2 Samuel Lesson 74
David’s Final Dealings with the House of Saul –
2 Samuel 21
Joe was talking about the great defect in their culture about the origin
of man and where they think man came from.
It reminded me of the great cultural myth of evolution that we face and
I don’t think until you’ve seen the origins problem in a cultural such as he
worked in that you will appreciate what we insist is true, that in the 20th
century America, in the academic world, we too have a mythology; it is a religious
mythology contrary to what the courts insist is a secular thing, it is deeply
religious and we too face our myths, a myth propagated among what we would
think would be sophisticated people. I
know many of you are getting the little booklet, Acts and Facts from the Institute for Creation Research, this month
in their issue notice how the response has been to creationism across the
country, how there’s an increasing hostility.
No longer can Drs. Morris and Gish obtain permission to have an open
discussion on a campus because the biology professors will refuse to debate
them in public, and the reason is because they’ve lost so many debates. It’s interesting that when the establishment
has been challenged it is found that they have simply not done their
homework. Actually Christians fail to
realize that we are in a very, very strong position, all you have to do is be a
little aggressive.
Turn to 1 Samuel 21. Chapter 20
ended the main argument of 1 and 2 Samuel, and chapters 21-24 are an addendum
to this book. These are chapters that
whoever it was that compiled the book put in as a profile of David, a closing
divine viewpoint profile. This profile
is important for a number of reasons; we have studied thoroughly two
characters, Saul and David. We have
noticed how Saul never seemed to get off the ground. Many scholars believe Saul was an unbeliever;
I have taken a position that he’s a believer, that Saul gradually went down and
was taken out by the sin unto death; his sanctification curve would like a
decline until finally God said it won’t go any more, I’m taking him out. David, on the other hand, his curve seems to
go up like this, it peaks somewhere along about the time of Bathsheba, and it
seems to go down. Now that seems to be
the argument up to the end of chapter 20.
In this period we’ve studied all of David’s faults. The Holy Spirit, in writing the Scripture,
has made it very clear and has given an honest portrait of David. David is a
fallible, fallen man, seeking to fulfill the office of “the Christ” and as a
fallen fallible man he cannot be a perfect type of Christ, though he is a type
of Christ in some respects.
David’s faults have been clearly shown in these last few chapters, but
the Holy Spirit cuts us off at the end of chapter 20 and had, whoever it was
put this book together, these four chapters put on the end to make sure we
don’t draw false conclusions, to study the point. Turn to 1 Kings 11:6 for a moment, there’s a
technical phrase used there, a phrase which was used of Caleb and of Joshua,
and a phrase which we find used of Solomon and David. It’s summarizing Solomon’s life; Solomon is a
man who started off real well, and peaked out, and went down, down, down the
rest of his life. The book is written
toward the end of his life, later edited by prophets; one of the key ones is
the book of Ecclesiastes; if you are a philosophy student you must read the
book of Ecclesiastes; you cannot understand human viewpoint without reading the
book of Ecclesiastes. It is saturated
with human viewpoint and it’s one of the most brilliant analyses of where human
viewpoint leads you, that is, into despair. And recent research has shown that
the rise of Greek philosophy begins very conspicuously in 586, and 586 should
ring a bell because it’s 586 when the kingdom of the south falls. And apparently, though we can’t prove it, I
get the inclination from the fact that the Greeks had contact with the
Phoenicians, the Phoenicians had contact with Solomon and David, that actually
Solomon may have been the father of a lot of the despair philosophy the world
has seen, because toward the end of his life he promulgated these years in the
book of Ecclesiastes and they were subsequently taken over by later men.
Now Solomon is spoken of in 1 Kings 11:6 and it says, “And Solomon did
evil in the sight of the LORD, and went not fully after the LORD, as did David,
his father.” Now the Hebrew word malah means to be fully dedicated when
it’s used in this kind of a thing, you can check the various uses of the word,
and this has reference to the fact that Solomon, though a believer, did not
finish the race; he flaked out. This
same expression, did “not fully follow the LORD,” is used of all the Exodus
generation that failed to go into the land. Caleb and Joshua alone are said to
have fully followed the Lord. So
believers who move on in the Christian life for a while and the kind of phase
out toward the end do not “fully follow the Lord.” This verse, teaching us that Solomon did not
fully follow the Lord, also conversely teaches that David did, for the last
clause is “as did David, his father,” meaning that from the point of view of
the author of Kings, David did follow the Lord fully.
Now we have a problem. How are we
going to reconcile the two portraits of David; one portrait given here in 1
Kings 11:6 and the last four chapters of 2 Samuel that show David going on with
the Lord, but then we’ve just been through 3 or 4 chapters of 2 Samuel that
show that David is flaking out. How do
we reconcile this? Are the Scriptures in
contradiction? Has the Holy Spirit made
a mistake? Are we interpreting it
correctly? It seems to be two different
pictures. These two different pictures
represent a tremendous truth of sanctification.
