Lessons from David by R.

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Nov 29, 1910

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 37, No. 47.

Lessons from David

By R.

It is said that poets “learn in suffering what they teach in song.” This was the experience of the sweet singer of Israel. Part of his marvelous gamut of poesy we may ascribe to inspiration, but it was nevertheless the revelation of truth which had been transmitted through the crystalline texture of his own soul.

His marvelous shepherd psalm is the outbreathing of a soul that had stood in the solemn hours of night upon some lonely hilltop, and looked out upon the drear world about with its lurking enemies and hidden dangers, and then up to the grand starlit skies, and from the strange experience had drawn comfort for all loneliness, solace for all fear, light amidst the darkness, and courage for the unknown darkness that loomed big before.

That early shepherd life left its deep impress upon his soul, and left its trace on many a line of his psalms.

“Love had he found in huts where poor men lie; His daily teachers had been woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills.”

Suddenly he rose from the quiet, humble life of the shepherd boy to be the companion of the king, the idol of the people, and the champion of the armies of the living God. But his is still the same clean, harmonious, consistently humble character as of old. He loses none of the gracious sweetness of the lowlier and more happy days.

But from the dizzy height he is suddenly plunged to the lowest depths of outlaw and fugitive. More than once he has the power to turn the issue of the conflict; but his holy purpose to harm no hair of the “Lord’s anointed,” holds him steadfastly to an absolute trust in God. Here indeed his life shines out the clearest and the brightest. God needs no aid from him against the power of the tyrannical and God-forsaken king.

Tho he is “hunted like a partridge upon the mountains,” and learns by deep experience the weariness, the loneliness, the homelessness, the coldness, of the exile’s and the alien’s lot, his courage never fails, his spirit never breaks, but waits until the providence of God shall prove to all the kingly heart that beats within his breast.

And when by swift transition he sat upon the throne of Israel, he did not change, “but kept in lofty place the wisdom which adversity had bred.”

It is this man whom the Scriptures declare to be a “man after God’s own heart.” Up to this point in his life he is God’s ideal of a human being. He has lived as God would have humans live.

Then, when life has run out in golden deeds wrought by a kingly soul, he sinks down deep, deep into the deathsome mire. In this he falsifies all his past, ruins forever his peace of heart and the prosperity of his kingdom.

From this time on, both in his conscience and in the turmoils of his kingdom, “his sin is ever before” him. From this time forward, trouble is never far away. Four sons are lost to him in the vengeance of justice that pursues him until he has restored, according to his own pronounced sentence, “fourfold.”

And so the sunlight of the earlier hours of life, gives way to clouds and shadows and the chill of afternoon. The day of life goes out in hope, but amidst the saddening consciousness of what he has done in bringing in the hatred and rebellion and murder and discontent and alienation so rampant in his own family and his own kingdom.

Sad as is the sequel, and plainly as is written in all of it the truth, “The way of the transgressor is hard,” — there are scoffers who turn to the crime of David as a pretext for reviling God and taunting His followers. But God is not mocked. He allowed David to feel the curse of his sins, and to see the consequence of evil, even when confessed and forsaken.

It is also manifest, therefore, that he who holds up the life of David as an excuse for vice and license to wickedness, will reap his own transgression’s reward. For if evil deeds thus burn in the green tree of God’s forgiveness and David’s forsaking of his sin, what shall be the end of that burning of self-abandoned lust and crime that shall at length engulf the wicked as a “lake of fire”?