King David

Hey, everyone.
Welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
Good to have you with us.
We hope that today’s discussion will be helpful.
We hope there’ll be some things in it that will be
thought-provoking for you.
We bite off a big chunk today as we think about the character David,
a story that arcs through several books,
major implications in the life of Israel.
Really,
Michael,
in lots of ways a bigger-than-life character,
a bigger-than-life story.
Yeah, that’s going to be a huge character for us to take on in our conversation today,
Clint.
But what’s interesting, and I’d be interested just to start this conversation,
as you’re joining with us,
I know that there’s lots of different experiences of Scripture.
Some here have really engaged in the Old Testament.
Maybe you’ve read all of these stories about David.
Some of you, maybe not.
Maybe you learned the story of David and Goliath,
and that’s really your David story.
Maybe you remember David and Bathsheba,
one of David’s lowest points in his life and journey.
But, you know, it’s interesting because David is this pivotal biblical character
in the Old Testament.
There’s not many, if anyone, who gets more time,
textual stories about them,
told in the Bible than David.
And yet,
there’s just this complicated,
nuanced kind of depiction
of who he is.
So, in all of the characters we talked about this far,
there’s just so much
content for David.
We’ll never be able to get to all of it.
There’s these little stories that
throw nuances and different colors and shades on David’s life and character.
And that need said,
this is not going to be an exhaustive conversation about who David was,
but regardless of whether
you know a lot of the David stories or not many of the David stories,
there is so much humanity in David,
there’s going to be something that all of us can relate to in today’s conversation.
Yeah, 100 percent, Michael.
And interestingly enough,
the Scripture both helps us and hurts
us in that I think it gives us,
David, from several perspectives,
the faith life of David,
the monarch, the ruling life as king,
probably maybe a life aspect that people are less familiar with,
this part of his story where he’s an outstanding military leader,
kind of a guerrilla
fighter, just a warrior,
a tremendous warrior.
Then we also have the aspects of David’s personal
life as a father and late in the story as things unravel.
And it can be very difficult to look
through those various lenses,
ruler,
statesman,
warrior,
man of faith,
and to try and balance
all of them.
And I think it’s a helpful conversation in that we get to look at a character who is
perhaps the most multifaceted,
arguably in the Old Testament.
Yeah, I think it would be easy for us to come to David with some swift judgments about ways that
he gets it right and gets it wrong,
sort of this metric that we’ve brought to these conversations
about the real people of faith.
I would really try to advise us to not do that as we have this
conversation with one another and with the text because Clint,
just take for instance the idea of
leadership.
You could say on one hand that David’s a great leader.
You look especially at some of
these military campaigns that he ran and the text makes it clear he was brilliant.
Then you look at
other places of leadership.
Some major stuff breaks down in administrative leadership of the
kingdom of Israel, this thing that he really pushes forward towards the end of his life.
We just see schisming.
And so you would point to that as an example of some lack of leadership.
So I think this is where the scripture is just so helpful,
is it’s not out to paint
one picture of a person.
It is trying to lift up these very discordant voices and anyone who
has spent some time being self-reflective, Clint,
knows that that’s in all of us.
Yeah, and we will circle back around to this because I think we see it so clearly in David Michael.
But here is a character in some moments shines because of his traits and in other moments
fall short because of the very same traits.
In many instances our strengths can also be our
strengths. But before we jump into the stories,
we could try to set an overarching idea of some of
those traits.
What are the things that seem to be true throughout these various narratives of David
in regard to his personality?
I would say to start with he’s brash or impulsive.
I mean, we’re going right away in the Goliath story.
We see this young man who goes to a camp full of warriors and says,
“What?
Nobody will fight that guy?
I’ll do it.” He tends to leap first and look second.
Yeah, another word.
In fact, the first word that came to mind,
Clint, was brash.
So I want to add yes.
But there’s a fine line,
isn’t there, between brash, impulsive, and courageous.
He’s also courageous.
I mean, there are moments when David goes head first and in those moments
embodies the best of even being king.
The fact that I’m not going to ask any of my men to do
something I’m not willing to do.
Now,
we’re going to see that reversed as well.
But I do think
he does have, in those words, brash and impulsive, he does have this sort of thing,
act first,
think later.
But he does also have a self-sacrificial side of him where he’s willing
to put his life on the line for those he cares about.