When we accept the Lord Jesus Christ we are in union with Him forever;
that is our position, a position indicated by the top circle. This position is yours forever when you are
regenerated. Nothing can move you out of
that position, it is a once and for all position. It is a position in the elect plan of
God. Now that position is totally
certain, there’s nothing that can change that.
But that position is also part of a larger plan called the plan of
grace. God does not have to save anyone
after the fall; God is not obligated to save anyone. You see, we preach Christ so often that some
of us fail to recall something.
Salvation by grace means God did not have to save anyone. Jesus Christ did not have to go to the cross;
He went to the cross simply because God chose to love people in spite of their
sin, and that love is called gracious love.
Now the bottom circle represents our experience, what we’re doing in
actual experience; not our position, our experience.
And when we talk about experience we’re talking about something that is
radically different from our position.
David in experience has a mixture of righteousness and
unrighteousness. In his position he has
only righteousness, he has only the absolute righteousness of the then future
Christ attributed to his account by God.
David is justified, Psalm 32. But
although David is justified in position the Holy Spirit makes clear that David
is very, very fallible; the Holy Spirit, for the last few chapters of 2 Samuel
is showing and proving to us David has many, many –R learned behavior patterns,
he has many habitual sins in his life.
He is very, very far away from being ideal king. In fact the Holy Spirit appears to go so far
as to argue, by the overall discussion of 2 Samuel, that David could not ever
have legitimate claim to the throne. He
fooled around in various ways and he sinned in various ways, and he made very,
very poor political decisions, poor administrative decisions, so David did not,
from the human point of view, deserve the throne.
Now why did the Holy Spirit do that?
Because the Holy Spirit, from 2 Samuel 1 on through chapter 20 has been
arguing politics by grace; that is, David’s throne is secure not because of
anything in David. That’s why the whole book of 2 Samuel starts off with total
political chaos, it’s confusion, nobody knows who is king. Here’s David down here in
Now the tendency, and I’ve spoken to many as we’ve gone through 2 Samuel
is that the great Biblical hero has become deflated in your eyes. And to some this has been a discouragement;
how, they ask, can the man who authored those great Psalms be doing some of the
foolish things we find him doing in the end of 2 Samuel. Do you want to know
why? Because he’s a sinner like you are
and like I am, we all are making these kinds of mistakes. We are making these kinds of mistakes and God
is taking us back to these two circles in David’s life to show us something
fantastic. Here is our position; just as
David’s throne was secure regardless of how many mistakes he made, our position
in Christ is secure regardless of how many mistakes you make. You may have religious people,
self-righteousness people looking down their long nose at you and saying in
effect, though they never dare to say it to your face, they will say you don’t
deserve salvation how’d you ever get in the kingdom, who opened the door for
you? The same one that opened the door
for everyone, the Lord Jesus Christ.
The position is certain; the experience, however, that you have has its
ups and its down and we’ve just looked at a lot of downs. So the Holy Spirit, before we draw a false
conclusion, is going to show us something about the heart of David. And what he shows us about the heart of David
is, to my mind, one of the most important areas of the doctrine of
sanctification. What is the aim of
sanctification. The aim of
sanctification, in other words, all the experiences that happen in your life,
the discouragements, the encouragements, the adversities, the blessings, the
cursings, does it all have a basic purpose.
Why do things happen in the sequence they happen in your life. What is
God trying to get across? What is the basic aim of sanctification?
First let’s define three words again and get an accurate
vocabulary. We use the word
sanctification for that time in your life stretching from the time when you
receive the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior until the time you die, or the rapture
occurs, whichever occurs first. During that phase, the second phase of
salvation, that phase is called sanctification.
That’s the way we’re using the word, sometimes it’s used differently,
but we are using it that way so you understand what we’re talking about. We’re
not talking about eternity, we are talking about time, now, historical
experience. Now what’s the aim of that
historical experience. The aim can be
summarized by the first and great commandment: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with all thy heart, with all thy mind, with all thy soul.” And the word “love” in the Bible means be
loyal. The word “love” used in Moses day
was used in many treaty documents; we have access to a treaty between Pharaoh
and a king by the name Ribadu, of Palestine.
Ribadu in the middle of this treaty uses the word “love,” and you want
to watch this because here’s the definition as it would have been understood in
Moses’ day. When Ribadu talks to Pharaoh
he makes the following statement: to love Pharaoh is to serve him. And that is the classic ancient use for the
word “love” in treaties and covenant forms.
So when you have Yahweh, or the God of the Old Testament, asking Israel
to love Him, He is asking Israel to serve Him.
