts—but the worldwide rebellion of the human heart faced God with a problem. He must, as King and judge, execute the punishment upon sin. But how would he do it, for he loves the creatures with a creator’s love. You know the answer God has given—in the death of his dear Son. In the problems that he faced in governing Israel, David is drawn a little bit nearer into the very heart of almighty God and, if you will excuse the expression, God’s problem in governing the universe and our world. Problems then in 2 Samuel—we’ll explore some of them in the nights left to us this week, God willing.
Unifying the nation
But let me recur now to some very practical things. When Saul eventually was killed by the Philistines, David went up to Hebron at God’s command and the Judahites anointed him king over Judah. But that left the ten tribes of Israel under Saul’s son Ish-bosheth. There was a long war between the two. The problem for David was how could he reunite the people of God as king over them and what methods would he use? The first few chapters of 2 Samuel are a study in practical politics. You will notice, in chapter 1, when the Amalekite came with the crown of Saul in his hand, and said, ‘David, I bring you the crown of Saul.’
‘How do you know he’s dead?’
‘Well, he asked me to kill him.’
‘And you killed him?’
‘Yes, I did.’
David ordered one of his young men to execute the Amalekite. He would not take the crown from the hand of a godless anti-God Amalekite, even though you might have thought politically it would have been a tremendous advance to take the crown of Saul and possess the actual crown. He wouldn’t take it from him any more than Christ is prepared to take the crown of authority from this world. It’s very important to notice from whom you take authority.
Then there was the matter of propaganda. What do you think the modern politicians would have done with a propaganda opportunity? David had no TV or iPad, but he wrote a song and taught it to the Israelites. All the kids at school had to sing it and all the young ladies came with their soprano voices and all the male chaps joined in. It became a popular song and they learned it and sung it all over the place. Talk about propaganda! If you’d been David, what kind of thing would you have said in a propaganda song about Saul and company? ‘Saul tried to pin me to the wall with a javelin. Praise God that God delivered me’? Or, ‘Saul tried to take me in my bed and have me speared but God delivered me from that wretched and wicked man Saul’?
Not David. Listen to his song: ‘For the whole of Israel, Saul and Jonathan were marvellously beautiful in their day. Saul gained many victories for you, and he clothed you ladies in scarlet and fine linen. And Jonathan, oh, how wonderful he was and how wonderful was his love for me. Weep your heart out that Saul is dead’ (see 2 Sam 1:23–25). Extraordinary propaganda, wasn’t it?
What a wise man he was. Instead of dwelling on the sins of Saul, to the abashment of the ten tribes, he praised Saul and Jonathan. They ceased to think of David as their enemy. Then there came two captains of Ish-bosheth, son of Saul. When Ish-bosheth was taking his siesta one afternoon, these two captains went in and stabbed him to death and cut his head off and took it to David, thinking to get reward. Well, if David was a modern European state, he’d have his Secret Service do the same thing to their enemies without telling anybody or answering for it in Parliament either! Not David. ‘Did you dare to slay your master, when it was your sacred duty to be loyal to him? You’ve slain the Lord’s anointed.’ David is not going to encourage that kind of thing. If you encourage that kind of disloyalty in your supposed enemy, you mustn’t be astonished if he shows that same disloyalty to you later on. David stood for the solid values of loyalty. There are many other lessons, but I must not be tempted to go down that road.
David—the focal point of the nation’s unity
Then David did two marvellous things. Well, one thing he did and the other God did. He found the elders of the ten tribes coming to him at last in chapter 5. They came to Hebron and they said to David, ‘We are your bone and flesh. In times past, when Saul was king over us, it was you who led out and brought in Israel and the Lord said to you, “You shall be shepherd of my people Israel. And you shall be prince over Israel”.’ So all the elders of Israel came to David and King David made a covenant with them in Hebron, before the Lord. David unified the people of God. You say, ‘What was his secret?’ The secret was David himself. You notice what they said: it was not, ‘We’re afraid of your armies David.’ They’d fallen in love and loyalty with David and now they felt they could express it: ‘We are bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh. We’re one with you, David, one in heart.’
Then I think of you and your loyalty to Christ. How do you really feel about Christ? I can tell you how he feels about you. We read it in Hebrews 2.
For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source. That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers. (v. 11)
What does that mean? Why should he be ashamed to call us his brothers? It wouldn’t take me long to think up a dozen or so reasons why he should be ashamed to call me his brother. Are you of the opinion that Christ calls you a brother and is not ashamed of you? You have to believe that: it says he’s not ashamed to call me his brother. Why not? Why should he be ashamed? If his use of the term ‘brother’ was an empty phrase meaning nothing really, then he should be ashamed of himself in using it. The reason he’s not ashamed to call us brothers is because he took our humanity to the full—he who was eternal spirit, the Word of God with the Father. Listen to those awesome words: ‘the Word became flesh’ (John 1:14)—as human as you are, flesh and bone—in order to save us. I’ll tell you a little bit more. In his resurrection, when the disciples thought they were looking at a spirit, he said, ‘No, don’t be afraid: I’m not a spirit. It is I, myself. Look, touch me and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have’ (see Luke 24:36–39). He was carried up into glory as a real human being of flesh and bone—one of us.
You find it overwhelming in your quiet times, don’t you? If that’s his attitude to me, how shall I not bow down and worship him as my Lord and God and be eternally loyal to him? The secret of loyalty, of unity, amongst you as his people, must begin with Christ himself. And they said to David, ‘You know, even when Saul was king, it was you that led us out and brought us in. You led us in our military campaigns, and fought the battle for all of us and gained the victory for us.’ Oh, that’s why you love Christ, isn’t it? For all of us, he fought the fight, the victory won. He fought the biggest fight of all on Calvary’s cross. Your heart beats loyally to him, doesn’t it? If all our hearts beat loyally to Christ, and we were more concerned that Christ’s will was done rather than that we would have our own way, there would be less disloyalty, wouldn’t there?
And they said to David, ‘It was the Lord who said you should be prince’ (see 5:2). There used to be a chorus when I was a boy: ‘Make Jesus King! Make Jesus King!’ And some of the great bearded theologians said it wasn’t true: we don’t make Jesus King—it’s God who has made him King. Amen! But I don’t see why we shouldn’t make him King as well: I’d agree with God! If God has made him both Lord and Christ, then why shouldn’t I make him my Lord? I’d be a fool not to. So the ten tribes came over to serve David. It was only for a brief while, because after his successor, Solomon, the nation split again and was never healed, and will not be until the Lord comes. David was the secret of their unity.
A new capital city
And then David did a magnificent thing. The strategy of it was blindingly clever, if I may use such a worldly term. He didn’t say, ‘Now you elders of Israel, I’m glad at last you’ve had some sense. All your attempts to keep that show going down there with Ish-bosheth was futile. You must have been daft to do it, but I’m glad you see sense and at last you have come to the only place where you ought to come—that’s Hebron.’ He didn’t say that, but he said, ‘Very good gentlemen. Let’s get the massed armies of Israel and we’ll go down to the city called Jebus’ (see 5:6–10). Jebus was on the border between Judah and Benjamin and had never been occupied by the Israelites or the Judahites. Even from the time of Joshua it had never been occupied by Israel: always the old Canaanites had lived there and they couldn’t get them out. David determined to set up a new capital city that could unite the nation.