Yeah, and then later we’ll see him jump into a situation where I’d have to say,
because of his impulsivity,
it leads him to cowardice.
Yes.
Instead of facing the truth of his actions,
he has to try and hide them.
And so that impulsivity,
I think we see the best of it in his story,
and we see the worst of it.
The second thing I might
point to, and this is a little more difficult to pin down in the story,
but it appears to me,
we have in David a character who is very charismatic.
He draws others to himself.
We’re told that he’s handsome.
We’re told that he’s ruddy.
He looks like a king.
He is a ruler.
He grows into that a little bit.
Maybe Samuel doesn’t recognize it right away.
But we see a person who others seem to react to.
He’s noticeable, let’s say that.
I think you’ve also got a trace through his story.
He’s committed.
He’s devoted might be the right word.
David does not always get things right.
And yet David is quick to return
to God to offer confession,
to offer thanksgiving, to offer praise.
I mean, let’s not pass by the fact
that the Psalms are almost exclusively attributed to David’s writing.
So let’s not forget the
this is a man who scripturally we are encouraged to know was just this wellspring of lament,
of joy, of confession.
So he was very devoted to his understanding of faith and God’s presence
with him, and that was a theme throughout his life.
Yeah, and even in those things,
Michael, I think we could read David,
again, particularly in those warrior texts and forget that this is a man with an amazing ability to apparently at least
connect with his own emotions.
He plays a musical instrument.
He writes music.
He writes poetic lyrics.
I mean, he’s not just some kind of gorilla out there fighting battles.
There’s a depth to him.
And at his best,
that depth is always anchored in who he understands himself to be before God.
He seems maybe until the very end of his story and maybe never to have forgotten that God has given
him so much of what he experiences.
And he seems at his best,
as we all are,
genuinely grateful and deeply affected by it.
Yeah, and in some ways,
the beginning of his story,
Clint, is a great point to turn there.
I mean, David was not in the farm team of Israel kings,
right?
I mean, there was no sense in which David was sort of primed and cut for that job.
What we actually have is the people visual.
I think this context matters a little bit here, Clint.
You got to know that really in the Old Testament,
a king for the nation of Israel is really cast as an accommodation.
Or to say it differently,
God concedes to the people that they can have a king.
The people are just begging.
They want to be like the nations around them.
And God would much rather
it that they would just trust God to be their leader.
And that is not a thing that the people accept.
So God concedes to a king.
Saul is chosen as a king.
And there’s this long and tumultuous
relationship that intertwines Saul and David.
And we won’t have time for all of that.
But it’s worth noting here that this is early even in the idea of monarchy for the people of Israel,
really, with a rough transition between Saul and David.
And so David gets chosen out of this lot of brothers.
Samuel, the prophet,
gets told by God,
there’s this king.
By the way, Saul is king when this happens.
Hey, I have the next king of Israel waiting.
You’re going to go find him.
You need to go out and you’re going to find him in Jesse’s house.
So Samuel comes out and we have this really
interesting selection story that happens at the beginning here.
Yeah. And then David and Saul
intertwine.
And there’s this moment where David is playing the liar and that soothes Saul.
And then we really kind of, I think,
pick up the pace of this story,
Michael, when we get to David and Goliath.
And again,
while this is a story about David in the background of this story,
really many places in the foreground of this story,
this is ultimately a story about God.
And who else decides I’ll take the youngest son of a shepherd family and that’s the guy,
that’s the next king.
And so we begin to see what God sees in David as we move to the David and Goliath story.
You all know that,
or at least know enough of it to work our way through it.
David shows up at the camp.
He starts asking around.
His brothers scold him.
But interesting, David is also a man of ambition.
His question is what will be done for the person who fights Goliath?
And he sounds like there’s a pretty good reward.
He says, “I’ll do it.”
There’s a lot of neat things in this story,
Michael, but I think my favorite is that moment where
David is fitted with the very king’s armor,
the best armor in the camp.
And then he leaves it
beside and he says,
“You know, God has always been with me.
God has helped me.
This stuff is hindering me.” And that incredible moment where he takes the trappings of security and protection,
and he just lays them in the dirt to let God be his protection.
And whatever else we can say about David,
in that moment, he is such a stunning example to the rest of us who believe that it
is the things of life that sort of protect us and define us.
