STUDIES IN SAMUEL No. 49

2 Samuel 9:1-13, 16:1-4, 19:17, 25-31

December 2, 2001

Text Comment

9:1 If you remember, in 1 Sam. 20:15-16, Jonathan had asked David, "When the Lord cuts off every one of the enemies of David from the face of the earth, let not the name of Jonathan be cut off from the house of David."

The NIV's "kindness" is the important Hebrew term hesed, love and faithfulness.

Now, there is a question whether David's inquiry in v. 1 presupposes the account in 21:1-14 about the male heirs of Saul who are executed to avenge Saul's crimes against the Gibeonites. We won't spend time discussing that question. The events in chapter 21 are not specifically placed in the chronology of David's reign and might have come before or after this.

No doubt David's great motive here is his own love for Jonathan and his determination to fulfill the promise he made to his friend, but the repeated use of the phrase "house of Saul" may indicate that David is also, at the same time, continuing to woo the disgruntled among those who had been loyal to Saul.

9:3 David's loyalty and love would be the means of God extending his love. How often we are taught that in the Bible. We are the instruments of God's love and mercy among men. It is a greater privilege than any of us knows that we are permitted to communicate the goodness of the Lord to other people! And we do that by treating others in that way we know God would approve.

9:4 Mephibosheth was living in the Trans-Jordan, not far from where Ish-Bosheth had had his capital.

9:6 Such bowing down would not have been easy for a man crippled in both feet. The fact that the narrator does not tell us that Ziba bowed down, but does tell us that Mephibosheth did so, may be a foreshadowing of things to come: the pride and hypocrisy of Ziba and the true humility of Jonathan's son.

9:7 This is how David's hesed will become God's hesed to Mephibosheth: generous provision far beyond what anyone might have expected. The granting to him of his grandfather's considerable private property made him immediately a wealthy man (for example, we read in v. 10 that Ziba, who became his servant as a result of David's bestowal of Saul's land on Mephibosheth, had 20 servants of his own), and, on top of that he was granted the equivalent of a pension, a right to be fed from the king's table.

9:8 "Dead dog" was a convention of humble speech in that time and place (it has shown up on an ostracon, a piece of pottery with writing on it: "Who is your servant but a dog?") but, as will become even more clear later, Mephibosheth really meant it!

9:12 The mention of Mephibosheth's son may be to indicate simply that Mephibosheth had a family and that that family was also the beneficiary of David's hesed, his love and loyalty to Jonathan. [Gordon, Com, 249] Mica is never mentioned again apart from his place in the genealogy in 1 Chronicles.

9:13 The final reiteration of Mephibosheth's lameness indicates how vulnerable he was, how dependent upon David's largesse.

16:1 We take up the story now in the middle of Absalom's coup d'etat. David is fleeing Jerusalem for his life.

16:4 As we will discover eventually, Ziba had betrayed Mephibosheth and lied to David. He is stealing the land that David now gives him. But the one who looks the worst here is David himself. Where is the old perceptivity, the skill at seeing through people? Remember how David treated those who had brought him news of the deaths of Saul and Ish-Bosheth? David seems easy pickings here for a small-time thief.

Notice that now we read that Ziba "bowed down," but, of course, he is bowing and lying at the same time!

19:17 The civil war is now over and Absalom has been killed.

19:24 Mephibosheth's behavior has demonstrated his innocence and his loyalty to David.

19:30 David's response to the situation seems impatient and hardly adequate. "Why say more?" sounds like he really doesn't care. He just wants to be rid of the problem. That someone may have perpetrated a major injustice upon someone to whom David owed special consideration, seems not to matter to the King. If he believed Mephibosheth, all of the property should have been restored to him and Ziba punished for his perfidy. If he wasn't sure who was telling him the truth he should have taken steps to get to the bottom of things. But David does neither. Rather, he half-heartedly divides the land he had far too precipitously given to Ziba, between Ziba and Mephibosheth. Ziba, the traitor was not only not punished, but profited from his betrayal. What David has done is to put the corrupt on the same level as the incorruptible, the unrighteous with the righteous. That is what ANE kings did; but it is not what the King of Israel was to do!