So all the armies, north and south, came together. They went down to Jebus and, in spite of severe opposition, Joab, under David, climbed up the water shaft and unexpectedly got into the city. The city was taken and there they founded the capital city for the whole nation called Jerusalem. The practical impact was of course that it had never been anybody’s capital city, neither of the two tribes in Hebron, nor the ten tribes as well. In that sense, it was neutral. All might come to it and feel it was their city and didn’t belong to some other tribe. And it was even on the border between two of the tribes. It was a shear bit of genius—to unite the nation in a capital city. It was called Jerusalem, of course, but they also called it the city of David: loyalty to David shone through.
You don’t need me to tell you that David’s deed was important. Recollect the mighty implications and impact of the founding of Jerusalem city by David all those centuries ago. Read the Psalms of Ascents as the people, not only from Israel, but from all the Roman Empire, came up to worship the Lord in Jerusalem and sang,
I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!’ Our feet have been standing within your gates, O Jerusalem! (Ps 122:1–2)
It was to that city that our blessed Lord Jesus came, deliberately fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah: ‘Rejoice O Zion, your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on a donkey’ (see 9:9). What an epically significant moment that was in human history, as Jerusalem’s King, our blessed Lord, officially came into his city. And one day he will come again. They took their King and just outside the walls of the city, they crucified him. He rose again from the dead. He told his apostles to go and preach the gospel. How does your gospel read? It reads like this: ‘that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem’ (Luke 24:47). If your gospel doesn’t begin at Jerusalem, you haven’t got the right gospel. It is the mark of the true gospel that it began at Jerusalem. Even the Samaritans, who didn’t like Jerusalem very much, had to bow to this. The gospel came from Jerusalem.
A new Jerusalem
And what more can I say? I can tell you this, though it’s a bit of a secret—not many reporters in the press know about this! There’s another kind of Jerusalem being built—it’s in the process of being built as I stand here in front of you. It’s called by Paul ‘the Jerusalem above [which] is free, and she is our mother’ (Gal 4:26). Are you a member of this Jerusalem which is above? On what conditions are you a member of that city? You would say it would take us too long to explain all that. We’d have to expound the whole of the Epistle to the Romans and a little bit of Galatians as well! Yes, we would indeed. It is that great eternal city, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets. And if you are in Christ, justified by faith and then of course by works too, you are in Christ. You are a member of that city, for our citizenship is in heaven, from whence also we look for the Saviour (see Phil 3:20). And one day we shall see him. You’ll think of David then perhaps: he may never have dreamed of it in all his life. You will see this present universe flee away as if it had never been and a new heaven and new earth; and you’ll see the new Jerusalem descending out of heaven as a bride adorned for her husband. And you are part of that eternal city, a bride for Christ, loved with the eternal affection of his heart. Why are you loyal to Christ? If all believers were, in that sense, loyal to Christ, we would still have hosts of practical problems and differences of opinion while here on earth, but underneath it all, there would be something seriously wrong if we were not observant that all true believers are members of that heavenly Jerusalem.
Shall we pray.
Our Father we have lingered long over thy word. But we thank thee that thou dost not treat us as slaves nor as little children, but as thy friends. And thou hast discussed with us in thy holy word the problems of this world’s government. We bless thee for the coming of thy dear Son; and this above all, for his personal love for us: the Son of God who loved us and gave himself for us. Help us Lord as we have read thy word together, to derive the right lessons from it. Correct us where we are wrong. But above all we pray, as life goes by, deepen our loyalty to the Lord Jesus. May we love him with all our hearts, soul, mind and strength, and in so doing be found to be drawn ever nearer to all who own him as Lord, God and Saviour. So part us with thy blessing, we pray, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
4: David’s Treatment of Absalom
The Problem of Love Versus Punishment
Tonight we have a somewhat unusual passage of holy Scripture to think about. It is to be found in 2 Samuel 14. Let me fill in the background for you, in case your memory is not altogether fresh. The situation is that King David’s son, Absalom, incensed by the fact that one of his brothers in the royal family had abused his sister, deliberately murdered his brother; and having murdered him, Absalom ran for refuge as an exile to a neighbouring country. David was sorely displeased at the murder of one of his sons by another. But the years went by, and David’s heart softened over the grief and he began to long for his exiled son. Seeing that was so, Joab, commander of the forces of David, hit upon a stratagem to persuade the king, against his sense of justice, to bring back his exiled son. His stratagem was to send a woman dressed up in black as though she were a widow, with the aim of persuading the king that all this business of punishing people was entirely misguided, and he should welcome back his exiled son without any word of punishment. So we’re going to read the speech that this woman made and what its consequences were. You’ll have to watch her, because she is a particularly cunning representative of the species and she could pull the wool over your eyes if you weren’t altogether observant!
Now Joab the son of Zeruiah knew that the king’s heart went out to Absalom. And Joab sent to Tekoa and brought from there a wise woman and said to her, ‘Pretend to be a mourner and put on mourning garments. Do not anoint yourself with oil, but behave like a woman who has been mourning many days for the dead. Go to the king and speak thus to him.’ So Joab put the words in her mouth. When the woman of Tekoa came to the king, she fell on her face to the ground and paid homage and said, ‘Save me, O king.’ And the king said to her, ‘What is your trouble?’ She answered, ‘Alas, I am a widow; my husband is dead. And your servant had two sons, and they quarrelled with one another in the field. There was no one to separate them, and one struck the other and killed him. And now the whole clan has risen against your servant, and they say, “Give up the man who struck his brother, that we may put him to death for the life of his brother whom he killed.” And so they would destroy the heir also. Thus they would quench my coal that is left and leave to my husband neither name nor remnant on the face of the earth.’ Then the king said to the woman, ‘Go to your house, and I will give orders concerning you.’ And the woman of Tekoa said to the king, ‘On me be the guilt, my lord the king, and on my father’s house; let the king and his throne be guiltless.’ The king said, ‘If anyone says anything to you, bring him to me, and he shall never touch you again.’ Then she said, ‘Please let the king invoke the Lord your God, that the avenger of blood kill no more, and my son be not destroyed.’ He said, ‘As the Lord lives, not one hair of your son shall fall to the ground.’ Then the woman said, ‘Please let your servant speak a word to my lord the king.’ He said, ‘Speak.’ And the woman said, ‘Why then have you planned such a thing against the people of God? For in giving this decision the king convicts himself, inasmuch as the king does not bring his banished one home again. We must all die; we are like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again. But God will not take away life, and he devises means so that the banished one will not remain an outcast. Now I have come to say this to my lord the king because the people have made me afraid, and your servant thought, “I will speak to the king; it may be that the king will perform the request of his servant. For the king will hear and deliver his servant from the hand of the man who would destroy me and my son together from the heritage of God.” And your servant thought, “The word of my lord the king will set me at rest”, for my lord the king is like the angel of God to discern good and evil. The Lord your God be with you!’ Then the king answered the woman, ‘Do not hide from me anything I ask you.’ And the woman said, ‘Let my lord the king speak.’ The king said, ‘Is the hand of Joab with you in all this?’ The woman answered and said, ‘As surely as you live, my lord the king, one cannot turn to the right hand or to the left from anything that my lord the king has said. It was your servant Joab who commanded me; it was he who put all these words in the mouth of your servant. In order to change the course of things your servant Joab did this. But my lord has wisdom like the wisdom of the angel of God to know all things that are on the earth.’ Then the king said to Joab, ‘Behold now, I grant this; go, bring back the young man Absalom.’ (14:1–21)
Changing attitudes to punishment
I suspect you have noticed, those of you who are older at least, that in the course of the last seventy years, the attitude of society at large towards punishment has significantly changed. In older days there were three reasons—so it was thought by the philosophers and the criminologists—for punishing those who had broken the law. The first one was known as retribution. It ordered that a criminal be punished because he deserved it. And he deserved it because he had broken the law and flouted the values for which that law stood. And the amount of the penalty, the punishment, was to be adjusted according to the seriousness of the offence that the criminal had committed. The second element that entered into punishment was that if the criminal had, first of all, deserved the punishment and was being given no more than he deserved, then the punishment might be used, if possible, as a deterrent, as an advertisement to other people not to commit the same crime and to deter them from doing it. That is called the deterrent theory of punishment. Then there was a third element that entered into it. If the criminal was being punished for what he had done and deserved it and was being punished no more than he deserved, then the punishment might be used, if possible, to reform the culprit: the reformatory theory of punishment.