And in David’s willingness to drop
those things by the river and go meet Goliath,
we see a tremendous sermon.
Absolutely.
I think that this is a fascinating story,
Clint. And it’s fascinating to me,
having young kids, I’ve read a whole lot of beginner’s Bibles.
I mean, I cannot tell you
the number of different versions of this story I’ve read.
And this is a thing that stuck out to me
is there are not many stories that get included in children’s Bibles that involve people being killed.
And this is in every children’s Bible.
And it has made me wonder why is that?
And I think one
of the reasons is, first of all,
this story is so out of the ordinary.
It is just one of those
scriptural stories that that just strikes you when you hear it.
But I think another thing is
here you have a boy,
a child performing as the king should have done.
Right.
And that is, I think, fundamentally,
that is the good news that gets told to kids in the retellings of this is
that God can use young people.
And I think that that’s one way which this story
is just amazingly powerful because it reminds us that even though we tell this as David and Goliath,
it’s really God winning over Goliath.
And that’s the whole point is that God chooses to act in
David’s life in a way that no child could be expected to pull off on their own.
Yeah.
In fact, I’ve preached this text.
And one of the things I’ve been compelled to say is that
when you read this text outside the lens of faith,
it looks like David is the underdog.
But when you understand the text,
it’s Goliath who never had a chance.
Right.
Because he’s not fighting David.
He’s fighting the living God.
And it’s wonderful.
And David alone remembers that in the camp.
David is the one who says,
“How dare this Philistine defy the Lord?” And it’s this wonderful story about a young man who
remembers what all of the other supposedly brave and faithful men have forgotten that
strength ultimately isn’t their ability, but God’s presence.
And David’s story could not,
I think literally could not get off to a better start.
No.
In this one story,
we see Saul for the king that he is.
We see David for the characteristics
that he has, and we see God working in the way that God said he was going to this amulet.
This is literally,
there’s a reason why David is the best king of Israel.
I mean, this is the best story that you could have.
Yeah.
And then we get David sort of moving into that circle of the royal family.
And it happens in two ways,
one positive and one negative, I would say.
On the positive side,
David and Saul’s son, Jonathan,
formed this incredible connection.
They become the very best of friends,
that there’s a bond between them that is amazing,
incredible.
In fact,
there have been times that it’s made people uncomfortable,
the way that they speak of one another.
But on the negative side,
there is a growing tension between David and Saul as
Saul gets increasingly jealous.
As David’s reputation grows and people celebrate what he’s doing,
Saul begins to feel sidelined.
And in fact, even in fits of rage, I think,
at least once, maybe twice, I think,
lashes out trying to kill David.
Yeah.
As that story goes on,
Clint, we begin to learn that really Saul is exerting anger at David
that is misplaced anger at God because God has moved this process of David taking the kingship.
And the text is clear that Saul isn’t going to hold on to it.
And so it ends for Saul on the battlefield.
And David lives into his own gifts as a warrior.
And really, it pushes forward in his story.
Yeah.
And so again, this is one of those sections we probably won’t be able to
spend a lot of time in.
It’s several chapters of the kind of David’s rise and Saul’s decline.
And David has the opportunity to exact vengeance on Saul.
He doesn’t.
He’s merciful.
And then in fact,
when he finds out that someone has killed Saul,
he has that man killed because
as a enforcer of the order of the monarchy,
that person has committed a crime,
which has always seemed to me a strange story because it benefited David so much.
And at that time,
David and Saul were essentially in open conflict.
Yeah.
And yet,
David does this thing where he kind of ties up the
ends.
And I don’t know if that’s a political thing or if that’s a character thing,
but it’s a strange story.
Then we move really into the sphere of David’s work as king,
David’s office as king,
and leadership.
Again,
these stories, they drag on a little bit with some of the
administrative work that David has to do.
But probably I would think in the context of what
most of us would need to understand,
David’s move of the capital from Judah to Jerusalem
is of significant importance in the scope of the story.
Not only for David personally,
though, it’s an interesting story and we’ll unpack it a little bit,
but nationally, this is an important moment,
but not an easy moment.
No. Well,
David is doing what any leader in his position would
find an impossible task,
and that’s to unite disparate people with differing ideas and differing values.
