2 Samuel Lesson 69
Hushai, David’s spy – 2 Samuel 16:1-14
We are in the section from 2 Samuel 15:13 through
Now the reasons are different, and they are not typological and not
analogous. The reasons why David had his
problem were three-fold. Remember that
David did not deal with his –R learned behavior patterns, these were patterns
that he had picked up, God warned him about them, as the Bathsheba incident,
and he refused to deal decisively with them, and with the result that when they
showed up in his own sons he was quite lenient in their treatment. Another thing that David, though a good
military man, was a poor administrator.
He did not take kindly to the details of the administration of the
But the marvelous thing about this whole era and the thing that you
want, the big picture among all the details that you want to keep focused on,
and never lose sight of it, is that even though David is a man who has these
problems, a man who is in sin, a man who is far from perfect, a man who isn’t
even, in the everyday secular world wouldn’t even hang in there because his
opponents would obviously put him off the throne fast, he had too many
vulnerable points politically speaking.
But the amazing thing about this character in 2 Samuel is that though
David, with all of his political vulnerability, sits on that throne, struggles
through, God keeps him there. That is
grace, politics by grace. God’s man,
trusted in God to provide his every need, will be kept on the throne. Even though he may be politically vulnerable,
even though he may not be anywhere near perfect in sanctification, because of
God’s plan, he will stay there.
It’s like that top circle, David’s top circle included God’s will to be
king of
The story tonight, as we finish this section of chapter 16 of 2 Samuel
takes into account a problem that we often face in our Christian life, and if
you haven’t, cheer up, you sometime will.
And that is when in the area of your experience things are not
clear. Ever had that feeling, where you
really don’t know where God is leading, and things are breaking loose all
around, pressures are upon you all around to make snap decisions, and if you do
you’re going to be in trouble and regret them.
But in a period of time like this you can only believe out to the limit
of that bottom circle. There are areas,
for example, that you cannot trust God for because you don’t know enough, God
hasn’t revealed His will clearly. So
don’t be upset if you find yourself unable to trust God in certain areas. The problem isn’t that you have to go into
your closet and work up faith, that won’t work, all you’ll do is work up
emotions, not faith. The problem is that
you’re going to have to get added revelation.
Now let’s take David’s problem.
David’s problem is, though in the top circle know by Monday morning
quarterbacking, we know it’s God’s will that David stay on the throne. But you see, David didn’t know that, and at
the time when all this stuff was breaking loose and his son usurped the throne
and he was in the middle of civil war, David could not, at least for 24 hours, that’s 2 Samuel 16:15, for 24 hours
until Psalm 3 had been written or the events of Psalm 3 had transpired, David
was unable to trust God to the point of knowing that it was definitely God’s
will that he stay on the throne. David
at this point, then, presents us with a model of how to function when the chips
are down and you’re not really sure which way the Lord is going to swing
it.
Now you recall that David had made some tremendous evidences of faith,
relaxation, trusting in God. Recall
chapter 15:25, we have David stating quite bluntly that he’s a confused man,
and he’s not confused to the point of panic.
There’s a difference between being confused in an orderly way and being
confused in a disorderly way. David was
confused in an orderly way, that is, he knew that he could trust God for
certain things inside that bottom circle, but at this point in his life he
couldn’t trust God to be sure that God would bring him to the throne. So in verse 25 he says, “if I shall find
favor in the eyes of the LORD, He will bring me again,” notice the condition,
“if.” David doesn’t know for sure
yet. So David then faces that agonizing
problem that we so often face, Lord, what do you want, what are You doing,
everything’s breaking loose and my tendency and the tendency we all have when
we’re faced with this kind of a thing is to go and make snap decisions because it
bugs us to be left indefinite. We want
certainty, and we’ll even get that certainty by human viewpoint, if
possible. But if you [can’t understand
word] quick snap dogmatic decisions and say at least we’ve done something
certain. David doesn’t do that. The only time David makes a snap decision as
you’ll see tonight is a wrong one.
