p. 172Ladies and Gentlemen,—
The story of David would be incomplete without those later passages which, equally with those we have passed under review, prove by their bare existence, the truth of the Bible. The domestic trouble that God said would afflict David in punishment of his sin in the matter of Uriah, soon began to shew itself. Amnon, his son, ravishes Tamar, the sister of his son Absalom, causing a feud which ends in the murder of Amnon by Absalom’s orders, and the flight of Absalom. Absalom is an exile for four years, at the end of which he returns by the king’s permission, but is not restored to his position at court, and in consequence plots against the king. His plots are so successful that David is obliged to fly from Jerusalem. Accompanied by many of the people he departs “by the ascent of Mount Olivet, and wept as he went up, and had his head covered, and he went bare-foot, and all the people that were with him covered every man p. 173 his head, and they went up, weeping as they went up” (2 Sam. xv. 30). The High Priest and all the Levites were with him “bearing the ark of the covenant of God: and they set down the ark of God . . . And the king said unto Zadok, Carry back the ark of God into the city: if I shall find favour in the eyes of the Lord, he will bring me again, and shew me both it and his habitation. But if he thus say, I have no delight in thee; behold, here am I, let him do to me as seemeth good unto him.” Zadok and his sons return with the ark to Jerusalem, to watch affairs in the interest of David. Hearing bad news of the popularity of Absalom’s conspiracy, David makes haste towards Jordan.
At Bahurim, where the road lay between two hills, an enemy of the name of Shimei came out on one of the hills parallel with the king’s course and the company that were with him, and, keeping pace with the king’s progress, poured forth volumes of insulting invective as he went. “Come out, come out, thou bloody man, thou man of Belial; the Lord hath returned upon thee all the blood of the house of Saul, in whose stead thou hast reigned.” This was the style of Shimei’s tirade, which he poured forth unceasingly, as he walked along the opposite hillside, throwing stones and dust at David’s company. It was very galling to all concerned. One of David’s men asked permission to go over to Shimei and take off his head. David’s response was: “Behold, my son, which came forth of my bowels, seeketh my life: how much more now may this Benjaminite do it? Let him alone, let him curse; for the Lord hath bidden him. It may be that the Lord will look on mine affliction, and that the Lord will requite me good for his cursing this day” (2 Sam. xvi. 11, 12). p. 174 David and his weary company encamped at Bahurim, and Absalom entered Jerusalem, which David had just evacuated. After consultation, Absalom, instead of pushing on at once after David, while he was weary and weak-handed, resolved on a pause, during which he should muster overwhelming forces to crush David. This gave David time to prepare for the attack at Mahanaim on the eastern side of Jordan, to which he had retreated. In due time Absalom advanced with a numerous army. On the eve of battle, David gave strict injunctions to his captains to be careful of the life of Absalom. The battle was a victory for David, and was fatal to Absalom’s life. When David heard of the death of Absalom, he gave himself over to a transport of grief. He went up to the chamber over the gate (of Mahanaim) and wept, and as he went, thus he said: “O my son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!” The effect of the king’s grief was to put a cloud over the victory. “The people, as they returned from the battle,” gat them by stealth that day into the city, as people being ashamed steal away when they flee in battle. The king covered his face, and the king cried with a loud voice, “O my son Absalom! O Absalom, my son, my son!” Joab, his commander-in-chief, put a check on the king’s grief when he came from the field. His tonic words were somewhat strong: “Thou hast shamed this day the faces of all thy servants, which this day hath saved thy life. . . . This day I perceive, that if Absalom had lived, and all we had died this day, then it had pleased thee well. Now therefore arise, go forth, and speak comfortably unto thy servants: for I swear by