v. 6 Some things do not change. You had parades and songs like this when the conquering heroes returned in ancient Rome and in the Western democracies after the Second World War. The problem is that in the enthusiasm of this celebration the women forget the obligations of tact and unwittingly create a terrible and deadly jealousy on Saul’s part. Of course, they were unknowingly fostering the Lord’s plan to place David first in the affections of the people.

"Lutes", by the way, is a guess. As with many other technical musical terms the precise identification is in doubt. The word used derives from the word "three" which may be a reference to a three-stringed lute, which as common the ANE, or, even, to a triangle.

v. 7 One scholar writes: "It is a fixed rule in biblical poetry that when a number occurs in the first verset, it must be increased in the parallel verset, often, as here, by going up one decimal point." [Alter, Com, 113]

v. 9 It is dawning on Saul that David must be the "neighbor" that Samuel had mentioned in 15:28 as having been given Saul’s kingdom by the Lord.

v. 10 Sin is often the punishment for sin. Saul gave himself to jealousy and the consequence for him was the evil spirit from the Lord once again.

Interestingly, the word "came forcefully upon" is the same word used in 10:10 to describe the Spirit’s coming upon Saul to equip him when first he was anointed king. Then, "prophesying" has been translated "raving." There were some outward similarities apparently in the state of those under the spell of a spirit, no matter how differently the cause or the result of that spell.

v. 11 Apparently twice before David’s music had its effect, David had to elude a thrown spear.

v. 12 This is not merely the narrator’s assessment of the reason for David’s great success. Saul himself knew that the Lord was with David and was no longer with him. (cf. vv. 28ff.) We said last week that the key-word in the chapter is "love." A number of different people are said to have come to "love" David. But this too is a leading motif: "The Lord was with David," which we get here, in v. 14, and again in v. 28. People loved him because the Lord was with him.

v. 13 Saul lost his lyre player, but, in his mind, it was worth it. David was given a minor command and sent away from the capital in hopes that he would be forgotten and his popularity would diminish. Jealous commanders have been doing this from time immemorial. But, to Saul’s distress, his tactic had the reverse effect. This brought David into greater contact with the army and the army to still greater admiration of David.

v. 17 The promise Saul had made to the conqueror of Goliath (17:25) is now to be redeemed. But Saul adds a condition. David must make war against the Philistines. Saul hopes, of course, that he will be killed in battle. Here again we see Saul caring more about his own position than the safety of the people of Israel [Gordon, 161]. And, as further illustration of the disintegration of his character, Saul is now willing to make his own daughter a pawn in his plan to get rid of David. He is now like the despicable Laban.

v. 18 David’s reply is very like Saul’s to Samuel years before. Whether this is simply the conventional self-effacement of court etiquette, the lowly called all of a sudden to higher things [Gordon], or David being crafty and seeing through Saul’s true motives is hard to say. It is certainly not unlikely that he understood how important it was for him to conceal from the jealous king any intention on his part to become king. It is also possible, as v. 26 may suggest, that David was already attracted to Michal, a younger daughter of Saul, and didn’t want to marry Merab.

v. 19 In any case, Saul, perhaps in a pique, suddenly gave his daughter to someone else and violated the promise he had made to the one who would kill Goliath.

v. 20 I don’t know that this is of any significance, but this happens to be the only place in the Hebrew Bible where a woman is explicitly said to love a man. [We learn from this, of course, that men are much more loving than women!]

v. 21 Saul realized he had a second opportunity to barter a daughter for Philistine heads [Gordon] and expose David to deadly risk.

v. 22 Having reneged on the first promise of his daughter in marriage, Saul approaches David through his servants and in that way demonstrates his sincerity. But Robert Alter [Com, 116] suggests that the word the NIV renders "privately" should be translated "discretely," and that the meaning is that the servants know full well what Saul’s intentions are and must cover them up.

v. 23 David again strikes a humble pose and raises the issue of his poverty. In that culture he would be expected to give the bride’s father a present. What could he give the king? But the question seems to suggest that David is open to suggestions and would be willing if he is able to meet the conditions.

v. 25 The bait being laid out, the trap is sprung.

v. 27 To Saul’s chagrin, David brings in two-hundred Philistine scalps and ahead of time. At least so says the MT. 2 Samuel 3:14 and the LXX here give the number as 100. But 2 Samuel 3:14 may simply be quoting Saul’s price not the actual number David brought in. Once again David thwarts Saul’s evil intention and succeeds splendidly in battle against the Philistines. It grows worse and worse for Saul because the Lord has left him. And, for David, like Joseph in another court centuries before, everything he does prospers and his reputation grows.

v. 28 Saul gave Michal to David to be the cause of his ruin. Now, he finds that she really loves him. 28-30 form a concluding frame for the account: all that is here is repeated from earlier in the episode: David’s success, the fact that the Lord was with him, Saul’s fear of David, Michal’s love of David, and David’s great reputation.

v. 29 Saul will be an enemy of this man who has made so many friends, even in Saul’s own court, this man, Saul himself admitted, who had the Lord on his side.

v. 30 If David was a poor man and little known, as he said in v. 23, he is no longer.