It was like this, I suppose, in the days when I grew up. It is much changed now, for in many quarters, not least in philosophical quarters, the theory of retribution is now devalued very far. Retribution is said to be pointless and stupid. It merely adds another act of violence to the violence the criminal has already committed and it does no good. Why should anybody be punished just for breaking a law on the statute book? In the place of retribution, therefore, the notion of deterrence is entertained sometimes. But then, if a man hasn’t first deserved his punishment, to punish him in order to deter other people from doing the same crime wouldn’t be just. It would be just if I put you in prison for cooking the books in your accountancy, but if you hadn’t done it, you wouldn’t deserve to be punished. Even though it would deter other would-be crooks from doing the same thing as you allegedly did, it wouldn’t be just to punish an innocent man in order to deter other people. There is left therefore the reformatory theory of punishment—that you punish people in the hope of reforming their characters.
But now, if you’re not careful, you trespass on the territory of doctors. If somebody’s ill, you aren’t supposed to punish them: you put them in hospital. That’s not meant to be a form of punishment—even though sometimes it turns out that way! And you don’t say, ‘You shall stay in hospital for three months or three years or ten years.’ Of course not. It isn’t a question of deserving. A patient is put there by the doctors who know best and you have to leave them to say when the person has been cured enough to be let out. We all accept that when it comes to medicine. In past decades the Russians used it, under the guise of medicine, to persecute anybody who dared think differently from the State. If they held democratic views or something, sometimes if they held Christian views, they weren’t punished, they were treated in hospital. They were sent to insane institutions and given drugs which, if they weren’t insane, would have sent them that way. They were left there indefinitely until they were ‘cured’ and the only people that could judge whether they were cured or not were the politicians. Curing meant coming round to agreeing with the politicians and the national policy or Marxist atheism. We cry injustice at that, don’t we? We shall have to be very careful with our theory of punishment in these modern, western countries.
But you are saying, doubtless, ‘What has all that got to do with the Bible in general and our passage in particular?’ The Christian gospel says that a sinner, however sinful, upon true repentance and faith in God and in the Saviour is immediately forgiven, justified, reconciled to God; they will never come into judgment and never face the wrath of God because of the guilt of his or her sin. On what grounds? On the grounds that God has grown soft-hearted or something and now has decided that sin doesn’t matter all that much? Indeed not. Is it because God has given up the theory of retribution? Indeed not. Sinners who put their faith in Christ can be forgiven and assured they will not come into condemnation or face the wrath of God, because Christ bore their sin in his body on the tree. Christ delivered us from the curse of the law and its penalty, not by improving us, but by being made a curse for us. And in the poetic language of Isaiah 53, ‘All we like sheep have gone astray. The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was bruised and afflicted.’ It was the purpose of God to crush him because he bore our sin in his body; and he paid the penalty and punishment due to our sin.
In our recent times once more there has been an outcry, not merely from atheists, but from theologians, sometimes from evangelical theologians, who say that the doctrine of the vicarious suffering of Christ ought to be banished from our preaching. The idea that God would bruise, chastise, lay the punishment of our sin upon Christ, they say, is a grievous insult to God. And if God did any such thing, he would be guilty of child cruelty. We shall need therefore to look again at this whole matter of punishment and in what sense Christ bore our punishment at Calvary. The question is a very antiquated one and this is why I read that passage to you. It is not so often read, perhaps because it turns on this very question.
The case of Absalom
Absalom had taken the law into his own hands and murdered his brother. Showing a guilty conscience he fled to the king of Geshur as an exile. David at first was heartbroken and angry. Over the years, grief subsides, and Joab could see that the king’s heart was towards Absalom. But how did you bring Absalom back if he were unrepentantly guilty of murder? Joab saw how the king was beginning to feel and he hit upon a strategy. He got a wise woman from Tekoa, told her to dress up in mourning clothes as though she had been mourning for her husband long since dead, to go into the king and weave her story—which was cleverly done. The woman went in and with a weepy voice she called upon the king to help her. She said, ‘Your servant is a widow woman and my husband is dead. I had two sons and they had an argument in the field and one killed the other. I’ve lost one son, and now the townspeople are coming round and saying, “Hand over the other boy for murdering his brother and we will execute him too.” And it’s stupid, for if they do that, they’ll leave me with nobody and my coal—my fire, my family fire—will go out completely. What is the sense of punishment? It does more harm than good.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ said the king. ‘That is a point. Go home woman and you’ll be all right.’
‘Oh, but, Your Majesty, this is a serious thing. Please swear an oath by God that you’ll not allow anybody to touch me.’
And the king obliged and swore an oath by God. ‘If anybody touches you,’ said he, ‘bring them to me. They’ll never touch you again.’
The woman ought to have gone home at this stage, if it had been a genuine thing. Of course all that speech wasn’t genuine really. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘if that is so, in giving that verdict, if I may say so, Your Majesty, it sounds to me as if the king is convicting himself of wrongdoing’
‘What do you mean, woman?’
‘Oh, you see, if the king doesn’t bring back his banished son, the king is guilty therefore.’
Listen to the reason she gives.
‘Why then have you planned such a thing against the people of God? For in giving this decision the king convicts himself in as much as the king does not bring his banished one home again. We must all die and we are like water spilled on the ground which cannot be gathered up again’ (see 14:13–14).
That is an oriental metaphor: we have slightly changed it. ‘It’s no good crying over spilt milk’ we say, and I think you understand it. Imagine the spilt bottle of milk and your youngster of three-years-old tries to scoop it up and you have to tell him, ‘It’s no use—you can’t gather it up again.’ So what’s that got to do with the argument? ‘Well my boy’s dead: I can’t bring him back. Punishing the other fellow for doing it doesn’t bring him back—like water spilled on the ground that cannot be gathered up again.’
But listen very carefully to what this woman says now, because she’s going to use the old-fashioned well-tried method of putting across a truth, perfectly true, wrapped round what is in fact a lie. You’ve followed the truth and, as she hopes, you follow the lie as well. Perhaps she didn’t mean it as a lie: perhaps she was really thinking this was true. Who knows? What she said was, ‘God will not take away life and he devises means so that the banished one will not remain an outcast.’ The second thing is gloriously true, and thousands of gospel sermons have been preached from it. We can widen the canvas now to the whole width of the gospel. God has devised means that men and women, banished like Adam out of the garden because of their sin and guilt, may not be forever banished. God has devised a means to bring them back home again to his heart. Shout an inward ‘Hallelujah!’ if you have benefited from it. And what a means he has devised: who could conceive of such a thing, that God should give his only son to bring us back from the banishment of guilt and sin, home to his heart and home to his heaven.