Now that shouldn’t be too much of a strange interpretation of the word
love; it’s precisely the Lord Jesus Christ, for you remember in the upper room
discourse in John 14 what did He say: He
who loves Me keeps My commandments. So
Christ had that same thing. In other
words, said another way, the king issue and aim of sanctification is loyalty to
God and we have to extend it because that by itself doesn’t fully define what
we are talking about, it allows too many people to slip away from the center of
it. Loyalty to what God has said, or
God’s Word, that is the aim of all experience that God the Holy Spirit brings
into your life. Deductions: that means
God the Holy Spirit is not primarily after giving you a sweet experience. The Holy Spirit is not primarily interested
even in the issue of how well you do against sin. We’ll discuss that and I’ll show you the
proper way of handling it. Loyalty to
God’s Word is the number one point. So
behind every one of the things that happen, here you may be, you have accepted
Christ you are in the top circle, that’s your position, you are regenerated,
indwelt, baptized, sealed, you have a spiritual gift, that’s the work of the
Holy Spirit for you; you share that work with every other believer in the Lord
Jesus Christ.
Down here is the realm of your experience, and it’s kind of up and down
if you’re the normal type of Christian.
Now you’re oftentimes discouraged by this; sometimes you should be
because the Holy Spirit wants you to be; other times the discouragement is
illegitimate. But your experience is
obviously a long way away from the ideal of your position. Our experience is up and down. Now in the middle of all this chaos of
experience there is a rhyme and there is a reason to these things that are
coming into your life; they don’t happen by chance, there’s no such thing as
chance, there’s no such thing as accident in your life. All those things that come in, Romans 8:28,
have something behind them, and the training program that you are involved in
and you may not have volunteered for it because when you accepted Christ you
didn’t know what you were getting in for and God deliberately kept it from you
because He was interested in giving you the plan of salvation, He was
interested that you accept Him just strictly on a grace basis. And then as you’ve grown in the Lord you
suddenly discover that it isn’t a bed of roses; you discover everything seems
to get dumped on you, you can’t understand why other Christians seem to be
flourishing and prospering and every time there’s a mistake it parks itself on
your back steps. And you seem to be the
lightening rod that catches it.
All right, why is all this going on?
There is a reason behind it and it is to develop a mental attitude in
your soul—loyalty, loyalty to God’s Word no matter what happens. That’s what
the Holy Spirit is teaching you, and He may do it with or without ecstatic
experiences; He may do it with people you don’t like, He may do it with people
you do like; He may do it when you are poor, He may do it when you are
rich; He may do it when you are without an
education or He may do it after you’ve had an education; He may do it while
you’re getting an education. All right,
what is He doing. He is putting you
through the grinder until your soul has within it a basic loyalty to the Word
of God. That’s what He is after, that is
the aim of sanctification.
Now let’s look at the strategy the Holy Spirit uses to understand what
went wrong here in David’s life and how the Holy Spirit salvaged it. In warfare there are two ways of handling
things. We’ll deal with the problem of strategy. In the 19th century there was a
man who wrote one of the best documents on war, his name was Clausewitz. And the idea that this man had was your
basic strategy is just bulldoze the enemy.
The enemy is here, you use a direct strategy. It was the influence of Clausewitz who led to
the tremendous blood-letting of World War I.
There has never been such a war fought so terribly as World War I. World War II was a lot more humane than World
War I ever was. In World War I the
British army had 60,000 casualties in 24 hours, one of the most shocking
periods in the era of England. And they
gained about 21 feet of ground, the average advance. Why did they do that? Because during World
War I the Clausewitz dogma of direct approach was used, so you’d have the
English and French in their trenches, and the Germans over here in their
trench, and it was the whole thing of the men over the top to try to capture
the next trench, and then the machine guns were used and these men would just
get mowed down by the hundreds as they tried to get ten more feet to the next
trench. So World War I was a very
horrible war but it was fought with the dogma of direct strategy; that means
you just frontally approach your enemy.
But between World War I and World War II there was a man by the name of
B. H. Liddell Hart. Hart was an
Englishman and he decided that something was radically wrong with the way World
War I was fought, and so he embarked on a great realm of historical studies and
B. H. Liddell Hart wrote the famous book that became the textbook for World War
II. It was simply entitled Strategy. Hart studied 2,500 years of war, and asked
himself what made victory in war possible with a minimum number of
casualties. If we study battle after
battle after battle can we find these men, maybe unconsciously, but can we find
something that all the great generals of history have used to win wars and win
them effectively? Do we have to go
through another blood bath like World War I.