I read a fascinating account of this chapter as an illustration of narrative technique in Robert Alter’s justly famous, The Art of Biblical Narrative [116-119]. He begins by saying this:

"…in reliable third-person narrations, such as in the Bible, there is a scale of means, in ascending order of explicitness and certainty, for conveying information about the motives, the attitudes, the moral nature of characters. Character can be revealed through the report of actions; through appearance, gestures, posture, costume, through one character’s comments on another; through direct speech by the character; through inward speech, either summarized or quoted as interior monologue; or through statements made by the narrator about the attitudes and intentions of the personages, which may come either as flat assertions or motivated explanations.

"The lower end of the scale – character revealed through actions or appearance – leaves us substantially in the realm of inference. The middle categories, involving direct speech either by a character himself or by others about him, lead us from inference to the weighing of claims. Although a character’s own statements might seem a straightforward enough revelation of who he is and what he makes of things, in fact the biblical writers are quite as aware as any James or Proust that speech may reflect the occasion more than the speaker, may be more a drawn shutter than an open window. With the report of inward speech, we enter the realm of the character’s conscious intentions, though we may still feel free to question the motive behind the intention. Finally, at the top of the ascending scale, we have the reliable narrator’s explicit statement of what the characters feel, intend, desire; here we are accorded certainty…" [116-117]

Now, as Alter goes on to point out, here in chapter 18, the narrator varies his means of presenting the characters. The episode begins with a statement of David’s success (in v. 5) and ends with a similar statement (v. 30). So we know that this account is a revelation of David’s success as a result of the fact that God is with him. But, we thought that God was with Saul too at the outset of his reign. We get nothing about David’s moral character in this account. David as a person remains opaque. He makes a few statements, but they are public statements and meant for public consumption. They are quite like statements Saul himself made at one time. In other words, the means used to represent David are deliberately limited to the lower and middle range of the ascending scale of certainties. We read about his actions in battle, we hear what others think about him, but we do not discover what he thinks or feels, what he intends to do or why.

In fact, in an extraordinarily suggestive comment, Alter goes on to say, "…one of the most striking aspects of the entire David story is that until his career reaches its crucial breaking point with his murder-by-proxy of Uriah after his adultery with Bathsheba, almost all his speeches are in public situations and can be read as politically motivated. It is only after the death of the child born of his union with Bathsheba that the personal voice of a shaken David begins to emerge." [119] I must think about that some more, but you think about it as well.

Here in 1 Samuel 18 however the situation is very different in regard to Saul. The means of presenting him are drawn from the top of the ascending scale of certainties. The narrator tells us exactly what Saul feels toward David – fear – and why he feels its – David’s astonishing military success. We are given Saul’s decorous public speech to David in v. 17 but immediately his words are commented on and his hypocrisy exposed by a revelation of his private speech in which he plots David’s death. Similarly in v. 21 we are told exactly what Saul intends by the outward act of deference to David.

We learn of Michal and her love for David, but nothing more. We are not told why she loved him or what she thought marriage to him might mean. We will learn more of that later.

Of David and of Michal there are depths still to be explored. We do not really know these people yet. We certainly cannot take the measure of them. But Saul is older now. The nature of his character has been exposed with every increasing illumination through these past scenes in the narrative. The narrator is no longer indirect in his judgment of Saul’s character. We see the man in all his insecurity, his hypocrisy, his cruelty, his self-absorption, his deviousness. The apostate man, dead at the top. That is King Saul by this point in his reign.

But there are hidden depths in the characters of David and Michal. Indeed, not to put too fine a point on it, both of these people are going to surprise us profoundly as the story proceeds. In the case of both of them perhaps, certainly David, we will be both pleased and horror struck.

Now, what to make of all this: the way the characters are presented so delicately, so thoughtfully, so subtly much of the time? So many unexplored depths remain.