I mean,
you’ve got the 12 tribes as we know them going back historically,
but you have more than that.
You have these alliances with foreign nations.
You have the outstanding
hostilities that he inherits from Saul’s time in leadership.
David is managing a lot of different
opposing fronts,
and he’s doing that with the tools of that day,
Clint.
Not all of those are
military.
Some of those are marriages.
He’s trying to strike the right balance of marrying
the right people and getting the right alliances out of that,
and some of that is religious.
He’s going to move the ark after he moves the city of Jerusalem.
That’s a significant religious
movement.
He’s trying to make the monarchy sustainable.
I mean, really, the people of Israel didn’t get it right administratively with Saul.
They never really had wind behind them,
and David is trying to get them there,
and it’s tough work.
Yeah, I think you’d have to argue that David brings to the throne a much larger vision
than did Saul.
And David sees that if the capital could be relocated to Jerusalem,
which is more central,
has a better sense of the northern tribes and the southern tribes,
just a better flow in terms of a place from which to rule and a city to make central.
And so, militarily,
he does the work.
As a statesman, he does the work.
What’s very interesting, I think, is he also does some of that work almost as a priest.
He understands that really what needs
to happen is that the ark of the covenant needs to be there.
In fact, he offers to build a temple.
God says, “No,
you’re a warrior, not a builder,
and another one will build the temple.”
But there’s this wonderful story.
And here in which I think maybe is the first major
story that I can think of in the David cycle,
Michael, where David, he gets a lesson.
His impulsivity and his natural tendency to jump first,
get him in a little trouble.
So what happens is he takes the ark of the covenant and he has it moved,
but he doesn’t have it moved the way
that it’s supposed to be moved,
which is carried on poles.
He puts it on a cart.
He doesn’t really give it the respect,
and it ends up being a disaster.
Someone touches the ark,
a man named Uzzah, that man dies.
Well, that really squashes kind of the excitement of a parade,
and David
has to send the ark over halfway along the route,
and it just kind of sticks it in a farmhouse,
in a barn almost,
and then goes back and sulks for a while.
Well, yeah, the Bible sometimes can say these things in a way that you could never summarize.
It just says David was afraid of the Lord that day.
That’s the understatement of the century.
You watch a guy drop dead because of a choice that you made to put on the cart.
The guy is trying to
keep it up there,
and yeah, it’s worth noting that David is,
he’s trying to lead the people forward,
and yet he’s also willing to cut corners,
and if we know anything about the God of Israel,
we know that God is not interested in corner cutting.
God is interested in you fulfilling the full
responsibilities and expectations, and that was not something that David did in this instance.
Yeah, and I think it’s fair to say that David learns a very hard lesson
being that when you treat God as a political tool,
you wish you hadn’t.
Now, nevertheless,
he tries again,
this time more respectful.
I love the second version of the story.
I think it says
that they took six steps,
and then they stopped and worshipped,
and then you kind of imagine
nobody wanted to be on carrying the ark job.
But as David comes into Jerusalem,
again, there’s this character story that we see,
and David,
the excitement, and keep in mind,
this is the king of Israel,
and he’s so caught up in this moment that it says he danced,
and he was basically wearing kind of an undercloth that says he lost his robe or took off his robe,
and he danced, and I think I have it right,
Michael, it says he danced with all his might
before the Lord.
He simply, he loses himself in this moment of celebration,
of pure joy,
and
I think it’s hard,
there are different ways you could read this,
but I don’t read this,
maybe you have a different opinion.
I don’t read this as political.
In other words, I don’t think he does it because people are watching him.
I think he’s genuinely swept up
in the joy of this moment, this accomplishment,
this fulfillment of what he’s been trying to do,
and I think he simply genuinely is overcome with it and dances.
This is one of the things about the Bible that I just find so incredible,
Clint is these unflattering stories that get told,
and I really mean that.
If you read in,
this is 2 Samuel 6 is where the story is,
and I’m looking here at verse 21,
I mean, his wife who watches this comes to him and says,
“Why in the world did you embarrass yourself
in front of all of the people?” I mean,
she very clearly perceived it as being a shameful act of
who couldn’t keep his clothes on,
and Clint, I think what’s fascinating about this is
David was king of Israel.