We’ll start in 16:1 and follow this problem of David. “And when David was a little past the top of
the hill,” and this relates back to what we have seen on the Mount of Olives,
halfway up the Mount of Olives David received some bad news, Ahithophel, the
grandfather of Bathsheba, a very trusted and wise observer, a very trusted
counselor, has defected. Ahithophel has
gone over to be with Absalom; bad news, because Absalom’s weakest point is his
inexperience. And so if Ahithophel
defects from David’s side to Absalom’s side, now Absalom has everything, he’s
got the experience that only age provides.
He’s got the old man with the wisdom and Absalom badly needs that. So David, right after that, still walking up
the
But David is still moving when we see him in 16:1, now he’s at the top
of the hill and he’s starting to go down the other side, very vivid
geographical motion. “And when David was
a little past the top of the hill, behold, Ziba, the servant of Mephibosheth,
met him with a couple of asses saddled, and upon them two hundred loaves of
bread, and an hundred bunches of raisins, and a hundred of summer fruits, and a
bottle of wine.” Now we have to get a
little background as to who Ziba is.
Just where did we meet this man before?
Turn back to 2 Samuel 9, here’s where we met Ziba. There’s something strange about this man, in
fact, you’re going to see that this whole thing that he comes to David with is
one big phony front. Ziba is a shrewd
man who is going to take advantage of political chaos.
In 2 Samuel 9:2, “And there was of the house of Saul a servant, whose
name was Ziba. And when they had called
him unto David, the king said unto him, Are you Ziba? And he said, Thy servant is. [3] And the king
said, Is there not yet any of the house of Saul, that I may show kindness of
God unto him? And Ziba said unto the king, Jonathan hath yet a son, who is lame
on his feet.” Notice David showing
kindness or grace to Saul’s house; that’s background for tonight, for the story
that we’re about to see. David always
showed graciousness to the house of Saul.
This is unknown in the Ancient East.
In the Ancient East usually the competing dynasty was killed but David
showed mercy to it. And then he set Ziba
of the custodian of Mephibosheth and the property, verse 10, “Thou, therefore,
and thy sons, and thy servants, shall till the land for him, and thou shall
bring in the fruits, that thy master’s son may have food to eat; but Mephibosheth,
thy master’s son, shall eat always at my table.
Now Ziba had fifteen sons and twenty servants,” so he had quite a
business.
Now let’s turn back to 2 Samuel 16, he comes to David with a
proposal. He comes bringing food,
obviously by this act Ziba believed that it’s God’s will that David is the man
who will stay, for if he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t have committed himself like
this. Ziba, then in his actions, betrays
the fact that he is well aware God will protect David. So in a way this is good news for David. But in a way it’s bad news because of what
Ziba is going to do. He comes and he
offers all this food in verse 2, “And the king said unto Ziba, What meanest
thou by these? And Ziba said, The asses
are for the king’s household to ride on; and the bread and summer fruit for the
young men to eat; and the wine, that such as are faint in the wilderness may
drink.”
Verse 3, “And the king said, And where is thy master’s son?” The word “master’s son” is Adonai; Adonai
refers to Saul. “Where is Saul, your
master’s son?” In other words, he’s
wondering, where is Mephibosheth, where is he?
Now Ziba comes out with a lie.
What he says next is a stretched distortion of the fact. “And Ziba said unto the king, Behold, he is
abiding” he uses a participle, “he is abiding at Jerusalem; for he said,” and
with the participle he makes vivid that Mephibosheth, right this hour David, is
staying in Jerusalem; he’s aligning himself with the other side. So Ziba says, “Today shall the house of
Israel restore to me the kingdom of my father,” that is Saul. So he’s saying that Mephibosheth is saying
that I will be reinstated on the throne.
