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Let us begin our study this evening by reading in the second book of Samuel and chapter uh fourteen. Second book of Samuel, chapter fourteen. I read from the Revised Version, and you will occasionally notice differences that are important. Now, Joab the son of Zeruiah perceived that the king's heart was toward Absalom. And Joab sent to Decur and fetched thence a wise woman and said unto her, I pray thee, feign thyself to be a mourner and put on mourning apparel.
I pray thee, and anoint not thyself with oil, but be as a woman that had a long time mourned for the dead. And go into the king and speak on this manner unto him. So Joab put the words in her mouth. And when the woman of Tekoa spake to the king, she fell on her face to the ground and did obeisance, and said, Help, O king. The king said unto her, What aileth thee? And she answered, Of a truth I am a widow woman, and mine husband is dead.
And thine handmaid had two sons, and they strove together in the field, and there was none to part them. But the one smote the other and killed him. And behold, the whole family is risen against thine handmaid, and they said, deliver him that smote his brother, that we may kill him for the life of his brother whom he slew. And so, destroy the heir also. Thus shall they quench my coal which is left, and shall leave to my husband neither name nor remainder upon the face of the earth.
And the king said unto the woman, Go to thine house, and I will give charge concerning thee. The woman of Takkur said unto the king, My lord, O king, the iniquity be on me and on my father's house, and the king and his throne be guiltless. The king said, Whosoever saith aught unto thee, bring him to me, and he shall not touch thee anymore. Then said she, I pray thee, let the king remember the Lord thy God, that the avenger of blood destroy not anymore, lest they destroy my son. He said, as the Lord liveth, there shall not one hair of thy son fall to the earth.
Then the woman said, let thine handmaid, I pray thee, speak a word unto my lord the king. And he said, say on. And the woman said, wherefore then hast thou devised such a thing against the people of God? For in speaking this word, the king is as one which is guilty, in that the king does not fetch home again his banished one. For we must needs die, and are as water spilt on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again. Neither does God take away life. That deviseth means that he that is banished be not an outcast from him.
Now therefore, seeing that I am come to speak this word unto my lord the king, it is because the people have made me afraid. Thine handmaid said, I will now speak unto the king. It may be that the king will perform the request of his servant. For the king will hear to deliver his servant out of the hand of the man that would destroy me and my son together out of the inheritance of the Lord. Then thine handmaid said, let I pray thee the word of my lord the king be comfortable, for as an angel of God, so is my lord the king to discern good and bad, and the Lord thy God be with thee.
Then the king answered and said unto the woman, Hide not from me, I pray thee, aught that I shall ask thee. And the woman said, Let the Lord, let my lord the king now speak. And the king said, Is the hand of Joab with thee in all this? The woman answered and said, As thy soul liveth, my lord the king, none can turn to the right hand or to the left from aught that my lord the king has spoken. For thy servant Joab, he bad me, and he put all these words in the mouth of thine handmaid. To change the face of the matter hath thy servant Joab done this thing, and my lord is wise according to the wisdom of an angel of God to know all things that are in the earth.
And the king said unto Joab, Behold, now I have done this thing. Go therefore, bring the young man Absalom again. And Joab fell to the ground on his face and did obeisance and blessed the king. And Joab said, Today thy servant knoweth that I have found grace in thy sight, my lord, O king, in that the king has performed the request of his servant. So Joab arose and went to Geshur and brought Absalom to Jerusalem. And the king said, let him turn to his own house, but let him not see my face. So Absalom turned to his own house and saw not the king's face.
Verse twenty eight: And Absalom dwelt two full years in Jerusalem, and he saw not the king's face. Then Absalom sent for Joab to send him to the king, but he would not come to him. And he sent again a second time, but he would not come. Therefore he said unto his servants, See, Joab's field is near mine, and he has barley there. Go and set it on fire. And Absalom's servants set the field on fire. Then Joab arose and came to Absalom unto his house and said unto him, Wherefore have thy servants set my field on fire? And Absalom answered Joab, Behold, I sent unto thee, saying, Come hither, that I may send thee to the king to say, Wherefore am I come from Gezer?
It were better for me to be still there. Now therefore, let me see the king's face, and if there be iniquity in me, let him kill me. So Joab came to the king and told him. And when he had called for Absalom, he came to the king and bowed himself on his face to the ground before the king. And the king kissed Absalom. The Lord give us good understanding of his word. We begin this evening our study of the second part in the life and reign of King David.
To consider there the problems that confronted him in the middle age of his life and of his reign. Last week we were, in a very rough and ready fashion, considering the first part of David's life as king, and found that the problems that then beset him were problems largely to do with the takeover of power, and therefore concerned with the question of methods, and by what means do you acquire power? And the question of source, from what source would you be willing to accept power and support?