And he had many, many interesting conclusions. One of his conclusions was the way to fight
war in the 1930s was what he called lightening war, and he tried to sell the
British army on this concept of using armor very rapidly, using it fast and so
forth to avoid getting bogged down. Use
a lot of flanking moves, so instead of hitting him straight on you move around
on his flank, this kind of thing, and to do so you have to have high
mobility. So he invented the concept of
rapid war. Unfortunately, as often
happens, Great Britain turned down their nose on him; his book found its way
into the hands of a German, Gedarin, and Gedarin was the founder of German
blitzkrieg war, and in 1939 when the German armies rapidly moved across Poland
they were simply following the researches of B. H. Liddell Hart, the Englishman
who had struggled to get the British army to do the same thing.
And so the Americans and the British and the French had to learn this
concept from the Germans and it was simply because, we’ll say, Britain’s eyes
were closed to the genius of this young man.
Well, B. H. Liddell Hart’s chief conclusion among all the other detailed
conclusions is that all wars that have ever been won and won effectively have
been won on a simple principle, and this simple principle has been prominent in
2500 years of fighting. It is always the
principle of the indirect approach. Hart
would argue that all wars are won from the day they begin by one side, simply
because one side in advance has made it psychologically and sometimes
physically impossibly for the other side to maneuver. In other words, there’s a lot more
maneuvering in the indirect approach.
You have an objective out here, you don’t use a frontal approach; you
come around from the side.
Now all this boils down to the fact that what part found in history is
there because God designed history that way; all conflicts, if God is the
author of history, have a pattern to them and that pattern will ultimately come
forward in the final conflict at Armageddon, when the Lord Jesus Christ will be
the expert strategist, and he will be the man who will use, as commanded, the
indirect approach.
Now the program of the Christian’s sanctification also follows the
indirect approach. Most of this, and it
will save you from a lot of theological problems, over here let’s map out as our
enemy the classic three enemies to sanctification: the flesh, the world system,
and Satan. There’s our enemy. Now usually in works on sanctification they
followed the idea of frontal attack, the Christian is to attack his enemies, he
is to attack Satan, he is to attack his flesh, he is to attack the world system
in one massive frontal attack. And the
result is nothing better than a microcosm World War I with trench warfare where
there is a high casualty rate with very low gain of land. God however, doesn’t
do this, and I’ll give you some illustrations of it, then we’ll go to the life
of David. Instead of designing the plan
of sanctification based on the direct strategy, we have God designing the same
thing, here we have the enemies of sanctification, but recall something.
These enemies weren’t there before the fall. These enemies, in other words, are something
that came in later. If there had been no
fall there still would have been a need of sanctification because
sanctification does not primarily deal even with sin; sanctification deals
primarily with the development of a mental attitude of loyalty to God. Jesus Christ had to be sanctified according
to the epistle to the Hebrews, but Jesus Christ didn’t have any sin. Jesus Christ wasn’t fighting sin in the sense
it was in His soul but Jesus had to be sanctified. So obviously, what does this mean. It means that Jesus Christ as a bona fide human being, having true
humanity, had to learn Himself loyalty, Hebrews 5:8, “Though He were a Son, yet
He had to learn obedience by the things which He suffered.”
So the strategy given in Scripture for sanctification is this: you
pursue the aim of loyalty to the Word of God first, and doing so you out-flank
the enemy. Now there are numerous
illustrations that God has given in the history of Israel to show this
point. For example, at the battle of Ai,
the Jews had come into Ai, they were following the command to exterminate the
enemy and they were clobbered in the process.
Why did God allow the sons of Israel to bleed to death in battle at the
battle of Ai? Why did He permit these
men to die when they were following His orders to exterminate the enemy. Weren’t they aligned against the enemies of
God? Yes. Except for one thing, they weren’t doing it
out of personal loyalty to Jehovah. In
other words, they were trying to substitute the enemies of sanctification and
their elimination as the aim of sanctification.
The aim of sanctification is not the elimination of Satan, it is not the
elimination of the world system, it is not the complete negation of the
flesh. That is not the aim of sanctification; the
aim is to develop a mental attitude of loyalty.
Now let’s watch how this works in David’s life. Here we have David; David is an illustration
of a man, according to 1 Kings 11:6 who went fully after the Lord, yet we know
from 2 Samuel that David wasn’t perfect, he was far from perfect. We have seen how vicious David was in 2
Samuel 20, how he sold out some of his friends. We have seen him make some very,
very stupid decisions politically; we have seen that he had a very weak
administration; we have seen that he had very poor insight at many points in
his career. But these last few chapters,
chapters 21-24 are going to show us that beneath all of David’s failure to deal
with the flesh, the world system and Satan, in spite of the fact that David
dealt irregularly with the enemies of his own sanctification, David always had
his eyes on loyalty to God. We’ll see
this and how this works, and therefore God Himself took care of many of these
men; took care of many, many of David’s enemies. David didn’t deserve that
these enemies be taken care of in quite this way.
