2 Samuel 1

Intro

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, they say. Or, you will know a tree by its fruits. Only sometimes the wicked disguise their true purpose. Even sorrow can become a mask for avarice, hiding the greedy desire for gain. David points toward a right response to the tragedies that attend life in this fallen world, including the sorrows of losing someone you love.

2 Samuel 1

Recap of 1 Samuel

1 and 2 Samuel are written to answer one question: why and how did Israel get a king, and who is he, and more importantly, what should he be like? Beginning with the ministry of Samuel as the last Judge over Israel, who was also a prophet, and tracing the struggles of Israel to define itself as a nation in relation to other nations. They wanted a king, a tacit rejection that the Lord was their king. So the Lord gave them a king just like the nations. Saul was tall, dark, and handsome, standing head and shoulders over everyone else. Only his appearance was surface deep. He lacked the character to lead the people of God successfully. He failed to embody as Israel’s king what an ideal Israelite should look like. But as the dynasty of Saul unravels, the Lord chose and anointed David as his successor, a man after God’s own heart. Only, he had much that he would teach David to fit him for the leadership of the people of God before he would become king. David endured the persecution of Saul, exposure in the wilderness, and eventually exile among the Philistines.

Just before the opening of 2 Samuel, all Israel was arrayed in battle against the Philistines. Saul, desperate for a word from the Lord, visits a witch to call up Samuel from the dead, who tells him this would be his last battle, for he and his sons would die at the hands of the Philistines. Meanwhile, David is spared from having to war against Israel alongside the Philistines and returns to Ziklag to find his home destroyed and his family and that of his men taken. After making war against the Amalekites, which Saul had been unsuccessful in doing, David returns to Ziklag having recovered what was lost. It is there that this Amalekite (intentionally suspect) comes and delivers news of Saul’s death.

The (false) sorrow of the wicked

A man from Saul’s camp wearing the marks of sorrow (torn clothes, dirt on head), with news for David of Saul’s death. If you had read this story continuously from 1 Samuel, you would note a discrepancy. For in 1 Samuel 31, Saul hard pressed in battle and struck with arrow, asked his armor bearer to kill him, but he refused. How could he put out his hand against the Lord’s anointed. So Saul kills himself. Now here comes a man who claims that Saul asked him to kill him and he did. Further this ‘man’ is an Amalekite. Of the people that raided David’s family, and whom David had just returned from defeating.

This Amalekite man is what you call an opportunist. He must have come upon Saul slain in battle and taken his ornaments, thinking this may be the way for him to make a name for himself in David’s cabinet. Only he made a severe miscalculation, not knowing the character of David, and his own refusal to reach out his hand against the Lord’s anointed, even when Saul was actively trying to kill him (wrongly).

We discover then that this wicked Amalekite has dawned the cloak of sorrow in an effort to disguise his avarice. But David sees through it and he is snared by his own words.

“Avarice is a preoccupation with the accumulation of material wealth, especially wealth in abundance, that is hoarded for the sake of one’s own benefit.”1 One of the more subtle sins that has in many ways become acceptable as a virtue in a Make America Great Again kind of way. As Gecko Gordan in Wall Street once syllogized.

"The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms— greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge—has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much!"2

The Amalekite man uses the sorrow of death, and especially the sea change that comes when the king dies, to try to come up in the world. I am reminded of the stories some widows in the church have told me of the vultures who hang around the death of their husbands, waiting to devour their inheritance. Death is a big business, from the taxman to the funeral home, there are people lined up waiting to profit from death.

The (true) sorrow of the godly

But this episode is not here to teach us as much what not to do, but to show us a godly response to sorrow. David does two very important things that help transition Israel through the loss of one of the Lord’s anointed, to the successful establishment of another. First, he vindicates the death of Saul by executing is self-confessed murderer, then in he leads the nation in lament of Jonathan and Saul.

It is ironic that an Amalekite claims to have killed Saul, since it was the battle against that the Amalekites that proved to be the undoing of Saul leading to the Lord tearing the kingdom from him and giving it another (David). And this was because he failed to devote them to complete destruction (ban), keeping alive the king Agag, and the best of the plunder, claiming that it was to offer to the Lord. That event was the beginning of the end of Saul’s dynasty. But David completes what Saul left undone, destroying Amalekites, and then executing the Lord’s vengeance on the Amalekite man, based on his own confession that he put out his hand against the Lord’s anointed. Something David refused to do, and thereby signaling to the watching world thus will it be done to the one who tries anything against the Lord’s anointed.

Often sorrow will cloud your judgment preventing you from seeing, or being aware of the right thing to do. David could have said, look I am to sad to think about what to do with this guy, and turned inward in grief to retreat from the world. We might have even understood this reaction. But a godly response to sorrow does not turn inward, it does the right thing.

You may be thinking that there is no one watching you. But trust me there is. Whether a spouse, a child, a coworker, a friend. How you respond to lives sorrows has an impact on others. Especially those younger more impressionable among us. I am not suggesting a stoic, stiff-upper-lip attitude to sorrow, as if you are impassable. But one that frames sorrow in light of the cross of Jesus Christ. For the cross relativizes sorrow and grief, by showing us that Jesus removed the finality of death’s sting.

Not only does David do thee right thing in respect to his office of king, as a minister of God’s justice, but also in this public capacity he leads the people in lament.

Lament is the biblical answer to the question of how to rightly respond to the sorrows that beset us in this sinful world. It is way not to complain to the world about God, but a way to complain to God about the world. A lament is an opportunity to bring our sorrows to the Lord and move from a place of pain to a place of trust.

David not only grieves the loss of Saul and Jonathan, but he celebrates their faithfulness. Here David shows himself to be a peacemaking king. For in the next four chapters that follow his rise to king over a united kingdom we will also see his valiant efforts to make peace with the house of Saul. Which is uncharacteristic of kings. Normally when there is a change of dynasty, the incoming king will wipe out everyone remaining of the old kings house (line) so there will be no future competition for the throne. David not only doesn’t do that, he celebrates the virtues of Jonathan and Saul. He grieves Israel’s loss, the might of Saul and Jonathan as warriors, and the deep friendship of Jonathan.

David has proven repeatedly to be the better man than Saul, when he refused to put out his hand against the Lord’s anointed, even though he, an innocent man, was hunted and persecuted by him. But he goes one step farther when after Saul’s death he leads Israel to celebrate the life of a great warrior and king. Here we see it is not enough merely to do no harm to our enemy, but the Lord calls you to love them.

I am reminded of the story of Corrie ten Boom, when after the war she was speaking in a church and a guard of the concentration camp she was in came and asked her to forgive me. He had become a Christian, and the lord had forgiven him, but he wondered would she. She hesitated, her sister Betsie was killed in that camp. But then she grasped his hand and forgave him. There are many, many examples of saints who loved their enemies.

But none comes even remotely close to the Lord Jesus Christ. Not only did he forgive the rabble who mocked him at the foot of the cross as his life drained out of him, but while you were His enemy, he died for you. Not only does His cross take away the sting of sorrow, it enables you to love your enemies.

4 Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. 5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

David, had the mind of Christ, uniting in himself a kingdom on the brink of collapse by his godly response to the loss of the Lord’s anointed, setting an example for you for how to respond to the sorrows this life is beset with by not neglecting to do what was right, and leading you to lament. Amen.

1 Grenz, Stanley J., and Jay T. Smith. Pocket Dictionary of Ethics. The IVP Pocket Reference Series. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003, 12. 2: Wall Street, directed by Oliver Stone (1987; Century City, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 2007), DVD ↩