And finally, the motives, for what motives would you wish for power? But now this evening we move on, as I say, to David's middle period, where no longer it is a question of where do you get power from, or why would you wish for power, or what method will you use in obtaining power? For David now is a middle-aged man. He's a very successful king. He is, I suspect, a little bit portly now compared with his youth, and not only that, he feels he has arrived. His kingdom is secure indeed at this stage.
His kingdom was advancing and was bidding fair to become one of the leading empires in the then Middle East, and could have become, had God allowed it, a rival to such kingdoms as Babylon and Persia themselves. But now David was secure. It is a question, therefore, not of how did you get power, but how did you use it? And on what principles would you maintain your power once you had gotten it? Now, when we begin this question at first, we shall find that it contains a whole series of what we could loosely describe as love stories.
Very questionable stories, some of them, but they will force our consideration of this question of love and make us ask what exactly the term love means. What is genuine love? Then as we proceed, we shall find that David became involved in a very difficult case of discipline. One of his sons by the name of Absalom murdered one of his half-brothers and then ran away in order to escape punishment.
Which raised eventually the whole question of whether David would insist on punishment, or whether eventually and with time he would bring the man back without any punishment. And we shall hear the case pleaded that punishment in and of itself is a senseless and a useless and a destructive thing, and ought to be put aside in the name of love and charity. That, as you will see, will raise again some very large questions. What is the relation of love to punishment and punishment to love?
We shall see David won over by the, what you might call the permissive argument on punishment, and foregoing all punishment, we shall see him bring Absalom home again. Now we shall detect there some uneasiness in David's behavior, for while Absalom was, uh, brought back again, he was not allowed for a while to see the king of Spain. And you may well come to consider, when you ponder it, that a reconciliation that will bring a man home but not allow him to see the king's face, nor grant him entry into the king's presence, is a very funny kind of reconciliation.
And that in itself will raise the big question, what do you mean by reconciliation anyway? And can you have true and sound reconciliation if there is neither repentance nor punishment? Finally, we shall see David come to one of the greatest sorrows in all his life, when the son whom he had brought back and excused all punishment turned around and led a revolt against his father and nearly turned his father completely off his world. But then sin unjudged has terrible potential.
We shall see David torn in two parts. His responsibility as a king to destroy the rebel. His concern as a father to save his son. And we shall hear with great sorrow and sympathy of that terrible dilemma, and pray God that we are never in it ourselves. How would you hold the Kabbalah? When as a king you ought to judge a rebel and destroy him, when that rebel is your son and you his father, and as a father you would do anything to save.
And we shall see how David's divided hearts in that matter led to a perpetuation and a worsening of the revolt, and could have ended in utter disaster had it not been for his army commander, Joab. Therefore, the major problem that is raised by our passage this evening will not be solved within the confines of the book of Samuel. But nevertheless, as we think about the problem, we shall presently observe that a similar problem has beset the very throne of God himself. For not just David, but God Almighty himself has suffered an enormous rebellion.
Nor here on earth only, but in higher realms as well. And earth itself, unfortunately, as you may think, has become involved in the rebellion against God Almighty and his government. That has raised as a problem that lies at the very heart of the universe, the question of punishment and law on the one hand, and whether punishment and law are opposites, irreconcilable opposites to love. And what is the proper relationship of love to punishment?
And what should be the proper function of punishment, if punishment has a true function at all? This, I say, is a problem that concerns not merely David, but God Almighty himself. A problem that God himself has only been able to solve by the extreme and drastic measure of giving his own son to die for rebel sinners. Not has God solved the problem.
But conversely, as we think of the central message of the gospel, how that God loved us and spared not his own son, but delivered him up for us all, that we might be truly reconciled with God. The very thought of the cross of Christ will ask the question in reverse. What is the significance of the cross of Christ? Is it right to talk of the sufferings of Christ in terms of his being punished by God? Liberal thought says no. Liberal thought believes in a God who wouldn't punish anybody.
Then if God wouldn't punish anybody, you can at once see, can you not, that that changes the whole significance and interpretation of the death of Jesus Christ on earth. Let that suffice then for a very rapid survey of the kind of problem that is raised by the middle chapters of the second book of Samuel. And with that we come to our Bibles, and I ask you to keep them where you can every now and again squint at them, and if you find Second Samuel a difficult place to find when the book is shut, well, once you find it, keep your thumb in it because we shall be turning to the passage from time to time.
And we begin this evening in chapter nine of Second Samuel. And rapidly we shall follow what stories that fo- that that ensue, uh, and cover as many stories as the court permits. Chapter nine therefore, begins the second part of David's life with these famous words, and David said, is there any yet that is left of the house of Saul that I may show him kindness for Jonathan's sake. A very interesting topic because it's a topic that is repeated in chapter ten.
if you notice verse one and two, Verse two says, and David said, I will show kindness unto Haman, the son of Nekas, as his father showed kindness unto me. And following on that, chapter eleven tells us that there came a war with Ammon, and whereas the normal custom was that the king would go out with his troops and head his army to attack the enemy, on this occasion David showed kindness to himself and stayed at home and took it easy while he allowed his other servants to go out and...