That’s true. The first thing isn’t true. ‘God will not take away life,’ she says. Well the king only had to read a few pages in his Bible, if he had one at that time, to know that that was a gross untruth. God does take away life. Listen to the law, listen to God’s chastisement of the Israelites, and see supremely the cross of Christ. In order to bring back his banished people, God gave his son to the death of the cross. It is a lie that God does not take away life. But she hid it very well, and the second bit was true. Notice where the argument is going: she’s now hinting, if you please, that King David is guilty in insisting on the punishment of Absalom. David is guilty, not Absalom. You may sense that you’re beginning to live in a topsy-turvy world.
Well that’s what she said and the king began to see through it. He said, ‘My dear woman, now be honest.’ Of course, the woman would know she was in a very dangerous position. If he discovered the truth about it, what would happen to her? He said, ‘Tell me, woman; and don’t you hide anything. Is Joab behind all this: is it Joab that put this in your mouth?’
What would you have said when the king asks such an embarrassing question?
‘O my lord the king,’ she says, ‘you are an angel.’
I suppose it’s difficult to be angry with a woman who tells you you’re an angel: she wasn’t called the wise woman of Tekoa for nothing!
‘You are like a very angel of God; nobody could hide anything from you.’
So the woman wasn’t punished. David had seen what the whole point was and that Joab was behind it. He said, ‘All right Joab, I grant you this. Go and you may bring back Absalom.’
A victim’s perspective
So Joab has gone and, in the interval before he comes back with Absalom, I should like to conduct a little thought experiment with you. I’m going to find this dead brother and I’m going to have a word with him. (I know you can’t have a word with the dead, but I’m going to pretend. I want to work out one or two things.) So, here I come, and there is this body on the ground. I say, ‘My dear boy, whatever has happened to you?’
‘I’m dead, can’t you see? What are you going to do about it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, I want justice. I have a right to live and my brother took away my life, deliberately. I want justice.’
‘Well, now my dear good man, do grow up. You see it’s no good crying over spilt milk. You’re dead now, aren’t you, and you can’t be brought back to life again. So what good would it do you to have your brother punished for what he did?’
What would you say about that argument? That was the argument that his mother used. Tell me what you think you good ladies. The mother who urged that argument over her dead boy, was she concerned out of love for that dead boy, or was she really thinking, not of him, but of herself? If justice were executed, she would lose the second boy as well, so was it love for the first one or love for herself?
We must leave that, because Joab has come back and he’s brought Absalom with him. That is, he’s brought him back to Jerusalem, for the king said, ‘Now Joab, he must not come and see the king’s face’—meaning he must not be allowed into the king’s presence. Why do you think David did that? I think, myself, David still had a bad conscience. There had been no word of regret from Absalom—no evidence of remorse, no repentance. David had given in to a specious argument, and Absalom was back but David didn’t feel comfortable to invite him back to see the king’s face. Whatever you think about the reason, let me turn aside once more and remind you of the vivid difference between that and the way God has treated us in Christ. I think of the great Apostle Paul, who confessed to Timothy, ‘Timothy, I was the veritable chief of sinners, in that I persecuted the church of God. I persecuted the very son of God and tried to destroy his very name from the earth. And the Lord had mercy on me because I did it in ignorance and unbelief. You know, the faithfulness of our God was marvellous with love and kindness that was in Christ Jesus’ (see 1 Tim 1:12–14).
When Saul of Tarsus was converted on the Damascus Road and hobbled blind into his lodging place in Damascus, Ananias came to see him and preached the gospel to him, and Saul was saved. In that very moment, Christ indicated to Saul that from then on he would be given this superlative benefit, glory, honour, responsibility of being a witness to Christ throughout the Gentile world and among sovereigns of State. More than that, Paul tells his fellow converts in the letter to Ephesus, ‘For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father’ (Eph 2:18). Tell me, how long did you have to wait after you got converted and repented of your sin? Were you made to stand outside the door of heaven for a while until you improved? Or were you admitted at once, permitted access through one Spirit to the Father? That’s a wonderful thing about our salvation, and it is possible not because God has gone soft on our sin. He never has and never will say it didn’t matter. But the penalty has been paid, the punishment endured, the curse of the law expended. Through what Christ suffered we can at once, upon repentance and faith, be admitted, so to speak, to see the king’s face. There’s a lot hangs on these principles, once one comes to think them through. Anyway, I must get on with the story.
Absalom came back and had to live away from the king, and there he was for two years. But Absalom wasn’t slow in coming forward. He told Joab to come and bring him to the king. Joab didn’t come. So Absalom sent his servant to set alight a whole field of Joab’s barley. Joab came around and said, ‘What do you think you’re doing, Absalom?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I sent for you to come and bring me to the king and you didn’t come.’
Talk about pushy.
‘I demand you bring me into the king.’ Then he added, ‘And if there is guilt in me, let him put me to death’ (2 Sam 14:32).
In other words, he was defying the king. He knew the king had already let him back halfway and now he was determined to push his case as far as he could. He would enter the king’s presence, in spite of what the king said, and defy the king to do anything about his sin.
There are some people like that. They are not only content to go on sinning, but they get our modern parliaments to tell us that if we say what they do is wrong, it is we who are guilty! Curious, isn’t it? So Absalom was brought to the king and no serious words followed, and the king kissed Absalom. Perhaps there arises in your mind the parable our Lord Jesus spoke, how that when the prodigal came home, the father ran to meet him and smothered him in kisses. But there’s a difference. The prodigal came home ready to say, ‘Father I have sinned before God and before you.’ Not Absalom—defiant still—and the king kissed him. What happens when a sovereign responsible for the law of his land and for upholding the values of human life, compromises with a man like Absalom? Well you know what happened next: Absalom went out and presently organized a rebellion against the king. He set himself up in Hebron, which was David’s earlier capital city—among David’s relatives indeed—and then led an insurrection, a rebellion, against the king.
Absalom’s adviser said, ‘What you must do, Absalom, is strike at once. Don’t wait to collect your army. Send your most vigorous and skilful soldiers. Seize the king and slit his throat forthwith. When Israel hears that the king is dead, they’ll flock around you. As long as he’s alive, he remains a possible gathering point for the anti-revolution movement’ (see 17:1–4). And Absalom at first thought that was very good tactics. He willingly would have assassinated the king and climbed on to his throne. So unforgiven sin, sin not paid for but permitted by God himself, would unseat God from his very throne! The revolution happened. The king was advised to flee Jerusalem, and we must think about that tomorrow. I hasten on to the end of the story.
Joab mustered the king’s troops. The day came that there would be a pitched battle between the king’s troops and Absalom’s troops. As Joab left for the battlefield, King David said to Joab, ‘Whatever you do, don’t you dare slay Absalom.’ Well, the battle was hot. David’s forces under Joab defeated the enemy and they ran off. As Absalom ran on his mule, his mule went under a tree and Absalom was caught by his neck in a fork on the tree’s branches and his mule went from under him. And Joab and his troops came and discovered him. And Joab said to one of his men, ‘Execute him forthwith.’
‘No I daren’t,’ he said to Joab, ‘I heard what his father the king said to you, that you must not kill Absalom.’
‘Oh, get out of the way,’ said Joab, and bringing out his lance, he pierced it into Absalom’s heart.
The revolution was over; but the king was absolutely broken-hearted. ‘O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would that I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!’ And the king went up into a room above the gate of the city and all the people down below, who had fought for David, heard David crying his eyes out, not for them but for Absalom.
