STUDIES IN SAMUEL No. 63

2 Samuel 23:1-39

March 24, 2002

Text Comment

Remember now, we are coming to the backside of the chiasmus in the appendix at the end of 2 Samuel. We have in the last four chapters: crisis, warriors, poem, poem, warriors, crisis. We are now beginning with the second poem and will also take tonight the second section devoted to warriors.

The first poem, the long 22nd chapter was a celebration of God's faithfulness to David and of his deliverance of David from all his enemies. This second poem concentrates on the Lord's covenant with him and his house. What was announced to him in 2 Samuel 7 by Nathan the prophet is now made the subject of David's "last words".

v.1 The impressive identification of David ends with his being a song-writer. More than we often remember, the Christian church owes David a great debt, for his poems have been the life-blood of Christian piety for 3000 years.

v.2 "The Spirit of the Lord spoke through me," reminds us that David is identified as a prophet in the Bible (Acts 2:30). Clearly vv. 3-4 are regarded as something of a prophecy, an oracle, that came through David by the Spirit of God.

v.4 What we have in these two verses, 3 and 4, is a picture of the ideal, righteous king and ruler. The same thing is said about him in Psalm 72 and Isa. 11, both explicitly messianic passages. Clearly David has in view someone coming who will fulfill the ideal of the king of God's people. Solar images for ANE kings were common and David takes that imagery over here. The sun, in turn, brings the growth of plant life on the earth. So the idea is that from the righteous king comes blessing to man.

v.5 The perspective alternates between David's own life and salvation and the prospect of his house through the rising generations.

The rest of the chapter is taken up with two elite groups within David's army: the "Three" and the "Thirty." You will see in your NIV margin that there are an unusual number of notes. This reflects the fact that there are a large number of textual difficulties. What this suggests is that the text is old, even liberal scholars admit this, and that it dates from the time of David himself.

v.8 The parallel text in Chronicles has 300 not 800 and that seems to be correct for we have 300 again in v. 18 which seems to compare that exploit to this. Remember, "hundred" may be a military term designating a unit of some size: like platoon or company. We may not be intended to imagine exactly 300 enemy soldiers.

v.10 Dodai did the fighting but the Lord brought about a great victory. This is the doctrine of divine providence and the part of the doctrine known as concursus. Concursus or concurrence refers to the biblical teaching that the same event can be regarded as the act of man and of God. "You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good," Joseph told his brothers. God lies behind what men do and they accomplish his will. Dodai was the means but God the ultimate actor.

v.12 "Shammah's feat was to repel a Philistine raiding party which came up at harvest time to deprive the local community of its crop of lentils." [Gordon, Com., 312]

In vv. 13-17 an act of heroism is recounted that may have occurred as far back as David's time in the wilderness before he was king. V. 14 mentions "the stronghold" and that may be the stronghold of Adullam mentioned in 1 Samuel 22. If not, it is likely to have occurred early on in his reign when he fought battles against the Philistines.

v.17 This story, of course, tells us a great deal about David himself at his best and about the loyalty he inspired in those who fought for him and why. David, when he uttered his yearning for his hometown, certainly had no intention of men risking their lives to get him water from its well. The soldiers would not have thought less of David for his act of pouring out the water before the Lord. They had gone as a demonstration of their loyalty to him; his act was the profoundest possible demonstration of his appreciation for what they had done.

Henry Lyte, the author of Abide with Me and Praise my Soul the King of Heaven has a lovely poem based on this incident. The poem has 16 verses, the last two of which are:

There is a well in Bethlehem still,

    A fountain, at whose brink

The weary soul may rest at will,

    The thirsty stoop and drink:

And unrepelled by foe or fence

Draw living waters freely hence.

 

Oh, did we thirst as David then

    For this diviner spring!

Had we the zeal of David's men

    To please a higher king!