Well, I want to use this very insightful observation of Robert Alter’s on our evening’s text and its description of the characters of Saul, Michal, and David, to make a point to you, a point very much in need of making in a day like ours. I have been thinking about this more and more as the years have passed.

We live in a therapeutic age. That’s what the sociologists are calling our time. We live among a cult of experts who are supposed to explain and solve everything. We have experts pontificating today about the beatings and murder in Hilltop and all sorts of solutions will be proposed. And Christian pastors, sucked into this view of the world and of the human condition – that it is amenable to expert analysis and therapeutic technology – have sought to become "spiritual technologists" who know how to solve human problems. The vast technological/psychological apparatus around us gives us the impression that there is, there must be a tool for the solving of every problem, if only we can afford it or find it. [P. Leithart, "The Prince and the Pastor," First Things 39 (Jan. 1994) 8-9]

The Bible’s authors knew better. Indeed, all wise men knew better until very recently. "The secular mind," one writer writes "is terrorized by mysteries." But, the fact is, the human heart is a great deep. No one understands it comprehensively, no one can predict what it will come to think and do, not even the person himself or herself. We speak of the incomprehensibility of God. We can as well speak of the incomprehensibility of man.

How many times have we been profoundly surprised by what someone we know has done or said or failed to do or say. How often have we said something like, "I could never imagine him doing that…" or "Never in a million years would I have thought that of him or of her…" We have certainly had occasion to say such things in our life together in this church. And, true as that is, we must admit even to being surprised by what we ourselves can say or do from time to time. We do not understand ourselves or the profound connections between one thing and another in our lives. And, and this is my point this evening, we are left in this position because we do not have an omniscient narrator explaining to us why people are doing things, what they mean by what they say, and what the outcome will be of the choices they make. We have that for Saul here, but in our lives we are always in the position the narrator places us here in respect to David and Michal. We can see and hear them, but we cannot know them, not very well at any rate. We cannot predict their behavior.

At this point we know that Saul is in spiritual freefall, but, without the commentary on the part of the narrator here, we still would not be able to know that he intended at this early date the destruction of David. Men can hide their motives very well behind fine sounding words and public deeds. At this point, we certainly have no expectation that Michal will despise David, after they are married, for his devotion to the Lord. And we certainly would never imagine David doing what he did with Bathsheba or to Uriah. And, what is more, the young David is not the same man as the old David. The David at the time of Absolom’s rebellion behaves very differently than the David at the time of his battle with Goliath or at the time of his conquest of the house of Saul and his assuming the throne of Israel. The years have their role in the shaping of a human life.

Think of how astonishing is the statement in v. 28 to the effect that Saul knew that the Lord was with David but became his sworn enemy nonetheless. How do you suppose Saul would have described the same situation? Not as this narrator does, you can be sure. Perhaps he would have told himself of his duty to his country and his throne, of the danger of sedition, of David’s lack of proper respect for the honor of the king. Few people who are eaten up by jealousy can admit the same to themselves. People are in many ways strangers to themselves.

But, in any case, there is an infinite variety of human conditions, of states of mind and heart. Most all of them are, at least to some degree, a mixture of good and bad. Few people know themselves all that well. There is also an infinite variety of human pain. The texture of life is woven from the first day of a person’s existence and everything, good and bad, takes its place in the fabric of that soul. We have seen that too over the years here, the past come up to bite someone and to bite hard!

I tell you, I sometimes sit in my office listening to someone explain his or her situation or feelings or frustration or despair, and I am completely at a loss either to explain or to console. I can commiserate, I can sympathize, I can remind them of the throne of God and of his promises, but I cannot explain and I cannot predict. Nor can I understand why another person in a very similar set of circumstances responds to them in so completely different a way.

I had a call this past Saturday from Virginia Johnson in New Mexico. Some of you will remember Rick and Virginia Johnson and our times with them. Both of them made professions of faith when they were among us, but troubles mounted and in Rick’s case the profession seemed undone. Even Virginia struggled in various ways. They left us for the Southwest some years ago and, I believe, if you had asked anyone familiar with their story what was likely to be the spiritual outcome of their lives, you would have received pessimistic answers. But, she called because she thought I should know how well they were doing, how they were all rejoicing in the Lord, how Rick had assumed the spiritual headship of his home, what great blessing that had been to their three children – the eldest of whom is married to a Christian young man – how they are faithfully a part of a Christian fellowship and thanking God for his abundant mercies. Rick hasn’t had a drink for four years, any tobacco for a year. No one could have or would have likely predicted any of that. How mysterious the ways of the heart and soul and of God with the heart and soul.