There are two things about this that tell us this is false. First, Mephibosheth is a cripple, he hasn’t
got a chance against Absalom. Absalom
has it all over Mephibosheth any way you want to calculate the political
equation. So there’s not a chance that
anybody in their right mind would try to undo Absalom. But we have more evidence than that, if you
turn to chapter 19, verse 24. After it’s
all over, “Mephibosheth, the son of Saul, came down to meet David [the king],”
now skip the rest of verse 24 and go to verse 25, “And it came to pass, when he
was come to Jerusalem to meet David [the king], that the king said unto him,”
notice David says, “Mephibosheth, why didn’t you go out with me?” See, he still has the words of Ziba on his
mind.
But in the last part of verse 24 we have solid evidence that
Mephibosheth was never intending to hurt David in any way, because the text
adds, he went “down to meet the king, and had neither dressed his feet, nor trimmed
his beard, nor washed his clothes,” and notice carefully, “from the day the
king departed …,” that’s a sign of sorrow, Mephibosheth was sorrowing for
David; Mephibosheth was a loyal supporter to David. And then in verse 26 he said, “And he answered,
My lord, O king, my servant deceived me; for thy servant said, I will saddle an
ass, that I may ride on it, and go to the king; because thy servant is lame.
[27] And he has slandered thy servant unto my lord, the king. But my lord, the king, is as an angel of God;
do, therefore, what is good in thine eyes. [28] For all of my father’s house
were but dead men before my lord, the king; yet did you did set thy servant
among them who did eat at thine own table.
What right, therefore, have I yet to cry any more unto the king? [29]
And the king said unto him, Why speak you any more of thy matters? I have said, Thou and Ziba divide the
land.”
Now please notice what David is going to do in chapter 19, he sets up a
real estate settlement, 50/50. That’s a
reverse of the decision he’s going to make in the chapter we’re studying. Verse 30, “And Mephibosheth said unto the
king, Yea, let him take all, forasmuch as my lord, the king, is come again in
peace unto his own house.” Mephibosheth
is a loyal crippled supporter of David.
This man was taken advantage of by a conniving politician, Ziba.
David, in this emergency of walking up the Mount of Olives and walking
down the other side, has to make some quick decisions. And turning back to chapter 16 he makes a bad
one here. And this is always a problem
when we are caught in this kind of a mess, where God leads you and it seems like the path stops and you
don’t know what to do then, and you look around and God doesn’t seem to provide
any clear leading, and everything seems unstable and up in the air. 2 Samuel 16:4, “Then the king said to Ziba,
Behold, thine are all unto Mephibosheth.”
Now in 2 Samuel 9 what was Mephibosheth a manager of? He was a manager of his farm, so the farm now
secedes 100% to Ziba. That was a wrong decision, it was based on
deceit. David made a quick judgment, and later, in 2 Samuel 19 David has to
undo this and go back to a 50/50 type decision.
Mephibosheth recognizes the poor wisdom in going back on this kind of a
decision and says you just forget it, just forget it. So here a man who was crippled, a man who
needs this kind of economic support, is deprived of it through a very bad
decision in the spur of the moment by David.
Now we keep on going, verse 5, David still had no clear words from God,
he won’t until night time, and it’s at night time that he writes Psalm 3, which
tells us that by that time God did give him the assurance. So he keeps on going to a place called
Bahurim, we don’t know where that is, but we can guess. Here’s the Jordan valley, here’s the west
bank, the north end of the Dead Sea, Jerusalem is over here. He’s walked this far and somewhere between
this point and the Jordan Valley is this Bahurim. “And when King David came to Bahurim, behold,
there came out a man of the family of the house of Saul,” you see how he’s
plagued by the house of Saul, “whose name was Shimei, the son of Gera; he came
forth,” and the Hebrew is very, very, very vivid here, there’s a participle and
it’s a picture, a motion picture, this man is coming forth, and as he comes
he’s waving his hands and he’s cursing at David.
Now what does it mean here to curse at David; if you want to see what
true cursing is in Scripture, turn to Judges 9:27, what is meant is what is
meant back here, Judges 9:27-29. It has
a very special type of connotation.