Compared to David's uninterested and irritating lack of concern to put things right, Mephibosheth's response is true humility, true dignity, and true loyalty. No doubt he did get his fields back, but only half of them. We are proud of the son of Saul and ashamed of David. What a reversal!

You will notice that the narrator gives the last word to Mephibosheth, indicating his approval of him and his viewpoint and his disapproval of David.

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Now we set the stage for interpreting and applying these texts we have read by remembering that in 2 Sam. 4:4 we learned that Mephibosheth was five years old when the news came of his father's death on Mt. Gilboa. Clearly he is an adult by the time we encounter him here in chapter 9. Perhaps at a minimum he is in his 20s, some 15 or 20 years after David began his reign of 40 years. But that means that we are well into David's reign by the time David summons Mephibosheth and blesses him for Jonathan's sake. This is an action taken by David in the maturity of his life and his kingdom.

That fact is important because the narrator's arrangement of his material strongly suggests that this piece of history is placed where it is in the larger narrative, not primarily for chronological considerations - as if this event happened just before the defeat of the Ammonites - but precisely as a contrast with what immediately follows it, viz. David's terrible sin and, in particular, his disloyalty to and his betrayal of Uriah the Hittite.

What we have in chapter 9 is the background against which we are going to be made to see David's fall and the disintegration of his family because of his sins. We want to read this account to David's credit, and, indeed, chapter 9 certainly reads to David's credit. The remaining two scenes involving these three persons, David's later encounters with Ziba and Mephibosheth, however, do not portray David so favorably. But, what is more important, is that in juxtaposition with chapter 9, chapter 11 - the account of David's adultery and murder - reveals a king who absolutely knew better than to do what he did! We have David in chapter 9 a wise, a kind, a generous man and king, looking out for the welfare of others. In chapter 11, we will find David a foolish, selfish, hurtful man, running roughshod over the welfare of everyone else in the mad pursuit of his pleasures and the protection of his reputation. The narrator has forced us to face the facts about David by placing these two scenes next to one another in his account. This shows us how important and catastrophic David's fall was in the view of the narrator and, of course, the Holy Spirit who stands behind the narrator.

Then, when we compare David in chapter 9 with David in chapters 16 and 19, when once again we find him dealing with Ziba and Mephibosheth, we have portrayed for us David's moral decline in vivid colors. He is no longer so perceptive. His grasp of affairs is no longer so sure. He jumps to conclusions, he fails to see through the behavior of people the way we have seen him seeing through it before. He is nothing like he was with the Amalekite man who brought him news of Saul's death. He is more easily duped. His old wisdom seems to have departed him. And, even when he finds out that he has been deceived, he seems not to care about justice and goodness, he is distracted with his own problems and fails to act as the King of Israel should. In other words, we see him in chapter 9 acting like a righteous king, a worthy predecessor of Jesus Christ, and afterward acting more and more like a typical ANE king, even though, to be sure, David will have his finer moments in the remaining narrative of his reign and the Bible unmistakably pronounces a favorable judgment on his person and on his reign as a whole.

Now, we will have a great deal to say about David's fall in chapter 11 and its aftermath in the remaining chapters of 2 Samuel. Tonight I want to deal more broadly with the undeniable fact, a fact of which David is a principle illustration and demonstration in the Bible, that godly people can and do fall terribly. They can fall even in those ways that have deadly consequences for other people.

It is striking to me how resistant even Christian people, even Reformed Christian people are to that last idea. They are willing to accept that they themselves have done some wrong things, they want to believe that they take the reality of their own sin seriously. But suggest to them that they may have had something to do with the damnation of someone else and their backs stiffen, their defensiveness appears. But David's sins certainly had eternal consequences for members of his family if not for others in his kingdom, and, surely, for others in his kingdom. That is how great the sins of real Christians can be and how catastrophic their falls.