The people didn’t know where they were and were starting to go off with embarrassment. And Joab, seeing what happened, ran up the stairs two at a time and virtually kicked David down the stairs. ‘You foolish man,’ said he. ‘These people have lost brothers and fathers and sons fighting for you against Absalom. You couldn’t care tuppence for them. Your sympathies are with Absalom.’ The king was more sympathetic with the criminal than with his victims. That could be a modern trend too, but we leave it there.
Let’s end our study this evening with coming to where we came the other night. The central problem of the second book of Samuel is the problem of being king, the last problem that David had to face. We suggested the other night that facing that problem, though in part it was the discipline of God upon David for his earlier sins, the discipline brought him nearer to the heart of God than perhaps he had ever been before. God himself has suffered a rebellion. That is the problem in the universe. A rebellion of his satanic majesty and a rebellion of a whole world full of sinners, like you and me. Why should God put up with the impertinence of the likes of you and me rebelling against almighty God?
If David had simply been a father and not king, he could have mourned for his son. Indeed if he’d just been a father, he might have even forgiven his son. But he wasn’t just a father, he was the king, the moral governor of the nation. If he had been simply the king, and not Absalom’s father, he could have had him executed, as he had executed hundreds in his day. The problem was he was both king and father. Hear his loud lament and hear it echo from the very heart of God. If he were merely the moral governor of the universe, he might well have banished us to perdition without a second thought. But he was the creator and he made us and loved us with a creator’s love.
How should he deal with the problem of our guilt? He could never admit us to heaven to see his face by pretending that our sin didn’t matter. He found the answer. And oh the lament that rose up from Gethsemane’s garden into the very presence of God: what did God feel when his son was made sin for us? What David could not do, God in Christ has done for us. We shall exhaust eternity itself in praising him for that solution. God give us the wisdom in our modern world to reject fanciful, modernistic reinterpretations of the story of the cross in order to fit in with modern psychological theories. Let us unashamedly preach the cross of Christ. It is, as the world counts it, the folly of God and the weakness of God; but it is the power of God unto salvation. Shall we pray.
Our Father we thank thee for thy word. We thank thee for these ancient stories written, we believe, at the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit and calculated to make us think. We have tried, Father, to think tonight, and found the question then doubling back on us to the very roots of our salvation, as we think what thou hast done for our redemption through Jesus Christ our Lord. Then, in this moment’s quiet, we bow our hearts to offer thee our profound thanksgiving and our love in Christ, and the intention that we may be daily more devoted to thee. Give us, we pray, wisdom in our modern world, to preach thy gospel unashamedly and untruncated, that the glory of the cross of Christ might appear to many even in our day and generation.
Bless us now, we pray, as we part. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
5: David’s Return from Exile
Reconciliation or Appeasement?
My first pleasant duty is to thank you heartily and warmly and sincerely for the friendship you have shown me while I have been among you. Thank you also for the delightful hospitality you have extended towards me. Thank you as well for your patience, enduring long diatribes every evening. That was very good of you and will earn you a lot of marks! I warned you on our first occasion when we began these studies of 1 and 2 Samuel that by the time I left, you would be thinking that I have posed you more questions than I have given you answers. I am about to fulfil that warning and promise this evening in an extreme fashion. I trust I may get through without your rebellion!
But remember the bargain that I proposed when I warned you that I would be giving you more questions than answers. I live in hope that when I am gone, I will have stimulated your interest in 1 and 2 Samuel such that you will not be able to resist the urge to look at it again, and to find out what the answers should be to the questions I have raised. I think I can already hear you talking to your friends at one of your beautiful dinners or coffee mornings or something, and someone will pipe up and say, ‘You remember that dogsbody of a preacher we had who was so full of questions? Well, I’ve been thinking about one of those questions, and I think the right answer would be this.’ And, of course, your friends will discuss it with you. And when I come again, if ever that were to happen by your kind invitation, I shall benefit from having sown the interest in your hearts. So let’s begin our study by reading from the second book of Samuel, chapter 15.
After this Absalom got himself a chariot and horses, and fifty men to run before him. And Absalom used to rise early and stand beside the way of the gate. And when any man had a dispute to come before the king for judgement, Absalom would call to him and say, ‘From what city are you?’ And when he said, ‘Your servant is of such and such a tribe in Israel’, Absalom would say to him, ‘See, your claims are good and right, but there is no man designated by the king to hear you.’ Then Absalom would say, ‘Oh that I were judge in the land! Then every man with a dispute or cause might come to me, and I would give him justice.’ And whenever a man came near to pay homage to him, he would put out his hand and take hold of him and kiss him. Thus Absalom did to all of Israel who came to the king for judgement. So Absalom stole the hearts of the men of Israel. And at the end of four years Absalom said to the king, ‘Please let me go and pay my vow which I have vowed to the Lord, in Hebron. For your servant vowed a vow while I lived at Geshur in Aram, saying, “If the Lord will indeed bring me back to Jerusalem, then I will offer worship to the Lord.”’ The king said to him, ‘Go in peace.’ So he arose and went to Hebron. But Absalom sent secret messengers throughout all the tribes of Israel, saying, ‘As soon as you hear the sound of the trumpet, then say, ‘Absalom is king at Hebron!’ With Absalom went two hundred men from Jerusalem who were invited guests, and they went in their innocence and knew nothing. And while Absalom was offering the sacrifices, he sent for Ahithophel the Gilonite, David’s counsellor, from his city Giloh. And the conspiracy grew strong, and the people with Absalom kept increasing. (vv. 1–12)
God help us in our study of his inspired word.
This evening, then, as briefly as may be, I would like to discuss with you David’s exile; how he was obliged to flee from his capital city Jerusalem across the Jordan into the hills in order to escape the imminent attack by his own son Absalom, who would freely have assassinated him. I want to discuss the attitude that David took while he was in his flight, for it is described in quite a number of paragraphs in this portion of the word of God.
Then I would like to discuss Absalom’s technique—how he, as the Bible puts it, stole the hearts of the people and won over a considerable number of people to back his rebellion. Notable is it that he won over a good number of David’s close relatives and kinsmen in Hebron, which was originally David’s first capital city. Then, finally, if there’s time I would like to think a little bit with you about David’s return and the tactics and strategies he used to pacify the people and get them back on his side when he eventually returned.
Who would you choose?
As we do this, I would like to pose you a question. As we read together some of the detailed description of what David did and said as he was fleeing from Jerusalem, and then as we consider Absalom’s claim upon the people and how he seemed to be so successful, I’d like to ask you which of the two would you have followed if you had been there? I have a funny feeling that it wouldn’t take you long to answer that one. You would say, ‘I would have followed David. Of course I would have followed David. Was he not the Lord’s anointed? I’d follow him through thick and thin because he was the Lord’s anointed. And as for that Absalom man, I wouldn’t look at him. He was a trumped up vainglorious fellow and he wasn’t the Lord’s anointed. He must be a figure of antichrist or something like that.’
David’s behaviour
I think you are a bit prejudiced, to be honest! What exactly would you be saying to me? ‘We don’t need to go through all those stories and the paragraphs of what David did while he was fleeing from Jerusalem, because we agree with everything he did. He was the Lord’s anointed, wasn’t he?’ So you agree with everything David did? Well, I hardly think that’s true. Before he had to flee, of course, remember the story of how he had grown middle-aged and not so vigorous as he used to be. And when the war with Ammon broke out, he let Joab lead his armies to go and fight the Ammonites and achieve the victory (see ch. 11), while David, in his expanded middle age (bodily expanded I mean), beguiled himself with this and that and indulged himself with Bathsheba. And then, to cover up his sin, he sent orders to Joab to put Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, in the front line so he would get killed. David was guilty of adultery and murder.