He had aspirations to do more than any king of Israel had ever done,
really to create a kingdom that had not yet,
prior to that time, not even existed,
and yet,
he’s a guy who’s not full of himself enough to be willing to dance before the Lord,
to get caught up
in worship, to lose himself,
and to not be thinking about what the subjects might be thinking,
right?
The people of Israel might be thinking,
and I think that’s a beautiful thing to hold
in tension.
A man who very clearly driven by authority,
power,
by continuing to administrate as a king,
and yet also someone who believes in this relationship with the living God,
who gets swept away in a moment of worship and ecstasy,
these two things are maybe,
they would too, most of us, be assumed to be opposing,
but they’re held in tension here in the text.
Yeah, and certainly for Presbyterians who are probably not known for our losing ourself in
dancing.
We don’t often lose ourselves in the pews.
Yeah, that’s fair.
It’s likely that maybe
we live more on one side of that fence than the other,
but I do think we see in David that moment
of getting swept up in joy,
and I read it as genuine,
and I think it’s a very interesting
text.
You know, his wife,
who by the way is Saul’s daughter,
is one of two people that I can think of
who called David to account,
and we’ll see the other one here in a moment,
but it’s very interesting
because to her, he responds without embarrassment, without accountability,
saying, “Look, I danced before God, and I have no apologies to make.” In the second time that he’s confronted,
it pulls the rug out from him.
It guts him, and he feels the weight of it.
So again,
I think one of the marks
of a faithful leader is that they can hear criticism when it’s valid,
and we can maybe
revisit that, but there are those two moments.
So the next major arc of the story,
Michael, I suspect, again, people are going to be familiar with this,
David and Vasheba,
and there are lots
of ways to read this story and lots of people from different perspectives put different spins on it.
In regard to the David portion of the story,
let’s start with this.
The chapter opens in the spring of the year when the kings go to battle.
David sent Joab with his officers,
and he remained in Jerusalem.
So it’s the text’s subtle way of saying,
“When most kings go with their armies,
he stayed behind.” And staying behind,
he’s looking around one day, he sees a woman,
she’s on the roof,
which isn’t as strange as it sounds because there was
often a bathing tub so that water would warm up during the day.
And since almost no one would
have lived in a building with more than one story,
that’s not a problem.
David can see, and he sees this woman,
and he has her brought.
And Vasheba gets a tough reputation at times.
There’s really nothing in the story that indicates she had anything to do with it.
Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t,
lots of speculation.
But what we do know is that David as the king
abuses his authority at the very least in having a married woman come to the castle
where they have an affair,
what part she plays in it initially is lost to us,
but David is certainly guilty.
And the sort of soap opera moment,
he gets word that she’s pregnant.
And by the way,
her husband serves in the army,
he’s not there.
Let’s make that clear.
Her husband’s doing the work that the text begins by saying that David
should have been doing.
Right. So that’s, that’s not a very cleverly hidden insult.
David does find out that Vasheba is pregnant.
He is terrified of what that means because he has
not only abused his authority,
but he’s also done this against a very respected man in his own military.
So he comes up with this sort of sly plan.
This is the kind of thing that you expect
to see in a movie almost,
right?
He thinks, okay, I need to get him back here.
He’s going to come
to the palace.
I’m going to get him drunk.
I’m going to send him home to his wife.
He’s going to have relations with her.
And then he’s going to just assume it’s his child and problem solved.
Nice and tidy little bow,
except that’s not how the story goes.
No.
So Uriah is an interesting character.
He comes back.
He meets with David.
He goes home, but he doesn’t go into his house.
He sleeps right on the doorstep threshold.
And David says, what are you doing?
Your wife’s home.
Get in there.
And Uriah says, I won’t do that.
Again,
this is the backdrop of David not going to war.
Uriah says,
while my comrades are out on the battlefield,
I will not have pleasure
and warmth and meals in the comfort of my home.
Far be it from me.
And so he has this moment of
integrity and honor, which only highlights is lacking in David in these moments.
So now it gets worse.
David has this secret.
It’s gotten bigger and it goes from bad to worse.
So you probably know this story.
David is now getting desperate and he takes the next more desperate step.
And he essentially,
through military means, plots to have Uriah killed.
He actually sends the orders for Uriah’s death with Uriah, ironically,
onto the battlefield.
He literally carries with him his death sentence.
