STUDIES IN SAMUEL No. 62

2 Samuel 22:1-51

March 17, 2002

Text Comment

Remember, now. We are in the midst of the appendix, chapters 21-24 of 2 Samuel and now come to the first of two poems that form the middle terms of a chiastic arrangement of material: crisis, warriors, poem, poem, warriors, crisis. The material in this appendix is arranged, we said last Lord's Day evening, to lay stress on the blessing and faithfulness of God as the cause of David's success, the blessing and faithfulness which is celebrated in the two poems in the middle of the arrangement, which are surrounded by accounts of David's successes.

This poem in chapter 22 is virtually identical to Psalm 18. There are numerous minor differences. This is the origin of that psalm which later was adapted to be a hymn for the use of the ancient church.

v.1 "from the hand of Saul" takes the story of David back to its beginning.

v.3 "horn" symbolizes strength as your NIV margin indicates. "The idiom is drawn from the goring horn or a charging ram or bull." [Alter, Com., 337]

v.6 Literally, of course, David faced death on numerous occasions, but also these are metaphorical ways of speaking of the troubles and afflictions of life.

v.7 Notice the use of the term "temple" before the temple was built. Heaven is depicted as God's temple and so is the place where he is worshipped on earth (e.g. Psalm 27).

v.16 To describe the effect of the Lord's intervention on David's behalf, in the midst of his troubles, David uses the language ordinarily associated with theophanies in the OT, those times when the Lord made a physical appearance to men and revealed in terrifying ways his glory and majesty and power.

As you can see, the imagery that David employs in the poem is obviously drawn from both the conventions of ancient poetry and the personal experience of powerful natural phenomena. You can find similar imagery in other ancient Near Eastern poetry. That does not mean, of course, that David meant the same thing by it that pagan poets did. Poetic imagery can remain an expressive force long after its original cultural context has disappeared. Think of Milton's use of classical mythical imagery in Paradise Lost. [Alter]

v.20 In Hebrew psychology and imagery, distress was regarded as a hemming in, a narrowing and relief was the opposite, spaciousness, being given room. [Gordon, Com, 306]

v.26 From his own personal experience, in vv. 26-28, David moves on to a general statement of God's ways with people in the world.

v.29 From vv. 29-37 we have further statements as to what God means to David personally.

v.32 Here is Israelite monotheism. It is the counterpart to the Muslim's "There is no God but Allah," though more than a thousand years earlier. [Gordon, Com., 307]

v.34 That is, the Lord made him both swift-footed and sure-footed.

v.38 Vv. 38-43 describe the Lord's complete destruction of David's enemies.

v.47 Vv. 47-51 are a final doxology, reprising some of the themes from earlier in the psalm.

v.50 Paul quotes this verse in Romans 15:9 as an intimation that the gospel will spread through the nations.

v.51 "David and his descendants" are in view because of the promise that God has made to David and his house (2 Sam. 7).

Well, we have come at last to the great theological problem posed by the biblical narrative of David's life, a problem that faces every serious-minded Christian and that must be resolved in our minds if we are to understand the meaning of the gospel for ourselves and take its truth to heart.

The poem itself, in largest part, is not controversial or difficult. It is more difficult for Hebrew scholars for its language seems to be quite old - dating, as we would expect, to the time of David himself - and this makes for some challenges for the translator. But the poem, as a psalm of praise, is not hard to understand.

The problem comes in vv. 21-25 where David claims that he has lived a righteous life and that many of the blessings that have been bestowed on him and Israel during his reign - remember Israel was never so great a nation as she became under David and had never controlled so great a territory - were bestowed precisely because of David's having kept the ways of the Lord.

How can he possibly say that after all that has so terribly darkened the later years of his reign? How can he talk about clean hands and having kept himself from sin when he has committed adultery, covered it up with a murder, mangled his family, divided his kingdom, and appeared in these later chapters of 2 Samuel as muddled, confused, weak, and lacking moral firmness and resolve?

Well, perhaps the most common solution to this "problem," is to assume that David is talking about imputed righteousness, that is, about his cleanness and blamelessness because he has believed in the Lord and received the forgiveness of his sins. David did not live a holy life, a righteous life. His hands were not clean. But by the grace of God he has been counted righteous because Christ's righteousness has been reckoned to him and he is now treated by God "as if he had never sinned nor been a sinner."

Augustine takes this view of things at Psalm 26 where David makes another bold claim to have lived a blameless life.

"Vindicate me, O Lord, for I have led a blameless life; I have trusted in the Lord without wavering.…and I walk continually in your truth."

Augustine imagines that, in making that statement, David is saying, in effect, "Not my merits but your mercy is before my eyes." That is, David is claiming to be blameless, only because he knows he has been forgiven.