Look at verse 1 of 2 Samuel 22, because chapters 21 and 22 go
together. These two chapters form a
unit, and in 22:1, which by the way, chapter 22 is nothing but Psalm 18;
chapter 22 is a psalm and it starts off, “And David spoke unto the LORD the
words of this son in the day that the LORD had delivered him out of the hand of
al his enemies, and out of the hand of Saul.”
Now notice, two categories, David is delivered from all enemies, and he
is delivered from Saul. So you have two categories at the beginning of Psalm 18
or 2 Samuel 22. These represent a
summation of the enemies that David faced in his life. There are two categories, the internal and
the external. God delivered him from all
those enemies. Now the Holy Spirit has
just got through painting a morbid picture of David and if we stopped the book
at chapter 20 you could say well, David certainly didn’t deserve to be
delivered from all his enemies. And the
Holy Spirit would agree with that, that’s exactly His point, David didn’t
deserve to be delivered from all his enemies, but I did it anyway; I delivered
David from all his enemies even though David did not deserve it, even though
from the human viewpoint David was not a great king in the latter times of his
life.
But beginning in chapter 21 and 22 you’re going to see another part of
David’s soul, that deep down within his soul, you can visualize it this way, on
the surface of his soul he has a lot of carnality, he has a lot of –R learned
behavior patterns that are not dealt with, he can be a very cruel man as we saw
in chapters 19-20, but in the inside of David’s soul there is a tremendous
positive volition toward God. He is
going to do some things in the dying days of his administration reported in the
book of Kings and Chronicles, which we will also study in this addendum, he
will go through these areas and you will see what he did. He let, so to speak, much of his
administration go but the one thing that he did do was establish the temple and
the worship there. And this shows you
where David’s heart was, even though he created political problems, he set up
the nation for war within several decades.
Solomon maybe could have handled the problem; David let all that go to
concentrate on one thing, loyalty to God.
And these other things he had to let go, there are the rough edges in
his life; we’re not condoning them but we’re simply saying that in the overall
David’s priorities were in the right place.
Now let’s look at chapter 21. It
neatly divides into two parts, from verses 1-14 and from verse 15 down to the
end, verse 22. The first 14 verses deal
with Saul, the house of Saul, not Saul himself but the house of Saul. And verses 14-22 deal with the Philistines of
his enemies. Now you just read chapter
22:1; from what two categories had God delivered David? From “all his enemies” and “out of the hand
of Saul.” Now what the Holy Spirit has
done in chapter 21 is to simply take two accounts, these are taken out of
chronological order, so don’t think that this comes after chapter 20
chronologically. As I said, the book end
in chapter 20, that’s it. If this were published in a modern format, chapters
21 and following would be appendix A, appendix B, appendix C, appendix D. They’re all appendices, they’re an addendum
to the main book. So these are taken out
of chronological order, both these accounts, and they’re put in as samples, or
examples, that the Holy Spirit is saying now I want to give you one example of
how God delivered David from the hand of Saul, and I’m going to give you
another example of how God delivered David from all his enemies. Then in chapter 22 David is going to respond
with his heart to God in thanksgiving and praise. Remember what praise is; it’s a public
response to something God has done. And
so obviously if we go into a praise Psalm like 2 Samuel 22 or Psalm 18, which
is a praise Psalm, you’ve got to have something to praise God about. So chapter 21 is put in here to give you the
historical facts that David is responding to.
Let’s look at the first one, verses 1-14. This is an example of how God delivered him
from Saul. “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.” Now notice David
acting as king and what he does; when this happened we are not sure; we can
guess within brackets. We know that this
happened sometime after 2 Samuel 5 because that was when David became
king. We know it happened before 2
Samuel 16 because by that time Shimei… this is the incident that Shimei is
talking about. Remember they were
marching during the revolt of Absalom, out of the east side of Jerusalem,
marching toward the Jordan valley and as they are marching along the road they
had this klutz picking up rocks and chucking them at the ranks. And that was when Joab’s brother said hey
David, do you want me to take his head off, or he said “lift his head,” well
that incident happened while he was going out the east part of the city, and
Shimei, the rock thrower, was throwing rocks because of what happened. This that incident that made him mad. So it obviously happened before chapter 16;
so when did these first 14 verses happen?
Sometime between chapter 5 and 16.
[1] “Then there was a famine in the days of David three years,” and this
is what David did, here is the mature believer responding to suffering. He “inquired of the LORD.” When you’re in a situation of prolonged
suffering just don’t ignore it, somebody might be trying to tell you something,
and what that somebody is trying to tell you can range in an of six categories,
so let’s just review the doctrine of suffering for the Christian.