And the general,
Joab,
he complies with those
orders and it results in Uriah’s death.
And it’s at that point then that David,
the way is clear
for him to take Bathsheba into his…
Yeah, moves Bathsheba in.
She goes through the period of
mourning, who’s going to fuss over a few weeks either way,
and especially when the king’s involved.
And David’s thinking,
dodge the bullet.
I had to manage this problem.
That’s too bad, but we’re okay now.
It’s all under the rug.
And then there’s a prophet named Nathan.
He comes and he confronts David.
You can read that in chapter 12 if you want,
but the short version is
that he tells David a story.
David is outraged by the story.
And then Nathan springs the trap on
him and says, “Well, you’re the man the story’s about and you’re guilty.” And it just floors
David.
It crushes him.
And that’s often the case,
right, Michael?
We hide a secret
and so much energy goes into hiding it that when it’s out,
sometimes there’s relief, but all of those things we’ve been denying,
all of the wrongness that we’ve been trying to push off,
it all lands at once.
And it just nearly destroys David.
If you want to read the response,
you can check out Psalm 51.
That’s traditionally thought to have been a writing that David did after this moment.
And it becomes a season of repentance for David.
It does.
It also becomes a sea change moment in his life.
We really should not understate.
This prophet says,
“Therefore the sword shall never depart from your house,
for you have despised
me.” Speaking for the Lord here.
Thus says the Lord,
“I will raise up trouble against you from
within your own house.” Immediately following this,
David does express just unbelievable,
almost inconsolable grief.
And he seeks to be able to confess what he has done.
But this mark is never going to leave David’s story from this point on.
In many ways, there’s pre-Bathsheba and post-Bathsheba,
and post this time,
we’re going to see this internal
affairs of David’s life begin to schism from here on out.
Yeah. And if you read this story,
this is chapter 12 of 2 Samuel.
I will warn you,
there’s a very troubling part of the text where as a punishment for David’s act,
this child doesn’t survive.
And there’s no easy way around that in the story that it seems
like an innocent pays the price of David’s sin.
And I do think that that’s part of the lesson.
I do think that’s part of the intention here, Michael.
Also, there’s simply no way in the
context of the story that a child of sin and adultery and murder is going to be the firstborn
heir to the king.
And there’s no way to make that comfortable as a reader,
but it is a painful part of the story.
And the text ties it directly to David’s action.
So to your point,
not only is there pain and suffering through his family life coming down the road,
it happens immediately.
It begins right away.
And so the next son born to David is Solomon,
and this is Bathsheba’s child again.
And so Solomon, as you may know,
will go on to be
the king, but he’s not the only son.
There are a couple of others,
one in particular named Absalon.
And here,
as we move toward the latter part of David’s story, Michael,
we really see some of this fracturing within the family come to the surface.
And what it does
is, in a family context,
because of David being the king,
it does also in a national context.
Yeah, 100%.
This is,
in many ways,
the struggle that every monarch is working to overcome,
right?
How do you transfer power to the next generation in a way that is sustainable for the kingdom?
And as we know, throughout history,
right,
that transfer of powership is a very delicate
process.
And then often,
when you have someone who moves the kingdom forward into uncharted
territory, that first transfer is particularly difficult because David is,
you mentioned earlier in our conversation, he’s a charismatic individual.
He has lots of gifts that he brings to the table
that the children may not.
And Absalon is really cast as an individual driven by rage and anger.
There is some sense in here that of reconciling and moving the kingdom forward.
But at least as
I read his character, Clint,
there is a lot of pent up anger being expressed throughout this story.
And it begins to sort of move in shape as Absalon tries to take over the throne from David.
In fact, David is ejected from Jerusalem or David leaves Jerusalem in the midst of this infighting.
It becomes a hotbed.
And there’s some questions,
I think, sort of subtly thrown into the text.
Is the kingdom going to make this transition?
Yeah, Absalon,
is it a stretch to say harbor some hatred toward David?
There’s an incident involving
a daughter of David who is raped and David for kind of semi-political, semi-family relationships
doesn’t punish the perpetrator of that rape.
And Absalon,
I think, never forgives David for that.
And that animosity grows,
that seed bears fruit,
and he essentially revolts and tries to take the
throne.
And father and son go to war.
And for Absalon’s part,
he’s committed to win.
