STUDIES IN SAMUEL No. 60

2 Samuel 20:1-25

March 3, 2002

Text Comment

We are coming to the end of the narrative of the rebellion against David which began with the revolt under Absalom and then continued with the effort of Sheba to split the kingdom between north and south.

v.1 For all of David's faults that the narrator has exposed he does not condone Sheba's rebellion, as we learn from his description of Sheba as a "troublemaker."

v.2 As we pointed out last Lord's Day evening, we have evidence here of the tribal jealousies that would eventually erupt in the division of the kingdom after the death of Solomon. David's weakness - the "there" in v. 1 indicates that this rebellion occurred at Gilgal, in the very presence of David and he did nothing to prevent it or stop it - was provocative and led to an attempt to divide the kingdom with Sheba at the head of the northern tribes.

v.3 These, you remember, were the concubines whom Absalom had slept with in a tent pitched on the palace roof in full view of the people. Absalom had taken that step, at Ahithophel's advice, to burn the bridges of his followers and nerve them to see the rebellion through to its end. Having done such a thing, it would be clear to everyone that there would be no making peace with David.

Remember, one of David's first wives, Michal, lived the rest of her life alone and childless. Now that fate is multiplied ten times. David has become a curse to the women in his life.

v.5 David intended immediately to put an army into the field against Sheba, but Amasa, like some ancient Gen. George Maclellan, is slow to act. Amasa, remember, had led the army of Absalom and had been granted command of David's army primarily as a swipe at Joab whom David hated for his having killed Absalom. While the narrator does not say so, it appears that Amasa's delay was due to his lack of sympathy for David and his cause. Verse 11 is thought to suggest that.

v.7 David had intended that Amasa would call up Judah's men to serve in the army. Unable to wait, he now placed the much smaller professional army under the command of Joab's brother, Abishai, and sent him out after Sheba. It is amazing, really, how much this military history jibes, for example, with what one reads in Caesar's Gallic Wars. He is always drawing attention to the difference in fighting quality between levied troops and professional soldiers. Joab, though demoted from overall command, is still present and influential.

In fact, the designation "Joab's men" indicates where the real power lives, which even Abishai understands, as we shall see.

v.8 The suggestion is of some slight of hand by which the dagger was moved from its sheath to Joab's hand without Amasa realizing it.

Remember, Gibeon was where Joab's and Abner's troops met in 2 Sam. 2 and where 12 men from each side did representative combat. And, if you remember, those 24 men killed one another in almost exactly the same way that Joab kills Amasa here.

v.9 Being grasped by the beard would suggest a greeting not the prelude to a stabbing. Amasa never suspected Joab's intention. They were relatives after all.

v.10 After this point we hear only of Joab and his men. Abishai is not mentioned again.

v.13 Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a little journal of his holiday in the South of France entitled, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. He came to one town that had been a Protestant stronghold during the religious wars of the 18th century. Think of the Camisards of the Cevennes as France's "covenanters." At first they resorted to field preaching and hiding from the royal and catholic authorities. But, eventually, as in Scotland, they took up arms. Their leaders were, as in the case of the Scottish covenanters, sometimes arrested, tortured and executed. The situation worsened when in 1702 the bloodthirsty Abbe du Chayla was murdered (the French equivalent of the Scottish Archbishop Sharpe). At any rate, on his travels, Stevenson came to St. Germain de Calberte, where du Chayla had been murdered. And he tells the story of how it happened. Du Chayla's house, which doubled as both rectory and prison, had been surrounded and set on fire. He tried to escape but was caught. The Camisards each took turns stabbing him. "This is for my father or brother who was broken on the wheel." "This is for my brother now suffering in the galleys." "This is for my mother or sister imprisoned in your cursed convents." 250 wounds in all. They knelt around the body and remained until morning, singing psalms.