What precious draughts we thence might drain,

What holy triumphs daily gain!

v.19 Abishai, of course, is familiar to us from the preceding narrative. He was a great warrior. However, despite his accomplishments and his well-earned reputation, he was not one of the three, though he seems to have earned a stature equal to theirs. Is the narrator suggesting that an honor he deserved was withheld from him? It is hard to say.

v.23 Benaiah was a PK, a pastor's kid, as we learn in 1 Chronicles 27:5. Jehoiada, his father, was a priest. The Egyptian may well have been a mercenary in the hire of the Philistines. Benaiah was the commander of David's bodyguard, he remained loyal to David during Absalom's rebellion, and, later, Solomon promoted him to command of the army (I Kgs 2:35).

In vv. 24-39 we are given 31 names that belonged to the membership of the "Thirty." With Abishai and Benaiah that would make 33. Of course, the hazards of war and the passage of time would account for there not being a precise number. Vacancies would have to be replaced over time. It is also, as with hundred and thousand, possible that "thirty" had come to represent not a precise number but a unit designation. Interestingly the preponderance of names hail from Judah, David's own tribe and that may indicate that this group formed in the early days when almost all of David's support was from Judah.

v.30 This is a different Benaiah.

v.34 Remember, we pointed out when considering chapter 11 that Bathsheba is identified there as the daughter of Eliam. Could this be her father? And, if so, could her relationship to Ahithophel, who seems clearly to be the same Ahithophel, David's counselor, who defected to Absalom, have anything to do with Ahithophel's betrayal of David?

v.39 Poignantly, and no doubt intentionally, the last name mentioned is that of Uriah, Bathsheba's husband. The narrator has not forgotten what David has done and putting Uriah last forces us to remember as well.

Counting up the names yields 36 not 37. It has long been wondered if the 37th is the unnamed, but hardly forgotten, Joab, the commander-in-chief.

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The Bible is chock full of heroes: men and women who did noble things and are celebrated for their achievements. Christians, perhaps especially American Christians nowadays, can be uncomfortable with that fact. But fact it is. Egalitarian as we are, uncomfortable as we may be with the notion of elevating some men and women above the rest as heroes, 28 times in the NT we are commanded to imitate someone. To be sure, 11 of those times it is God or Christ whom we are to imitate, but 17 times it is some man whose faith and obedience we are to emulate. Again and again in the Bible people are singled out and commended for their faith or their exploits on behalf of the kingdom of God. Times without number we are taught that in such a person's life or in such a person's character we are to see the will of God for ourselves. Holy Scripture holds up a man or a woman to our view and tells us: "Look at him; look at her. That is the way; walk in it."

Nowadays we may be inclined to ask whether this concentration on the achievements of human beings does not, in some way, diminish our sense of complete dependence upon the Lord? Does this celebration of human accomplishment not to some degree threaten what ought to be the basic conviction of a sinful human heart: viz. that without the Lord and apart from his grace, we can do nothing. Is it not dangerous to talk so much about men, about how good they are, about how much they have achieved, about how well they have lived? Is not Christ diminished when we speak in such complimentary ways about mere human beings and does it not pose the danger that we will be too much tempted to boast in other things besides the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ? After all, when we are at our very best, are we not still unprofitable servants?

Well, apparently not, for it is the Lord himself who wrote his book as he did and who is forever lavishing praise and credit on men and women who served him well. I suppose it would not have surprised any of us if, had we turned to Hebrews 11 early on in our Christian life, we had read the Lord saying there:

"Look at the men and women of faith in the ancient epoch. Look at what they accomplished and what they endured by their faith. I gave them that faith. Everything they did and everything they endured was the consequence of my grace and my Spirit within them. It is not too much to say that it was I who, in Abraham, saw the better country; it was I who, in Moses, chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time; it was I, who in those saints of old was willing to be tortured and refused to be released so that they might gain a better resurrection." These people would have been nothing and would have done nothing without me."

Had the text read that way, we would have taken it entirely in stride, for that would have been the very truth and every Christian knows it. Our Savior never spoke truer words than when he said, "Without me you can do nothing!"