the Lord, if thou go not forth, there will not tarry one p. 175 with thee this night: and that will be worse unto thee than all the evil that befell thee from thy youth until now” (2 Sam. xix. 5-7). Rallied in this way, David stopped his mourning, and went out, and “sat in the gate,” and the people hearing of it, came out of their hiding everywhere, and presented themselves to the king. Soon everyone was in suspense as to the next move. The people who had followed Absalom began to ask why David should not come back, seeing Absalom was dead. “The speech of all Israel came to the king” in this sense: and at last the king returned, amidst universal joy, marred with a slight and temporary exception. The tribe of Judah, to which David belonged, and with which Benjamin was always allied, stole a march on the nation in the matter of bringing him back. They brought him back before the other (ten) tribes had given their voice in a definite way, and the tribes challenged the action of Judah in the matter. Judah defended their conduct on the plea that the king was near of kin to them. The ten tribes answered this by saying that they had ten parts in David, and ought to have been consulted. Judah would not admit of the reasonableness of the demur, and the strife was so sharp that the standard of revolt was raised by one, Sheba, to whose treasonable leadership the ten tribes yielded themselves. The rebellion was short-lived. Joab, with characteristic energy and promptitude, gave chase to Sheba before he had time to make his arrangements, followed him into a city called Abel, on which he made a vigorous attack with battering rams, but was spared the trouble of overcoming the city by the people inside agreeing to throw the head of Sheba over the wall. The kingdom was then re-settled in peace, and David wrote a psalm for public use “in the day that the Lord had p. 176 delivered him out of the hand of all his enemies.” A passage or two from this psalm will throw light on the nature of all these performances.
“Yahweh liveth. Blessed by my Rock, and exalted be the God of the Rock of my salvation. It is God that avengeth me, and that bringeth down the people under me: and that bringeth me forth from mine enemies. Thou also hast lifted me up on high above them that rose up against me. Thou hast delivered me from the violent man. . . . He delivered me from my strong enemy, and from them that hated me, for they were too strong for me. . . . The Lord rewarded me according to my righteousness: according to the cleanness of my hands, He recompensed me. For I have kept the ways of the Lord, and have not wickedly departed from my God. For all His judgments were before me: and as for the statutes, I did not depart from them. I was also upright before Him, and have kept myself from mine iniquity. Therefore the Lord hath recompensed me according to my righteousness, according to my cleanness in His eyesight. With the merciful man, thou wilt shew thyself merciful: and to the upright man, thou wilt shew thyself upright. With the pure, thou wilt shew thyself pure: and with the froward, thou wilt shew thyself unsavoury. And the afflicted people thou wilt save: but thine eyes are upon the haughty, that thou mayest bring them down. . . . Therefore, I will give thanks unto thee, O Lord, among the heathen: and I will sing praises unto thy name.”
But there was one more day of darkness for David which, as a narrative, emits what we might call a culminating gleam of brightness on the question I am pressing upon your notice, namely, the self-evident truth of the Bible narratives when all their elements p. 177 are taken into account. In a moment of self-complacence at the greatness of his position, he ordered a census of the people to be taken. When the census was completed, “David’s heart smote him,” and “he said unto the Lord, I have sinned greatly in that which I have done.” But God would mark His displeasure. “When David was up in the morning, the word of the Lord came unto the prophet Gad, David’s seer, saying, Go and say unto David, Thus saith the Lord, I offer these three things: choose thee one of them, that I may do it unto thee: . . . Shall seven years of famine come unto thee in thy land? Or wilt thou flee three months before thine enemies while they pursue thee? Or that there be three days’ pestilence in thy land?”