All your suffering will come in one of these six categories; one reason
you suffer is because in Adam we fell, all suffering will involve category one;
there will not ever be any suffering you’ll ever face in your life that isn’t
due at least in part to a fallen creature identified with Adam in history. Another reason for suffering is simple
rebellion, that’s category 2 and that is because we have disobeyed something
that God has put on our heart to do and we have failed to do it, it may range
from being called into some particular line of work on to some person with whom
you have a relationship or something like this; rebellion. So failure to deal with that, that’s a second
reason for suffering. A third reason for
suffering is by association in the divine institution’s, that’s category
three. In other words, because you are a
part of a family that has sinned you share that sin pattern of that home, to
the third and fourth generations. And so
that’s an illustration. Another
illustration is that Christians, particularly missionaries are suffering
because they are Americans in foreign lands.
The fourth reason why we suffer; we live in Satan’s world so we become
the object of Satan’s attack. Another
reason for suffering is to teach us certain lessons. And a sixth reason for suffering is that we
are a testimony before men and angels.
You ought to as a believer know these things and know them just like
that. So when suffering comes into your
life you think categorically, you don’t sit around and fall apart. When
suffering hits you go through these categories prayerfully. It’s going to take time, granted, just
knowing these categories isn’t going to solve your problem alone, I know
that. But it’s going to give you the
tools so you can organize your prayers, so you can go to Scripture and ask the
Holy Spirit to work through the text of His Word to convict you, give you some
direction on what is going on. You’ve
got some orderly process, some approach to use with the six principles so it’s
not just chaotic.
David is that kind of a believer, so in verse 1 when there was a famine
for three years, what does he do year after year? He inquired of the Lord. And he got an answer, and the answer is
category three, the famine was because of association with another believer
that was getting clobbered. Saul, the
house of Saul, is a word for the dynasty
of Saul. David had been promised to be the only dynasty over Israel. If David is to survive, and we’re going to
see how close David came to not surviving in this passage, if he is going to
survive the dynasty of Saul must be eliminated, apparently for many reasons. Number one, there was an intense grassroots
loyalty to the house of Saul and the only way God could deal with it was simply
remove the whole house of Saul. Another reason was that the sons of Saul
inherited the sin patterns of their father, God couldn’t have another group on
the throne like that, plus the fact God in 2 Samuel 7 had promised the throne
to David.
So look at the situation now, we’ve got the Saul dynasty living Israel
at the time David is on the throne. Now
by the end of 13 more verses the whole town is going to be eliminated and
that’s why God delivered David. And
David really has nothing to do with it; he just goes along and says Lord, why
is my country suffering, what is wrong with it.
And God says your country is suffering David because of divine
institution number three, family, divine institution four, nation, this is the
royal family that’s involved and this country suffered because you have people
in this country disloyal to Me to the core and they have to be eliminated. Now why?
“…Because he slew the Gibeonites.”
Now there’s a lot of background in this.
Gibeon is a place north of Jerusalem, six miles or so north of Jerusalem
and it was a place where they had a worship center; we don’t know exactly how
the ark was there or how long, but we know definitely the Gibeonites were are a
worship center.
Turn back to Joshua 9, the Gibeonites had been the people that tricked
Joshua into making a treaty with them; they were Canaanites but they pulled a
fast one on Joshua. They came over to
his side and they apparently were believers, they got the message and they
believed the Word of God, and they tricked Joshua into making a treaty with
them. Joshua found out and he was rather
hacked that he had been tricked, so he sentenced them to a particular place,
verse 21. “And the princes said unto them, “ the Gibeonites, “Let them live,
but let them be hewers of wood and drawers of water into all the congregation;
as the princes had promised.” Verse 27,
“And Joshua made them that day hewers of wood and drawers of water for the
congregation, and for the altar of the LORD, even unto this day, in the place
which he should choose.”
Now in a nutshell here’s the problem.
At the very altar of God, remember, this is the most sacred center of
the nation you have Gentiles. So you’ve
got a group of Gentiles serving, right close, physically, to the ark of
God. The Gibeonites, in other words,
represent God’s grace. God is saying
though I exterminate the Canaanites, when and if those Canaanites accept Me as
Savior, they can come as close as you can come.
Now this galled Saul. Saul was a
self-righteous kind of person and he couldn’t stand the thought that these
Gentiles were around the ark of God. The very idea, as Saul would walk by this
ark every day and see those Gentile dogs, as he would call them, serving there
when he, Saul, was a Jew, he had more right to be there, why not eliminate
them. So he started, according to this
verse.
