STUDIES IN SAMUEL No. 41

2 Samuel 1:17-27

October 7, 2001

Text Comment

v. 18 No one knows exactly what to do with "bow." If it is the title for the lament, no one knows precisely why or what it suggests. The Book of Jasher is also mentioned in Joshua 10:13, again in reference to a poem, and was perhaps an anthology of poems celebrating the great events of Israel's national life.

v.19 You'll notice that at v. 25b you find the same phrase, but now Jonathan's name has been put in the place of "glory." "How the mighty have fallen is a refrain, occurring again in vv. 25 and 27. These repetitions are literary devices such as we find in all great poetry.

v.20 The idea of Philistine women celebrating what has been such a tragedy for David is hard for him to take. Not unlike, by the way, seeing folk, and many women, in the middle East rejoicing at the terror strikes in the United States.

v.21 In typical Hebrew hyperbole, the mountain is cursed as if, being the location of Saul and Jonathan's death, it was somehow responsible. This is akin to Jeremiah expressing his mental anguish not only by saying that he wished he had never been born, but by calling down a curse on the unfortunate man who had brought his father the news of Jeremiah's birth.

v.22 Here Jonathan and Saul's exploits during their entire careers as warriors are celebrated.

v.26 Jonathan gets pride of place in this lament because of David's special affection for him and because of Jonathan's great virtue.

Military history is replete with such laments. They are not always in the form of such beautiful poetry, but they give expression to the powerful bonds that can be forged between men who share great or terrible experiences and the emotions that such experiences produce. I've been reading of late Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers, his account of the young men of a single airborne company from their days of training through their experiences in combat during World War II. And there is a great deal of "lament" in that book, men expressing their love for fallen comrades, their devastation at their loss, the indelible impression of the dead in the memories of the living.

Or, take this from World War I. One of only three men in the history of British arms granted the Victoria Cross twice (the Victoria Cross is the British version of our Congressional Medal of Honor), Captain Noel Chavasse was a medical officer, twice granted his nation's highest military honor for rescuing the wounded from No-man's land. He was wounded in action in one of the great battles of 1917 as he was hard at work rescuing the wounded under heavy fire. Bleeding profusely, he was able to drag himself to an aid post. He was taken from there to a field hospital where he was operated on, but he died two days later. To a nurse who was with him during his final hours, he dictated a letter to his sister. He told the nurse to write, "Give her my love, tell her duty called and called me to obey." Noel Chavasse's brother wrote to a friend some forty years later, "I still mourn my Noel every day of my life, and have done so for forty-four years…. I seem still to think things over with Noel, and to feel he might walk into the room any minute." [Martin Gilbert, The First World War, 354]

Laments have a great and noble place in the life of the world and it should be no surprise to us that the Bible, the most perfectly human book of all books, should include some of the most beautiful laments of all. We have David's here; you remember Jeremiah's for Josiah the King.

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Now we have come finally to the end of the Saul story and are ready to begin the narrative of David's rise to power.

Now, there are two things I want to draw to your attention in this beautiful lament, a poem that those who are competent to judge such things regard as one of the most beautiful in the Bible.

I. The first is the simple observation, often made in the commentaries, that there is no reference to God in the poem and that there is no specifically religious thought in it.

It is human feeling, and human emotion that is expressed, but it is not interpreted in a theological fashion. David's sorrow is not specifically related to any theological idea and is not interpreted in terms of what he believes about Saul and Jonathan's eternal destiny, nor even in terms of what he believes the Lord may have done in the death of Saul, which, after all, has been long expected since the Lord rejected Saul as King of Israel.