It wasn’t merely that he was guilty of adultery, was it? Because you will remember the parable by which Nathan the prophet convicted him of his sin, and if it won’t upset you modern ladies, I will tell you the parable. Nathan said, ‘There was a very rich man in this place and a very poor man. The rich man had thousands of sheep. The poor man had one little ewe lamb, and it was to him as a daughter and it would sleep on his knees and he would feed it by hand. Well, there came a guest to the rich man, and the rich man made him a feast, but instead of taking some of his own hundreds of sheep or oxen to furnish the feast, he went and took the poor man’s one ewe lamb and served that up.’ And David was so enraged when he heard that, he said, ‘The man is worthy of death.’ But Nathan turned the parable against him. ‘You have taken the wife of Uriah. God has given you many wives and would have given you more. Why must you go and take another man’s wife?’ (see 12:1–15). Now, it doesn’t suit modern thinking, I know that, but the charges were essentially of trespass against private property—taking the sacred property of Uriah. When we remember who David was and his earlier concern to maintain the sanctities of life as against the all-powerful monarchy, this was certainly a very serious fall from grace politically.
Of course, the oriental monotype Nebuchadnezzar or Sargon or any of those rulers if they had taken a liking to your wife, they wouldn’t have bothered about such matters as ‘private property’. They would take your wife, and if you objected you would have ceased to exist. David, as a ruler anointed by the Lord, might have been expected in his government not to trespass on the private property of his citizens, but he did, and it was a serious sin, not only morally but politically. And when Joab won the victory by the hard toil of fighting the enemy, Joab in his generosity summoned the king to come very quickly, ‘Lest I defeat the Ammonites, and I get the credit’ (see 12:26–31). David went up and ostensibly took command of the army. The Ammonite king was defeated and they took the crown off his head and put it on the head of David. The lesson wasn’t lost to the troops: David wasn’t the eager, valiant, forceful warrior that once he had been. Possibly middle age had overtaken him, I don’t know. It’ll overtake me soon, if I’m not careful. It can happen with Christians that in middle life they’re not so keen as once they were in their youth.
Then there was the affair of Amnon, one of the king’s sons, who abused one of Absalom’s sisters, whose name was Tamar. Absalom, of course, was greatly put out, and David apparently did nothing. What about the law of Moses concerning such things? Why didn’t David deal with it? Did he have a conscience—feeling he couldn’t say much because of what he had so recently done with Bathsheba and had compromised himself? I don’t think you meant it, did you, when you said you’d agree with everything David did because he was the Lord’s anointed? Not quite everything.
So Absalom, under the pretence of discharging a vow in Hebron, went out to Hebron, and there was the hotbed of the rebellion against David, which was astonishing, because that was the area of the country from which David came and had been his first capital city for seven months. How were they—some of them indirectly related to David—so soon drawn away from David?
To put the other side of the story, there’s no denying that Absalom was attractive. He’d have graced any Hello magazine that you would have bought anywhere! And look at his hair: every year it was so weighty he had to have it cut, you see, and it was weighed. Astonishing weight (14:25–26). He was the last word in up-to-date fashion, so very attractive. He wasn’t middle-aged by any means. He was young, with a vigorous personality, and he wasn’t afraid to put on a show. You’ve got to if you’re going to impress the people—no good being an old Victorian fuddy-duddy. You’ve got to put on a big show, and so he did. He got chariots and horses, and when Absalom came through town, everybody stopped and noticed the strappings of his horses and chariots—he didn’t advertise the fact they were the king’s chariots, but that’s another story! He was very attractive to the younger generation particularly: more attractive than David, you must admit.
David’s exile
There came a point when David heard that Absalom was about to descend upon Jerusalem, and David was obliged to leave his palace and leave Jerusalem city, lest Absalom would have come upon him and murdered him forthwith—the man who had so recently retrieved him and allowed him to come back to the palace and had kissed him. Absalom would have murdered him. But now we have a number of paragraphs—let’s go through them as briefly as we may—that tell of David’s attitude as he was escaping.
Then David said to all his servants who were with him at Jerusalem, ‘Arise, and let us flee, or else there will be no escape for us from Absalom. Go quickly, lest he overtake us quickly and bring down ruin on us and strike the city with the edge of the sword.’ And the king’s servants said to the king, ‘Behold, your servants are ready to do whatever my lord the king decides.’ So the king went out, and all his household after him. And the king left ten concubines to keep the house. And the king went out, and all the people after him. And they halted at the last house. And all his servants passed by him, and all the Cherethites, and all the Pelethites, and all the six hundred Gittites who had followed him from Gath, passed on before the king. Then the king said to Ittai the Gittite, ‘Why do you also go with us? Go back and stay with the king, for you are a foreigner and also an exile from your home. You came only yesterday, and shall I today make you wander about with us, since I go I know not where? Go back and take your brothers with you, and may the Lord show steadfast love and faithfulness to you.’ (15:14–20)
This was the first noticeable reaction on David’s part. The troops just mentioned were all foreign troops. For his personal bodyguard and guards of the palace, David would not use ordinary Judahites or Israelites, but like the Pope in the Vatican has guards of a different nationality, so you hear the different nationalities listed here of the men that were David’s immediate bodyguards and guardians of the palace. And as they came by him, David said, in the largeness of his heart, ‘Look here, gentlemen, I don’t expect you to have to be involved in this trouble. You are, after all, foreigners. You needn’t feel you have loyalty to me. You can go back to the city.’ How do you react to that? If I were David’s examiner, I would give him ten marks out of ten for that, and for this reason. When people get involved in dispute, each party wants you on their side and would take a dim view of you if you’re not on their side. David here had the strength of character to say to these foreign troops, ‘Look, you don’t need to feel you’re loyal to me and must suffer this rejection with me. You’re foreigners. Go home.’ It is altogether remarkable, surely, that the foreign troops remained loyal to him and their leader answered the king, ‘wherever my lord the king shall be, whether for death or for life, there also will your servant be’ (15:21). It is significant in my mind that the leader of the foreign troops or bodyguards remained willingly and voluntarily loyal to the king. They weren’t merely on his personal payroll; they willingly endangered their lives for him. It opens a little window for me on the character of the king, to find such people willing to share his exile voluntarily. Then we read,
And Abiathar came up, and behold, Zadok came also with all the Levites, bearing the ark of the covenant of God. And they set down the ark of God until the people had all passed out of the city. Then the king said to Zadok, ‘Carry the ark of God back into the city. If I find favour in the eyes of the Lord, he will bring me back and let me see both it and his dwelling place. But if he says, “I have no pleasure in you”, behold, here I am, let him do to me what seems good to him.’ (15:24–26)
Again, greatly daring. I commend David here. He excites my admiration. Why? These folks wanted to be loyal to David. That in itself is significant, but they brought the ark and put it with him, thinking of course that anybody who possessed the ark—that symbolic piece of furniture—automatically had God on his side. If his friends could manoeuvre the ark so it came down to where David was and it went with him, that would be a great strengthening of David’s position in the eyes of the religiously inclined. It’s astonishing that when they brought the ark to him, he said, ‘Well, thank you, but take it back. Take it back, because now the point at issue has yet to be proved. This trouble that has come upon me, is it ultimately simply from men, or is it of the Lord? Perhaps it is the Lord’s discipline on me. Perhaps I am in the wrong. You mustn’t presuppose that God is for me. You can’t force him anyway. You can take the ark where you like. If God has mercy on me, he will bring me back to the place, but if he doesn’t, I’ll have to go wherever he sends me.’ That excites my admiration. Here’s a man, being persecuted by his son, who honestly opens his heart to God. ‘You mustn’t presuppose that God is on my side. Now the issue, having been raised, might be that God is chastising me, so send the ark back. We won’t try to leverage God to be on our side. Leave it to the Lord. If he’s on my side, he’ll bring me back. If not, I must suffer the consequences.’