Anyway, the priest of St. Germain de Calberte, the next day, preached a rousing sermon on this very text, 2 Samuel 20:12-13, with the bloody body of the du Chayla laid out before the catholic congregation. Just as Amasa lay wallowing in blood in the middle of the road, now the Abbe lay in blood before them all. He exhorted them all to die, each at his post, like their unhappy and illustrious, but now dead leader. In the midst of his sermon came the news that the Camisards were approaching. Both the congregation and the priest scattered like the wind. [Chapters "The Lord's Day" and "Pont de Montvert"]

v.14 Abel Beth Maacah was one of the northernmost towns of Israel. "Berites" may well be a corruption of Bichrites, that is members of the clan of Bicri, as Sheba was. [Gordon, Com., 295]

v.15 The siege ramp was built to enable the attacking army to assault the upper part of the city wall.

v.16 Remember, Joab had enlisted the aid of "a wise woman" in chapter 14. Apparently such women were not uncommon in Israel. That is, this woman was more than simply an ordinary citizen who was known for her discernment; she was an official or semi-official advisor.

v.18 Apparently, there was some saying or adage that represented the town of Abel as a place where one could find good advice.

v.19 In other words, the town doesn't deserve the fate that Joab has in store for it and it would be a loss to the kingdom as a whole to have Abel destroyed.

v.21 Interestingly, if you remember, Joab's approach is the same the wise Ahithophel had urged Absalom to take. Remove the leader and the revolt will immediately collapse.

v.22 The death of Amasa and the execution of Sheba restored Joab to command of the army de facto and he went back to Jerusalem apparently assuming that David would either want to or be forced to recognize his command de jure.

v.23 Obviously, Joab got his way! David would get back at Joab only after his death and through Solomon. Benaiah was a senior army commander given command of David's permanent bodyguard.

v.24 In the earlier list of David's senior staff, Adoniram was not mentioned, suggesting that the forced levy for the labor required for government building projects - the levy that was to prove under Solomon so embittering to the people, especially the people of the northern tribes - only was begun in the later years of David's reign. Remember, this same Adoniram was stoned to death by the northern tribesmen when Rehoboam, Solomon's son, sent him north immediately after the onset of the rebellion of the northern tribes. Apparently Adoniram was still thinking that he could conscript labor from the northern tribes and paid for his error with his life (1 Kgs 12:18).

v.26 Remember, in the earlier list David's sons were listed as his chaplains. Apparently, given all the trouble his sons had caused him, David chose someone else from outside the family!

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Now, there is no question that Joab is the center of this narrative. It is an account of his restoration to command and his crushing of Sheba's rebellion, work that David had entrusted to Amasa and should have seen to himself.

In any case, Joab is presented in this material as the complex man he has appeared to be all along. Through the course of years he often saw more clearly the requirements of the state than David did. The original reconciliation between Absalom and David was his idea, as you remember, and it was not his fault that it came to nothing. He made sure that Absalom did not live through the civil war and that certainly was wise statesmanship on Joab's part. And now, it appears, once more, he takes the decisive step that someone else was unwilling to take, in this case, Amasa. In all of this Joab seems to have had the best interests of the state in view and to have been wiser than David. Certainly the soldier in v. 11 took it as a matter of course that loyalty to David and loyalty to Joab amounted to the same thing. And, to be sure, at no point so far does it appear that Joab acted to David's disadvantage or, at least, that he intended to do so. Indeed, in most cases, he did precisely what should have been done and what needed to be done.

There is no doubt, however, that Joab was a brutal man and that he was careless of God's law when, in his view, either his own self-interest or his loyalty to David's house required it. His participation in the murder of Uriah is sufficient proof of that! No doubt here, in killing Amasa, he was just as much motivated by a desire to regain command of the army for himself as he was preserving the unity of the kingdom of Israel. Perhaps nowadays we would say that Joab was a man who got things done but that he wasn't always as much a "people-person" as he might have been!

What is perfectly clear, in any case, is that the conclusion of the account of David's reign, and that is what we have in this chapter, features not David but Joab. We know that this is the narrative conclusion and that all that follows is something of an appendix to the narrative of David's reign, because of the little section at the end of chapter 20 that lists David's senior staff. We were given another such list, with some of the same names, in 8:15-18, at the end of a chapter summarizing the consolidation of David's kingdom and his rule over the entire area promised to Abraham by the Lord, i.e. the entire Promised Land. Now we are given another such list. The two lists form an inclusio with the history of David's rule, from consolidation to the end of the civil war, between them.