Ladies and Gentlemen,—I strongly submit, and would implore you to consider, whether it is not so, and cannot be otherwise than so, that the occurrence of such a passage in the national archives of the house of Israel is inexplicable on any hypothesis but its truth. First, of all, it is inconceivable that the numbering of the people should have been considered an offence, apart from the thoughts of God: for on no principle natural to men would such a thing be regarded in that light. To glory in one’s greatness is universal among men—a thing done and accepted as the right thing to be done in all countries, and in all ages of which history furnishes any record. Even boasting is not viewed as a crime; and as to ascertaining the precise extent of your resources, the idea of its being a censurable thing would be scouted in every land—in every age. A mere affair of innocent statistics! Yet here it is put on record as a crime against God. That the king should be represented at all in the national records as falling into an error is conclusive p. 178 evidence of truth, in view of the universal disposition of courtiers of all sorts to be flatterers, and, at least, to be smooth spoken, and say nothing about the king’s faults. But that counting his people should be represented as a punishable offence is not at all to be accounted for on the notion that we are dealing with an invented narrative. No man could suggest even a plausible notion of how such a narrative could come to be put on record if it were not true. Its truth admitted, all is clear as noonday.
David is greatly embarrassed by the choice of evil offered him. “I am in a great strait,” he says. He ends the strait by a choice which is very eloquent of many things. “Let me fall now into the hands of YAHWEH, for very great are His mercies: let me not fall into the hand of man.” Here is a distinction very real and practical to David in a moment of great trouble:—(1) Falling into the hands of Yahweh: (2) Falling into the hand of man. How came David to make the distinction, and to choose the former in preference to the latter, if he had no experience of what it was to “fall into” the Divine hands as contrasted with human hands? According to the view which is so popular, and becoming daily and rapidly more so, there was no “falling into the hands of Yahweh” to choose. That was a mere illusion, and any choice of that sort must have ended in nothing. If so, how came it on this great state occasion to be a practical alternative offered to David—by whomsoever? The thing offered him was not that God in providence should go against him; in such a case as that it might be supposable that a merely human occurrence might erroneously and superstitiously described as “falling into the hands of Yahweh.” The thing offered him was offered in contrast to that: he might p. 179 have that if he liked—discomfiture before his enemies or famine; but the third thing offered, and which David chose, was a thing out of the order of natural occurrence altogether, and beyond the power of any priests or conjurers to manipulate, viz., that an angel should go through the land with ravaging pestilence for three days.
And the question pressingly returns and returns; how came such an alternative to be offered to David, and David to choose it, unless the matter were a matter of fact and truth, and no illusion at all? David expressly stipulated that he should “not fall into the hand of man.” Is not this evidence of a very practical discrimination on the part of David? He had experience of man, as we all may have; and he found, as we may all have found, that man in power is unmerciful and false. Here is no roseate idealizing of human nature—so common to human books, but so foreign to the one Divine Book on earth, which Mr. Carlyle calls “the truest of all books.” Here rather is the flat colourless record of truth—that man was not to be trusted as the administrator of punishment. “Let me fall, now,” exclaims David, “into the hands of Yahweh.” He gives his reason: “Very great are Yahweh’s mercies,” which shews he had practical experience of the thing lamented by Jonah on a certain occasion, that Yahweh is “gracious and merciful, and slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth of the evil” (Jonah iv. 2). “So Yahweh sent pestilence upon Israel: and there fell of Israel seventy thousand men. And God sent an angel unto Jerusalem to destroy it: and as he was destroying, Yahweh beheld, and he repented him of the evil, and said to the angel that destroyed, It is enough, stay now thine hand. . . . And David lifted up his p. 180 eyes and SAW the angel of Yahweh stand between the earth and the heaven, having a drawn sword in his hand stretched out over Jerusalem. Then David and the elders of Israel, who were clothed in sackcloth, fell upon their faces. And David said unto God, Is it not I that commanded the people to be numbered? Even I it is that have sinned and done evil indeed; but as for these sheep, what have they done? Let thine hand, I pray thee, O Yahweh my God, be on me, and on my father’s house; but not on Thy people, that they should be plagued” (1 Chron. xxi. 14-17).
Ladies and Gentlemen,—The more you investigate these narratives, the more you must, in the exercise of a discriminating reason, be able to see that their very existence as narratives, quite apart from all extraneous questions whatsoever, is proof of their truth, and therefore of the truth of the whole Bible, of which they form a part.