These men are cursing Gideon’s son, Abimelech. In the last part of verse 27 you see the verb
to curse, they “did eat and drink, and cursed Abimelech.” Now it tells you what they did as they were cursing. [28] “And Gaal, the son of Ebed, said, Who is
Abimelech, and who is Shechem, that we should serve him? Is he not the son of Jerubbaal? And Zebul his officer. Serve the men of Hamor, the father of
Shechem; for why should we serve him?”
In other words, the cursing has a technical meaning that you lose if you
think of what we think of as cursing.
The cursing here is demeaning the office of a man of God. That’s what is meant.
So when this man comes out cursing, he is demeaning the call of God. In other words, this is David’s top circle;
part of that top circle is that he be king.
This man, Shimei is demeaning David’s top circle, sort of like Satan
tries all the time with all of us. He
tries to paint this gory picture in heaven, and he doesn’t have too hard a job
doing it, of the way we behave. But that
would deny our justification, so there’s constantly an attack on that top
circle. It’s the top circle, not the bottom,
that’s the focus. So he comes out,
constantly coming down, constantly cursing.
Verse 6, “And he cast stones at David, and at all the servants of King
David; and all the people and all the mighty men were on his right hand and on
his left.” And the picture is that these
men are marching, they’re marching through this town of Bahurim, and as they
march through the town with the rank and file on one side and the rank and file
on the other, this man up along this ridge is cursing and throwing rocks and
dust at this parade of soldiers. Now
knowing what you know of David in the past, you can imagine what his natural
instincts would be. And you can also
imagine what the natural instinct of some of his generals would be who happened
to be in the first of the thing and they’re getting hit with the rocks. Sure enough, let’s watch what happens in the
text.
Verse 7, “And thus said Shimei when he cursed, Come out, come out, you
bloody man, [and you worthless fellow,]” now he’s really saying the man of
blood, in other words, the man who slaughters.
See, Shimei has this self-righteousness that we find in Absalom and in
all human viewpoint politicians. Very
religious people they are, and they’re always accusing God’s people of
violating their standard of morals. So
Shimei is telling them get out, get out, in other words, get off the throne,
you’ve had it David, you’ve had it, you’ve had it, you’ve had it, you man of
blood. Here is what will always happen
to the man of grace. Whenever you’re down you will find some slob that comes
along in the name of morality and points out some of your faults and says
ha-ha, because you did this and because you did that now you’re going to get it
from God… see.
Notice how he says this, verse 8, “The LORD has returned upon you all
the blood of the house of Saul,” see, very religious, very pious sounding, you
bad boy, God is going to slap your wrist David, “in whose stead you have
reigned,” now obviously by the time you get to the center of verse 8 he’s
already shown his spiritual ignorance because why has David reigned in Saul’s
stead? The reason why he has reigned in
Saul’s stead is because he’s been anointed by a prophet, that’s why, it’s God’s
will. “…and the LORD has delivered the
kingdom into the hand of Absalom, thy son; and, behold, you art taken in your
mischief, because you are a blood man.”
Now why is he so concerned with this man of blood? A problem of interpretation in this passage
is, what is it that Shimei has on his mind.
We don’t have any real account that David slaughtered the house of
Saul. The nearest thing that passes for
it is if you to chapter 28 we have a time later on when he does allow all the
sons of the house of Saul to be executed except Mephibosheth. Now this sounds like it’s a bloody mess and
this could be what Shimei is thinking of.
But chapter 21 begins in verse 1 with the will of God. “Then there was a famine in the days of David
three years, year after year; and David inquired of the LORD. And the LORD answered, It is for Saul, and for
his bloody house, because he slew the Gibeonites,” that was when Saul was on
one of his sanctified holy wars. Verse
2, “And the king called the Gibeonites, and said unto them…” and then he
offered the Gibeonites expiation, the expiation was that Saul’s sons had to
die. But you can’t really say this is
unjust because the point was that they had iniquity that God pointed out and He
was disciplining the nation for it. So
if Shimei is truly referring to the content of chapter 21, he still doesn’t
have a case. He is simply approaching
the point of view on the basis of human viewpoint morality and coming up with
the fact that David is bad because he’s in God’s will.