But, of course, that is not what we read in Hebrews 11 or elsewhere in the Bible. Rather, the Lord himself directs our attention to those saints and celebrates their achievements. He takes his own pride in them. In full view of the Bible's readers, he admires these men and women and salutes their faithfulness to him as if it had been their own doing.

But, we ask, were they not sinners? Were they not small and selfish in many ways? Did they not as often fail at faith as succeed? To be sure. They were more sinful than any of us knows. And no one knew better the full extent of their sinfulness than God himself who looks upon the heart, and yet he often writes about his faithful followers and servants as if they hardly sinned at all. James, our Lord's younger brother, who had so much of his elder brother's spirit, said on one occasion, "You have heard of the patience of Job." He might just as well have said, "You have heard of the impatience of Job." But such is God's grace that he considers his people according to what is good in them, not according to what is bad. And so it is that a man who stumbled badly on more than a few occasions, is known in Holy Scripture as "the friend of God;" a man who on some very notable occasions thought only of himself is now forever remembered as the "humblest man on the face of the earth;" that a man whose heart was sometimes filled to the brim with lust and rage is remembered in the annals of the kingdom of God as "the man after God's own heart;" and a man who at the worst possible times shrunk in craven fear before the face of men will be forever renown as "the rock" upon which was built the church of Jesus Christ.

And so it is that we have in the Bible a book of heroes and in the history of Christianity multitudes more of the same. People who by their lives and their deeds both represent us and carry us on to higher things and win our victories for us in the Lord's name. Such men and women are our "standard bearers." This vision of greatness in a human being is, in the Bible's view of life, essential to Christian godliness and fruitfulness. We need heroes, we need aspirations after greatness, we need the celebration of achievement, Holy Scripture seems to teach us, to prevent the Christian life being reduced in our view to nothing more than a lifestyle, a creed and moral code, a mere obedience to rules. No, the Christian life is something very noble to be done, worthy of great endeavors and high aspirations.

David had his mighty men who performed great exploits in battle against giants and in the teeth of fearsome odds and through them God won great victories for Israel. In Daniel's prophecies of the Maccabean period we are told that in those dark and difficult days the men who know their God would stand firm and take action. In the history of the age of the apostles and of early Christianity it was true as it has been ever since that the history of the church has been the history of her great men and women. These are the saints who have, more than most, shown us that the gospel works in the world, that the things that it promises to us in this world are real things, that holiness and faith to move mountains are real things. These are the people who, to an eminent degree, did as Paul commanded and by their lives and their work for the Lord Jesus, made the teaching about God our Savior attractive, or, as the Braid Scots version has it, "made bonnie the doctrine." And we need such people, because we need to know that the gospel works and that, as Luther said, "the words of God's mouth are not so many merely grammatical vocables [but]… are true, and actual, and essential things."

Indeed, it is God's way, demonstrated in both biblical history and the history of the church since biblical times that when God chooses to move his kingdom forward in the world, when he pours out his Spirit upon the world, he multiplies the number of great men and women, and great men especially.

When God gives a David, he usually gives mighty men to go with him and serve him. When in the 4th century it became necessary to defend the truth of the gospel of Christ against devilish errors abroad in the church, it is no surprise that we should find an unusual number of great men, men mighty in mind and spirit and faith, fighting the Lord's battles and through them, as through Dodai, the Lord won a great victory. If Athanasius was David, then the Gregories, Basil, John Chrysostom, Jerome and Ambrose were his mighty men and Augustine was his Solomon.

When Luther rose on the horizon of Christian history, suddenly there were around him a small host of mighty men: Melanchthon, Bucer, Zwingli, Calvin, Beza, Latimer, Ridley, Cranmer, Hamilton, Wishart, Knox, and many others. These were mighty men and the same sort of things might be said about them that were said of Eleazar and Benaiah. In his History of the Reformation in Scotland, Knox speaks of a point when God seemed "to rain men from heaven." So it always is.