And later on in the last part if you turn back to 2 Samuel, in verse 2,
“And the king called the Gibeonites, and said unto them;” and the Gibeonites
are then explained, “(now the Gibeonites were not of the children of Israel,”
they were Gentiles, “but of the remnant of the Amorites; and the children of
Israel had sworn unto them:” that swearing in verse 2 is what I just showed you
in Joshua 9, they made a treaty, an oath with them, “but Saul sought to slay
them in his zeal to the children of Israel and Judah.)” We don’t know exactly when this occurred, it
may have been the massacre at Nob, it may have been later on. But at some point in Saul’s career he launched
on a super patriot campaign of eliminating all Gentiles. Remember Saul is a picture of a carnal
Christian, he is one who can’t think spiritually, to Saul the issue was race,
the issue was something physical instead of being that which was
spiritual. It wasn’t a case that these
people were Gentiles, it was a case of who around here believes in Jehovah;
that’s the issue, not their racial background. But Saul never got the point and
so he started a campaign of genocide, and apparently he got very successful in
this because the Gibeonites later on in verse 5 say “the man that consumed us,”
so that implies that Saul’s campaign of genocide was almost successful.
Now in verse 3 David realizes he’s got to solve the problem, there’s sin
in the land. And God, according to the
principles of suffering laid down in Leviticus 26 is disciplining the nation.
So David, as king, representing the nation, must do something, and he asks a
very interesting question in verse 3, “Wherefore David said unto the
Gibeonites, What shall I do for you? and wherewith shall I make the atonement,
that ye may bless the inheritance of the LORD?”
Notice the word “atonement” in verse 3.
That shows you right away David knows the issue. He knows that there is a sin that has to be
atoned for, and as we’ve gone through the substitutionary blood atonement there
must be that sort of sacrifice. And so
the only way to do it is by a procedure outlined in the Old Testament Law in
Number 25:4 [2-4, “And they called the people unto the sacrifices of their
gods; and the people did eat, and bowed down to their gods. [3] And Israel
joined himself unto Bael-peor; and the anger of the LORD was kindled against
Israel. [4] And the LORD said unto Moses, Take all the heads of the people, and
hang them up before the LORD against the sun, that the fierce anger of the LORD
may be turned away from Israel.”]
In Numbers 24:4 there’s a procedure given in the Mosaic Law for handling
this kind of a problem. When you have a situation like this where there’s
tremendous sin involved in a group of people the procedure under the Old
Testament Law was to kill these people by stoning and then take sticks and put
up by a public road somewhere, then they would nail these bodies on these
sticks; and instead of putting billboards up they just put bodies up and you’d
be driving by in your chariot and you’d see people hanging there. Now why were these people hung? This is the early form of crucifixion. They were hung there because they were
considered to be atoning for the blood that had come upon the land; they were
executed, capital punishment, and then they were displayed publicly; this got
the point across to the people and to all of the tribes that God was serious
about this business of enforcing the law.
[4, “And the Gibeonites said unto him, We will have no silver nor gold
of Saul, nor of his house; neither for us shalt thou kill any man in Israel.
And he said, What ye shall say, that will I do for you. [5] And they answered the
king, The man that consumed us, and that devised against us that we should be
destroyed from remaining in any of the coasts of Israel.”]
So they suggest this in verse 6, “Let seven men of his sons be delivered unto
us, and we will hang them up unto the LORD in Gibeah of Saul, whom the LORD did
choose. And the king said, I will give them.”
In verse 7 he spares one of his sons, Mephibosheth, who is the son of
Jonathan because that’s the case where he had also made an oath, notice in
verse 7, “But the king spared Mephibosheth, the son of Jonathan the son of
Saul, because of the LORD’s oath that was between them, between David and
Jonathan the son of Saul.” So that
particular grandson, literally, of Saul is not eliminated. By the way, when they say “sons,” God’s not
talking just about the first generation, He’s talking about Saul’s sons and
their sons. In other words, the whole
colony of the Saul family he wants eliminated.
And it all works out, you don’t have the Holy Spirit speaking at any of
these points but the idea of the text is this is how God is working it out
through the volition of the Gibeonites.
In verse 8, “But the king took the two sons of Rizpah the daughter of
Aiah,” Rizpah was Saul’s favorite girlfriend, “whom she bare unto Saul, Armoni
and Mephibosheth,” and these are two names, the Mephibosheth here in verse 8 is
not the same Mephibosheth, this is the uncle of the Mephibosheth in verse 7,
“and the five sons of Michal the daughter of Saul, whom she brought up for
Adriel the son of Barzillai the Meholathite:”
And that Barzillai is not the same one that we mentioned earlier. There is one problem in verse 8 that somebody
will hit you with every once in a while. Michal is said to be “childless.” Remember Michal, she was Saul’s daughter,
that proud self-righteousness woman couldn’t stand it when David did the dance
in the ephod before the ark, he exposed himself and she got all high about
that, and the Lord solved her problem because the Lord made her barren. Now if Michal was barren, how could she have
five sons? Well, these five sons were
brought up by Michal for her sister. Her
sister was Merab and Merab had married this man mentioned in verse 8; the man
Adriel was the husband of Merab, not Michal. So the custom was that when
something happened to the wife, the sister came in and she helped out. So Michal is taking care of these five
sons.