For David’s part,
he’s conflicted because while he certainly doesn’t want to lose the throne and he does want
to defend the nation,
he doesn’t want to attack his son.
And there’s a poignant moment where,
from the text perspective,
David chooses his son over what’s best for Israel.
And really, in that moment,
probably, I would say,
even in spite of the Bathsheba stuff,
I would argue that in the text,
that seems to be the low point of his reign.
Yeah, in many ways, you could see that
as the moment when the strands most come untied.
I mean, fundamentally,
that promise or that threat
or that prophecy that Nathan offered becomes lived out.
And, you know,
interestingly,
you’re going to see later some of those same strands in Solomon,
David’s next son.
You’re going to see the same kind of unraveling happening.
So, you have the sins of one
generation in some ways passing on to the generations that follow.
Yeah.
And there is a moment at the end, Absalon is defeated,
and David mourns and his generals
and his military people,
they feel betrayed because he’s more sad over the death of an enemy
than he is happy, I guess,
about their work and about victory and about securing the nation of Israel.
And it’s not the moment David goes out on,
which is good, but I do think it’s the low point
of the moment.
Now, in terms of the very end of the story,
how David is remembered,
if you read the book of 2 Samuel,
the ending is all praise.
It’s songs about David’s greatness,
about the men that he fought with,
about the ones that he conquered,
about his prowess as a warrior.
All in all, for all the ups and downs of David’s life, Michael,
I think scripture is largely
undeterred in lifting David up as a great hero in the faith.
Yes.
And quite frankly, it does so without apologizing.
It doesn’t apologize for David’s actions.
And let me say that differently.
Scripture is not interested in telling the
parts where David got wrong and then massaging them to make it seem like that was the only
choice he had or he acted in wisdom and figured it out.
No,
scripture is just laying David out
for the person who he was.
And it is in that that you can see really the writers of scripture,
their affection for David.
And I think fundamentally where we start this conversation and where it’s
fitting, I think, for us to come to as we start thinking about these larger themes,
Clint, is that fundamentally David is one of those examples par excellence of where your strengths
are simultaneously your weaknesses.
The thing that drives you forward and makes you effective
is simultaneously your kryptonite.
And the thing that has the ability to destroy you.
And the thing that I think makes David such an admirable character is that
even though he was a fully human person
with both strengths and weaknesses,
he did so with a honest,
heartfelt, sincere devotion to God.
Whether he got it right or got it wrong,
he praised God
and he confessed his wrongdoing and he stayed connected to the one who he believed called him.
Yeah, I think maybe two snippets to put that in context, Michael.
The 22nd chapter is entirely
a song of David’s thanksgiving.
And then there’s another brief psalm of praise that is recorded in
the 23rd chapter of 2 Samuel as David’s last words.
And so the idea that this person
goes out with this song of praise,
this song of thanksgiving that is,
well, what here?
53 verses,
51 verses, excuse me.
And that that’s ultimately David’s last word is thanksgiving and praise.
And there’s another moment back in that Bathsheba text where the child born to Bathsheba
after their adultery is sick and David fasts and he wears sackcloth and people begin to worry about
him that he may be crazy.
And then they worry even more when the child dies and David goes
and showers up and cleans up and comes back and now he seems normal and they say, “What happened?”
And he says,
“I thought that God might listen,
but now that the child has died,
what more could I do?” And again,
that’s a hard text for us to read.
But for David,
it’s a moment of acceptance.
God has acted and we live with it,
that even this thing,
there’s not anger from David.
He accepts the fault of it.
And he says,
“God made a choice and
there’s nothing I can do about it,” and continues to be able to praise God later in his life,
which those who have been through deep,
painful valleys know that these kind of songs of thanksgiving
are hard-won trophies.
Right.
I think you can really put David maybe into focus if you recognize
how many themes he combines that we’ve already seen.
I think characters like Jacob and Esau
are a really strong example of this idea of the family that’s in conflict.
You have someone like Joshua,
who’s a military general who does what God calls them to do.
He’s faithful.
He’s militarily
able to move the people forward.
David combines all of that.
David has many of these different aspects, skill sets,
and yet Clint,
wouldn’t you have to say the guy who so much of the Psalms are
attributed to, you also have to factor he in many ways.
I don’t know if I maybe need to think through
this more.