Now, verse 9, Joab used to have two brothers; one was killed by Abner,
and this is his other brother, Abishai.
They were cousins of David, they were the sons of David’s sister. And Zeruiah is David’s sister. So these two men are close to David and
they’re his generals. And every time you
see the sons of Zeruiah, they always emphasize the rough-neck character of
these guys. These were blood and guts
guys all the way, all of them, Joab and this man. Notice what he says. “Then said Abishai, the son of Zeruiah, unto
the king, Why should this dead dog curse my lord, the king? Let me go over, I pray thee, and take off his
head.” In the Hebrew it’s very interesting, it says “lift off his head.” And you can imagine, you have to keep the
context you see, all this is going on with a big parade, and it’s bad enough to
keep marching like they are, with a minimum of food and so on, they know what’s
ahead of them is the wilderness, so they’re not very… morale isn’t to hot at
the present time, and to have this klutz throwing rocks at you and dust and all
the rest of it, and it would be a beautiful shot in some movie some time, to
have these two guys next to David, hey David, let me go over there and lift off
his head.
Now in verse 10 David administers a rebuke, and here’s one of the great
moments of David. And here is a central
lesson for us when we are faced with these kinds of situations. It would have been completely natural for
David to say yeah, go ahead and shut him up, because the man didn’t have a
direct claim upon David that was directly wrong. Now we’re going to see, David is thinking of
something else but the direct accusation doesn’t hold water by anything we know
in the text of the Word of God. It’s a false accusation. But David’s problem is that he doesn’t
know. Remember the problem, is he going
to stay on the throne or not hasn’t been made clear by revelation to him. Therefore David can’t trust the Lord for that. All David can trust the Lord for is for his
own personal protection right now.
Now we have just seen David make a snap decision that is an immediate
tendency when faced with these… the Lord leaves you hanging and you try to kind
of get God to get you off the hanging hook by doing something dogmatically in
hopes that now God will do something.
But it doesn’t work, and this first thing shows you how David gets in
trouble. Now by this time, when we come
to a more serious thing, David is very wise, and he says, “What have I to do
with you, ye sons of Zeruiah?”
Now that is an expression that Jesus Christ talks to His mother with at
the wedding feast of Cana. And I often
think, and we had a tremendous Greek professor at Dallas Seminary, the course
was to go through the Gospel of John, and I’ll never forget his words when he
got to that point in the wedding feast of Cana, and Mary comes trotting up to
Jesus, and Jesus, Jesus, what are we going to do, and it seems like Jesus just
deliberately puts down his mother. He
says “what do I have to do with you, woman.”
Now why does the New Testament do that to Mary; every time you see Mary,
with one exception, Mary the mother of Jesus in the New Testament is always
getting put down. The only exception is
when Christ dies on the cross and he says, “Woman, behold your son,” and then
He takes care of her. But all the other
times in the Gospels Jesus always puts down Mary.
This professor has a thought, we can’t be dogmatic, but has a thought
that the Holy Spirit being omniscient looked down the corridors of time and
knew that there would be a natural tendency in church history to exalt Mary,
and therefore we have right in the central text of the New Testament provisions
to head that problem off. We have, as it
were, the New Testament presenting Jesus Christ rebuking His mother, time after
time, for being out of it, for being ignorant of the will of God, and that is
put in as a hedge because if Mary can’t do any better in heaven than she did on
earth, she’s not going to be very much of a mediatrix between Jesus and His
followers. Mary, in other words, is
finite and she’s a creature. Jesus is
not. Mary can’t be the mediatrix, she
doesn’t have any special access.