And, even more, contrary to our expectation, Christian people, real believers, can end their pilgrimage poorly, not nearly so faithful to the Lord as they were at an earlier time of life. Often the downward trend is precipitated by a particular fall, as, it appears, David's was. We may teach sanctification as if to suggest that a Christian more and more dies to sin and lives unto righteousness, as our Catechism has it, but the fact is, we all know it isn't so. In the Bible and in our own observation, many are poorer Christians when they are older than they were when they were younger. It is so with David. It was with Solomon his son. It was with King Asa.

Andrew Bonar, the saintly Scottish pastor, used to tell what was said to him at the beginning of his ministry by an old friend and minister: "Remember, it is a remark of old and experienced men, that very few men and very few ministers, keep up to the end the edge that was on their spirit at the first." [Andrew Bonar: Diary and Letters, 349]

There are many applications of this unhappy but undeniable fact, but I will limit myself to the two most obvious of them.

I. First, there is an urgent warning being given to all of us.

When we see a man like David, a man whom we have observed through many chapters now, growing in the grace and the knowledge of the Lord, a man who in this ninth chapter, seems so full of goodness, then forsake all of this in a tawdry affair that leads to murder, and then see his life wither, as a husband, a father, and king, stumbling his way to the finish line - he takes, you remember, a young maid into bed at the end to keep himself warm, this king with various wives all of whom could have shared his bed - and we turn our eyes away in disgust from a man whom we had grown so much to admire.

But, if a man such as David can fall so terribly and then see the rest of his life lived under the dark shadow of that fall, how much more careful ought you and I to be to avoid being overtaken by our temptations that our lives might not be squandered and the lives of others ruined by our fall.

Let me tell you how this sometimes happens in Christian lives. In David's case it was Lord Acton's principle apparently at work. "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." David, at the last, could not handle the temptation of being able to do whatever he pleased. You and I, brothers and sisters, should thank the Lord that we have little power and less money. You imagine your soul would stand the test of being able to enjoy any pleasure and to exercise control over the lives of others. But you imagine that because you have never really experienced the temptation that goes with wealth and power. Very few people indeed can face those temptations without suffering terrible damage to their characters.

Here is Spurgeon talking about this temptation as it has so often unmanned Christian ministers.

"Failure at a crucial moment may mar the entire outcome of a life. A man who has enjoyed special light is made bold to follow in the way of the Lord, and is anointed to guide others therein. He rises into a place of love and esteem among the godly, and this promotes his advancement among men. What then? The temptation comes to be careful of the position he has gained, and to do nothing to endanger it. The man, so lately a faithful man of God, compromises with worldlings, and to quiet his own conscience invents a theory by which such compromises are justified and even commended. He receives the praises of "the judicious"; he has, in truth, gone over to the enemy. The whole force of his former life now tells upon the wrong side…. To avoid such an end it becomes us ever to stand fast." [In I. Murray, Forgotten Spurgeon, 161-162]

But there are other ways in which one's later life is squandered in ways we might never have expected. I have a friend who, for far too long, did not treat his wife with love and respect and tender affection. She endured his sharp tongue and indifference for many years while their children were being raised, but finally she had enough and left him. She perhaps should not have done what she did. But, the fact is, he asked for it and now has got it and his future stretches out before him in a fashion he would never have imagined just a year or two ago. His family is broken, he has, as a result, seen his career turned upside down. And now what? When there is no turning back; no way to mend what was for so long done amiss with no thought to its long term consequences.

We preach the grace of God in this church, his full and free forgiveness of sins. David, terrible as his sins were, and pathetic a figure as he became in certain respects, received that forgiveness and there is hardly a more hopeful word for us than that in all of the Book of God. But I would not be preaching the Bible faithfully if I did not warn you that sin pays a wage even in a Christian's life, that God is not mocked, that even in the world of grace, whatever a man sows, he also reaps, and that sins can have devastating consequences. We know it is so. We see it so in many lives we know. Well, then, let us not fail to take the warning to heart.