In many ways, you have Moses who stands between God and the people.
Really,
in many ways, David is the next person in that line to bear all of that in the same way that Moses did.
I mean,
he does in many ways with the ark coming back to Jerusalem,
sort of stand in that intermediary
way.
Yeah, I think that’s fair, Michael.
And I believe there’s a line somewhere in this
story where it says that David is a man after God’s own heart.
One of the things I appreciate
about the David story you alluded to a moment ago is we are not forced in this corner to try and
make David one thing or the other.
I very much appreciate that the Scripture leaves for us
the best moments and the worst moments to somehow reconcile ourselves and doesn’t try to clean one
up.
It doesn’t make him all bad.
It doesn’t make him all good.
It makes him human.
And in some cases, human bigger than life,
but he’s the king.
And we have this narrative in which we’re not
forced into this false place of trying to either make him perfect
or say that he’s a scoundrel that somehow gets lucky and gets to rule.
He is both a talented,
brilliant,
insightful,
emotional, wonderful man,
and a man who did horrific things
when they served him because he had the power to do so.
And I like that the Bible
asks us to deal with both of those,
and the history of David asks us to deal with both.
I think that feels human to me.
And I think that’s where this text turns towards us,
realistically.
Far too many of us,
I think, walk around thinking that Christianity
is displaying a certain set of ideas that we’ve accumulated of what a Christian is, as if
a perfect Christian life is one of which we always look consistently perfect to the world.
David blows that up.
I mean, David is the guy who dances in Jerusalem half naked,
right?
But he does so in devotion to God.
I think Jesus’ words to the Pharisees help us here, right?
That he accused them of being whitewashed tombs,
the idea that they look good on the outside,
but on the inside,
they were empty.
Realistically, we all know of our human frailty.
We all know that our story is
filled with moments where we got it right,
moments where we got it wrong,
moments where we could do
nothing but thank God for the blessings of that day.
And all of us can point to a time when all
that we had were words of mourning and grief and sadness,
or maybe put differently,
we had other moments where there’s moments where we got it wrong.
And the only thing we could say or do is
confess the guilt of that.
And friends, if that is you and everyone who’s with us today,
we find ourselves somewhere in that.
The good news of David’s story is that God is right there with you in your journey,
that God is ready to accept your confession and to give you grace.
God is willing to receive your praise and to continue to lead you forward in your life.
So instead of trying
to fashion ourselves as people of faith into the mold of what we think that should look like,
I think we would all be helped to simply recognize the truth of who we are and in that allow God to lead us forward.
Yeah, and I find this true.
It’s a bias of mine and I want to confess that,
but I think we see in David an example of it.
I’m struck in David’s story by the reality that our
strengths are so often also our weaknesses and that the very things that made David great in his
moments of faith led him to his downfall in the moments where he turned to self instead of God.
That the same man who steps out on the battlefield with five rocks and a sling against the most feared
warrior of his day sees a woman on a rooftop and is feeling restless and chases the wrong path.
That the same man who writes Psalm 51,
“Have mercy upon me,
God, for I see my iniquity,” writes
Psalm 23 in the shadow of the valley of death.
And maybe no greater tribute could be given to David
than to say if you read the Psalms that are attributed to him,
they span the entirety
of one’s experiences in life and in faith.
And ultimately, I think it makes him a fascinating
character from which we can learn so much.
And that’s not to excuse what he did.
It’s just simply to say,
I think in David,
again, we see a person who is in his best moments led by
God and in his worst led by self to places that cost him dearly.
And I hate to make this sound
like a broken record as you’ve been joining with us in these conversations, but fundamentally,
that’s because this is God’s story.
It’s God’s story and David gets some time in it.
And fundamentally, that’s true of us that we are living in God’s story,
and we get a little bit of time in
it.
And we’re invited to give our devotion to God in this time and to let God work in our stories.
Yeah, I think it’s helpful.
Way many, many years ago, way back, I read something to the effect of
that the Bible is the biography of God and don’t get caught up in the other characters.
All of the other characters matter,
but when you look at start to finish what the Bible is trying
to tell us, it’s God, it’s exactly that, Michael, as you said,
it’s the story of God.
Well, friends, we’re grateful that you continue to join us as we’ve explored these characters
in as we go throughout.
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Yeah.
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