What do you mean by kindness? And is kindness always a good thing? Well, the first instance is wonderfully good, isn't it? So David, now an established monarch, with all the power in his hands and able to do exactly as he pleased. Not only show kindness, but look around for opportunities to show kindness. And if you please, to show kindness to the house of Saul, who once time had been his bitterest enemy.
But now the reason is given, says David, is there any left of the house of Saul that I may show him kindness for Jonathan's sake? Our minds go back over the history to the time when David was still on the run, and David had his last meeting with Jonathan before David must leave Israel and go and plead for his life, and went off, you may remember, for a while to the Gentiles. On that famous occasion, when Jonathan had arranged the whole arrangement with the arrows and shot the birds to tell David how he soon must go, we read on that occasion when it had dawned on the both of them that Israel officially were going to reject the Messiah, and the Messiah would have to go who knows how far out into rejection.
And that precise and historic moment, David left his hiding place and came and embraced Jonathan, and Jonathan embraced David, and they worked for each other more. Jonathan loved David and couldn't believe that the children of Israel would officially reject her Messiah. But now Jonathan has pointed out that Paul is determined to have David back. Israel is determined to destroy her Messiah. And David himself, it was said of his greatest son on one occasion, the son of man, Joseph.
And at that moment, when David, so to speak, was all weakness and screaming before the enemy, we read that David made a covenant with Jonathan. Ah. Said Jonathan to David, you'll one day be king, David, in spite of the fact that the nation is now rejecting you, one day you'll be king. Swear unto me that when you become king and the power is in your hand, you will be kind to me and to my seed after me forever. And they did swear, and they made the covenant. How delightful it is now to see David honor that covenant.
David is in power. Jonathan is long since dead. No one has survived who knew about that covenant made in secret between David and Jonathan. What will David do now? Now is the power in his hand. Will he say, well, that was only a political maneuver, you know, it seemed to me at the time to make that arrangement with Jonathan because circumstances are different now, and I don't have to honor it, do I? Well, David. Within the days of rejection and weakness, he made a covenant with Jonathan. Even though Jonathan's gone. Now he is coming to power.
He will honor that covenant. Perhaps you perceive yet another reason why David, in spite of all his many faults, was a king after God's own heart. For therein you see a prototype of the coming Messiah himself. Peter couldn't believe it when our Lord said that Israel officially would reject the Messiah. Peter even contradicted the Savior and told him it was all nonsense, and Peter had to discover by the hard way that, yes, it was so. Israel were sworn enemies of their Messiah and officially would reject him.
And on that very night, when he had to tell the disciples and the apostles in the upper room, the Son of Man goeth, even as it is written of him, on that very night he took bread, and he took a cup and filled it with wine and said, this cup is the covenant in my blood, which is shed for many. And they went out, that little wee band of men, and went down into the darkness of the garden, and presently Jesus Christ our Lord was dead, crucified on the cross.
Now will you listen? Now the heavens of heavens are big enough to contain him, and all the power is in his hands. Okay, will you remember his time? Now did you, like the writer to the Hebrew, bear his readers in his captivity, my dear brethren, consider the apostle and high priest as your confession, being, being. He's made a new covenant. He will honor its terms to the end of an endless eternity.
He doesn't need Martha's dining room now, nor Peter's boat, nor the winding cross they gave him for a trial. But he remember his covenant with his people. So we applaud David's kindness, marvel at it in an oriental monarch of those long centuries past, but they weren't all kind like that to their former enemies.
But when we come to the next chapter and observe David's attempt to show kindness to the king of A- A- Ammon, then perhaps our feelings will be mixed. Is it a good thing? That David, I will show kindness to the king of Adam- Ammon now, as his father showed kindness to me. For the king of Ammon certainly had shown kindness to David when David was a fugitive from the court of four. Now David was in the throne of Israel. Was it wise to try and show kindness to Ammon? You say, why not? Oughtn't you to be kind to your, even to your enemies?
Well, yes, I suppose you do in a way. And being kind to your enemies is one thing, being kind to what they stand for is another. And you say, what did Ammon stand for then? Well, according to Old Testament, if Old Testament be in fact, and indeed as it is, the inspired word of God, then you only have to flip the pages of your concordance to find out what Ammon stood for. Consistently all down the centuries of Old Testament history, Ammon stood for certain things unmediatingly. He might be kind personally to an Israelite if the Israelite was running away from the Israelite government, as David was on a certain stage.
It could have suited him politically to have David in his hand as a pawn to use against Saul if the occasion arose. But as for Israel, and as for the people of God, Aaron was an unpeccable and undeviating enemy against them. And for the monarch on the throne, to try and show kindness to the monarch on the throne of Ammon, you might perhaps wonder whether it was a wise thing. You say, what was wrong with Ammon then?