Now you have to catch the political irony of this book. Remember there’s irony all over this
book. Now what is true of Michal? She was a very proud woman. Every time this woman has got in a position
of authority and blessing God has clobbered her, every single time. And you can just see Michal in this story. She never says a word, we don’t know for sure
what she said but here she must have thought, ha, God has said I’m infertile,
God has said I’m not going to have children but my sister dies and I’m going to
raise up five boys to my father and they’re going to carry on the lineage of my
father. Isn’t it ironic, how when Michal
gets her five sons that aren’t hers but she gets them to raise, she gets them
up to the point where they can be young men, and they’re eliminated. God has said Michal, you will be childless
and that means even by adoption. And so
the five sons are taken away from this woman.
Verse , David “delivered them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they
hanged them in the hill before the LORD: and they fell all seven together,” it
means a mass execution, we don’t know how, but they were all seven butchered
together, “and were put to death in the days of harvest, in the first days, in
the beginning of barley harvest. [10] And Rizpah the daughter of Aiah” this was
one of Saul’s favorite concubines, “took sackcloth, and spread it for her upon
the rock, from the beginning of harvest until water dropped upon them out of
heaven, and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day, nor
the beasts of the field by night.”
Notice who’s missing; see there were two women involved, only one shows
up; Michal doesn’t show. It’s Rizpah
that has the sense of dignity, that even though these men are hanging there by
the road on these posts, she camps by the side of that road until the day that
the Lord brings rain. And all day long
was spent shooing the vultures away from the bodies because it is lack of
dignity to be eaten by these animals before your buried. This is a very sensitive point in the book of
Samuel. So to keep the various… the Lord’s garbage men, the vultures and other
kinds of animals He created to take care of this, that woman day after day
after day would walk back and forth through these smelly bodies. You’ve got to see this scene to visualize it;
the loyalty of Rizpah, that she must give these men a proper burial. And David was so touched by what she does….
Verse 11, “And it was told David what Rizpah the daughter of Aiah, the
concubine of Saul, had done.” And again,
for about the fifth time in the book ladies, please notice how men like David
and Joab are reached; they are not reached by direct strategy, they are reached
by indirect strategy. And in all the cases we observe where women have
influenced men righteously in this book it has always been through the Word of
God, not by relating how they felt, not by telling some man their experience,
but by sharing the Word of God in a very persuasive way, not losing their
femininity but at the same time deeply influencing these men. And here again, this is about the third or
fourth time this happened in the book, we have David, who you would think could
care less for Rizpah, but the act of her obeying the Word of God does something
to him.
[12] “And David went and took the bones of Saul and the bones of
Jonathan, his son from the men of Jabesh-gilead, which had stolen them from the
street of Beth-shan, where the Philistines had hanged them, when the
Philistines had slain Saul in Gilboa.” it suddenly reminds him, hey, here’s
this concubine and she has more respect for those five men than I have for Saul
and Jonathan, Jonathan being his closest friend, hey, we’ve never given
Jonathan a burial, so Rizpah’s act recalls to David something he had
forgotten. So he brings the bones back,
verse 13, “And he brought up from thence the bones of Saul and the bones of
Jonathan his son; and they gathered the bones of them that were hanged,” and he
buries them. And then verse 14, “And the
bones of Saul and Jonathan his son buried they in the country of Benjamin in
Zelah, in the sepulcher of Kish his father: and they performed all that the king
commanded. And after that God was entreated for the land.”
Now we know God was entreated for the land because later on, according
to verse 10 and other verses, we find that the rains came, the famine
disappeared, and God was propitiated; there had been an attempt made, somebody
died to make up for the blood of the Gibeonites. This is one part of God’s delivering
David. Notice it hasn’t been miraculous
here; in all these fourteen verses if you were there you wouldn’t see anything
spooky, lights in the skies, no speaking in tongues, nothing like that ever
happened. It was just a normal ordinary
providential leading of God. But Psalm
18 or 2 Samuel 22 when it turns around and praises it is going to praise it as
a supernatural deliverance. With this
verse, verse 14, David is secure from direct competition. And if you have paid attention, I developed
this point about Michal, even though hastily, but where was Michal living when
all this was going on? She was in the
palace, she was still David’s wife. Now
do you see why God had it so worked out that those boys were eliminated. You have five sons that are grandsons with
the blood of Saul in them living right in the palace, and David apparently
wasn’t or didn’t think that these would be a threat to him. But God in His omniscience realized that this
would be a tremendous threat to the Davidic dynasty, so it all works out; they
are purged from the house, David is saved.
Now look at what has happened.
Was David saved and delivered from this because he figured it all out,
he plotted it, he schemed. Nothing like
that at all; he simply made it a point of obeying what he knew of God and God
worked all the rest out. And He can do
it in your life too. With our heads
bowed please.
[Verse 15, “Moreover the Philistines had yet war again with