II. The second application is of another kind altogether: it concerns our understanding of and appreciation of our forgiveness in Christ.

There may be many reasons why our heavenly Father permits the lives of his beloved children to continue to be so troubled by sin as they are and even to be devastated by sin as so many of them are and have been through the ages. I cannot begin to explain all of those reasons to you. We can, to be sure, think of many reasons why it might not have been so. Would the church not be a much better witness to the world if her own sons and daughters did not so often behave just like the people of the world and, indeed sometimes, worse? But the Lord's ways are not our ways and are high above us, past finding out.

But, there is one reason for all of this continuing sinfulness, even for the reality of weakened and withered Christian lives on account of sin. And that is the way in which this, more than anything else, throws into sharp relief the true extent of God's mercy to us and of our forgiveness.

Alexander Whyte in his own memorable fashion put it this way:

"God did not sanctify you on the same day on which He justified you…. I will put it to yourself to say - if you had been both called and justified and adopted and sanctified wholly and all at once you would never have known, you would never have believed, what an inveterate and hopeless and unparalleled sinner you are, nor what a glorious Saviour you have got in the Son of God. No, it is not your first pardon that gives God his great name in you. It is his every day and every hour pardon of your sins; sins that are past all name and past all belief." [Thomas Shepard, 99-100]

You can see his point, can't you. If the sins you reckoned with in thinking about the grace of God were all the sins you had committed before you became a Christian or, even, early in your Christian life, the temptation would be irresistible to come to regard yourself as really past all of that sinning and, regarding yourself that way, you would come to think less and less of the forgiveness that is yours in Christ. But, when a Christian continues to sin, even against light and God's grace, when he sins when he knows better, when he sins in the teeth of God's Word and God's law and God's Spirit, when he sins after time and again confessing his sins as evil and asking that they be forgiven, when he sins in such a way as to suggest that, as long as he has been a Christian, he still loves his sins more than he loves God and Christ, then and then only a man comes to realize how deep a sinner he is, how ugly and utterly inexcusable his sins actually are, and how amazing must be the grace of God that continues to cover them, time after time!

And is this not what we think when we hear about the falls of others? We do if we are at all of a spiritual mind. For, what good and wise people think and say is always the same: "There, but for the grace of God, go I." We know full well that we could have done the same. In fact, we may know that we actually have done the same, only we were not caught in our sin.

Remember John Newton's confession.

"The Lord makes some of his children examples and warnings to others, as he pleases. They who are spared, and whose worst deviations are only known to the Lord and themselves, have great reason to be thankful. I am sure that I have: the merciful Lord has not suffered me to make any considerable blot in my profession during the time I have been numbered amongst his people. But I have nothing to boast of herein. It has not been owing to my wisdom, watchfulness, or spirituality…. But I hope to go softly all my days under the remembrance of many things for which I have as great cause to be abased before Him, as if I had been left to sin grievously in the sight of man." ["Grace in the Ear," Cardiphonia]

Well, so it is with me, I know, and I'm sure it is with you! It is this realization and this alone, I fear, that keeps our overweening pride from swallowing up our faith and our love for God and our appreciation of Christ's great sacrifice for us. Otherwise we would come, I guarantee you, we would come to think down deep - even if we would never dare to utter the thought to ourselves or others - that, of course, Christ died for folk as pleasing and worthy and admirable as we are! The hard facts of Christian sin put an end to that nonsense.

And, remember, if the placing of this chapter where it is in 2 Samuel is primarily for the purpose of painting the background against which David's fall will be properly assessed, it does, to be sure, show us what a true and righteous king is like and what he does. He loves and extends grace and generous provision to those who are lame and helpless.

David's great descendant would do that on our behalf to a far greater degree than David ever did for Mephibosheth. For we are all Mephibosheths spiritually, lame and useless and dead dogs. And here we are, in Christ, eating at the King's table!