How was he an enemy of Israel? Well, let's listen to his history. We'll find throughout the Old Testament that Ammon was constantly attempting to filch, to steal Israel's inheritance, or what parts of it he could get his hands on. There is the story, is there not, in the book of Judges, in the time of Jephthah, where Ammon sent messengers to Israel and said, look here, Israel, you jolly well know you have no right to that piece of territory that you now occupy.
Belongs to us. Jephthah had to send the, uh, the ambassadors to Ammon and say, I'm sorry, but you've got it wrong, it belongs to us. No, said Ammon, you have no right to it, my man, and if you don't give it up, it will come and take it, for our God gave us that land. You know right to it. And Jethro was obliged to get out his church history, I mean his Old Testament history, and to read the man a lesson in, uh, in history. I'll have you know, he said, that this is how we came by this land, and we are not aggressors, and it is our right, and we're sticking by our God-given inheritance.
But Aaron persisted with his claim that they had no right to it, and so, um, Jessa was obliged to use the sword on them. The centuries passed, and uh, Nehemiah came back to Jerusalem to complete his restoration, and in particular the restoration of the city, and then to get the temple in good working order. He was opposed by many of the little nations around him at that stage, you may remember, and not least of those who opposed him was Tobiah the Hemanite.
Presently, Nehemiah had to go back, his furlough being up, he had to go back to the court in Persia, and when eventually, some many months later, he was able to return to Jerusalem, he found a very curious thing. There was Tobiah, if you please, the very man that had been amongst the foremost opponents of Nehemiah and the rebuilding of the, of Jerusalem and the reuse of its temple, that, if you please, was to buy as broad as daylight occupying one of the rooms in the temple as his own personal flat. This is a convenient thing to do. I mean, if you had to visit Jerusalem on business, you'd need a PA repair, wouldn't you, in my design?
And he was to buy, if you please, in the very sake of three things, he got a flat in the temple. How about that? For stealing Israel's, and if he could, God's inheritance as well. You may be not be surprised, therefore, to find that when you come to the prophecy of Jeremiah in chapter forty nine, God is heard complaining through his servant, the prophet Jeremiah, why has Israel no heir? Is that so? Has he no heir? What do you mean, has Israel no heir?
Well, says God, what is this I perceive? I perceive Ammon dwelling in Israel's inheritance. That's what I perceive. Why is that? Has Israel run out of heirs and given the whole thing lock, stock, and barrel to women? Always and forever lasting. Turn to steal the God-given inheritance of Israel, and in the process, always and forever making a mock. You will remember, will you not, what the king of, of Ammon did in the days of Saul. He came up to one of the Israelite towns, and he said, I'll make a covenant with you, gentlemen.
They said, you will? Well, we weren't thinking of making a covenant. Yes, he said, but you don't have any choice really, because I'm going to make it with you. Oh, I see. And what might your terms be? I can make a covenant with you, he said, on this condition that you allow me to put out the right eye of every man in town, as they it, for a reproach upon Israel. Make them all look stupid. On this occasion in two Samuel, when David sent messengers to comfort the king of Ammon on the death of his father, hey, what did they do? They got hold of the men, they shaved off half their beards to do a feature society in your life, and they covered their garments in the middle up to their stomachs and made them ashamed of themselves.
This is the Ammonite technique. And in the time of Nehemiah that we've already referred to, when Nehemiah had begun the rebuilding of the wall, you remember what Tobiah the Ammonite and his friends said. They came up and had a look at this wall, and Tobiah the Ammonite said, you know, these feeble nonco- I not mean to be nonco- uh, the, the feeble, the feeble m- men here, what do they do? Why, if a fox went up and wagged its tail, he'd knock the wall down. Ah. Hmm. Same man who thought that was very glad of a flat in the temple later on, but that's another story.
And that being Ammon's determined and consistent attitude all down the century to love the people of God as their God-given possession. It is questionable, don't you think, whether as monarch of Israel, David did right in attempting to show kindness to the king of Am- Ammon. We have to love our enemies. We cannot, can we, compromise with their objectives.
You might as well try to show kindness to His Majesty the Devil himself, who is, of course, relentlessly behind every effort to deprive God's people of their God-given inheritance, and how many times he's done it, and doing it trying to make a lot of these uneducated people here, reading the Bible, trying to make sense of it. It ought to be given to the ordinary person. Who gave it to them then? Is it not part of their God-given inheritance?
You cannot make friends with the policy that would deprive people of their God-given in heaven. Who ordained it that all God's people are priests? Who ordained it that every believer has the right to know that he has eternal life? You cannot make friends with the doctrine that would deny priesthood to all believers, or deny the right of the believer to know that he has eternal life.
And thus to compromise is not kindness. At the very best, it is misguided kindness. And David was in the mood, apparently, for kindness. And hence it was now that when war broke out with Ammon, he sent generals to the front with, to Joab with the armies to the front, and himself stayed at home. A big temptation for the middle age, isn't it?