This is a not an insignificant point. Human beings do not become less human for their knowledge of God and the ultimate issue of things. Nor do Christians, because of their theological understanding of life, become less involved in the human experience of life. Young Christians sometimes can get the notion that if we believe that God is sovereign, that nothing is an accident, that everything that happens to us is the will of God, we should not really grieve anything that happens. After all, whatever happens is the perfect will of God and leads in its own way to that just and holy end to which God has appointed all things. Why should David fret the death of Saul and Jonathan? He knew that Saul was going to be removed so that he could be the King. God had told him this. This was not a bad thing, but a good thing. And Jonathan's death was surely not an accident. There are no accidents, not really, in God's universe. But David mourned as one who has suffered a great blow, a terrible loss. It even seems that it all came to him as a great shock, as something unexpected, out of the blue. Was he wrong in that?

No, of course not. The Bible is full of witness to the very real, authentic, and entirely appropriate expressions of human emotion - surprise, pleasure, and pain - that, while not divorced from true faith, are not nullified by it either. There may be no accidents in God's world in an ultimate sense, but there are many things that seem to be accidents to us and suddenly disrupt or overturn our lives. There may be no setbacks in the deepest sense of the word, for God is always accomplishing his holy will, but there are many things that are experienced by us as setbacks and produce shock and surprise and sudden pain for us.

Do you know that the word "chance" or "coincidence" appears in the Bible and that it is used favorably even by the Lord Jesus? In his parable of the Good Samaritan he says, in Luke 10:31, "Now, by chance, a priest was going down the same road…" "By chance…" Basil expressed the theological viewpoint of the Christian faith when he said, "Chance is a pagan term." What a strange thing then for the King of Kings to use the word; but he did use it! And by using it he taught us that there is legitimacy to our experiencing life as it comes to us, from the vantage point of a human being, without the necessity of subjecting all our immediate experience to theological reinterpretation. Surely, we would have to say that God foreordained that priest to be on the Jericho road that day. But that isn't the way Jesus spoke or taught us to think about that fact in the moment. We can think about it both ways and each way is true and authentic. From our vantage point it was a happenstance and that is why Jesus describes it as such. And there are many ways in which we can think this way about our life in this world, that is in the immediate rather than in the ultimate meaning of things.

What, for example, of the achievements of unbelievers? It would not be difficult to think that a genuinely faithful man or woman would never be able to take pleasure in anything that made the world a happier place for an unbeliever, because that happiness is the very thing that keeps him or her from crying out to God and Christ for salvation. Successful people, happy people, people who are enjoying the bounties of this world, are less likely to find themselves weary and heavy-laden and come to Jesus for rest. Should we then, if we care about the souls of men, grieve over human success and achievement rather than celebrate it. And, besides, if we are thinking from the vantage point of eternity, ought we not to mourn any kindness that God shows to the unrepentant and unbelieving, any kindness that does not immediately lead to saving faith in Christ, knowing that they will be held accountable for that kindness and their failure to acknowledge God as the giver of it? In the same way, negatively, what is there to mourn in the death of Saul except that he has died under God's judgment and what is there to mourn in the death of Jonathan knowing that he has died and gone to heaven? But, David does both things. He celebrates the achievements of Saul, who was, at bottom an unbelieving and wicked man, and mourns the death of the believing man whose death has brought him into the immediate presence of God. As a man in the world, David can appreciate the accomplishments of a Saul and mourn the death of a Jonathan.

There may be a certain logic in thinking that Christians should have no regard for the achievements of unbelievers - they are, after all, as Augustine said, only peccata splendida, splendid sins, or that they ought not to mourn the trials, even the deaths that advance the cause of God's grace - does not James teach us to "count it all joy when we fall into trials of various kinds, knowing that the testing of our faith produces patience" - but it is not the only way of thinking that we are taught in the Bible. Nor is it the way our Savior always thought and spoke. You remember that at Lazarus' grave, he once wept over a death that he was and he knew he was in just a few moments going to turn into a glorious resurrection! He should have been having trouble hiding his smile, so we think, and instead he was living in the immediate present as a man and mourning the sorrow that had overtaken his dear friends.