The problem with taking David's statements in that way is that clearly he is talking about his life and living, his conduct. He is in Psalm 26 and he is here in 2 Samuel 22. In Ps. 26 he goes on to describe why he is blameless: "I do not sit with deceitful men, nor do I consort with hypocrites; I lead a blameless life…" And here in 2 Samuel he says not that he has been forgiven but that he has "kept the way of the Lord" nor has he "done evil by turning from God." He even says that he has "kept himself from sin."

Whatever we say about David's claim to blamelessness, it is plainly a claim to have lived a godly, obedient, devout life. So the problem that we face in reconciling his claim to the facts of his life, as we have read them in the preceding chapters, cannot be solved by assuming that he is only talking about being forgiven.

Well, another solution might be to assume that David had written the psalm early on in his reign, before his great sins and moral decline, and that he would have known better than to say such things if he had written the same psalm as an old man. Perhaps we should think that David himself, as an older man, cringed when he read these verses that he had written as a young man. He knew very well how inappropriate they were and how people would shake their heads in astonishment that an adulterer and a murderer would be so brazen as to talk about his clean hands.

Well, sensible as that explanation may seem to us, it will not suffice to explain David's statements about himself here. For, more surprisingly still, the Lord himself offers the same assessment of David's life that David offers here. In 1Kings 9:4, after David's life is over the Lord says to Solomon, David's son:

"As for you, if you walk before me in integrity of heart and uprightness, as David your father did, and do all I commanded and observe my decrees and laws, I will establish your royal throne over Israel forever, as I promised David your father when I said, 'You shall never fail to have a man on the throne of Israel."

But, we say, has God forgotten the evil that David did? No, clearly not. In 1 Kings 15:5, the narrator says about David,

"For David had done what was right in the eyes of the Lord and had not failed to keep any of the Lord's commands all the days of his life - except in the case of Uriah the Hittite."

In other words, striking as this assessment is of David's life that he gives himself in 2 Samuel 22:21-25, it is the assessment the Lord also gives. What is more, the narrator surely knew that his readers had just finished reading about David's moral and spiritual collapse. He knew, when he put David's poem where he did, that at whatever point in David's life he actually wrote the poem, it was going to come after the narrative of David's sins.

Well, an answer to this problem of reconciling David's terrible sins to his claim that he lived a blameless life begins to emerge when we take note of the obvious fact that we encounter the problem elsewhere in the Bible. Frequently, elsewhere in the Bible.

Isaac, you remember, was portrayed to us in Genesis, in the second half of his life as a worldly, sensual man who cared more about his taste buds than he cared about his sons. His spiritual indifference brought misery into his family, a misery that was to extend into Jacob's family as well, who was, in sad ways, very like his father. But, be that as it may, Isaac is clearly set forth as one of the great patriarchs of faith and God's covenant. Remember the Lord saying once that in the great day many would come from the East and from the West and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of God.

Even more notable in this way is Samson. Many of us have felt the confusion in our minds as we read the account of Samson in Judges. The man seems, by and large, to be a lusty fool. He sports with prostitutes, he foolishly makes large wagers, he marries outside the faith and then gets snookered by his Philistine wife. But, lo and behold, there is Samson's name in Hebrews 11 among the heroes of faith! How can that be, we may well wonder, but there he is, next to Abraham, Joseph and Moses.

The simple fact is that the Bible is chock full of men who very definitely have feet of clay and yet, at the same time, are judged to have lived godly, devout, and righteous lives. Start with Noah and Abraham and go all the way to Peter and Paul and you will find serious, disgusting sin mixed together with strict obedience and faithful service. In many cases we are treated to accounts of their sins in gory detail; in others we are simply told enough to know that there were such sins and of them as well gory details could have been given. So we have Peter's denial and his cowardice in Antioch, but we have, in Paul's case, only his own confession that there would be plenty to tell if he or someone else had chosen to tell it. And the history of the church tells the same tale, from its beginning to today. Of many Christian heroes we know enough to blanch at many of the things they said and did: from Jerome's pride and disagreeableness to Rutherford's conceiving a child out of wedlock; from Toplady's churlish bitterness to Wesley's utter disregard for his wife.

What are we to conclude from these facts? What are we being taught?

1. First, that sins, even great sins, do not nullify the transforming grace of God in one's life or cancel the obedience and the service that one does offer to God. The plain fact of the matter is this: it is not the absence of sin that separates us Christians from the unrighteous and the unbelieving, it is the presence of real righteousness, heartfelt obedience rendered to God, loving and faithful service performed in Christ's name. This is the distinguishing thing. The sin we have in common with everyone else. The righteousness only those in Christ have.