And so they went on, and what a bedraggled crowd they were.
But David went up the ascent of the Mount of Olives, weeping as he went, barefoot and with his head covered. And all the people who were with him covered their heads, and they went up, weeping as they went. And it was told David, ‘Ahithophel is among the conspirators with Absalom.’ And David said, ‘O Lord, please turn the counsel of Ahithophel into foolishness.’ (vv. 30–31)
We must for time’s sake skip over certain passages. We’ll look now at chapter 16.
When David had passed a little beyond the summit, Ziba the servant of Mephibosheth met him, with a couple of donkeys saddled, bearing two hundred loaves of bread, a hundred bunches of raisins, a hundred of summer fruits, and a skin of wine. And the king said to Ziba, ‘Why have you brought these?’ Ziba answered, ‘The donkeys are for the king’s household to ride on, the bread and summer fruit for the young men to eat, and the wine for those who faint in the wilderness to drink.’ And the king said, ‘And where is your master’s son?’ Ziba said to the king, ‘Behold, he remains in Jerusalem, for he said, “Today the house of Israel will give me back the kingdom of my father.”’ Then the king said to Ziba, ‘Behold, all that belonged to Mephibosheth is now yours.’ And Ziba said, ‘I pay homage; let me ever find favour in your sight, my lord the king.’ (vv. 1–4)
So now I’m going to press my question on you, and you’ll have no escape now! Do you believe that everything that David did was right, because he was the Lord’s anointed? Was he right to believe Ziba? Ziba had said that his master Mephibosheth had stayed in Jerusalem rather than coming with David because Mephibosheth saw an opportunity now. He might perhaps seize this opportunity and be appointed king over Saul’s house, so said Ziba. When David thought about how kind he had been to Mephibosheth and how he had allowed him to retain his estates, and appointed Ziba to be his manager, David would have been very seriously hurt by being told that Mephibosheth was now turning against the king and hoping to seize the throne for himself. Should David have believed it? When David came back, Mephibosheth came, and when David asked, ‘Why didn’t you come with me?’ Mephibosheth had a very different story to tell. He claimed that his servant Ziba had grossly misrepresented him. David, it seems to me, was so embarrassed that he altered what he had earlier said to Ziba, ‘You can have the lot,’ and tried to do a compromise. ‘Mephibosheth and Ziba, you share it now between you.’ So was that a just compromise? But then, when a man is under pressure and the world seems to be against him, he is liable to be taken in by someone who at first sight brings false rumours about other people and questions their loyalty to him, and confesses himself to be totally loyal. ‘Well,’ you say, ‘David had no foresight, did he?’ Well, no. I’m just calling attention to the facts. You say, ‘Ah, but you’ve got it wrong there.’ I am delighted to hear it, because now you’ll feel a Christian duty, if I’ve got it wrong, to tell me what the right attitude would have been!
And then there came a member of the house of Saul. His name was Shimei, and he was a man of some substance, and he came down with his men and insulted and cursed David up hill and down dale, and threw stones at him and charged him with being a blood-soaked murderer. ‘That’s what you are, David, and God has brought your crimes back on your own head.’ And David’s friend Abishai was so incensed at this gratuitous, blasphemous cursing of David that he said to David, ‘Let me go and take off the man’s head forthwith.’ David said, ‘No you don’t. Maybe the Lord has told him to curse me, don’t try to stop it.’ I wonder if David was still feeling the weight of what he had done with Bathsheba and his murder of her husband, and that this was God’s discipline on him (see 16:5–14).
I’ve said enough, perhaps too much, to let you see the kind of questions that whirl round in my untutored head. Whose side would you have been on, had you been there? You say David’s, of course. Well, can I ask a second question? Why? Would you have approved of everything he did, or not? No, you say, but then he was the Lord’s anointed. I leave it there for the moment.
Absalom’s behaviour
Let us go and look at Absalom. He was, as I said, a fashion expert, always in the very latest style of clothes, equivalent of Paris and all that, and you should have seen his hair and his chariots and the outriders! A forceful man, who seemed to know his ability and worth and place in society. He was not apologetic: he was made to rule, and then he was all for justice. This was the theme of his formidable political campaign. If you’d have asked him what he stood for, he would have said, ‘Justice, justice, justice, that’s what I stand for.’ So, he would stand at the gate, and when people came to be judged with the king, he would go out and say, ‘How do you do, my friend? Now, what is your complaint and your cause?’ And the people would tell him their cause, and Absalom would say—not to one or two here and there but to everybody he came across—‘your cause is very good.’ Well, how could it be? Not everybody’s cause was good, surely, but it sounded good.
Then Absalom would add, ‘The trouble is, my good friend, your cause is very good but there’s no one appointed by the king to judge you. Oh that I were made judge.’ This is what’s called nowadays meeting the people ‘on the stump’. So then whenever a person came to be judged, Absalom would go out and ask his name and give him a kiss. All for justice? Really? For all his claim and show, his behaviour belies it. He’s not interested in justice but in currying favour with the people. He hadn’t been interested in justice when he murdered his brother, and in the end forced his way back into the palace and defied the king’s justice and defied the king to put him to death for his evil. He was not at all concerned for justice, but rather he was concerned for power.
But then some revealing things about Absalom come to light because, as in modern days, important people have their advisors and so did the kings of Judah. There was one who had been David’s advisor. He was mightily clever, as advisors are meant to be, and when Absalom had revolted, Ahithophel had gone over to Absalom’s side—much to David’s alarm and dismay. Now, there was another advisor. His name was Hushai, and he was supportive of David and went to join David. David said to him, ‘Hushai, don’t come with me. You’d do me a better service if you went back to Jerusalem and joined Absalom, and you know how to phrase yourself, don’t you?’ And that’s what Hushai did, and whether you think this was good Christian behaviour, I must leave you to decide and then tell me later!
When Absalom saw Hushai coming, he said, ‘Fancy seeing you here, Hushai. I wouldn’t have expected you to come to my side.’ ‘Long live the king,’ said Hushai. That could be taken two ways—which king? And then he added, ‘As I have served in your father’s presence, so will I be in your presence’ (see 16:16–19 kjv). What did that mean? It could mean two things, ‘I have served your father loyally and I am going to serve you loyally.’ It meant the opposite, of course. ‘I served your father loyally in past days, and so shall I serve now—that is, I shall carry on serving David now loyally.’ It was doublespeak, really. Would you approve of Christians speaking in doublespeak? Well, anyway, Absalom summoned his two advisors. There was Ahithophel and there was Hushai. ‘Now, what shall we do, Ahithophel?’ says Absalom.
Ahithophel says, ‘The first thing you do is you take the royal harem of women that David’s left behind, spread them on the palace roof, and go in to them. That will be so shocking a thing to do that the people will see and conclude that there is no possibility of reconciliation, so they can’t afford to sit on the fence. They must join Absalom. That was clever, devilishly clever. ‘Then, with all speed, let me take a few select troops and follow after David before he gets lodged somewhere, and while he is feeling despondent and sorrowful and bewildered, we’ll come upon him and kill him. We’ll only need to kill him and the kingdom will be yours.’ And this advice seemed right in the eyes of Absalom and all the elders of Israel. What do you think of Absalom?