The Bible is a wonderfully human book and it celebrates the emotions and affections of human life for themselves as right and good. Our theology, our understanding of the world, should not make us less prone to feel pleasure and pain, but more. We can rejoice with the success of unbelievers on the principle of doing to others what we would have them do to us or on the principle of the love of our neighbor or on the principle of our own love of what is good and noble and inspiring. We can mourn for their sorrows, even if we suspect that nothing but sharp sorrows will ever be likely to make them think seriously about Christ and their souls. We can celebrate the achievements of an athlete or appreciate the work of a singer or an actor, even if we know that that person is not a Christian and, perhaps, lives a degraded life. God never expects that our knowledge of him will make us less human. What is interesting and impressive and what is painful and sorrowful to human beings will be so to Christians as well in most cases, even if they may ultimately look at those same things in a completely different way than unbelievers look at them. What David shows us here, for example, is that there is nothing unchristian about being moved by a movie you watch, even if the characters and the plot that so stir you are not only non-Christian but in some ways anti-Christian.

There was an old Latin adage that read: "I am a man. I consider nothing having to do with man foreign to me." Christians later adapted that adage. "I am a Christian. I consider nothing having to do with a Christian foreign to me." But Christians can still say the adage in the first way. They remain human beings. Indeed, they ought to be the most authentic of human beings, because they are being recreated in the image of God which is the definition of true humanity, humanity in its ideal form. No one ought to be more appreciative of human life, more affected by it, more a participant in it, than a Christian.

Many of us have thought about just these things over these past few weeks. We have mourned the tragedies at the same time we have believed that they were, in some sense, visited upon us as our just deserts and are, therefore, absolutely the unsettling, terrifying, confidence destroying acts that we hope will lead our nation to repentance and faith. We have been proud of the courage shown by people who are not Christians and yet have demonstrated a selflessness in the care of others that is right to regard as noble and praiseworthy, even if it will avail nothing when that same man stands before Jesus Christ on the judgment day. There is an immediate way of thinking about things and an ultimate way and both are legitimate and both are right and both are biblical.

Here, by the way, is a wonderful example of the Bible, even in its details, teaching us what is now called a worldview, a way of looking at all of life and reality in keeping with the truth that has been revealed in God's Word. How we view events around us, how we respond to things that happen, all of this is determined by our worldview. And the worldview that is taught in the Bible embraces everything we encounter in human life, absolutely everything, though it does so with a breadth and sophistication that often escapes Christians who stop too soon applying the Bible to their lives or who apply some of its teaching but not all of it.

Human culture and our living place in that culture is part of the Bible's worldview. Listen to this from one Christian philosopher.

"We read in Scripture of the agriculture and art and technology that people developed, of the cities they built and the nations of which they were part. We read of social justice and compassion provided for in the Jewish law, preached by the prophets, and practiced at times by the kings. We read of the virtue of conscientious work, the joys of song and of love and friendship. We read the Old Testament poetic books whose artistic form is that of their culture. In the New Testament we meet one who incarnated himself in the mundane, in the social and religious and political structures of the time. He spent thirty of his thirty-three earthly years in ["so called"] "secular" pursuits, in the family at Nazareth and at the carpenter's bench. From the parables he told we sense his delight in nature and in Jewish culture. He says that all of life is a stewardship, sacred before God. We meet the apostles who talk of the Lordship of Christ in everything, and in their missionary work use cultural vehicles, even Greek philosophical concepts, to communicate the gospel." [Arthur Holmes, The Idea of a Christian College, 20]

He could have mentioned the positive references to sports or to contests, or many other features of human culture. In other words, there is nothing anti-culture per se in the Christian faith, nothing to prevent Christians from entering most deeply into human experience and accomplishment and appreciation.

II. The second thing to notice is the way in which David is so ready to celebrate the good and forget the evil in the case of Saul.

It is really astonishing and unexpected to hear David's lament for Saul. It is no surprise to hear the emotion in his voice as he gives expression to his desolation over the death of Jonathan, but Saul is another matter. Saul had been unjustly seeking David's life for a long time now and had made David's life miserable in many ways. Saul was not a worthy man in the same way Jonathan was. God had rejected him as Israel's king and had told David that he would take Saul's place. David had seen enough of Saul's bad side.