2. Second, God's mercy is shown to us not only in the forgiveness of our sins, but in God's readiness to consider our obedience and service as Christians as if it were the whole story of our lives and in his willingness not to nullify our obedience by our disobedience. The biblical writer, we have seen, was careful to expose David for the sinner he was in the second half of his reign, over the past number of chapters he has held our nose in David's disgusting selfishness, lust, and cowardice. But it troubles him not at all then to let us hear David describe himself as a blameless man. This is what the gospel makes of a person's life, something very wonderful and worthy even though great sin continues.

3. Third, it is only possible for a very sinful man to plead his righteousness when he is a gospel man. Remember, David plead for the forgiveness of his sins. Some of his greatest psalms are confessions of his sins, pleas for forgiveness, and praise to God for his mercy to him, unworthy as he is. David is by no means saying, here in 2 Sam. 22, that he was a sinless man or a deserving man or that, in and of himself, he was a righteous man. He is a man who knows and who has often spoken of the forgiveness of God, who knows how much of it he has consumed in his lifetime, and who knows full well, as every believer does, that apart from the mercy of God he would be consumed. Only for such men and women, only for those living in the world of God's grace as David so clearly did, is there the possibility of saying that "I have kept the way of the Lord."

Now, there is wisdom required here, discernment, and the application of a spiritual mind. For, everyone knows the temptation to conclude from David's self-assessment here that perhaps adultery isn't that bad after all; it didn't keep David from being a blameless man. Perhaps our sins don't need to be considered so terrible; perhaps God is more willing to overlook them than we think.

But, I tell you in the Lord's name, if you take David's words here as an invitation to disobey the Lord, you are making a terrible, terrible mistake.

1. First, you are forgetting the terrible consequences that ensued as the punishment and the outworking of David's sins. David may be able to say that he was a righteous man, but he would not be able to say that his sins did not stain and poison his life and, what was worse, the life of his family. No one can survey the carnage that lay strewn over the landscape at the end of David's life and think that his sins were no big deal! Four dead sons, eventually, a permanently weakened kingdom and a palace full of joyless and barren wives: these are no recommendations for the idea that one can sin so that grace may abound! I think it may be in large part to make us force this fact that the narrator has spent so much time on the dismal record of David's latter reign; precisely to prevent us from thinking that David, who will be remembered as a man of faith and righteousness, sinned with impunity!

2. Second, to his credit, David never sinned because he knew he would be considered blameless and righteous anyway. He never had the temerity to put a theological argument behind his lust and cowardice and indifference. He never justified himself. It was evil on his part, pure and simple, as he himself says against himself in Psalm 51. Anyone who sins because he thinks he can sin without significant consequence is sinning in a very different and a very much worse way than does the man who falls into sin out of frailty and at least has the good sense to shudder at the evil he has done and to worry what might be its immediate and lasting consequence. It is a very much more dangerous thing - that raises much more fundamental questions about a man or woman's faith in Christ - when a professing Christian, as the Puritans used to say, "turns the garments of Christ's righteousness into a cloak for sin." [William Woodward, cited in Kevan, The Grace of Law, 208] This is what Rabbi Duncan meant when he said that the fact that everyone sins is the believer's bed of thorns and the hypocrite's bed of roses. The hypocrite thinks, "well, everyone is doing it, so it can't be so big a deal if I do it too." The believer also knows that everyone sins but that does not excuse it, it makes sin worse because it is so pervasive, so universal, so inescapable. To sin because the world sins is virtually to say that Christ makes no difference to you and you have no more loyalty to him than the world does. The man or woman who loves Christ will never excuse misbehavior by thinking or saying that everyone is doing it.

Ask yourself, you husbands, what your wives would think if, having discovered you in an affair, you were to say to them, well, everyone does it; affairs are commonplace. Would you expect her to say, "Oh, thank you for reminding me; now it doesn't seem such a serious thing." Or would you expect her to say, "You are not everyone. You are my husband and you have betrayed me! And, the fact is, while everyone may sin, there are a great many men who for loyalty to God and their wives never have affairs."

The fact is, there are no sinless Christians, but there are a great host of Christians who have never done what David did and have never brought down upon their families the horror that he brought down upon his.

So, you see, we have astonishing gospel truth here - a very sinful man who is declared to be a righteous man! Wonderful! What potential there is in our lives! You tend to think that your sins will prevent you from accomplishing much for the Lord, that your potential for the Lord's blessing has been stunted by your sins. But, no! Sins and all, if you follow the Lord and strive to serve him, you can do great things for the Lord. See what David did. See what is said of him, sins and all. What might then be said of you? What a great thing our lives can be, even our lives, yours and mine. But, like all great and precious truths, it must be rightly understood and carefully applied to our lives, lest we take the gift of God's extraordinary grace and spoil it and dishonor the Lord with his own wonderful gift.