Remember that time in the Gospel narratives when the crowds gathered
around Jesus and somebody breaks through the crowd and they say, your mother
and your sister and your brothers are out there, and He’s not impressed. He says my brothers and my sisters are those who
believe on Me, just as though he ignores His own family. Why?
Because at this point they were unbelievers, except for Mary, and she
was a believer that did not know very much doctrine. So you find that Mary, the mother of Jesus,
is not a star saint; she is definitely not to be elevated above any other
believer.
And one of those phrases, to go back to our point, one of those phrases
is this same kind of phrase, “what have I to do with you, woman.” That is an idiom used over and over in the
Bible to say we share nothing in common.
“What have we to do with you,” in other words, what has your business go
to do with mine. It would be an idiom of
exasperation. And so when Mary comes to
Jesus, Jesus, can’t you do something for this feast, Jesus is really telling
his mother, mother, you’re business is none of mine. He does so, and then He adds, My time is not
yet come, because Mary is trying to force His hand, that’s the whole story of
John 2. But the clause that is used is
the same one that David uses here for Zeruiah.
We have this same clause used again in 2 Samuel 3:39, back at David’s
Watergate. Except I might add David had
a lot worse problem than Watergate; it wasn’t just some clown breaking into
Democratic Party headquarters. You see,
what had happened was that Joab slaughtered Abner, and so in verse 39 David
complains….
[loud siren goes by] By the way,
those of you who are interested in a little principle of science, that
particular type of siren, if you listen to it carefully changes its frequency
after it goes by; and that is the reason why, a long story short, is one of the
reasons why people often talk about the expanding universe, it’s a principle
related to it. And that is when the
sound waves are coming toward you, because they are moving, you’re standing
still, they come at you faster, and so it’s a higher frequency sound. After the thing goes by the sound waves are
traveling away from you and they tend to go like this and it’s lower frequency. And it’s that observation in the area of
light where you have low frequency light is red, high frequency light is purple
and blue, and since stars have what they call the red shift, that interpreted
means the universe is expanding, if that’s what causing the red shift. There are many creationists, however, who
differ on this interpretation. That’s
thrown in, no extra charge.
In 2 Samuel 3 Joab has killed Abner and at the end of this chapter David
is faced with a problem; murder has been committed and the nation is going to
blame its administration for it; we covered how David coped with this kind of
a political problem with his administration in the last part of chapter 3. Then at the end he said to his servant, “I
am this day weak, though anointed king,” and you remember that. David was anointed by God and yet David could
not control everyone in his administration.
Now he didn’t chicken out and blame it on someone else, he accepted the
blame, but he admitted he was weak. And
then he says, “and these men, the sons of Zeruiah, are too hard” or “too harsh
for me.” In other words, David’s
administration was constantly plagued with this picky, picky, picky, picky
movement on the part of Joab and his brothers; always they were the vengeful,
always they were the ones that wanted to go out and slaughter somebody. Get ‘em, that was their political solution to
every problem that came up. Now David,
under pressure could have yielded to this.
I show you this because this isn’t the first time, this is probably the
8000th time since David assumed the throne, put the crown on, that
he’s had to face this problem.
But notice the greatness of David.
Faced with a situation, back in 2 Samuel 16, where he’s not sure of
God’s will, he refuses to take those drastic moves. Don’t you ever take drastic moves if you’re
not sure of God’s will. You are
endangering the path of your life by jumping out, it’s called the bum’s rush
technique, and Satan does it all the time; he gets your eyes off the Word of
God and onto problems. And then he heaps
on the pressure, and he makes you think you have to keep on moving, and have to
keep on deciding. And so this is where
bad decisions are most generally made in the Christian life, when you think you
have to make decisions which you really don’t have to make. And David doesn’t have to allow this man to
do it, so in verse 9 he cuts it off, verse 10 he says, “What have I to do with
you, ye sons of Zeruiah? So let him
curse,” now there’s a problem in translation here, properly it appears to be
this. “If he cursed, and if the Lord has
said to him, curse David, how can anyone say what made you do it?” That’s a lot
different from your King James, and it’s because the Hebrew text itself, I
can’t go into all the details, the Hebrew text itself is messed up here and it involves
a lot of study, but the best scholars in the field who work with textual
criticism favor the condition nature of the sentence, and if that’s true then
it solves the whole thing. He’s not
saying that God necessarily has started this thing in action. What he’s saying is, if he is cursing, and if
God has said to him, “Curse David,” then how can we oppose it.