And if you ask me how I know, just look at me. How once we were keen. Oh, we got older now, quite got the energies we used to have. We've arrived a bit more, haven't we? Life isn't the struggle it was. We can pay the mortgage anyway, not to worry exactly too much, and uh... Then comes the temptation to settle down and to be kind to oneself. Not quite the warriors of the land that we used to be.
That is life's, middle life's temptation, isn't it? It's a temptation you've got to be on your guard against, because you know the work of God, whatever form it take, is one of those things that is calculated to preserve us. For while I'm busy at doing this and doing that, and of necessity busy at my prayers, that I might find grace from the Lord to do it as I ought to do, then perhaps, if ever, I am safe. But let me have given up on things to do for the Lord, and I haven't anything particular that I would do for the Lord if you were to ask me, come, my good man, what is it that you do for the Lord as one of the main things you do for the Lord?
And I had to scratch my head in the way. Well, what do I do? I don't know what I do. Then the danger of wandering from the Lord and becoming lax in my spiritual self-discipline, the danger of indulging wrong appetite increases proportionately. So it was all unintentionally David fell into sin and took Uriah's wife and murdered Uriah by proxy.
I wish to say very little about that sorry episode in his life. Let others speak of it who are more qualified to speak. Say they will observe that it is not there just to entertain us. What was fundamentally wrong with it? We will gather how God viewed the whole episode if we listen to to the prophet who came in to convict, convict David of his sin. The chapter is, of course, chapter twelve.
What was wrong with the whole thing? In order to convict the king, Nathan used a parable, and it went like this, that there was a very rich man in a certain town and a very poor man. The rich man had herds in abundance, the rich man, the poor man only had one little ewe lamb. Being poor and having his only one, he treated the thing as though it were his daughter. He must have been a solitary bachelor, I should think, starved of, uh, affection. And, uh, he used to have it at the table and, uh, murky it and talk to it, sweet nothings into its ear, and the thing used to entertain him and show him as much affection as such things are capable of.
There came a visitor to the rich man. The rich man thought he wanted veal for dinner, and instead of taking one of the thousand and one, uh, lambs he had, he chose to, to, um, go down the road, forcibly take away the poor man's new lamb, butcher that, and serve it to his guests. David, when he heard that story, was indignant and declared the man should die. But the parable and the sentence rebounded on David's head, for he had done likewise, hadn't he? And now they have to begin to say the parable, and I, oh, I know you don't like it.
The great sin in the parable was robbing another man of his property. And if there are any women live here tonight, I shall have to be careful as I go out. For to conceive of marriage and the status of a married woman as being the property of her husband, and the great sin in this matter being the stealing of another man's property, isn't perhaps to the taste of the modern theorists in that movement. Now, these were at least other times, and that's how God viewed it, a stealing of another man's property.
Why, even that bit of property was that li- that that that was that little ewe lamb. It was rather a special bit of property, wasn't it? You took that away, and you took away a veritable piece of that man's personality. The little thing was part of him. And for the sovereign on the throne to go and steal another man's property in the form of his wife, was to steal away a most sacred part of that very man's personality.
Just ponder the matter a moment. If you don't like the idea of the married woman as her husband's property, let's try think of the principle of private property anyway, in general, if you will, just a moment. There are those, are there not, that in the general way, in their general political and social theories would tell us that private property is a very bad thing, and they would ban it all. And they think the way forward to the utopia of bliss is to ban private property. There have been those who, in the name of Christ, have thought that it is an essential part of Christian discipleship when in great concern to give away all private property.
That, of course, is not true indeed. In the early days of the Acts, Luke tells us that some of the early Christians voluntarily gave away their private property. Neither did any man say that what he had was his own private property. Uh, Mark, it was voluntary. Not even to Ananias and Sapphira did Peter say, look here, your sin is dreadful. Do you not know that if you profess to be a Christian, you ought not to have any private property? Of course he didn't. Because here we touch an exceedingly fundamental and important principle of life, which is this, that if private property is wrong, then the whole experience of giving and receiving is wrong likewise.
You see, if I have no right to this pen here, for a pen as it is, but if I have no right to it, if this is not my private property, I can't give it to you, can I? It ain't mine to give. Consider a moment what would happen if private property were utterly and fundamentally wrong and unrighteous and unchristian as well. The whole experience of giving and receiving would be wiped out. And pray consider the fearful thing it would be if womankind were not, uh, owners of their own body.
And a man had no right to his wife, nor she to her husband, but they were both of them common property of whoever was the stronger and liked to come and take them. How long would the very concept of love survive in such a society? We are touching something fundamental because you'll see in the ancient world there were many oriental monarchs, and like David, they committed many serious offenses, but unlike him. Most of the oriental monarchs that you might have heard of, if they had taken a fancy to your wife, sir, would have come down the street and got her, and if you had dared yack against them, so much the worse for you.