In the early 18th century the prospects for evangelical Christianity appeared very unpromising, bleak indeed. The church was in the hands of rank unbelievers, there was little life to be found except in small isolated pockets of believers. And, then, suddenly there was Whitefield and the Wesleys and, before you could say Jack Robinson, they were surrounded by their mighty men: the Tennants and Jonathan Edwards in America, Howell Harris, Daniel Rowland, and William Williams in Wales, and Cowper and Newton, Toplady, Cecil, Romaine, and Venn in England.

If Charles Simeon might be called the David of the 19th century missions movement, he had a host of mighty men and women who fought the great battle and brought victory around the world: Carey, Martyn, Morrison, Livingstone, Paton, and many, many more. It is God's way to use men, heroic men and women and to advance his cause by their exploits.

I am sure that in areas of the world we are unfamiliar with, in those parts of the church whose history we do not know, the story will be the same: times of advance populated by mighty men and great women.

And to read the story of the church's great men - something I urge upon us all always to be doing - is to realize not only what must be done again, but how it must be done. I speak especially to you young people. You live in a world that does not urge you to aspire to greatness, to celebrity perhaps, but not to greatness, to wealth and comfort and pleasure, no doubt, but not to greatness. Certainly not to moral, spiritual greatness in the service of the kingdom of God.

But we need that greatness, we need men and women who aspire to do great things for Jesus Christ and his kingdom. We again need men to fight battles against giants and lions and a host of men. It is God's way and it will, no doubt, be God's way again. And where will that greatness come from? It will come from the church of God and, as always, it will come in largest part from her sons and daughters growing up in the church of God. Virtually every name I just mentioned to you from church history was a child of the Christian church. There are others, many others, who came from the world by the grace of God and did great things for the kingdom of Jesus Christ, but most came from within the church herself.

Without the Lord, we tell you, young people, you can do nothing. But, we also tell you this: with the Lord you can do great things and, therefore, you ought to aspire to great things, you ought to prepare yourself for great things, you ought to plan to do great things for the Lord. The last thing we want is for our children here, our young people, simply planning to get a good job and buy a nice house and perhaps a boat and live out their years in happy prosperity. NO! We want them to plan on this: that at the end of their days their names will be found in a list like this one in 2 Samuel 23, a list of mighty ones who fought the Lord's battles and won great victories. Parents, are you raising your children to aspire to such greatness? Are you telling them that you expect this of them and that you care for nothing else but that they serve the Lord faithfully? Such great servants of God are made not born!

When he was a senior at Wheaton College, in 1948, Jim Elliot recorded in his Journal, in the entry for October 28th, the following:

"Wonderful session of intercession with Dave tonight. 'At thy right hand are pleasures…' (Pss. [sic] 16:11). Prayed a strange prayer today. I covenanted with my Father that He would do either of two things - either glorify Himself to the utmost in me, or slay me. By his grace I shall not have His second best. For He heard me, I believe, so that now I have nothing to look forward to but a life of sacrificial sonship (that's how [your] Savior was glorified, my soul) or heaven soon. Perhaps tomorrow. What a prospect!" [p. 97]

In the few short years that remained to him in this world, the Lord glorified himself in Jim Elliot in a remarkable way. He got more glory for himself and more progress for his kingdom out of the eight years and a few months that Jim Elliot was to live before he gave his life for the gospel in Ecuador, than he gets from many long lives of his children added together.

Now you young men and women; will you pray such a prayer? Tonight and in the days to come? Will you pray that the Lord would glorify himself in you to the utmost and that yours might be a life of doing great things for him? Take care. If you pray it and mean what you pray, such a prayer will change your life in ways you probably cannot imagine. But, I promise you this, it will change your life in just that way the Lord wants to change it and in just that way the Christian church needs for it to be changed, and in just that way you are going to want for it to have been changed, when your days for living and serving the Lord in this world are done.

It will be the greatest blessing for this church and it will be her greatest contribution to the kingdom of God if we send out into the world generations of Dodai's and Benaiah's and a hundred years from now the session of Faith Presbyterian Church can write a list for posterity and ponder and decide themselves who belonged to our "Three" and who belonged to our "Thirty."