But, what a difference! Chapter 8, leading up to the first list is an account of David's victories. Twice in that chapter we read that "The Lord gave David victory wherever he went." David is the warrior king and God's blessing rests mightily upon his throne. But, leading up to the second list, David is a shadow of his former self and, in fact, others, and Joab especially, are achieving the victories. David is very much in the background, hardly in control of anything. He doesn't even really control who commands his army. David fired Joab and it is as if he was simply ignored.

Last Lord's Day evening we considered again the obvious fact that David's decline was the direct consequence of his sin and that we must take warning from David and resist the notion, the very notion the Devil is always insinuating in our minds, that we can sin without consequence; that we will get away with it, whether because God is gracious, or because when we repent later he will have to forgive us and spare us the bitter fruit of our choices, or, even, because no one will see what we do, as if God being invisible to us, we are invisible to him.

Tonight I want to conclude this long narrative of David's decline by paying attention to another lesson of this dismal history and David's old age. Once again, it is a lesson taught in the negative, but, for that reason perhaps, taught very powerfully. And it is this: we have been called to work in the service of the Lord and to work until the end of our days.

What we have strikingly in this text is an active Joab - who probably wasn't much older or younger than David; he had been with David from the beginning, remember, from before he became king - but an inactive David. David worked, worked hard and fruitfully in the early years of his reign, but he relaxed in the later years. He got into his great trouble, you remember, when he stayed at home and enjoyed the pleasures of the palace when he should have been at the head of his army. And that is the sense we get of David and his life throughout the rest of the narrative of his reign. Everybody else is doing something, David is just sitting there. The final chapter of the narrative of his reign hardly even mentions David, it is all about Joab and what he does to secure the unity of the kingdom and the security of David's throne.

That David became such an indolent and do-nothing man in his later years was, in one respect, the consequence of his sins and, thus, the judgment of God. God often punishes our sins by leaving us to fall prey to other sins. Sin is often the punishment of sin.

But, David's indolence is also a lesson for us. The narrator's great judgment on David's life is that he stopped working for the Lord, stopped fulfilling his responsibilities, stopped spending his life in the service of God's kingdom. He did things, of course, but perfunctorily, and many other things he should have done, he let others do for him. So much so, that you can virtually tell the story of the great crisis of David's later reign, the civil war and its outcome without mentioning David at all!

We are being taught in all of this not to do the same thing ourselves, not to check out of the spiritual warfare or of Christian service. We are not to cease to be the loyal servants of our God and Savior. We are not to flag in fulfilling our callings. Rather, we are to serve the Lord as faithfully and as zealously at the end of our lives as we may have at the beginning of our Christian life or earlier on in it. This David did not do and our narrator has made no effort to hide his disgust or and has instead explored in detail the deadly consequences of David's inaction.

The great hymnwriter, James Montgomery (Stand Up and Bless the Lord; Angels from the Realms of Glory; etc.), had a Methodist pastor friend, Thomas Taylor who, one Sunday evening, in his sermon had declared that he hoped to die as an old soldier of Jesus Christ, with his sword in his hand. That very night Taylor died suddenly and unexpectedly. Montgomery wrote a poem in commemoration of his friend entitled "Soldier of Christ! Well Done!" that has the lines:

The voice at midnight came;

He started up to hear:

A mortal arrow pierced his frame,

He fell, -- but felt no fear.

 

Tanquil amid alarms,

It found him in the field,

A veteran slumbering on his arms,

Beneath his red-cross shield;

His sword was in his hand,

Still warm with recent fight,

Ready that moment at command

Through rock and steel to smite.

Well, that should be the earnest desire of every Christian: to be found in the field when the summons comes, with a sword in one's hand still warm from recent fight. Many of us are growing older in this congregation. We are all growing older, of course, but many of us are growing older! We are now reaching years we thought would remain far ahead of us. We feel that we should not be already as old as we are. We tell others how old we are and can hardly believe our ears.

Will we be as faithful in our later years as our former? Will we be more faithful, as we ought to be, profiting from our experience and the faithfulness of the Lord? Will we serve to the very end and work for and contribute to the kingdom of God to our last days? These are no longer theoretical questions for many of us. But even if you are young and much nearer the beginning of your life than its end, it is not too soon for you to begin to determine that you are going to serve the Lord not some of the way, not half way, not most of the way, but all the way to the very end. Among the "resolutions" Jonathan Edwards wrote for himself while still a teenager were promises that he would no be as many older Christians he observed, but would keep growing and serving the Lord when he was an old man.