And as for repenting about him, and putting it in the public records that they'd done wrong by taking your wife, what oriental despot in those days was going to have any such thing done? And it is altogether an extraordinary thing that David, king and emperor, should bow down and confess himself a guilty sinner worthy of death for having stolen the wife of one of his common soldiers. And God will have it. That's God's concept of power.
If the man on the throne will abuse his power and destroy your right of private property, God will judge him. Why so? Because God himself insists upon the right of private property. And in all the process of the government of God, God will never deprive you of your basic personal right of private property. You say, what do you mean? You have a free will, haven't you?
You can decide what you'll do with yourself. Do you know God loves you? You will excuse the term, won't you? I don't know how else to put it. God will never rape you. He loves you. He will woo you by his gospel. He will never overrule your free will and take you without your consent. And if you decide to say no to God, and you persist in saying no to his advances, and you pass into eternity saying no to God and his love and to his advances, God will respect your choice and your decision, and he'll let respect it for all eternity.
That's God's concept of government. And if David will abuse his power to rob a man of this most sacred element in his private property, and then go the stage further and rob the man of life in order to get his wife, that is such an outrageous slander on the character of God who anointed him to be king, that God will deal with King David, that's all. Where David is not a man after God's own heart, the world must be told he isn't.
Let us leave it there, and move on to what was, in one sense, an outcome of that. When David confessed his sin, God forgave him. But at that same time, through the prophet Na- Nathan, he told David that while the guilt of his sin was forgiven, the consequences would not be removed. And that is a distinction that if we have not pondered on, we do well to stay and ponder on. We are so commonly accustomed to tell the unconverted that if they trust Christ tonight, the guilt of sin will be removed, and the penalty of sin will be removed, that sometimes we don't make it altogether clear that while the penalty is removed, the consequences are not, necessarily.
Third, you'll see, if in your wild unconverted days you were given to drinking pints of methylated spirit, and you murdered somebody else and you ruined your own insides, and now you'll come back to God in repentance and faith to Christ. God will pardon you, and the moment you trust Christ, it will be true of you. There is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus. That doesn't mean that God will put your stomach right overnight. You may be a physical wreck for the rest of your days. And as for the poor man you murdered, God won't say, well, now you've repented, I shall raise him to life again.
Well, that's one consequence that can never be undone. Moreover, God, in order to make David see the seriousness of what he had done, said, David, I've forgiven your sin. There is no penalty, but I shall discipline you. You will suffer trials in your kingdom, and you will suffer, suffer trials in your home and family because of this evil thing you have done. You say that was rather severe of God, wasn't it? No. I remember as a kid once, I was warned, as were all my superior brethren and sisters, not to play at ball too near the window.
I persisted in playing at ball too near the window, and lo and behold, the inevitable, of course, happened. I cracked the pane of glass. Well, I suppose my father, being a great gentleman and a Christian to boot, he forgave me out of the wealth of his heart, forgave me for cracking this pane of glass. Well, it was really only a small pane of glass. It wouldn't have cost him five pence hate me to have a new bit of glass put in. Do you know what he did? Left it there. To my embarrassment, here came Uncle George, Jack or John, Aunt so and so, and aunts can be very prying in these matters. Oh, you've got a cracked window pane.
Well, how did that come about? And I wished, wished, I wished. Hmm. I tell you what it did. I wished he'd put a new window pane in there, and then these aunts and uncles and things wouldn't inquire. No, he left it. It taught me not to play ball near the window. Because if I'd been too easily forgiven, the penalty... I might have got the impression that, well, this doesn't matter, you can easily, if anything happens wrong, you can easily get it forgiven or void. No, not all that important. And a wiser head decided that the consequences must remain a while to teach me the seriousness of his obedience.
But as is God's way, the difficulties that then came into David's home weren't by way of making life simply miserable for the sake of being miserable. The very difficulties that came drew David nearer God's heart. Because what God allowed to happen was that one of David's own sons rebelled against him. And in trying to cope with a rebellious son, David, under God's discipline, began to understand, as he never would have understood before, how God feels about a whole universe of rebellious creatures.
And that taught David more about rebellion and disobedience than he'd known, and taught him how his own rebellion had made God feel. Thus will God use our very mistakes, and the disciplines that must inevitably follow upon our mistakes. God will use our very mistakes to train us for glory. So that if we submit to his hand and discipline, we shall in the end not only be conquerors, but more than conquerors.
As God uses the consequences of our mistakes and the disciplines he imposes upon us because of them, as means to chasten us and bring us more conformed to his own heart. But the story had its rise here. In the king's palaces, of course, there were many harees, many different wives the man had. The son of one of those wives, by the name of Amnon, loved his sister, loved Absalom's sister.
She was only a half sister. Loved, says the Bible. Well, it's as decent a word as any, I suppose. But if you read the story closely, you may decide that it isn't perhaps, uh, more than a euphemism that the Bible has used. Love? Well then, what do you mean by love then? Thought he took the woman and satisfied his desires, and once he'd done that, he threw her out. Love for him was not love of her.