I guarantee you, had David said something like, "Well, Saul is dead. It is sad to consider his end. So much opportunity, so many gifts, and all squandered so terribly. Israel, take heed what unbelief does to a man," not a reader of the Bible would have been surprised or disturbed. It would have been the obvious thing to say. And, without a doubt, that was the truth of the matter.

Yet David speaks as if Saul had been a fine king and a great warrior, when, to be honest, cowardice and weakness had been Saul's undoing. He says of Saul and Jonathan that in life they were loved and gracious and in death they were not parted, even though on two occasions, as we have seen, Saul came close to killing Jonathan. How can he say such things when the Lord obviously passed a very negative judgment on Saul's life and his reign and when his death was explicitly an act of God's judgment against Saul?

Well, here too we have a lesson in godly living. It is the way a gracious man, a man who has himself been forgiven many sins by a gracious God, speaks about a man who has died. There may be times when it is necessary to speak the truth about another man's behavior. David did that on several occasions with regard to Saul's behavior. But if there is a time for that, there is also a time to draw a veil over the sins of another. This was such a time. David placed the best possible construction on the things that Saul had done, he remembered the good things, and he simply ignored and forgot the bad. If the Lord can forget our sins and remember them no more, if he can bury them in the deepest sea and trample them under his feet, then surely we ought to be able to do that with the sins of other human beings, especially when there is no need to remember them any longer. Here in David, I think, we clearly have a man who has been touched by the gospel and the grace of God, and so we find him looking at another man with a gospel spirit and a gospel heart.

Commentators, especially of the liberal kind, are sure that David was putting on a bit here. He wanted everyone to know that he had nothing to do with Saul's death and had not desired it, so he published this beautiful lament as if Saul had been his friend. It would be a device to ingratiate himself with Saul's supporters in Israel and advance his interests in assuming the throne. By posing as Saul's friend it makes it easier for others to think of him as Saul's successor. I think that is so predictable, so natural that they should think that precisely because that is the way we think and the way we so often speak. We simply don't praise men we don't like, public men or private men. We don't make admiring statements about people we don't think are deserving. If President Clinton did some good things, those of us who may have been deeply offended by some other things that he did would tend to be the last to acknowledge his accomplishments or credit him for them.

But, I'm quite sure David was entirely sincere and his lament was entirely well meant and was not an effort to strike a pose that would be helpful to his effort to gain the loyalty of the nation.

This is the way to forgive, truly to forgive your neighbor: To speak freely of his virtues and to remain so silent as to his faults that it seems as if you think he had none. In Proverbs 19:11 we read that it is to a man's glory to overlook an offense. Why? Because it is true virtue and true humility and true goodness in a man who does it and can do it. And what we have seen over the past eight chapters of Samuel is precisely David learning true humility and true gospel righteousness. He had learned to treat others in that same generous way in which God was treating him.

We have, over the years, dealt with people, from time to time, who have felt themselves deeply wounded, profoundly harmed by another person. And, without a doubt, it has become the orthodox opinion in Christian counseling circles to tell such people that there is no immediate obligation for them to "forgive and forget." To tell people who had been hurt deeply that they must forgive and forget those who had hurt them seemed to belittle the crime that had been committed and to trivialize the hurt that it had caused. And, surely, no one should underestimate the struggle that it may require to forgive great evil and remember it no more. But I have become more and more certain through these years, that just the authentic forgiveness that leads, if not to a complete forgetting, at least to speaking and acting as if one had completely forgotten, is not only what the gospel requires of us, but is the only true path to our own healing, for only in that way do we open up our hearts to the healing power of God's forgiveness. When we nurse and even nourish our bitterness toward those who have harmed us, we are as much as allowing them to harm us still. Our hearts are damaged by the grudge we hold. But, when we realize that, completely and comprehensively as our own terrible sins have been swept away by the blood of Jesus Christ, as fully reconciled as God is with us, as free as we have become from the guilt and the oppression of our own sins, we are now that free to forgive the sins that have been committed against us by others, we are at that moment in our hearts delivered from the grip of those sins. We have learned from Christ that forgiveness renders sins toothless. God's love is much stronger than they, and we have God's love. We stand above the sins of others by the grace of God and the blood of Christ and can be rid of them by the same principle by which God got rid of ours!