"Bring the parchments…" Paul said to Timothy, even as he knew his end was near. There was more good work for the Lord that could be squeezed into the remaining days if only he had his books with him. And the Christian church has produced great congregations of holy men and women who have done the Lord's work gladly until their dying day.

Somerset Maugham, in his autobiography, The Summing Up, wrote, "When I have finished this book, I shall know where I stand. I can afford then to do what I choose with the years that remain to me." [Cited in William Barclay, A Spiritual Autobiography, 7] Well, no Christian should ever say such a thing. When we have done one piece of work or another for the Lord, when we have borne witness to an unbeliever of the gospel of Jesus Christ, when we have shown kindness in the Lord's name to someone in need, when we have put on the armor of God and done battle against the devil's schemes that we might present ourselves holy to our Lord and Master, when we have spent our time or money advancing the cause of the kingdom of God in the world, when we have given ourselves to study that we might have more to say and know better what to do in the Lord's name, we are in exactly the same place as when we began: with more to do for the Lord in ourselves and in the world than we can possibly accomplish in the time that remains. And we will have the benefit of that! For there is nothing spiritually healthier, nothing more conducive to a Christian's happiness, than simply to serve the Lord faithfully and constantly. He gives more of himself to those who give themselves more to him.

Now, I'm going to conclude with a very specific application of this general point. I make it because I have had occasion of late on several occasions to witness the destructive power of this particular modern temptation to indolence and to see it sap a person's interest in serving the Lord and fulfilling sacred responsibilities. I am speaking of the internet and the power it seems to gain over the time and attention of many people, including Christian people nowadays. It is a new form of the same temptation that television has long posed for people but, in fact, seems still more addictive and destructive.

Had David lived in our day, I see him in the palace sitting at a computer screen playing a game or visiting web sites while Joab went out, waged David's battles, and won back his kingdom. The hours, days, weeks, and eventually years thus wasted can never be regained and the softening, the weakening of the spirit that comes from indulging this vanity, from concentrating on nothing for hours on end at the expense of the great issues and callings of human life is a tragedy of epic proportions. And that is beside the great dangers that lurk in the internet, that draw a Christian into behavior that is wrong not simply because it is a waste of precious time and opportunity but because it is positively evil and corrupting.

If you are young and the internet is claiming your attention, you must, you must get free of this desire. Pray to God, make yourself accountable to others, and, still more, fill up your time with better and much more important things and leave yourself little room for this wastage of your life. Make industry in doing what is pleasing to God the habit of your life, not indolence and emptiness. Do it now before the habit sets in and before you have already lost so much of your life and so deadened your mind and heart that you risk never making much of anything of this precious gift of life that God has given you.

And if you are older, shame on you, for taking these precious years that God has allowed you - one of his children, his servants in this world - and squandering it on nothing; squandering it on something so insubstantial that afterwards you would be hard pressed to bother even to think about how you just spent those several hours.

I fear very much that the church is cultivating today a generation of people who will waste their lives more comprehensively than any generation before them. Captives to these new technologies, they will spend their days and nights staring dumbly into a screen, and when they are gone it will be hard to tell if they accomplished much of anything as a Christian in the world. Sad and shameful if the best thing they can say about a professing Christian is that he is a whiz at Nintendo! Remember Shakespeare's lines?

That which should accompany old age,

As, honour, love, obedience, troops of friends.

Those are the rewards of a useful and well-spent life. As is: "Well done, thou good and faithful servant."

"It is required of a steward," Paul says, "that he be found faithful." Well, hear me. You will not find Christ's faithful stewards entertaining themselves, staring doe-like at a computer screen. You will find them everywhere else but: with their wives or husbands, with their children or neighbors, with their brethren, with the Word of God in their hands or in their mouths. Let David at the end of his reign be for you the picture of the avid internet user, sitting about doing nothing, while others, even really sinful men, do more with their lives than he or she.

Jesus, David's son, did not squander his time in that way. He was a faithful steward at every point along the way and he was at his very best at the very end! And it would have been so had he lived 85 years. And it would have been so had he access to the internet in his day!