It was simply being in love with his own feelings. That isn't love, is it? How this modern world needs to be told it. You'll build no paradise, pleasure on that concept or practice of love. While we're at the thing, perhaps we could transpose it a key, could we? It is no accident, is it, that God can speak to us of his love for us and of the love of the Lord Jesus for his church in terms of human love, which permits us to make the analogy.
Do you love the Lord? What do you mean by love? Well, you'd love him, would you? You'd love and serve him. When he fills you with all sorts of wonderful experiences, and you float on top of the moon. Well, if that's what we say, then... our love for the Lord is a pretty shallow kind of love, isn't it? He loves us, you know, as their phrase has it, for better and for worse.
Who knew us through and through before he proposed, and having loved his own which were in the world, he has and he will love them to the end. He may get rough with you on times in correcting your sin, my friend, but never throw you out like Amnon threw out Tamar. But when Amnon treated his sister like this, David, of course, ought to have intervened, didn't he? The law of Deuteronomy said quite clearly what the king ought to do. There is no record that the king made any move to do anything.
Perhaps, as some have suggested, he was too embarrassed by the memory, the public memory of his recent faults, to dare to do anything, lest other people had pointed their accusing finger at him and his behavior. But for whatever reason it was, he seems not to have done anything. Whereas Absalom, Tamar's sister, in heart hatred and determined to get revenge, deliberately murdered Anne and showed his own sense of guilt and disease by running off to a foreign country and taking refuge there for three years.
Doubtless, if you had talked to Absalom, he would have said he was only having justice. A calm, dispassioned view of the thing would see that his justice was a crime worse than the original fault, was it not? Not all who cried justice really are for justice. By justice they mean revenge. This all set the king a great problem. Absalom, a son he loved exceedingly, now had been away three years after having murdered his brother, and Joab perceived that the king's heart was toward Absalom.
The passage of time has a way of dulling things, doesn't it? And not least of the things it dulls is our moral judgment. What looked a very bad thing yesterday doesn't look quite so bad this time next year, looks even less bad the year after, and presently we're coming to ask, well, does it really matter after all? Time doesn't affect God like that. A murder today is evil in his sight, ten million, thousands, billions of years hence. That murder will look exactly the same in God's sight as it looks now.
But Dahav- David's heart was towards Absalom, and Joab, seeing it, sought, sought an opportunity. As we earlier read, he instructed the wise woman of Tekoa to go in and make up a little charade. In order to persuade the king to bring Absalom back. Her message was altogether on the question of love and punishment, with a very modern ring about it. It discusses the question, or at least it doesn't discuss, it puts one view of the discussion of punishment. My lord the king, she said, and there was a sob in her voice, her clothes were a little disheveled, and I think there was a tear now glistening in the eyelid.
How she managed it, I'm not quite sure. My lord the king, she said, now listen. And he said, what, my good woman? She said, thy handmaid had two servants, two, two sons, you'll see, and one rose up in the field and slew his brother, and the poor man died. That was terrible. Now, she said, the townspeople have risen up, and they say to me, hand over the other fellow that killed his brother, that we may execute him for murder. And oh, my king, she says, all this business of punishment, you see, what good does it do? Isn't it bad enough I lost one son? That was terrible, losing one son.
Now they're threatening to take the other son, and they will quench my soul altogether and put my light out. She said, you know, my husband's dead, and if you kill both sons, that will be the end of our family forever. You could have felt for the woman, couldn't you, had it not been a whole yarn from start to finish? But if it had been real, what good is punishment? Doesn't it make the matter worse?
What sense, says her modern counterpart. What sense in insisting on punishment? What good does it do? How do you cure one death by demanding another? Now the king said, I, I, I must admit, must admit, I'd never thought of that before. My good woman, go to your house, no one shall touch you. Well, she said, my lord the king, you know, I, I, that's all very nice of you to say that, but um, you'll say I'm afraid of the people, lest they touch me and my son, and uh...
No, he said, but if I, if you would permit me to say something to the king. Yes, he said, what is it? She said, you know, in saying that, I mean, in a certain sense now, now in a certain sense, um, you'd almost be making yourself out guilty, wouldn't you? Me guilty? Why guilty? Why, in that you're not bringing back your own son and still insisting on punishing him by keeping him in, uh, in exile.
And she said, you know, really, the king is one that is guilty because, my lord, you know, when it all comes down, we're like water poured out on the ground, aren't we? We use a different metaphor. We say, well, you can't gather up spilt milk, can you? I didn't take my son down there. The first boy got killed. Well, that was bad because he's dead now, isn't he? He's dead, see? Oh, what's the good of crying over spilt milk? Doesn't bring him back to life if you go and execute the other chap. As you're crying over spilt milk, you can't gather it up again.
