THE MAN AFTER GODS OWN HEART
That
God Himself has said that David was "a man
after His own heart" (1 Sam.13:14)
- a statement repeated in the New Testament (Acts
13: 22) - is as wonderful a tribute as has ever been paid
to a human soul. It at once rivets our
thoughtful, pondering, imitative gaze upon the man whose very name was - ‘beloved of God’. Moreover, David's niche in prophecy is unique.
He shares with Daniel the rarest of all
honours - named as in the First
Resurrection: apostles (Matt. 19: 28), prophets (Luke 13: 28), martyrs
(Rev. 20: 4), all are named as classes; but
the solitary individual disclosed by God Himself as actually rising from the
dead* is David. There is probably no more human
character in the Bible, and it is the human that God loves - "My delight is with the sons of men"; nor is any
other character (apart from our Lord’s) so fully portrayed by inspiration:
therefore, the wise disciple, disentangling qualities merely personal to David
- gifts as poet, as prophet, as musician - and fastening on the fundamental
God-lovability possible to us all, will ponder the triumphant march of one of
the Victors of God.
[*
Daniel's ‘standing’ implies resurrection, but of
David alone is the act explicitly stated, and that by God. "Go thy way till
the end be; for thou shalt rest, and shalt stand
[in resurrection] in thy lot, at the end of the
days” (Dan.
12: 13); "thou man greatly beloved" (Dan. 10: 11).]
David’s
first and most dominant characteristic is an unsurpassed devotion, both in
heart and in intellect, to God and the Word of God. Probably more of David’s prayers are recorded
than of all other saints put together. The
Book A Psalms, a standard hymn-book of the people of God for three thousand
years, as perfect a mirror as was ever made - of a trusting, weeping,
rejoicing, trembling, loving soul, who lives in the presence of God; and the 119th Psalm has no parallel in all literature,
inspired or uninspired, as the expression an overwhelming passion for the Word
of God - its truthfulness, its inerrancy, its sweetness, its saving power, its
divine origin. David's whole life is one
constant grip of the Unseen Hand. The
Books of Samuel, Kings, Chronicles give the outer panorama of his life: the
Psalms, the X-Rays that disclose the motive springs, reveal a saint in heaven
while lived on earth: though one of the wealthiest of Kings, he was a stranger
and a pilgrim, and his absorption in Scripture day and night had, for aim, a
perfectly God-patterned life. The
Psalmist models all thought and conduct on the Word of God.
In
a second characteristic David stands forth in lonely splendour: a warrior all
his life, he never lost a pitched battle. With great significance to us the
Arch-enemy in the unseen stirred by his goodness and Divine favour, so
constantly stirred up enemies that the sword was never out of David’s hand;
and, far more wonderful, no set engagement ever proved a lost battle. He fought God’s battles at the peril of his
life; and at least once nearly won the martyr’s crown, when, faint and
exhausted, he was all but slain by a gigantic Philistine (2 Sam. 21: 15). His war-work - symbol of our holier war - was
magnificent. Philistia
was finally broken: Moab’s army, out-generalled and
outflanked, fell nearly whole into his hands, and Moab paid tribute for the
following century and a half; Syria and its allies - soldiers whose very
shields were of plated gold - were broken and subjugated and Edom was
exterminated. By the close of his reign
the Hebrew dominion, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Arabian
wilderness, and reaching up to and embracing Syria in the north, had been
lifted to a commanding sphere among the Oriental nations; and David’s weapons
after his death, deposited as sacred relics in the Temple (2 Kings 11: 10) became exquisite symbols of the
Spirit’s epitaph on Apocalyptic overcomers - "Blessed
are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: yea, saith the Spirit, that
they may rest from their labours; for their works follow
with them" (Rev. 14: 13).
The
third characteristic of David is, to us all, of extraordinary importance. It is inexpressibly comforting that David’s
sins - though, it is true, few and isolated, and receiving a publicity
unparalleled in the history of the world - are as great as they are: what was
in God's sight (2 Sam. 12: 9) adultery and
murder - both of which, under the Law, carried the death-penalty - were
actually part of the life of one of God’s greatest saints. It is exactly here that modern evangelicalism
has plumbed neither the sinfulness of the saint nor the immensity of pardoning
grace. So stoutly is the possibility of
grave sin in a child of God resisted - so as to elude the fearful consequences
of which many Scriptures warn us - that The Homilist, avoiding the common plea that such a man
could never have been converted, solves the problem by a point-blank denial of
the Scripture. "Was the character of David after God’s own heart? Conventional pietists
will to a man say, Yes. The most thoughtful, independent, and critical
students of God’s Book will to a man say, No. David had his virtues, as most bad men have;
but few men in history have been guilty of more heinous crimes. It is blasphemy to say that such a character
was after the heart of infinite purity."
All
such critics, another section of whom have the word ‘grace’
constantly on their lips, flinch from facing both facts and Scriptures - the
depth to which the servant of God can fall, and the corresponding depth and
wonder of the grace of God.* For David’s is the golden possibility of us all
- a perfect pardon and a complete
recovery long ere the sin reaches the inexorable Judgment Seat of Christ.
For the Fifty-first
Psalm is the supreme confession of sin in all literature. It has supplied millions of penitent souls with
exactly the words they wanted, and their use after sin - if we can use them -
is to let down into the waters of the soul a thermometer which will reveal, or
not, a broken and a contrite heart. For David was vastly more than a pardoned
backslider. Ample sowing brought
ample harvest. His extraordinary
generosity, his frank forgiveness of his enemies his warm affections - for his
parents, for Jonathan, for the little son that died, for Absolom:
- all the splendid large-heartedness he meted, God measured back to him again. For David is a supreme embodiment of the
pregnant law of Christ, "Many that are first shall
be last, and the last first” (Mark 10: 31):
first become last - in the grossest
sins ever attributed to a saint in the Bible; last become first - in an
after-life of perfect penitence and purity.
[* This most prominent of all sinfulness
in a saint is peculiarly valuable as placing beyond reasonable doubt or denial
the sins which the truly regenerate can commit, and so establishes that the warnings and punishments for such sins, in
contexts addressed to believers, directly concern the regenerate.
It will hardly be contended that David
when he sinned was an ‘empty professor’,
or a ‘false brother’ crept unawares into the
fold of God. So New Testament Scriptures
explicitly assert that the regenerate can commit murder (1 Pet. 4: 15) and adultery (1 Cor. 6: 15), with
consequent though not eternal, consequences; and to assume that 'grace’ covers such sin unabandoved,
or that if unabandoned it will never come into
judgment, is doctrine as immoral and unscriptural as could be conceived.]
David's
fourth characteristic is the magnificence of his unattained ideal. A man’s ambition is the exact revelation of
his heart. So ample and complete were
David's preparations for the building of the
So
now we arrive at the inevitable destiny of a man or woman after God’s own heart
- a first-broken tomb; as "accounted worthy to
attain to that age, and the resurrection [from among] the dead"
(Luke 20: 35). David
alone is personally named by God, in a prophecy made three times, through three
different prophets, as in the First Resurrection. Jehovah says
through Jeremiah (30:
8), centuries after David was dead:- "And
it shall come to pass in that day" -
the age of the restoration of Israel - "that
[Israel] shall serve the Lord their God, and
David their King, WHOM I WILL RAISE UP UNTO THEM."
David's tomb, unbroken at the Lord’s
resurrection (Acts 2: 29), will be split by
the last earthquakes that will again rock the
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