"Forgive," we are taught as God forgave you. Well, we know that he did not look at our worst sins and forgive all but they. And, we know, that once he has forgiven them, he does not constantly bring them up and harp on them and rub our noses in them. He remembers them no more! Well, if we have received such forgiveness from God, surely we must offer the same to our neighbor. If it is wonderful beyond words to receive such forgiveness from God, then it must be God-like to extend such forgiveness to others. Even to others who haven't asked for it. We didn't ask for it either. It was given to us first, then we asked! "While we were his enemies Christ died for us." You remember what stern words the Lord Jesus reserved for that man who had been forgiven a great debt and then refused to forgive the debts of those who owed him money. He had not learned from his own forgiveness to practice the same toward others. He had not appreciated his forgiveness and the proof was that he had not come to love the forgiveness of sins or trust its power.

Well, fair enough, we say. But we need to take a long look at David and discover what that means. It means covering our neighbors sins and it means saluting his virtues as if he had no sins! Try to do that in your conversation about people you don't like very much and you will find out how resistant your heart is to the real meaning of the gospel. You may be happy enough at the thought of your own sins being swept away, all of them, root and branch, but you are not so enthusiastic about the sins of others being given the same treatment; at least it does not seem to be so, for you seem to want to count them and remember them and keep a record.

David knew, as every Christian should know, that God the Father and Jesus Christ love, praise, and commend us even though we are not deserving. They speak of our worthiness when we know that we have none, at least no worthiness of our own making. They speak of the rewards we have earned when we know full well that anything good in us at all Christ put there by his Spirit. If Christ speaks of us that way, if his grace wipes our slate clean that way, if he treats us as if we had only virtues and no sins, if this is what his love does for us, then we cannot act as if we were better than Jesus Christ, or wiser, and hold others to account for their sins when he did not hold us to account for ours. There is the principle of grace in the heart expressing itself towards others. And when it expresses itself, it does it in just this way: it highlights the virtues, it pays the compliments, as if that were the entire story of that man or woman's life.

I have always wanted to be the kind of man who speaks that way about everyone! I am not such a man, to be sure, but I aspire to be one. Not because it would make me popular, not even because it would be a blessing to other people. I suspect that it would have both results. But, no, I have wanted to be David's kind of man toward the Saul's in my life - and the Sauls in our lives are all those people who seem to us faulty in some way - simply because that is how a man will think about others and will speak about others who has been thoroughly transformed by God's grace to him and Christ's sacrifice for him. Jesus did not tell us to forgive those who sinned against us 70x7 because by doing so we would convert them to faith and obedience or because we would make them our friends by so much forgiveness. He told us to forgive 70x7 because that is what he did and because that is what is truly right and good and because that is how we show ourselves to be like Jesus Christ the only perfect man who ever lived. It is just like the gospel however, that the one who does what is right and good, is also the one who finds that in doing it no one has profited more than himself or herself.

Do you aspire to really holy things? Do you want to be like Jesus Christ? Do you want his love to reign in your heart and life? Do you want to do great things for him? Do you want the principle of the gospel, of God's salvation through Christ's sacrifice received as a free gift, do you want that principle to reign in your heart and life. Well then, you remind yourself why it is that David forgot Saul's sins and mentioned only his virtues, even after all that Saul had done to David and tried to do to David. And, then, tell the Lord that you want to be like that for his sake. You want to begin right now speaking about others in the way David spoke about Saul. And you want to do it for no other reason but that Christ's love for you, his sweeping away of all your sins, has made you fall in love with the generosity of spirit, the kindness, the self-forgetfulness that he has shown toward you. And, after you have prayed, make a point of practicing that love in just that way!