Do you know what to the king? I hadn't thought of that either. Oh. And she said, my lord the king, you see, even God doesn't take away life. And she slipped that one in pretty quick. God doesn't take away life, is that true? What did the law book of Israel say a hundred times and more that such sins should be followed by the punishment of capital execution? God doesn't take away life. Oh come, before things get too bad and gone down the throat too far, put your toes in or your heels, whichever you prefer, and think hard.
Is it true that God is such a God of love that he never did take away anybody's life? Then what's the meaning of Calvary? Was it just that brutal, sadistic men took Jesus Christ and crucified him, and God let it be done. And you owe your salvation simply to the fact that, to the fact now that what? What do you say, that Jesus Christ so loved men that he didn't, uh, he didn't do anything to them, and he let them crucify him, and they've got all scot-free, and God is so kind he's going to say it doesn't matter, and they can all come home to his heaven whether they repent or not.
God wouldn't punish anybody. Is that what you're going to say? Or are you going to say what Holy Scripture says, that God spared not his own son, but delivered him up to the sanctions of the law, and he was made a curse for us. God doesn't take away life, that was lie, the whole central basic lie. But she passed over it glibly, God doesn't take away life, she said, but devises means by which his banished be not outcast from him, and that bit was perfectly true.
But he did what Satan constantly does. One lovely half truth mixed in one with one positive lie. God has indeed devised means that his banished be not outcast permanently from him, and the means was Calvary, where God's wrath fell upon his son, and it pleased the Lord to bruise him. Because I don't like that doctrine, that doesn't sound to me much love. Who are you thinking of?
Well, you say the man, I mean, for instance, that, that Absalom who killed his brother, you'll see. To think that God would punish anybody? You say it doesn't sound like love. Oh, half a minute. You've been concentrating on one brother. Let's have a look at the other brother. He's dead, of course, so you'll have to shout to make him hear. Hello, boy. Just listen a minute. You're dead, you know. You had all of life before you, but, uh, your brother executed you. And the dead man says, what are you going to do about it? Nothing. You see, you're dead now.
No good crime, you have still moved, old boy. You see, you're dead, aren't you? I see. What do you call that? You call that love of that brother? You wouldn't want him to die, you wouldn't want him to get murdered, but now he is murdered, you say, well, well, well, you see, well, hello boy, it's happened, so there's nothing much we can do about that, you see, that's unfortunate, isn't it? You're dead. You call that love? Well, you only have to ask the question to expose this as a fault. It is a deep, puny, and cruel denial of love.
To deny that sin must be punished. God cannot stand by and say that that man now is dead and it doesn't matter because he's dead. The day he was murdered, God said it mattered. Ten billion years from now, God will still be saying it matters. Why? Because God loved the man. I can understand Lamar's grief. I would sympathize with it were it a real situation in life. But here you have a terrible dilemma.
Love doesn't want to execute punishment on the murderer, but love for the murderer was my home. How do you reconcile the two? David wasn't able to reconcile them. And so he yielded to the permissive argument, and he brought Absalom back. It showed how uneasy he was, because when Absalom came back, David said to Joab, well, bring him back, but the young man shall not see my face.
What kind of a reconciliation is that, I wonder? Well, come. You talk about being reconciled to God. What quality of reconciliation have you got? There's many a man walking around our cities, and he would claim to be a believer, and if you ask him, old chap, have you certainty of heaven? Have you boldness to enter into the very holiest of all and see the king's face? And say, no, of course not. Nobody could have that certainty. Well, what kind of reconciliation is that then? What kind of a love of God is that that would let you come so far back, but not, not let you into these ways?
The only kind of reconciliation that's worth having is a reconciliation that will receive you right to the very heart of God and admit you into the divine presence, into the holiest of all, and that right now. How can it be done? It can only be done when God's law is honored and fulfilled, and the penalty is paid, and sin is just fulfilled. There is no assurance of salvation other than through that doctrine of the cross that teaches that the sufferings of our Lord was a God-sent punishment of sin upon his son for our sake.
Finally, Absalom got impatient with being in Jerusalem and not allowed to see the king's face, so he burnt Joab's field of barley and made Jo- Joab go and see David and bring Absalom in. And here comes Absalom. And here's the king. I wonder what David was feeling. The first time he set eyes on the young gentleman since Absalom murdered his brother. And David is so kind, and he loves his son. The boy walks. Will he say, sorry, Dad? Not on your life.
He wants to come in. Joy doesn't bring him in, he'll burn his field of barley before you'll do. And without a word of sorry, without any repentance, he comes in and the king kisses him. Oh, what have you done? Or to kiss the man when there's been no repentance. You'll see what that will do. In barely next five minutes, he turned around and organized a rebellion to turn his father off the throne. Tell them stories, aren't they?
As we go, God give us the grace to try and think them through. Please don't you take what I've been saying as the last word. Think them through, my brother, my sister. They bear a lot of thinking, because these are not simple problems, they're problems that lie at the very heart of the universe and at the very heart of the story of redemption and reconciliation. The Lord use his word for our instruction and our better understanding and all to his glory, for his name's sake. Amen.