But then in verse 11, “And David said t Abishai, and to all his
servants, Behold, my son, who came forth of my own body, is seeking my life: how
much more, now, may this Benjamite do it? Let him alone, and let him curse; for
the LORD has bidden him.” Now what David
is meaning here is not that… the accusation itself is correct; the accusation
itself is not necessarily correct, he is using Lord here as the sovereign. He is not saying that God say, hey, when
David comes over the hill curse him; that’s not what David is saying, he
doesn’t accept that. What he is saying is
that God has allowed this in His sovereignty to take place and it must have a
reason and a purpose. And while David is
in this area of uncertainty where he can’t really discern what is right and
wrong, certainly he’s open to all evidences.
He’s carefully weighing and he’s saying possibly God is allowing that to
happen to make me turn and think of something.
See the cautious nature of David here, all through this, until he has
dogmatically made up his mind he is very, very cautious. Notice he says in verse 11, he says if God
has allowed this to happen, namely that my own son seeks my life, then how much
more will He allow this Benjamite to do it?
So we have here a picture of a believer very cautious.
But verse 12, David is also very smart.
And so what he is going to do is he is going to, as we say, let the man
have enough rope and he will hang himself.
Very shrewd tactic! You see,
David doesn’t know yet whether God will be merciful to him, so he, as it were,
he’s walking through this formation and these guys have just tried to get that
guy that’s throwing the rocks and he calmed them down and they keep on
marching, what he’s thinking to himself is something like this. All right Lord, you’re not revealing to me
yet exactly what Your will is, whether I should stay on the throne or not. But I also know enough of spiritual principles
to know that if I show mercy to that man I will heap coals of fire upon his
head. And that is a principle Paul picks
up and we are to use in Romans 14, that when faced with this kind of a thing,
be it whatever, if you exercise mercy toward one of these snipers, one of the
maligners, one of the gossipers, don’t worry about it. David’s soldiers aren’t going to get hurt by
a few rocks and a little dust. But that
man can be very much hurt by David exercising grace.
And so what does he do, verse 12, “It may be that the LORD will look on
my affliction, and the LORD will requite me good for his cursing this
day.” See what he’s doing, he’s trying
to get the attention of the Lord. This
guy is a spiritual shrewdy, he may not be a good administrator but when it
comes to his personal relationship with the Lord he uses and exploits every
single thing he can. And so what he’s
saying, okay God, and remember how concretely the Hebrews thing, they don’t
think of some platonic God up here, they literally think that God is looking
down or not, and at this point David, expressing Hebraically, he’s saying God’s
looking somewhere else, He’s not looking at me right now, he says I know what
I’m going to do, I’m going to be gracious to this guy and then God will look
down. This is what he says, and that’s
why the reason verse 12 quickly follows the action described in verse 11.
Verse 13, “And as David and his men went by the way, Shimei went along
on the hillside over against [opposite] him, cursed as he went, and threw
stones at him, and cast dust. [14] And
the king, and all the people who were with him, became weary, and refreshed
themselves there,” that’s the west bank of Jordan, and this is the place where
David is going to spend the night. Next week we’re going to find out what kind
of a night, before that night is over, many, many things are going to be
changed in Israel, all because David has not panicked, he has kept his cool,
he’s made a couple of bad decisions but generally he’s made good decisions. Don’t panic when you are uncertain. God, if He wants you to make a major decision
in your life, will always give you sufficient revelation, so you’ll never get
that I’m rushed feeling, about choosing for God.
With our heads bowed…..