You rescue the humble… 2 Sam 22:28 (NLT)
Humble Before God – Part 2
Go to PART 1
We’ve said this before, and we’ll say it again (and again and again), it's important to ask two questions when reading the Bible:
- Who wrote this and who were they writing to? This question invites cultural and contextual understanding.
- Why was this important enough to be recorded, what's the message here?
When you ask these questions, and you take the time to think and dig and research, I believe you find a richer sense of what God is trying to communicate to us through this age old divine collection of stories that make up one huge narrative of God’s redemptive nature and his love for humankind. In the case of 2 Samuel 22, and the fact that many of David’s faults are there for us to read, there has to be something God is trying to tell us through it all.
I get a little tired of the stories about David being a hero, a warrior king, the greatest ruler the world has ever known, handsome, charismatic, artistic… we paint him out to be the perfect man. The right mix of strength and sensitivity, from rags to riches, a forgotten boy to the ruler of the free world, poet and warrior, lover and fighter, handsome and regal. Apparently.
There’s was so much more to him than that. He was so much more real and conflicted than the Hollywood-like version of him that is so often preached about. He was a nobody, the youngest, a pest. Yes, he killed Goliath, but his brothers hated him for it. Yes, he won the kingdom beauty Michal, but she ended up hating him too. Yes, he worshiped and wrote prolifically – his voice and songs calmed the insanity within his predecessor Saul, but he was still hunted. He lived in caves, his friends were outcasts. He fought and killed and was ruthless and merciless. And that was just the beginning. David lived a full life and experienced much more than most of us would want to. His kingship cost him dearly, and the blood he spilled stained his soul. This man who had “a heart after God” was also the man that God would not allow to build the temple: his hands were too bloody for something so holy…
This is a man more like the flawed leaders we have around us. More like ourselves.
And it was this man who proclaimed his innocence before God. 2 Sam 22:25 (NKJV): “Therefore the Lord has recompensed me according to my righteousness, according to my cleanness in His eyes.” The original texts where our modern translations of the Bible come from, write, “the cleanness of my hands in His sight (Septuagint), and “my cleanness before His word” (Targum).
Here we find a charismatic but flawed king, who can’t decide if he wants to be a worshiper or a warrior; who gets dangerously distracted by women, and has a royal career full of every scandal and triumph imaginable (almost) and before the eyes of God, the living word, he knows (and hopes) that he can be made new. In the eyes of God, he is loved and forgiven, protected and restored. His righteousness was not secured by his exploits, but by his relationship with the Divine.
Considering where David began his life, and the choices he made along the way, perhaps we could have expected his story to unfold differently. But by the grace of God, David's future, life, heart, and redemption were re-written time and time again as he brought himself before God; not as a proud and blameless king, but a broken and repentant man. The scandal of grace was evident even in our origin stories, there from the very beginning, and is still being re-written into our lives new each day.
Are you like David? Would you like your life re-written?
I would…
Go to Part 3 – First Draft
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