I am loving the Bible more and more for the profundity, the honesty, and the complexity of its presentation of human life and character and personality and development. I didn’t see all of this before, but I am seeing it now. With an art so perfect that the Holy Spirit must lie behind and beneath it, these biblical writers, with a few strokes, reveal to us a particular person, like David, but reveal him to us in all the uncertainty and all the complication of real human life. Alasdair MacIntyre has written that novels are better guides to the surfaces and depths of human life than even the most refined statistical studies. [Leithart, 8] But the Bible, with the divine authority in its words and the weight of its matter bearing down upon the interested mind, reveals those depths and complications still more profoundly than even the best novelists.

And those very best novelists always did what the Bible does, leave a great deal of those depths of the human heart uncharted, unexplored, and unexplained. For they cannot be explained. We see Saul disintegrate and we know it was for lack of true faith in God. But why and how that happened we do not understand. No truer words were spoken than those by Jeremiah: "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure, who can understand it?" That is what the narrator is teaching us. We cannot understand the ways of the human heart. We can know what is really happening if God tells us, as he does here with regard to Saul. But usually we do not and cannot know as here with David and Michal. God can. But we cannot. We can understand some things and say true things about the human condition, but we cannot explain and we cannot resolve.

Why are you as you are? Why do you struggle as you do in this way or that? Why are certain things so difficult and others so easy for you? Why are your relationships with God and man as they are? Nowadays you are likely to hear someone tell you that you need to get to the bottom of those questions. But the Bible never says that. It is content that you know about sin and God’s grace, and that you set out with true sincerity to live by faith and in obedience to God. The rest he knows but you cannot.

I’m looking forward to reading the David story closely, because I think that I will find more depth here than I ever found before. The mysteries will accumulate, but so will the lessons. And among those lessons, perhaps chief among them, will be this: that no one can move forward and upward in life, no one can move toward God, by figuring life out for himself. It is in most important respects an impenetrable mystery. What matters is knowing God as he has revealed himself to us, knowing his will, and relying on him for strength doing his will to our utmost.

This summer I read a new book on Samuel Rutherford. You know how much I love Samuel Rutherford, how often I have quoted him to you, how often I have used him for an illustration. But the biographical resources on Rutherford are quite meager. The only full scale biography was written in the 1830s and is almost impossible to find. So the work by an English scholar, a very sympathetic scholar by the way – I imagine him to be an evangelical, though I don’t know that for sure – was a welcome find, despite the outrageous price!

Here I found the Rutherford I knew and loved. But, here I found another Rutherford as well. The evidence all taken together, it seems very likely to me that Rutherford, while a young teacher at Edinburgh University fathered a child out of wedlock. He later married the woman but it was the cause of public scandal and he lost his position over it. Rutherford’s supporters through the centuries have tried to convince posterity that this was, from the beginning, a baseless charge. But the evidence is against them, in my mind. Like David, another master of passionate words, Rutherford’s great passion was also his undoing.

I had known of Rutherford’s temper before. He speaks of it himself. "I am a man of extremes," he once admitted. But, here in this new study the fury of his anger toward those who disagreed with him is seen in all its grotesquerie.

I admire the man as I always have, in some ways more for the superb account of his gifts and graces that is also found in the book. But, I see him, more than I did before, in all the complexity and incomprehensibility of human life. How can a heart that understands love and grace and mercy as Rutherford did – few have understood the love of God better or felt it more deeply – could be so hard-hearted toward even other Christians with whom he disagreed? These are the real questions of life and the kind of questions that you and I must ponder about ourselves. How can we, knowing what we know, loving God as we say we do, believing his Word as we do, then behave as we do and fail to meet even the simplest requirements of true fidelity to God and Christ? But you will not answer those questions. Not really. Nor will you be able to explain why one Christian life is so different from another. We must put our hands over our mouths and confess how little we are before the transcendent and eternal God.

By all means study your heart. You must if you would be humble before God and man. But, the answer to your life will not come from there. You will never know nearly enough about yourself for that. The answer comes from what may be known for a certainty. What God has revealed in his Word and what God has promised to his people and the laws he has laid down to govern the lives of those who love and trust him. Through all the changing scenes of life, God and his Word are the only things we can be absolutely sure of. We do not even know the truth about ourselves and cannot as surely as we can know the truth that God has revealed. "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" It is a rhetorical question. No one can understand it. The only things we know for sure, even about ourselves, are those things the Bible tells us. Those and those alone!