Absalom was on the point of obeying Ahithophel when he thought to check with Hushai.
Now, Hushai was one of these people that took an hour and a half to say something that could’ve been said in five minutes! He said, ‘Your Majesty, the advice of Ahithophel isn’t good at this time, actually. Everybody knows your father is a valiant man and very skilful at warfare, and he’s feeling like a bear bereft of her cubs and very sore and liable to be rather wild. By now he’s in some secret place or hiding already, ready for any attack, and when your men come they’ll be caught unexpectedly. He’ll kill them and the rumour will come home that there is massacre among the troops of Absalom, and all the people will come back to David. So you mustn’t go at once.’ (That was clever too, wasn’t it? Hushai was playing for time, for David to be able to get away far enough to be safe: hence all this business about not doing it at once.) ‘What you want to do, Your Majesty, if I may suggest it, is to send out messengers from Dan in the north to Beersheba in the south and raise an enormous great army.’ (That would take a lot of time as well, but the idea appealed to Absalom.) ‘You need to be at the head of a very big army, Absalom, as befits your station in life and your dignity: you don’t want a little troop of assassins going and doing the thing. No, you want to be the head of a big army and you will attack David and his men. If they run off and get in the city, then what you want to do is to take ropes and put them all round the city and pull the city into the river.’ What an outstanding civil engineering achievement that would be, and it would be in the news and television and everything else. Never was such a thing attempted before, and it was the great Absalom that did it! And Absalom said, ‘Ah, that’s the plan. I will adopt that.’
Hushai had played on Absalom’s vanity. Was he interested in justice, interested in the people’s welfare, interested in good government because he wanted to set up a regime that was more kindly to the people? No, he was interested in advancing his own self-pride, self-image and self-interest, and he fell for it under Hushai’s supposed advice. Now, I must leave that to you to tell me whether you approve; whether you would have done it if you had been in Hushai’s shoes. Would you have subtly appealed to his pride and got him to slit his own throat by his pride? Would you have done it? Well, you are going to tell me some time later!
But it worked, and as you know eventually David had time to rebuild his army and there came a battle. Absalom’s troops were defeated and Absalom himself was killed. So the exile was over, but not quite. Allow me to raise one or two more questions. How did David manage to come back? He was on the other side of the Jordan. He arrived with his troops on the east bank of Jordan. The first people to offer to take him back over the Jordan were not the Judahites but the Israelites, the ten tribes. Have you figured out why that would be? Why didn’t the Judahites come rushing down to meet him? For the simple reason that the Judahites had been head over heels on the side of Absalom, and one of the leading generals among the Judahites was a certain Amasa, and he had been appointed commander-in-chief of the forces of Absalom to destroy David. And now David had won, and was liable to cross that river and come to Hebron. You can imagine that people like Amasa had cold feet: what would happen if the king came? What would you have done, had you been David?
I can tell you what David did. He sent a note to the people of Hebron. ‘Why are you so slow in coming down to bring me back? You’re bone of my bone: you belong to my own family. Why are you slow?’ Well, obviously, they feared repercussions if he came back, and summary justice. So David said, ‘Please tell Amasa, commander-in-chief of Absalom’s forces, that I’m going to appoint him as commander-in-chief of my forces in the place of Joab.’ Really? It was Joab who had won the battle against Absalom for David, and generally speaking, David’s continuance to live depended on Joab.
Now David was going to reward Joab by demoting him and putting in his place the commander-in-chief of Absalom’s forces, who would willingly have carried out Absalom’s instructions and assassinated David! Would you approve of that tactic on David’s part? I think I know why he did it. If he had warned Amasa, ‘I’m coming, and you will know justice’, Amasa and the rest would have fought him to the last ditch. So he made it easy for them to surrender by saying that Amasa would be commander-in-chief of the army. How do you read it? Do you say it’s an example of how God makes it easy for sinners to repent and come over to the side of Christ: God doesn’t threaten them with judgment but offers them forgiveness and reconciliation, and that’s what David was doing to Amasa? Do you approve of it? If that was what David was doing to Amasa, had David taken the view that justice didn’t matter, and what Amasa had done was not sinful, or something? Or was it sheer political appeasement? We have been told in Ireland hundreds of times that what the people should be seeking is not justice but reconciliation, and therefore it would be right to have a man that had commanded the army of Sinn Fein and slaughtered thousands of people put in the government. They say that will lead to reconciliation, whereas justice is a difficult thing and only stirs up trouble.
What was David doing? Didn’t you tell me you believed everything David did was right, because he was God’s anointed? I wish I could take these chapters of David’s return, and use them as pictures of our Lord’s return. Do we not rightly sing,
Our Lord is now rejected, And by the world disowned, By the many still neglected, And by the few enthroned, But soon He’ll come in glory! The hour is drawing nigh, For the crowning day is coming by and by. 2
I would love to take these stories of David’s return and use them as examples of the way the Lord Jesus will behave when he becomes king. But am I not right in saying that when the New Testament describes the second coming, it talks about the judgment he will inflict—as well as our salvation that he will complete at his coming? And so I am in a quandary. You say to yourselves, ‘Why did we ask this man that doesn’t know what he believes, to come and talk to us who know well what we believe?’ Well, you were merciful with me, and you’ll tell me—after some study I hope—what I should think about these things!
I will say this, that when he came back he did reward some of his servants. And dear old Mephibosheth, when David learned the facts that Mephibosheth wanted to come and support him but his servant Ziba misled him and ran off without him, David changed what he had already said to Ziba and said, ‘You and Ziba divide the inheritance.’ That was an uneasy compromise, wasn’t it? Mephibosheth said, ‘My lord king, you have been so marvellous to me. I don’t care if I lose the lot, so long as you came again. That’s enough for me’ (19:24–30). And Barzillai the Gileadite, who had supported David in his exile, when David pressed him to return to Jerusalem, said, ‘Well, that’s kind of you, Your Majesty, but I’m a wealthy man myself and I’m gone deaf with old age and I can’t hear the singing women and all this modern music thing. It would be kinder of you to let me stay at home, rather than rewarding me with such a burden of pleasure as coming to court.’ So David did reward people when he came back.
Questions and not always answers
But if you ask, ‘Why do you bother to study these things and try to think out the answers?’ I tell you straight. I believe this passage of Scripture is inspired of God and is there for our learning. Therefore I believe it is our duty as believers, as best we can, to seek to understand God’s word and to profit by its understanding. So, once more, thank you for your patience.
Let us commit our study to the Lord.
Our Father, we thank thee for thy word. We thank thee for those parts that are simple, direct, straightforward and easy to be understood. We thank thee for them. They give us eternal solid hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. We thank thee also for treating us like grown-up sons and daughters. Thou art not afraid to discuss with us some of the practical problems of life’s complications, and these in particular in the history of David. Give us the strength to pursue our thinking and our study. Grant us the aid of thy Holy Spirit that we might be brought to understanding, and this not that we may know a great deal, but that we might be loyal to thy dear Son in the day of his rejection, and that our admiration of his character and ways may deepen into worship—worship begun here on earth that shall last for eternity. So dismiss us with thy blessing, we pray. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
2 D. W. Whittle (1840-1901), ‘The Crowning Day.’